Planning a website

When it comes to building a website, many people simply don't plan or budget properly. No proper budget, no firm requirements and no online strategy results in finding something quick and cheap, which inevitably leads to a poorly built website that the owner may be happy with, but potential clients won't be.

There are many considerations to be incorporated into a web project, and to get you started I've listed three of the most common pitfalls I've seen business owners fall into.

A larger list is available via my Tuesday Tips site.

Think about your priorities

Priorities Calculator

Budget

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Delivery Speed

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Quality

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Points Remaining

Quality means the most to me. There are so many awful and outdated websites out there and with the speed at which technology advances it is important to have a website that is mobile friendly, intuitive and visually appealing.

There is a vast combination of browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions and device types, and if a potential customer visits your website and it doesn't work perfectly for them they will simply visit one of your competitors instead.

Cost and timescales should never be the two main priorities, as that just highlights poor planning.

If you want it quickly you've got to be prepared to pay more. Agencies would need to have more people working on your project and a freelancer would have to dedicate more time to your project and maybe even turn down other work to prioritise yours.

If your budget is tight then it will take longer. Agencies and freelancers will have other projects that will take priority.

Be very wary of Drag & Drop DIY site builders

Fully Customisable?

While the vast majority of these sites claim that you can fully customise their templates, the reality is that you can choose between a few fonts, change a few colours and reorder the content.

Responsive Design?

Again, a lot of claims of responsive templates, yet when actually tested many elements of the designs were not responsive at all. It seems that just incorporating a hamburger style menu icon for mobile devices is enough to make such a claim.

The reality is that there is a lot more to responsive design than a responsive menu.

Code Quality

The main issue with templates, particularly free or cheap ones is that they are designed at a point in time, published and then left as they are.

This means that when web standards change the templates are immediately out of date and will cause errors.

Other issues include images not being optimised, SEO techniques being outdated (to the point that some sites can be penalised), restrictive templates resulting in a '90s website' look, advertising forced onto the site, hidden costs, bloated code and additional code that is generated to lock you in.

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