	Article Directory		Article Submission Service		Article Marketing Blog		Publishers		Member Log In

Article Directory :: Internet Marketing/Online Business Articles

5 Easily Avoided Mistakes When Having A New Website Built

By John King

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 01Nov2010
Word count: 597
Viewed: 233 time(s)

Get Free Content For Your Site

It's amazing how often I see basic mistakes made on a website build that could have easily been avoided had the client had some information at their fingertips, that they could have communicated to their chosen web design company. Unfortunately not everyone has access to this and therefore silly mistakes are made.

Here are 5 common mistakes to look out for when having your website built:

1. The first port of call is your domain name. Don't just grab the first available, fancy sounding name, but consider a name with an important, and relevant keyword in it. Words can be separated by hyphens but not by underscores. For example, if your company sells gold teapots, the domain names goldteapots.com or gold-teapots.com would be fine, whereas gold_teapots.com would not be. By incorporating an important keyword in your domain name you will gain a slight advantage with the search engines. Get this right before anything else is you won't want to change your domain name later on.

2. Time and time again I chat to people who've made a classic and common mistake when having a site built. This mistake is to write your website copy before any keyword research has been done. The reason you will want to research your important keywords and their search potential before writing your copy, is that you will want to stitch your important key phrases naturally into your copy as you write it. Do it the wrong way round and you will end up having to write your copy again. Any decent web building company should do this keyword research for you, and provided a copywriting service should you need it.

3. Check that your web pages will have what is known as friendly URLs. A friendly URL is a website page address that Google can more easily index and rank. In case you don't know what an un-friendly URL looks like, it will look something like this example: page_about.php?catID=4258. This will have been dynamically generated by something like a content management system. A friendly URL will look something like this: aboutus.php. Don't be afraid to check with your website builders that you will have friendly URLs.

4. Another classic mistake that is so easily avoided is when a website looks okay on one browser and terrible on others. This is due to the fact that different browsers render websites differently and therefore not only should you check your finished website on as many browsers as possible, but also check how it looks on both a PC and a Mac of different screen sizes. Make sure you do this before you sign your project off.

5. Whilst you may not have paid your web design company for search engine optimisation services, it is my opinion that the website build should be search engine friendly. It's amazing how often important title and description tags are not completed at the build stage resulting in your website missing out on some valuable search engine ranking positions. Take the meta description tag for example, if this tag is left blank on any page, when a link to this page is shown in the search engine ranking results you will not have any control over the descriptive text next to your link. Google will just randomly select any text from the page, resulting in you missing out on a valuable call to action.

So there are 5 common mistakes often made when undertaking a website build. Don't be afraid to communicate with your chosen web design company to ensure that none of these costly mistakes occur.

The author lives in Surrey in the UK and runs a design agency. He highly recommends visiting WebsiteLauncher.co.uk for high-quality, affordable website packages. Their cheap websites avoid any of the silly mistakes mentioned in the article.

EasyPublish™ this article - publishers click here