Online Business Setup Mistakes
While starting an online business, there are some factors which are responsible for the growth as the good downfall of your business; it’s not about cramming the textbook. Everything depends on other different factors like experience, strategies, and numerous other underlying factors that decide the fate of any business.
Developing a website is not an easy task, it requires lots of efforts and hard work. If you do not have any technical knowledge, then you should not try to handle the process yourself, either you should take help of the professionals if you do not seek any professional help then you are bound to make mistakes. For this kind of specific tasks, you can hire one of the best website design company in Kolkata, who are proficient at it.
Blunders that business owner make during the different stages of website development.
1. Initial Planning
The most crucial stage of website development process, under this, the very first mistake that business owners make during the planning stage is not outlining the goals of their websites.
None of the business can work without clear goals, without settled business models, certain targeted audience, and set target audience all such needs becomes directionless and as a result what we get is a website with no base but lots of investments. Therefore, taking professional help can avoid this chain of blunders.
2. Brand Name
Brand name is such an important part of your business that it can either make it or break it, most of the times while choosing a brand name, we go for catchy brand names, without thinking whether the name has already taken, or the name we have chosen has a bad online reputation, this results in the breakdown of your business. In case, the brand name you have chosen has already taken; you will receive an Infringement letter if your brand names resemble with any other company’s copyrights. If you are planning for an e-commerce company, then it can be the best choice to have a professional ecommerce website development company in kolkata.
So, what you need to do is to create a long list of brand names with an available domain name and then you can shortlist them by their catchiness, you should also include the product name into your brand name as it helps customers to find you.
3. Aspects of Marketing
One thing that every business owner should do is that they should always plan their website from the marketing point of view. Some of the questions to be considered from the market point of view are:
- How to present the content to the targeted audience on the website?
- Which are the essential web pages for a particular type of website?
- How to make website rank better in Google result?
- What are different revenue channels by which my website can earn money?
- How should the budget be divided between development and marketing?
- Which programs should be offered to attract more users?
- Which new market features to include to have the competitors?
- Why $8000 website, and not a $800 website, for a particular business?
- Does the development team have the right skill set to undertake a particular website project?
- Which technology is ideal to build a particular type of website?
A hiring marketing professional is needed because neither business owner nor the development team has an answer to the following questions. Marketing professional plays an important role during different stages of the startup business, not hiring a marketing professional may bring you to the situation of regret.
4. Design
Always design your website as per your customers, not the business. As a business can only grow if your website can attract the customers and has a great impact on them. If you fail to make an impression, it won’t bring you good results.
Here are few points to be kept in mind during the designing phase of the website-
- Design as per your business requirement:
Many clients give the designing decision into the hands of designers, thinking they are professionals and might know better, but the thing is designer’s job is to make things look good and attractive, but it is your job to make sure that the things work well and look good as per your specific business requirements. Also, you can take the help of marketing professional in deciding the right design for your website. Well, to get your website designed by professionals you can choose best website design companies in Kolkata, who are more efficient with their work.
- Heavy Graphics:
What does graphics do to your website? Graphics make your website look more attractive and alive, the purpose of graphics is to enhance the user experiences, and therefore it is good to use graphics only where required as customers have very less time to stay on a website that takes too long to load.
- Bad Navigation:
The main reason behind bad navigation is poor information architecture; this is because of having no clear picture why the user should visit your website and what he should do once reached your website.
Don’t make the user feel stuck at every point of your website; this may result in zero visitors at your website. Navigation techniques can be seen in the work by many website designers in Kolkata, who design well-furnished websites.
- Unorganized Content layout and Uneven interface:
The uneven interface can make you lose customers as experimenting with the interface results in a change of interface from page to page, and this will irritate the customers. Same is with the content layout if content is not properly organized the message you want to convey to the customers they will not reach them properly, and you will lose customers; it also makes sure to figure out the screen size.
- Development:
During the development phase of your website you should always keep in mind to keep your website updated, as some of the business owners make such mistakes to save a little money they lose huge piles of money in future.
- Compatibility:
Browser compatibility is often left out, it can be detected and fixed during the testing phase, but the thing is, why to leave things for later on when they can be fixed with few efforts, one should make sure that the developing team is switched between browsers and avoid browsers specific code whenever possible.
- Making Non-Responsive Website:
More and more customers get attracted towards responsive websites, not making your website responsive is the biggest mistake ever in a marketing business as such a website is incapable of attracting customers.
- Not adding SEO:
Another silly mistake of the developing stage is not adding SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it is not just about adding keywords, meta-data, image alt tags, etc.
Components like to crawlable site architecture, smart back linking, optimizing site loading time, eliminating duplicity content issue, proper URL structure, conversion funnel optimization, etc. Should be implemented within the development phase.
- Testing phase:
After following each and every step during the designing and development stage, even though you have done everything you should not skip the testing stage of the website.
- Relying completely on developers:
This is a big blunder to completely depend on developers as firstly; the developer cannot perform testing at the level at which testing engineers can do, secondly finding errors in one's code could be difficult as well as challenging task, last but not the least, developers skip small code errors.
- Getting Stuck in Micro-Optimization:
Micro-optimizations like, color change button, minor code optimization, etc. consume lots of time and distracts. This can make testing an unnecessarily a dull process; this is something that testers need to take care of, but at the end they have to pay extra cash.
- Hosting:
With poor hosting services, your website is unfortunate to become an occupied domain name. A single mistake here can cost you a lot.
- Cheap/Free Hosting Solution:
When we hear the term, Free sounds nice, but it can get you in the problem. Whereas, Poor website loading time, error in running scripts, the server going down, no importance on search results, etc. are only a few things you can get from free web hosting services.
- Shared Hosting:
Shared hosting means you are sharing the server space with hundreds of other websites. Even if one of these sites has a virus, it could affect your website as well as the market value of your website.
- 404 ‘Not Found’ Errors:
Any website can have ‘Not Found’ pages, and e-commerce websites can have a bundle of them. Not fixing them can screw up the user experience of the website and leads to poor ranking in search results. To get assured of having error free websites, you must assign the designing job to best hands, web designing company in Kolkata like Intlum, are one of the web designers who can do this work proficiently.
Conclusion
Even after establishing your brand name, you need to follow market trends closely. So, from business model to SEO approach, you should be ready to make the necessary changes so that your website is always on the top.