5 Things You Probably Shouldn’t Say About Your New Website

So you’ve done the work, written the copy, assembled the images, and marshalled the designers. Time to put your feet up? Probably not. Working in an agency that offers website design and development, we’ve encountered a whole host of myths and misconceptions about getting a new website. So, we’ve pulled together some of the most common ones here so you don’t fall prey to them!

You’ve paid the developers their final invoice, you’ve shown your family and friends and the orders are coming in. Surely it’s finished?

There’s a popular quote you’ve probably heard before, ‘Art is never finished, only abandoned’, attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci.

We’re not suggesting your website is art but anything beyond simplest website can and should be improved almost continuously.

Regardless of how well planned a site is, no matter how experienced the developers or the number of users who tested it – real world use of a website seldom matches predictions exactly. The very improvements you’ve made to interface and functionality may spark new ideas for both you and your users.

It would be wise to review your new site after a few weeks and expect to want to make tweaks.

2. “I Love the Way it Looks”

It may look perfect, we hope it does. You may love it and we hope you do. But unless it’s a very unusual project, your website isn’t for you.

My neighbour is about to sell her house. She’s highly creative with distinctive taste and she’d like to paint it purple. She loves purple, but the sad fact is that many people don’t – you don’t see many purple houses. To appeal to the largest number of people, the house should be painted a colour a buyer might like.

The house is now a subtle sage green and somewhere a unicorn is crying. But the viewers are rolling in.

Your website is just the same. It should have been designed with your customers in mind. It’s not easy to do. After all, your web designer will probably have been trying to appeal to his clients’ tastes, not those of his clients’ clients.

Developing a user-oriented design is not easy. It may mean you really don’t like the look of your new site, but if it makes the customers click “Buy”, it is hard to argue.

Designers like white space. It feels sophisticated and luxurious. A few years ago, we were working on a site and three times we were told to lose space and squeeze more products onto the homepage. We didn’t like it; we bridled a bit. But it’s the clients earning the pennies now.

You’ve just launched a new website with a swish new design. Sadly that in itself does not mean you’ll get thousands of new users. A new design doesn’t automatically boost your traffic or improve your conversion rate. Regardless of how good it is, the Internet is a crowded space and it is hard to gain attention.

But, you’ll definitely need a strategy to continue growing and enhancing your traffic.

At the very least, you should be banging the drum! Share the news on social media, send out a mail shot to all your clients … make some noise!

Attracting increased traffic and conversions is hard work! Having a well-designed website is certainly a step in the right direction but it’s not the culmination of your efforts.

Gaining a lasting increase to your user base requires consistent effort over months.

4. “It’s Just Like the Apple Website”

It may be, but if you didn’t check with your users first, you might be in for a shock. Apple offers an exceptionally refined user experience, and its loyal users accept many non-standard elements within the customer flow and design.

Your hardware and DIY business might have similarly well-informed and sophisticated customers, but this isn’t the time to find out it doesn’t.

Further, market giants like Apple needn’t fret overly about their Search Engine Optimisation: so famous are these brands that users will go straight there rather than Google it. To gain attention, it is likely you will need to pay more attention to your keywords, your site structure and copy to get your site to perform well with search engines. Really good content is unlikely to sit tidily in an extremely minimal design.

It really isn’t.

A website is a tool, an instrument for helping your business thrive online. But, just like a hammer, it’s little good on its own. If you leave that hammer on the table for 6 months, when you come back, it won’t have driven many nails.

• Do you have a clear plan as to what you want your website to do?
• Are you doing everything you can to make sure it does it?
• Are you sending people to it?
• Are you advertising to raise its presence?
• Are you maintaining your SEO?
• Are you keeping the content up to date?
• Are you reviewing how users are interacting with it?

If you cannot answer “Yes!” to those questions, your website will likely disappoint you in the long term.

What’s more … your website will not remain cutting-edge for long. It will have aged somewhat since development began. It’s no one’s fault, the internet is changing all the time and ever faster.

Either you or your developer need to review it regularly. Very few websites (and none that do anything complex) get developed without using a host of supporting technologies (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixels, maps, text editors …). These age, get updated, become deprecated and require review. With appropriate updates it your website could stop working or, worse, become a security risk.

But your new website is a starting point, not the finish line.

Owning a website is not free. Just to keep is as good as it is now will cost money; staying ahead of technical debt will take time and commitment.

The good news is that, like all jobs undertaken well, consistent efforts will be rewarding and enjoyable. Do the right things, and traffic will grow. Keep your content up to date, and you will learn more about your business — you really will.