How to Avoid Costly Mistakes Setting up Your Website

Whether you're designing and maintaining your own website, or paying someone else, it's critical to avoid certain mistakes that will spell doom for your website.

This article will point out the more devastating mistakes that most people make when setting up a site, and how you can avoid those costly errors.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Make sure your contact information is visible and easy to get to. This legitimizes your site and gives your visitors a way to contact you quickly. You should also get into the habit of answering your emails in a timely manner, and I'm not talking about an "auto-responder," I'm referring to actually responding to emails yourself or have an assistant to respond.

2. Proofread all your pages and make sure there are no errors, typos, or misspelled words. Misspelled words are tacky, extremely unprofessional, and so unnecessary since most programs have a built-in spell checker. You're just letting the world know that you're lazy if you have misspelled words on your website.

3. Make sure all your links work and go to actual sites and pages. Broken links on your website are the bane of any surfer. Place a "contact the webmaster" link on your site so your viewers can contact you or your web-designer to let you know if you have a bad or broken link.

4. Use one font, and not several different fonts on your website. Make sure you keep your information up-to-date. There is no excuse for outdated information. Outdated info on a website is like an unkempt yard. Keep your yard (website) clean and well-manicured.

5. Your site must be user-friendly and easy to navigate. Site visitors should not have to look for the most pertinent information about your business because it should be in clear view for them to see.
   
   You can use leading-edge technology for your site but not if it requires most visitors to go to another site to download a program. You will lose visitors this way. The acronym KISS is very applicable when putting your website together, especially an e-Commerce site: Keep it Simple Sir (I'll be nice, but you know what it really means).

[SarahElizabeth]

on 11/16/2009 Excellent info! I'm going to be putting up another web site this spring, so I will be sure to employ your suggestions (and also integrate them into my current web site, which I think has some outdated links). Thanks for sharing! 5*