6 Frustratingly Common Mistakes When Building a Website on Your Own

The journey to create an online presence starts with building a website. A well-designed site can help you draw in customers interested in the products and services you are offering. However, there are plenty of pitfalls along the way that can derail your website building strategy, especially if it’s a DIY project.

Building a website is not what it used to be. You no longer need to know HTML or any kind of coding. There are plenty of free user-friendly platforms that allow you to create your own site. The most famous of them all is WordPress. However, even if you are a WordPress specialist you can still make mistakes that can hurt your site dearly.

This is mainly because building a website is not just about possessing the technical knowledge. It’s knowing how users behave when they search for a keyword on Google and what causes them to pick one site over countless others.

In this post, we will talk about the 6 mistakes you need to avoid when building your own site from scratch.

Not Being Direct In Terms of What You Offer

There is no gimmick, most successful sites serve a purpose or help solve a problem. Websites should be oriented to convey what it’s trying to do right at the home page without distracting their visitors. People on the internet have limited patience and a short attention span. This means if your homepage looks too confusing and cluttered your visitors are going to bail. Large pop-up ads and irrelevant videos can also distract users and steer them away from what you actually want them to do.

The best way to sidestep this issue is to trim the fat by deleting menus, texts, images, and buttons that do not serve the overall goal of the website. Decluttering the website will also improve the user experience and thus improve ranking.

Thinking It’s No Biggie

Even if you happen to be a WordPress specialist, copywriting expert, and a digital marketing guru all at the same time you have a tough task ahead of you. It usually takes months for a team of experts to create a website and then fix all the bugs. If you are doing it on your own it’s obviously going to take you longer.

While it’s a herculean task, it’s definitely achievable. All you need to do is expect the difficulties and hard work. Going in thinking it’s going to be a walk in the park can leave you overwhelmed and cause you to abandon the project.

Underestimating the Importance of Quality Content

There was a time back in the day when people could get away with keyword stuffing and inferior content. That time is far gone. Nowadays, you need content that keeps the readers engaged and appeals to a wide range of audiences. The content writing style needs to be easy to understand even when explaining complex ideas. Like Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” As far as keywords go, they need to be inserted in a way that feels relevant.

Not Learning How to Create a Responsive Web Design

According to 2017 statistics, 49.7% of all users accessing websites do so using a mobile device.  This means when creating a design that’s optimized only for desktops you end up losing half of the traffic. A responsive website adjusts itself to offer the best view of the site based on the aspect ratio of the screen size. Unlike a desktop-only design, it makes sure all menus and information on a page is easily accessible on all types of devices.

Relying Solely on One Tool

WordPress is a great tool for creating a website. However, it’s not the only tool you would need to learn. You may need tools like Grammarly to check the content and have Photoshop skills to create custom designs for your site. You would also need a gallery of SEO tools to find the right keywords to target when creating the content. While you can probably create a website using WordPress, using a combination of tools will always generate better results.

Rushing to Finish

There is a reason why marathon runners don’t start sprinting right from the starting line. If you rush, you increase the chances of making mistakes when building your site. You need to give yourself ample time to choose a domain hosting service, selecting a theme, create on-page content, fix navigation glitches, and position buttons and items. This is just for creating a basic website. Including custom videos and animation can greatly add to the overall effort.

Set a realistic timeline to achieve smaller goals on your way to launching your website. Make sure to give yourself adequate time to test and review your website before launching it.