Huge Website No-No’s To Avoid Your First Time Online

When deciding to put your business online, you have certain desires. You likely want to make a positive impact. You want to be proud of the product you’re putting out there. You likely wish to feel comfortable and worthwhile in your approach. But you also want to generate interest. You want to be vindicated. You want to feel as though this has been worth it.

Of course, feeling all of those satisfying feelings will take work, energy, and an effort on your part to succeed. The first step is to believe you can. Then, it’s time to start taking practical steps. One of the best measures of getting ahead and being accepted by an audience is to offer an output that positively needs to be seen.

This means considering the hub of your business – your website. However, while website design has become much easier to tailor in recent years, it can also be you fail to achieve certain necessary measures in the long-term. To us, that can sometimes be a problem. With the following advice in this article, we hope that you avoid all of the troublesome no-no’s you should be avoiding as a business.

Misdirected Links

When we come to a 404 on a website, we know that there’s been an error. Either a link we were given is now outdated, or perhaps the navigation of a website is flawed.

One word comes to the mind of any user who experiences this – incompetence. You might have noticed some websites seem to offer cuter and more humorous 404 messages to help you feel positive about the whole thing.

Perhaps you’ll see a sad robot with a speech bubble apologizing for sending you to the wrong place. But no matter how this interaction is masked, or whatever artifice you use to cover this approach, misdirected links wastes the time of your guest, and also negates an opportunity to give them functional access to your website intent.

For that reason, regularly inspect your backlinks. Keep on top of your referrals. Ensure that 404 reports are logged, so you can look into their origin. And by the heavens, ensure that all pages are functional. If you can do this, you can avoid the plague of misdirected links.

Bad Advertisements

Advertisements on your website page are one thing. It’s something to promote a product on another page, or to personalize results, but to make them intrusive? This can be odious to a visitor. On top of this, ensure that your outreach is taen care of.

Bad adwords support for example might not only attract visitors to pages that longer longer exist (as we’ve already explored,) but it might attract the wrong type of visitor. For this reason, learning the best automation of Adwords PPC could be your best approach here, and give you something much more engagement for your efforts.

After all, functional advertising isn’t the be-all and end-all. Optimized advertising is.

User Account Utility

If offering your users the ability to make accounts – good heavens, please, make it functional. It’s important to offer your users the chance to change their password and contact details, to save their payment information, to even add 2-factor authentication. 

They should be able to view their recent orders or bookings, skip support security measures thanks to logging into the account, and also count on website security whenever logging in.

On top of that, they must also be able to access all data you hold on them should they request it. And, most importantly, they should be able to delete the user account at a whim, perhaps behind a secondary settings menu, but it should be there none-the-less.

Too many firms fall into the trap of hiding user account cancellation behind a phone call  or other support request.

Not only does this come across as a deceptive manner of trying to reel customers in, but it can cause hassle for your support staff.

Security Woes

Your website needs to be secure. No ifs, and’s or buts. You need to have a valid, up to date security certificate.

You must detect dodgy account behavior. Your staff must log into their administrative modules through secure VPN accounts, and using a hosting service that can protect against DDOS attacks or other forms of intrusion can be worthwhile.

Host your user data on a secure server, and employ important account management procedures such as forcing users to register a password with a capital letter, a symbol and a number.

With these tips, you’re certain to avoid huge website no-no’s as a first-time business.