Like your business, you should consider your website a constant work-in-progress, one that must be flexible enough to change with the needs of your clients, improve with the advancements in your products and respond to shifts in the market of your industry. To make sure that your business has an advantage over competitors, you’ll also need to stay on the cutting edge of progress in web design, online advertising and internet marketing strategies which means frequently considering how your website can be developed to maintain a high level of online performance.
In order to allow for future development of your website, you’ll need to put a plan in place from the outset that allows easy modification of the initial content and structure. To help you out with this, we’ve put together a list of some common website planning and design mistakes that can hamper the functionality and future development of your site (plus some tips on how to avoid them):
1. Disorganization: It may sound simple, but you should keep copies of all the content that is on your website, or that you plan to add to your website, in an ordered manner on your hard drive. Having copies of all the elements on your website, and new information you hope to add, stored in easily accessible and well-ordered files will save you a lot of time when it comes to adding new content and features.
2. No room to grow: Your website should be built around a structure that allows for easy expansion of each theme or section. If it is likely that a particular section of the website will expand from one page to several you should ensure that you select a basic design that allows for extensive addition of content in the future.
3. Use of Flash: Unless your website necessarily includes complex design elements, including flash in your web development plan can cause problems for your customers by slowing the load time of pages. Flash also does not show up in search results and does not run on most smart phones and personal wireless devices. When it comes to redeveloping your website, video, rather than flash, is a feature that is successful in capturing the attention of your customers and is also very search-friendly.
4. Crash: As your company develops and your products and services gain more widespread popularity you may find that the amount of visitors to your website increases dramatically. It is therefore important to make sure that all elements of your website can be adjusted accordingly (graphic files that allow for compression in size and dynamic elements that can be replaced for example) to prevent your website crashing with increased traffic.
5. Information overload: As your website grows in the course of development and begins to cover an increasing amount of topics and contain greater quantities of information, it may become difficult for visitors to find exactly what they are looking for. Including a search box in your original design will allow for easier navigation of your site in the first instance and help to filter information to customers in a way that is relevant and under their control.
6. Insecurity: When your website begins to contain an increased amount of information and boasts a greater amount of daily traffic, security risks can also increase. To prevent hacking and unauthorised access to your customer databases and confidential company information, it is crucial to establish and maintain secure operating systems and coding.
7. Immobile: As people increasingly use their mobile phones and other hand-held wireless devices to access websites, it is absolutely imperative to ensure that the developments you implement on your website are compatible with all manner of mobile platforms. Nothing will frustrate visitors to your site more than if they are trying to access information on the go and your site will not display.
8. Cross browser compatibility: Another possible problem that must be taken into account with any new web development is the site’s incompatibility with some of the most popular web browsers. To make sure that your clients don’t become ‘cross browsers’ themselves, make sure you rigorously test your website for cross browser compatibility.
Finally, it is most important to find a web designer that will listen to your web development needs and be equipped to advise you on the best way to prepare and implement a solution.