Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or an international company worth million, your website is your public face. Unless you’re somehow entirely offline in the modern world, customers or clients will be getting most of their information about you online. Here are some common mistakes you can watch out for when putting together your own site.
Keep Your URLs Clean
Most website makers are keenly aware of a lot of aspects of their pages, whether that’s the theme, the text or the overall layout, but a page URL is often overlooked. A URL should be crystal clear on what the page contains, especially on sites with lots of categories and subcategories, such as an online casino site. If a user opens up a URL like https://casino.betfair.com/c/blackjack, then they can immediately expect a casino page of Betfair that will contain blackjack games. Opening one particular game then would add the title onto the end so the logic is obvious to the user.
It isn’t just your customers that need this, however. One of the most important steps of getting your site off the ground is Google indexing, where Google’s bots scan the contents of your pages. An unclear URL could get the page indexed incorrectly, which can be highly damaging to the SEO rating for that page.
Don’t Overload Your Pages
Those who remember the early, Wild West days of the World Wide Web will surely remember those basic HTML websites packed with moving objects, bright flashing text and links scattered everywhere. The folks at https://interestingengineering.com/ even compiled some still around today. Luckily, we’ve moved on a long way from this kind of Internet, but even some modern designers still have a habit of cramming too much into a single page.
There are two risks involved in this. Firstly, there’s a chance of overwhelming site users and making it too difficult for them to find any particular information they need. Secondly, if you’re using a lot of images and large assets, you could get an extremely slow load time, which is bad for users as well as another big SEO issue. Keep things separated and properly organized for the best results here.
Never Overlook Mobile
Over half of all Internet users now access it from mobile devices. That means the majority of your users expect a mobile-friendly site, and ignoring that is increasingly risky. Not only is it yet another SEO quality that Google looks for, but it can be enough to put off customers entirely.
Optimizing for mobile is luckily something that many pre-made website themes can already handle to some extent. If you’re working or something more custom, there are also tools like https://smallseotools.com/mobile-friendly-test/ that you can use to analyze your site. Even better, you can use a mobile-first approach, as making a mobile site fit a regular browser is far easier than doing it the other way around.
The good news is that there is plenty of help across the Internet both for building a site correctly and making sure everything is in order afterward. Just watch the details and there shouldn’t be an issue!
