It is important for any business environment to have a strong website. Being present on the web is also not enough. There is a necessity to make a website work for the business operations. A survey was conducted by Yola in 1,100 small businesses. It was revealed that about half of them did not have websites and even those having them were struggling. A lack of fundamental knowledge and design skills were observed among those businesses. These companies were interested to strengthen their online presence and had submitted their sites for redesign in Yola Makeover Challenge.
The study revealed that design of the websites was considered as the most important obstacle for many businesses. This resulted in decreasing the number of people interested to look at their websites. According to the study, poor design was found to be the problem by 50% of the surveyed firms. Lack of experience and knowledge was another problem reported by 23% of them. The other factors include lack of traffic, lack of funds, and lack of time which was reported by 18%, 85, and 2% of the surveyed companies respectively.
Some of the common mistakes that are done in building a website were also reported by the study. Some of them are mentioned here.
- Building the website without blueprints and no planning before starting the site
- Lack of approach of the site ignoring the list of most important customers and audience
- Ignorance of SEO and other tools which are important for enhancing the visibility of the websites
- Providing the content on the sites with lengthy and complicated style
- Lack of receiving feedback after publishing of the site