June 2022 - Trident

It can be hard to realise that a project you’ve put time and effort into structuring is faulty or has not given you results you had hoped for. At these times, the best thing to do is review your progress and figure out what might have gone wrong along the way. In this blog, we look into the reasons your website is bad… even if its just a bit.

A good way of getting around this problem is to identify those issues that you may or may not have noticed or contributed to. In this post, we hope to make that process easier to deal with by discussing five reasons your website may be dysfunctional, or, quite frankly, bad at achieving the purpose it’s been designed for:

Problematic Mobile Compatibility

It’s estimated that around 72% of website activity is found through mobile devices or devices outside of the usual ‘desktop computer or laptop’ web browser environment. For this reason, it’s essential to make sure your website offers suitable mobile compatibility for a range of devices and screen sizes.

What matters is utilising a web design agency like Trident, which can help you make image spreads compatible and adjustable, and that features or widgets can be loaded. Regular testing is also important and the smooth running of your website can be helped with regular maintenance.

Poor SEO & A Lack of Google Optimisation

If you hope to encourage organic traffic, you need to make sure your website is optimised for Google. Appropriate keywords, helpful content that solves issues, and good formatting gets you most of the way there. It’s also a good idea to make sure that the custom links for each post are properly defined.

Check the best SEO tips to make sure you conform to those standard practices.

A Lack Of Cross-Platform Promotion

Ultimately, you need to promote your website. Cross-promotion can be achieved by posting article titles to sites like Twitter, for example, using the hashtag feature there to increase visibility. If we wait for solely organic traffic to come from our search engine ranking, we’ll effectively neuter just how many visitors may be exposed to our website in the first place. Make sure you’re promoting outside of your own page and reaching people on other channels.

Slow Loading

Slow loading pages are often caused by unoptimised web formatting as well as large images. This can be a problem when those with slower connections wish to visit your website, but it can frustrate those with fibre broadband, too. Google now includes page speed as a ranking factor, so a slow website can hurt your SEO. Remember, a good portion of your users will rely on cellular data. As fast as 5G is, our foresight in web design should perform the grunt work when delivering our content to visitors.

Broken or Defunct Pages

Most people know exactly how frustrating and tiresome it is to utilise a website only to be greeted with pages that don’t load, are broken in their formatting, or return a 404 as if they had never existed in the first place. This is especially annoying if it’s encountered when trying to do something essential, like managing an account or booking a service. Make sure that all of your links redirects head to valid pages, and it can be healthy to integrate a ‘report this page/bug’ feature so that users can quickly inform you of any issues you may be unaware of.

Poor user experience

A poor user experience can be a number of the above adding up to a poor user experience, but it goes beyond this. A poor user experience relates to the design and how the person can use your website. This might mean them missing key bits of information, or not accessing the right pages because the layout is poor, through to not purchasing or getting in touch because the call to action is in the wrong place or missing altogether.

With this advice, you’ll be able to go back to the drawing board and manage a much better website next time around. If you need a bit of help and would prefer to put your website in the hands of professionals, then get in touch with us today. We take all the hassle out of your website design, ensuring that it functions intuitively and innovatively. If you have a website that you think is performing poorly in search results, or you need support maintaining it – we can help you.

We’re often asked, “how to build a website on a low budget”? This might be relevant to a new start-up business or a business going through some changes that need to be actioned quickly and the marketing budget has already been spent for the year. Having a larger budget usually means that you’re going to have a much more polished website with a higher spec in functionality, it is possible to do something with a lower budget.

In the years I have worked on designing and building websites, we’ve found ways that can help reduce the budget for a client. The following ways are how you can build a website on a lower budget. It must be said that a “low budget” for one business might not be low for another.

1. Build it yourself (not recommended if you’re busy, running your business)

This might seem like the “cheapest” way to do it and that’s to build it yourself. It’s totally possible, but if you’re busy running your business the time it will take you to learn WordPress or Wix and build a site yourself, you’re likely to have wasted much more of your time and earning capacity building the site than if you’d hired a professional to do it for you.

2. Save money on the domain

Buying the domain can be expensive. If you’re looking to make savings, getting a cheaper domain would help you with your initial investment but also on the ongoing costs. Domain extensions like .com or .co.uk or .org usually carry more of a premium than .tech or .xyz. The cheaper domains don’t have the same prestige but you may be more likely to get something that hasn’t already been registered.

3. Keep the design simple.

If you’re planning to get your website on a lower budget, you’ll need to lower your expectations on what you need with the design. If you’re hiring an agency, agencies usually price on time spent and the more complex the design the more time they will spend to achieve the design for you. One way you can keep the design simple is to choose a pre-designed WordPress or Wix template that either matches your branding or is a pre-designed template for your industry sector. Whilst this isn’t ideal as someone is likely to have this one. It could be a competitor and might cause confusion.

If you’re speaking to an agency, having an idea of what you like already can help keep the cost of your website down as it means that they’ll spend less time researching and coming up with design variations for you.

4. Development

You can save costs in the development of your website as well. There are a few ways to do this. The first would be to limit the number of pages.

If you’re thinking of other ways to reduce the budget of your web development, I would recommend keeping the number of complex functionalities to a minimum. This might mean leaving out e-commerce or a booking engine from the site. Or this could be just keeping the movement and animation on the site to a lower end because this is where additional HTML or CSS development can add to your budget.

It’s worth caveating here that a website should deliver for your business as a tool to either drive leads, or save you time by having functionality that moves your business forwards. If you’re stripping functionality and pages out to such an extent that it is a carcass of a site – you may be better to save some money to do the job properly as you’ll probably waste money in the longer term by having to re-do the whole thing again.

5. Hosting

Hosting for your website is important. A slow site can hamper your SEO as Google does count site speed as a ranking factor. Cheaper hosting can mean slower, but there are plenty of budget hosts that you can use for a few pounds a month that will be ample fast enough until you need a larger plan. At Trident, we host on Amazon AWS – this is because it’s scalable and provides a seriously reliable hosting service – it hosts the main Amazon site for a start, plus other big brands such as Netflix, BBC, so we figured if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us and our clients.

If you’re embarking on a lower-budget website – just plan what you really need and then start at that point. Remember: your time may be better spent running your business than learning a new platform like WordPress.

If you need help planning out your new website and some professional expertise, at Trident, we are more than happy to help. Contact us today for a free consultation.

Month: June 2022

Here Are The Reasons Your Website Is Bad