Virtually every business now knows that they need a website if they’re going to succeed. Many of your potential clients will try to locate you online. If you don’t have a professional-looking site with excellent UX, you’re going to miss out on their business.
You can definitely employ a web designer to create your company’s site for you, but ultimately, you have to check it to make sure everything looks the way it should before you let it go live. In light of that, we’ve compiled a list of business website mistakes you need to look for if you’re about to allow the public access to your site for the first time. It might surprise you how many company websites feature these errors.
Lack of a Fundamental Explanation of What Your Company Does
Many web designers talk about what you should feature “above the fold” on a company website, meaning what the potential customer will see on your landing page before they begin to scroll down. Maybe you want there to be a company logo there and little else. Doing this makes your site look very minimalistic.
The problem is that if you go this route, you’re assuming that every site visitor automatically knows what it is your company does. That’s not always going to be the case.
Imagine for one second that you’ve got a company that supplies servo-electric presses for assembly plants. If all a visitor sees is a logo, they’re not going to know what your company does or what your mission is.
You can alleviate the issue by making sure you have at least a brief company explanation right there on the landing page, above the fold, for any new site visitor to read. It doesn’t need to be more than a sentence or two. That way, the visitor will quickly surmise whether they’re in the right place or whether they need to look elsewhere.
Misspellings and Grammatical Errors
Your web designer generally does not write copy for your business’s website. You can hire a professional copywriter to do that.
Your copywriter will probably not only write the copy, but they will also proofread it before you allow it to go live on the site. They might run it through a service like Grammarly, and that will help catch a lot of misspellings and syntax errors.
However, because the individual you hired wrote the copy, they might be too close to the material. They may miss an error that someone else would find obvious. It could also be that you’ve hired a copywriter who does not have total command of the English language.
It’s best to have a second set of eyes that can carefully proofread all website copy before you post it. If a significant spelling or grammatical error slips through the cracks, and the public sees it when they stop by your site, that’s not a good look for you. It speaks to your company’s professionalism if all your copy features flawless grammar and spelling.
There Should Not Be Broken Links or 404 Redirects
Your business website will also probably have both internal and external links. Internal links go from page to page while remaining on your site. External links will guide a client or site visitor to outside websites that are tangentially related to yours.
You want internal and external links on your site for SEO purposes. They allow Google to rank your website higher, particularly if you only link to well-known, reputable sites rather than spammy ones.
The problem is that sometimes you’ll link to a site through a corrupted link. Maybe the link was fine when you first set up your site UX, but after some time passed, it ceased working.
This is not uncommon, particularly if you restructure your website at some point or the site to which you linked restructured theirs. You should have a web designer check your company’s site periodically, though, to make sure this sort of thing does not happen.
If you continue allowing broken links on your site that prompt 404 redirect messages, that will frustrate your potential customers. An irritated customer is likely to go with one of your competitors, and there are sure to be plenty of them, regardless of your niche.
It helps to think of your business website as a living organism you need to care for and maintain. If you neglect these fundamental issues, your company is not going to thrive.