I want you to try and picture something with me.

Imagine you’re building your dream home. It’s perfect. You’ve saved countless images of floor plans and know exactly how you want your kitchen to look. You trust the builder you chose and you both have grand plans of your future house.

And then, at the end of everything, you don’t end up with what you envisioned. All your plans and expectations did not become a reality, and you’re left with an unsatisfying experience.

The rooms are the wrong size. The kitchen hardware was installed incorrectly and is lopsided. The floor makes noise and there are dents and scratches in your brand new appliances.

Building a website can sometimes yield a similar result.

In the beginning, it can be an exciting process. But somewhere in the middle, the wheels came off the bus, leaving you to ask the question ‘what happened?’

Building a website for your business is taxing and can be stressful, especially when you’re not working with a web designer who has any clue on what your business needs.

So to prevent future stress, let’s talk about what ruins the website building process, and why your previous website didn’t give you the results you wanted.

Style over function

Everyone wants their website to look fantastic.

You want prospects to click on your site eagerly because of the color choices and your sweet new logo. And while looks are important, it’s a costly mistake to only focus on how your site looks instead of how it functions.

Some of the most beautiful websites out there are ones that are awful when it comes to user experience. Your business website needs to give your visitors the ability to find out what you do and where to learn more about your business. Despite having a beautiful color palette, if visitors can’t use your site, they’ll leave.

Your prospects and site visitors aren’t going to care if you selected a particular shade of orange, they want your site to be easy to navigate and give them the answers they’re looking for.

Website doesn’t fit core business type

You should research other websites and find ones you like to show your potential web designer.

In fact, it’s something all of our team would recommend. It gives a designer an idea of the style you’re looking for and a point of reference.

But I’m going to add a condition to that statement and say we only recommend looking websites that are in your industry.

You might be shocked and asking yourself why you’d want to look like a competitor. Before you click away, let me explain. You don’t want to rip off your competitor, but looking at other businesses in your industry and how they’ve laid out their site will help you build a website that fits the needs of your ideal buyer.

When reviewing other websites consider these aspects.

• Do they have a blog?
• Do they have detailed landing pages with images or just a photo gallery?
• What seems to be working in terms of driving leads, sales, etc.?
• What’s going to give you an edge over your competition?

You want to make sure the website for your business fits your industry by being relevant for your ideal buyer.

Too many opinions and not the right ones

It’s important to get everyone on board with your new website, but the expression “too many cooks in the kitchen” is particularly the case when it comes to building a company website.

Much like children’s names, wedding planning, and parenting, EVERYONE has an opinion. And it can become super easy to lose sight on the original vision of what you wanted your website to be able to do.

The easiest way to prevent too many voices cluttering up your project is to make it clear with your business who is managing the website project and has final say. Meet beforehand and choose a person who will manage your website effort and let that person handle the details.

You went with the lowest bidder

When making your decision to pay someone to build your website, you have three options: good, fast, and cheap.

The dilemma comes having to choose one of these options.

If you choose fast, the end product will not be good. If you choose cheap, the end product will be low quality.

If you want a cheap website, chances are you are going to end up with a cheap and ineffective website.

We’re not saying you need to spend $40,000 for a website. But you can’t expect to have a website that gives you a return on investment without paying several thousand dollars for it.

What about Wix.com or Square Space? These are certainly viable options, but I can guarantee you it’s probably not going to be good, or fast. You’ll more than likely spend countless hours trying to manage it, support it, and might not even build it in a way that helps your business grow.

The truth is if you want something of value, you have to be willing to pay for it.

The lowest bidder is going try to finish it as soon as possible and with as little effort as possible. And that does no good for your business in the long run, other than save you some money upfront.

You didn’t consider SEO

I’m just going to come out and say it: many web designers don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to search engine optimization.

It’s an unfortunate truth, but many times web designers don’t put any stock in making a website friendly to search engines like Google and Bing. Which is a shame.

SEO is one of the key components that go into making your website useful as a way to grow your business. SEO helps your business gain credibility, draw in leads, and be found by prospects.

Unfortunately, as important as it is, a lot of agencies and freelancers do not think about SEO when building a website. Which is really strange.

It’d be like someone building a house and forgetting to build a roof.

As much as it should be a given, you don’t always want to assume your website designer is going to consider SEO when building your website. You should always ask about how they plan to help drive traffic to your site and help your website with SEO.

Understand you might have the wrong vision

This point is possibly hardest to comprehend.

Sometimes your original dream is not actually what’s going to help your business the most. If you choose to work with someone like us, we might look at your business and realize your website needs to go in an entirely different direction than what you wanted.

It can be frustrating, but if you’re working with a web design company that cares about your business, they are going to tell you the truth.

You might want a simple five-page website with a single form, but you might need a full E-Commerce site. You might want to rank for a specific keyword, but you need to focus on a more targeted keyword to beat your competition.

Talking out these concerns is important, but sometimes you need to trust an expert’s recommendation when they explain what your actual website needs are.

Not sure what you need?

Once you take some of the above steps and come up with your list of what you want for your site, give us a call. BNG Design was created out of the need to build our internal websites.

We understand the struggle of trying to be found in the massive sea that is Google and know how frustrating it is to work on a website only to see nothing come from it.

Contact us here, and we’ll do a free consultation. We can go over any questions or concerns you have with your website process.