It goes without saying that the Internet’s all-consuming presence in our daily lives has brought about a huge number of benefits, among them, the fact that it’s now pretty easy for anyone who wants one to start their very own website.
With the likes of WordPress, Wix and similar tools all available for free, we no longer need wade through pages of complicated code or spend hundreds -if not thousands- on paying a professional to do all the hard work for us.
On the contrary, we often need do little more than log in, customise a pre-designed theme, and off we go. Yet just because we can build a website doesn’t mean that newcomers can always build them successfully without making a few mistakes on the way.
Hey, it’s only natural. We all make mistakes from time to time, but if you’re looking for a way to build that website without things going wrong, here’s our look at the biggest mistakes people make when starting a website, and how you can avoid them.
Failing to plan
As the old saying goes, failing to prepare is ultimately preparing to fail, and the last thing you want is for your website to flounder before its even taken off.
There’s more to owning a website than the ‘build it and they’ll come’ approach. Come up with a concrete plan of action for how you’ll put your website together, the products or services you want to promote, how you’ll do that, and how you’ll ensure you both attract visitors in the first place and keep them coming back.
Without it, you’ll likely find that your sparkly new site languishes in some dark corner of the web with nobody dropping by to visit. And that’s not exactly why you built it in the first place, is it?
Opting to free web hosting
There may be some situations when it’s a good idea to sign up with a free web hosting company, but there certainly aren’t many. Still, for some folks, the allure of getting something for nothing can be all too strong.
Yet opting for free web hosting could present all kinds of problems. Forget about the limit storage space and the questionable reliability, if there’s one reason to avoid making the mistake of using freebie hosting, it’s those ads. The way free hosting sites make their money is by placing adverts on your website, which not only looks ugly, but could well drive your visitors off to other sites.
Many of the web’s best hosting providers offer plans from just a few pounds per year, and signing up with them ensures you get as much storage space as you need, increased reliability, and absolutely no ads sending your visitors packing.
Forgetting about mobile
For the most people, building a website means sitting down at a laptop or desktop computer and getting to work. They finish the job, see how good it looks on the same computer they used to design it, and march headlong into promoting it.
Before you do the same thing, it’s worth stopping for a moment to test how your new site looks on mobile smartphones and tablet devices. As you’ll probably know from the way you check out the web, more and more of us are using those devices to access the web, and it isn’t always a guarantee that your site is going to look just as good on an iPhone as it does on your laptop.
Though it’s one thing to start testing your site after its designed, it’s even better think about mobile responsive design before you even start. That way, you avoid the headache of having to redesign the whole thing if it ends up looking and functioning miserably on mobile devices.