Up to 70% of my clientele have tried to, or have had someone else, design a basic D.I.Y website to save costs. This can seem like the most affordable and suitable option for new businesses when starting up, but it can be incredibly damaging to the business’s image. Let’s look at some reasons why…
Poor design / colour combinations
A few websites I have had to revamp consisted of poor colour schemes with badly designed pages / navigation. This is primarily due to the type of software and knowledge of the designer but this can be the first reason for a potential customer to walk away. While it is important to have a bold website, there still needs to be a flowing, easy-on-the-eye design. Perfect examples would be a bright background with bright boxes and white text. This can be tragic on the eyes and the customer will not hesitate to leave.
Another example would be having the navigation out of site and ‘discombobulated’. Your customers and audience in general want to have a nice looking website with an easy to use menu.
If these primary aspects do not exist, it can be goodbye to a potential sale.
Website addons / large images
I see these on almost every DIY website I have had to rescue. To make up for a template-based or poorly drawn website people will include these fascinating addons such as flash galleries and ‘wow’ media banners etc. Not only are they installed or implemented incorrectly, but they also dramatically increase loading time for the viewer. Taking into consideration browser compatibility with these scripts can open up another kettle of fish.
Image compression is something that is often overlooked during the website building process. A “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) website builder can resize an image for you, but it will not compress it. Compression in lemans terms means to reduce the file size of an image. For example having an image that is 5MB in size by using a suitable program you can compress the image to 0.5MB or 500Kb. This is done by reducing the quality of the image, saving as a different file type (.bmp to .jpg) or reducing the physical size of the image.
Large images = bad experience for the user. A resized image on a website that has not been compressed can take a long time to load (even for broadband users), which can result in a potential customer, again, being steered away from your product.
Search Engine Optimization
This can be the absolute killer for your business. If your DIY website has not been designed by a professional there is a great chance that search engines such as Google will either never know it exists or not get the most out of the keyword setup.
Keywords are basically the be-all end-all of getting onto search engines. Little creatures known as ‘Robots’ will filter through millions of websites daily obtaining the keyword data on a website and submitting that back to the search engines to be ranked. If there are no keywords or perhaps poorly selected keywords there will be a great chance of your website never being noticed.
How important is this to your business? If you’re wishing to have a strong internet-based audience then it should be vital. When you think about it, how many people use the Yellow Pages compared to those who use Google or Yahoo?
Final Word
I strongly urge new or existing businesses looking to get online to go through a professional. Yes it may seem expensive but treat this as an investment for the future. If done correctly the leads and exposure your business will receive through your website may quickly be worth much more than you paid.
The Author
Luke Hampshire manages weBlue.com.au based in Melbourne, Australia. He has over 5 years of web design experience. weBlue can provide effective, bold and clean websites from $499 AUD. If you wish to find out more please visit http://www.weblue.com.au.