Common pitfalls that could sink your small business web design project

Sep 23 2008

Web projects are challenging. This is — and always will be — a fact of life for all of us that choose to endeavor to build them for a living. Our Zero-G team has worked on dozens of web sites in the last two years alone and we have all grown to accept this fact and understand that it is an unavoidable side effect of the career we chose.

But the average entrepreneur on our client roster has never built a web site before; never given much though as to what goes into them, never managed or even witnessed the development process firsthand. The average small business owner doesn’t know what a web site should do for their business. Many have inaccurate expectations and many just don’t know what to look for or ask for once they’re in the process.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be outlining some common issues that we’ve seen come up repeatedly in our experience in working with small business owners and helping to coach them through unfamiliar territory on the web. Falling into any one of these traps could potentially lead to costly redesigns down the road or possibly even before it goes live in the first place.

My first topic should not be a surporise to anyone… Poor Planning & Lack of Overall Strategy.

This is definitely a killer to any web project or marketing project. Your web site is a business tool, just like any other in your company’s arsenal and it needs to serve a function. And while its true that every business should have a web presence, that isn’t reason enough to push your online strategy to the back burner, especially when it usually costs about the same to build a lousy web site and a great one. Actually it costs less to build a great one once you’ve factored in the costs of constantly redoing the lousy one.

So what “function” does my web site serve? Probably more than one, but good answers would be lead generation, building credibility, generating e-commerce sales, increasing presence on search engines, gathering information from your audience or possibly even addressing an operational concern like an overloaded customer service team. Knowing and understanding your business goals will give your design team great direction and will help them more effectively prioritize the elements in your layout. If your design group doesn’t understand your business goals — or worse, doesn’t care — you would be best served by firing them.