Did You Do That Yourself? 6 Pitfalls of Self Built Website Design
With the advent of user-friendly Content Management Systems and DIY site builders like WordPress, Squarespace, WebFlow and Wix, creating a self built website has never been easier. But how do you know you’re building it right?
Here are 6 mistakes we frequently encounter.
1. Non-Responsive Design
Mobile friendliness as a requirement is a given. Most page builders will provide templates which will, nominally at least, be mobile friendly.
But it still takes skill and experience to make a website work well in a space which is, after all, smaller than most letterboxes. Are your clickable targets big enough? Did you format and optimise your images appropriately? Do elements occlude each other at certain break-points?
Which mobile device does your work on? If it’s just your phone, that’s unlikely to be enough. It pays to research the screen sizes your users use most frequently before you start work. If you’re using a ready-built theme, look for the term Responsive Design rather than Mobile Friendly.
Hacks introduced later in the process of developing your self built website are often painfully obvious.
If you are designing the site yourself, make sure you can view your site on a range of desktop (and laptop) devices. Consider a service like BrowserStack to review your site across a range of mobile devices. Review your site design as early as possible and as frequently as possible.
2. Disorderly Content
It might be Google where you want your site to perform. But never forget that it will be a real, live, human, person that clicks that ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Contact Us’ button. If your copy is clumsily stuffed with SEO keywords, spelling mistakes or is jumbled, those people will just drift elsewhere.
Similarly, at the date of writing (May 2024), AI generated content is profoundly un-compelling. Humourless, impersonal and frequently incorrect, it stands out a mile to anyone who deals with text frequently. Just because it’s a self built website, it does not mean it should sound like a robot built it.
Start With Why
For every website, you should be able to coin a single sentence to the question: “What is this website for?”
It may be:
- to sell books
- to generate income from advertising
- to provide evidence of professional qualifications to legislating bodies
- to generate leads by displaying the quality of our work or expertise
Whatever it is, everything about the website should reflect this. Does yours? Can you clearly define what your website is meant to do?
If you can’t, I suspect yours is a self built website.
If you can but your website doesn’t reflect your answer, I suspect yours is a self built website.
3. No Analytics or Conversion Measurement
Your website needs to work, it needs to answer that question “What is this website for?”. How can you know if it’s doing it? Your users will be using your site when you’re not there. That’s kind of the point.
Without having direct measurements of success, how will you know if your website is working? This process is called conversion. Some conversions are user led and clearly visible e.g.
- The user completes the Contact Us form
- You gain a website newsletter subscription
- The user completes a purchase and so on …
Others are managed without users knowing using technologies like Google Analytics or Microsoft Clarity.
If your website measures no conversions or offers no means of users becoming prospects, then how can you tell it’s working?
4. Poor Netiquette
Some popups are inevitable, but we all hate them. It takes experience and knowledge of the user base to provide the minimum level of annoyance.
If you use large, unoptimised images without care, mobile users will use up a data allowance which may be finite, just to view your page.
Similarly, if you provide links to huge downloadable files without announcing what the file is and how big it is, your users will not be pleased.
Flaunting copyright either with images or video are both poor netiquette and illegal. Don’t do it.
Not all of these transgressions are major but, include too many of them, and your customer will find your site ‘annoying’ and leave.
5. Off Putting User Experience (UI)
Broken links, system warnings, poor font choices or irregular font usage, obvious web-vitals fails: all of these represent hurdles to the users who are trying to visit your site.
Without the tools to assess page performance, a self-built website is likely to fail one or more web vitals tests. Without the tools to test, how would you know?
There are clear conventions about font sizes and readability. If you ignore these (or are ignorant of these) as you build your site, your site will look shamefully amateur.
If your SSL certificate has expired, your potential customers are likely to receive an alert so brutal that they will flee your site immediately. As they should.
404 Page Not Found errors scream “SELF BUILT WEBSITE!” and, like shaving cuts on a barber, they are gravely damaging to customer trust. Use any one of a number of online site health tools to find them and remove them from your site.
6. Poor Hosting
Hosting is the means by which you make your website available to the internet at large.
Hosting can be cheap.
How cheap?
Hosting can be free.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, for starters:
- Cheap hosting is likely to be unreliable – if you’re paying too little for your hosting, your hosts cannot invest in labour or technology to ensure you have any real uptime guarantees.
- Cheap hosting is less likely to be secure – online security software is not cheap and the costs of losing users’ data are crippling. If you are found not to have taken due care securing client data, expect to lose your business.
- Speed is likely to be slow or, at best, patchy. If there is insufficient resource ensuring your server has rapid access to the internet or if your website is sharing resource with many other sites, speed will suffer.
Why does site speed matter? We wrote a post about that …
At Little Fire, we offer fast, secure, reliable hosting services for businesses. Our hosting is climate positive.
We’re Sorry!
We don’t mean to be rude. We know you put a lot of effort in to building your site. You’ve got a business to run, why should you know about wild-card certificates or JSON encoding?
Website builders flatter you, they set out to convince you that you can build a website without knowledge and, sometimes, you can. But there’s a lot that can go wrong and it may not always be obvious.
If you recognise your website in the above, don’t worry, it may not be too hard to fix. You can always drop us a line, we’re friendly, we don’t bite and we might be able to help you for free.
Reg Prescott screenshot © Kenny Everett/Thames TV