Mistakes when designing a Startup's Website

These shared things are all real problems I have experienced when doing business, and when talking to many of you who are starting a startup and embarking on website design.

Most of my websites when doing business are made by myself. I am not a coder, nor a person who provides website design services. If you are a Startup, you will understand the situation of doing everything yourself from Website, Marketing, Delivery, Customer Consulting, content writing,... you know everything.

That's why I tinker with Websites to design websites for my "projects" (saying projects just to make it more impressive). All the websites I create serve the purpose of starting my business and are mainly "asked" by friends to do them. (quote the word "thank" for its true nature because you still pay the normal fee that people trust, so "thank you" must be done).

Currently, I see quite a few people starting a business struggling with design issues. Some problems I see you often encounter are:

• Looking down on website design

If you are a startup, the Website is your face when customers contact you online, replacing the store premises, replacing sales staff introducing your products and services to customers. Imagine you walked into a sleazy store with bad employees, would you think about buying?

Yet, many people currently ignore this issue and design cheap websites just for the sake of it. Don't ask why after spending so much money on advertising and bringing in so much traffic, no one pays attention.

For many websites, when I researched my competitors to run ads, I couldn't understand why they could run ads on such websites. The website looks like it was made more than ten years ago, has a rustic interface, lots of errors, is not optimized on phones and has nothing called UX/UI (optimized experience when customers visit).

This is no different than you are burning money like joss paper because bringing customers to such Websites cannot make customers place orders. It even left a bad impression because of this unprofessionalism.

There are some sides who say: "Oh my god! Make a website that makes sense.” With friends like that, I'm speechless. Because perhaps they are moving too slowly for the times. And it seems like they don't care much about the development of their business. Because in this era, users always search Google for the company name to find out first.

If a user searches and doesn't see your business's official information page, you've lost a customer. But if they come in and see a crappy website, you've lost more than one product because they'll keep a bad impression of your business and tell their relatives about it.

• Don't know where to choose for design

I used to work as a Sales Officer at Sapo before I quit to pursue my own goals (not designing a website to avoid misunderstandings). Therefore, I understand quite clearly the advantages and disadvantages of different systems, website types, and competitors.

Each type of website will have different advantages and disadvantages. If you do not have much experience, it will be easy for you to be deceived by business parties who say sweet words.

Even in the past at the company I worked for, the sales staff also had this person and that person. While I will give customers real advice on the pros and cons as I am sharing with you now, and the direction of website development suitable for the business, many business people give random advice that building a website with you is safe. Surely SEO will be TOP 1, blah..bla and all.

There is nothing so easy, it's just that the SEO optimization code is better, there's no way that after building a website, it will be in the Top 1. If so, then all the SEO parties would be gone... there's no such thing as an SEO contract costing a few hundred dollars. huhu

I can't answer for you which reputable coder you should hire, or which company is best to design your own website at because I honestly don't know and there's no party that trusts me enough for me to advise. advise you.

If you don't want to spend too much time designing a website and need someone to support you throughout the sales process. I recommend that you only choose one of the two platforms Sapo and Haravan because of the scale of the two companies and their superiority compared to other competitors in the market.

Although a Sapo or Haravan style website also has some advantages and disadvantages that I have analyzed (you can read the article below). But above all, they are all large and scaled companies, so they will provide good customer support to maintain their reputation.

You should read the article Which platform should I choose as an online sales website? to know about the advantages and disadvantages of current Website platforms and choose the appropriate platform for yourself.

• Don't know how to design properly

Each type of Brand, Product, and Service will have different ways to design, arrange, and choose colors accordingly.

You need to clearly determine what the purpose of your website is? Is it a company introduction website, product introduction website, online sales website, room booking website, calendar booking website or simply a blog website providing information to create a funnel to get customer information.

For example, when selling Organic products, most of the website's color tones will be green or soft colors associated with nature. Websites selling food will often have warm colors like orange, red, etc. In fact, it will according to logo color, identify your brand.

It is also about making operations easier for customers and providing more complete information to increase the ability to close customers through the website. This is mostly true for new startups with little or no experience.

One more thing, many Website consultants have no experience because they have never run their own business and understand your customers, right?

Therefore, a combination of both parties is needed. You need to provide the Website consultant with information about your customers and a caring consultant will advise on the right Website for you, not care about you. Waiting for you to sign the contract.

• There is no foresight.

Many people think that they should just temporarily design a website and then have money to redo it later. So I would like to warn those people that: If you are determined to start a business, I won't say anything else. Having a temporary website and then replacing it will be like renting a store and then changing the address for a few days and a half a month, throwing away what you've built..

Everything you have built from content, to articles, to links will be lost and will be lost because Google evaluates that there are too many links that do not exist because they have been changed.

A temporary website makes you have no intention of investing seriously in advertising, articles, exploiting online channels, etc.

Lack of foresight is also reflected in choosing the wrong source code, making the Website unable to be upgraded and modified to suit future needs. For example, initially it was just a normal product introduction sales website, but when you want to upgrade additional features such as shipping, online payment, order notification, etc., it cannot be done.

Or sometimes it's simply a sales website and you want to add a blogging section to provide more information to customers but the source code does not meet the requirements.

So please be careful to choose a source code that can be upgraded to meet your future needs!

• Spending too much time on trivial details.

A lot of my friends have this problem. This may be because you care too much about website design, pay too much attention to trivial details, thus wasting a lot of time.

Perhaps it's largely because some of you are too picky and inexperienced in e-commerce so you don't know what is important and not necessary to have a good website.

This is not contrary to what I said above. Instead of having a perfect 100% Website. You only need a perfect 80% Website to sell. Because if you sit down and edit the remaining 20% note to perfection, you will probably spend 80% more time.

Instead, spend 80% this time finding customers and optimizing the sales process to be more effective. The remaining 20% should be gradually improved during the sales period. That will definitely be more effective.

I encounter this very often, and what makes me angry the most. Although I advise all the small things like the font to be a little bigger, the color to be a little darker and a little lighter, the left and right alignment to be 1.2 pixels, the image must be extremely sharp (even though it's heavy). ~, loading is slow,... I can temporarily ignore it to focus on content, sales methods,... Because accessing more than 90% from the phone, it just needs to be clear and easy to operate.

Many "brothers" and "sisters" only focus on small details, fixing them over and over again, and can't even finish the website for a month.

Recently I also made a company website for an acquaintance, adjusting it up and down little by little. After seeing what one side has done, the other side wants to do the same thing, regardless of whether their scale or operating method is appropriate. In the end, the website was nowhere to be found and stuck in a bit of place.

There were dozens of photo slide banners. I advised them that it would slow down the website and not have to sit and wait to see all the dozens of photo slides on the homepage, but I didn't listen. It's said that there are dozens left on this side and that side. Really, I'm at a loss for words... I can only say that I will advise you on what I think is good, but how to do it will be up to you to decide.

That party previously asked me to run ads for that website, but in the end I didn't accept because I felt that even running that website would be ineffective and a waste of their budget. Let them find someone else who knows better.

Having encountered so many cases like that, I now choose to do it for myself, and no longer accept work through acquaintances like that. I always want to give them the best advice, but they don't think so.