The issues related to creating, branding and maintaining a website in an

effective manner
• 1. Messy codes
• 2. Presence of broken links
• 3. Poor or outdated website design
• 4. Slow loading time
• 5. Problematic landing page
• 6. Mobile incompatibility
• 7. Lack of SEO optimization
• 8. Cluttered home page
• 9. Security and certification pages.
• 10. Not periodically backed up.
• 11. Tracking codes.
• 12. Social media integration
• 1. Messy code- A lot of coding is involved in the building of a website,
especially as you add more functions and features to your site. If your
code is unorganized and messy, it can result in a variety of issues. Not
only can it affect how your website is supposed to function, but it can
affect the ability of search engines to properly index your site’s
content, thereby hurting your search rankings
• 2. Presence of broken links- Broken links are links on your site that
don’t work, whether they are links directing visitors to a page off of
your website or that exists on your website. When you click on a
broken link, you’ll be taken to a 404 page, which displays a message
indicating that the page could not be found. There are several issues
with having broken links. Visitors will be frustrated if they click on a
link and it doesn’t take them to where they’re expecting to go. This
reflects poorly on your site and on your brand. If you can’t maintain
your website, how can visitors be expected to trust in the quality of
your brand?
• Broken links also indicate to Google and other search engines that
you’re not keeping your website up to date. This can hurt your search
engine rankings. When your rankings decline, so will your website’s
exposure, resulting in fewer visitors.
• 3. Poor or outdated website design- The overall design of a website
needs to be both functional and aesthetically pleasing. Visitors will
judge how your website looks, after all. However, website design
trends change relatively often.

• This means that if it’s been a few years since you’ve updated your
site, it’s likely now outdated. The more outdated it looks, the more
unprofessional your brand will appear to be. You need to update your
site regularly to adhere to modern website design principles.
• 4. Slow loading time- Slow loading times can absolutely kill the
website experience of your visitors. Few people have the patience to
wait more than a few seconds for a page to load–especially when
they’ve become so accustomed to how quickly other high-quality
websites load. If your site won’t load, they can find a site that will.
Generally speaking, the majority of your visitors will expect your page
to load within two seconds. If it takes more than three seconds to
load, expect to lose around 90 percent of the visitors trying to visit
that page. 79 percent of all visitors who experience slow loading
speeds won’t come back to your website.
• If that wasn’t bad enough, losing visitors as a result of slow loading
times will cause your bounce rate to spike. The bounce rate is a metric
referring to how many people leave your page without engaging
further. A high bounce rate will hurt your search engine rankings.
• 5. Problematic landing page- Landing pages are vital to your ability to
convert leads. They help reiterate the benefits of your offer, keep
leads focused, and guide leads to conversion. If your landing pages
are poor, the odds are your conversion rate will be too.

• 6. Mobile incompatibility- According to the Pew Research Center, as of

2018, roughly 77 percent of Americans owned a smartphone. Around
20 percent of American adults only use their smartphones to access
the Internet. Additionally, 52.2 percent of the world’s web traffic is
generated through mobile phones. This means that a significant
amount of your website traffic will be coming via mobile devices both
now and in the future.
• If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it will affect how it’s displayed on
mobile devices. If your site doesn’t display properly, load quickly (or at
all), or is difficult to navigate on mobile devices, you’ll lose a massive
number of potential leads. To top it off, Google ranks pages for mobile
separately from desktop, meaning that a lack of mobile optimization
can hurt your ability to bring in web traffic. While there are many
ways to improve how mobile-friendly your site is, the most effective
way to ensure mobile optimization is to use a responsive website
design. Responsive design ensures that your site will display properly
no matter how big or small the screen is.
• 7. Lack of search engine optimization- Visitors aren’t going to come
out of anywhere. Your website needs to be properly optimized for
SEO (search engine optimization). Proper SEO optimization helps
search engines correctly identify your content and can help to
increase your rankings on SERP, thereby increasing exposure to your
target audience and bringing in more web traffic. Poor SEO
optimization will hurt your ability to find new leads.

• 8. Cluttered homepage- Your homepage is the introduction to not just

your website, but to your business. As such, you need to make sure it
leaves a good first impression on new visitors. One of the more
common mistakes businesses make on their homepage is trying to
present too much information. This causes it to become cluttered. A
cluttered homepage can be overwhelming and difficult to read,
making it hard for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
• - Duplicate homepage
• Complicated site navigation
• Non-specific page titles
• No contact information
• Presence of the entry page
9. Security and certification problems- Don’t assume that just because
you’re not a giant corporation that you won’t be exposed to any
security threats. Hackers these days often go after smaller businesses
because their security is often poor.
• An unsecure website can pose serious problems — not only can it result in
compliance issues, but if your security is compromised, it can cause a PR
nightmare that will hurt the trust your audience has in your brand.
Obtaining an SSL certificate (resulting in the HTTPS protocol) will encrypt
the data transferred between your visitors and your site and solve all these
security headaches. However, you’ll also want to be aware of the following
common security issues.

• 10. Not periodically back up- Even if you take the security of your website
seriously and take every precaution to protect your site against hackers,
you should always plan for the worse. If a hacker is able to penetrate your
security, they could potentially destroy your entire website. As you can
imagine, this could be incredibly problematic. It’s why you should back up
your website periodically. This way, if your site is hacked and destroyed,
you can retrieve a recent version of your site. It may be missing some
newer content, but at least your website won’t be down and out. If you
regularly update your site, then you should back it up on a weekly basis.
• 11. Tracking codes- You need to know how your website is performing
to identify problem areas that need adjustings, such as website issues
or marketing issues. In order to monitor the performance of your
website, you will have to implement tracking codes. Tracking codes
help you track visitors who come to your website, thereby allowing
you to collect valuable data that includes how many people are
visiting your site, what pages are being viewed the most, where
visitors are coming from, and more.
• 12. Social media integration- Social media is an important component
of any inbound marketing campaign. Considering that billions of
people around the world use social media, you’re missing out on a
huge audience if you don’t have a social presence. However, it’s not
enough to just set up a Facebook or Twitter page. Your social pages
need to be integrated with your website as well.
Tips for building an Effective business
websites
• 1. Make your site mobile responsive.
• 2. Make it easy to find.
• 3. Place your contact information above the fold.
• 4. Make it easy to navigate.
• 5. Keep your pages uncluttered.
• 6. Make sure it’s accurate.
• 7. Respect the need for speed.
• 8. Have a call to action.
• 9. Keep your design simple.
• 10. Get personal.
• 11. Make sure your website copy is customer-oriented.
• 12. Incorporate SEO best practices.
• 1. Make your site mobile responsive.
• Mobile responsiveness is critical for a website to be effective. American
adults spend more than five hours on their mobile phones every day,
while more than one-third do all of their shopping online via mobile
device Needless to say, your business’s mobile website must offer a
positive user experience.
• If potential customers land on your site but find it difficult to read or
navigate on a mobile device, they may simply abandon you in favor of a
competitor. Furthermore, a negative mobile user experience affects
your website in search engine rankings, making it harder for users to
find through a Google search – which brings us to our next point.
• 2. Make it easy to find.
• You need a domain name that either matches your company name or
describes your business in some way. You can even have multiple
domains that point to the website. This means incorporating technical
SEO best practices, keyword research, content marketing, and paid
advertising campaigns to drive traffic to your website.

• Tip: Consider outsourcing your web development, branding, SEO, and

content marketing to professionals who can offer advice and guidance in
creating your website and landing pages.
• 3. Place your contact information above the fold.
• If your business depends on people being able to contact you or call
your sales team, put that information where they can find it easily.
• “Your contact information should be visible, preferably at the top of
the homepage, so that visitors don’t have to search for a phone
number or address if they want to contact the business,” said David
Brown, CEO of Web.com.
• If you use social media to connect with customers, put your social
links in the website header or footer, where they are easily found.
• 4. Make it easy to navigate.
• Dan Veltri, co-founder and chief product officer of Weebly, advises
limiting your top-level navigation menu to five clearly labeled tabs,
with related pages organized under them. You should also offer a
clear way to get back to the homepage no matter where your readers
land. Very often, a Google search may take your reader to a page on
your website other than the homepage.

• Did you know? People scan webpages from top to bottom, left to
right, so put your navigation menu where most people expect to find
it: at the top of the page. Use dropdown menus under each top-level
category for clean and organized navigation.
• 5. Keep your pages uncluttered.
• Paul Bolls, associate professor of strategic communication at the
Missouri School of Journalism, said that readers need to be able to
put information in context. If a site has too much information, it
overloads the mind, making it unable to retain the new information.
Be sure to use a good balance of text and graphics that presents a
clean page.

• One way to keep it simple is to cut the social widgets, such as a

Twitter feed on your site. Ask yourself if you are adding information
your reader cares about, advised Michael LaVista, CEO of Caxy
Interactive. If your widget content does not support the purpose of
the page, remove it.
• 6. Make sure it’s accurate.
• It should go without saying that inaccurate information will turn off
consumers, whether it’s a wrong number, outdated product
information or simple grammatical errors. You should not only
proofread each page before it goes live, but also periodically check
each page, especially after making updates anywhere else.

• Tip: Whenever you update core information about your business on

your website, also be sure to update your social media pages, Google
My Business Yelp and other sites on which your business might
appear.
• 7. Respect the need for speed.

• A study by digital marketing company Akamai found that 88.5% of

web users will leave a website if it loads too slowly. Furthermore, the
time it takes to load a webpage affects the purchase decisions of
nearly 70% of online shoppers.

• Make sure your website runs smoothly by keeping the software up to

date, optimizing videos and images for quicker downloads, and using
a website host that can handle your bandwidth demands.
• 8. Have a call to action.

• Each page on your website should entice the reader to do something.

In other words, you need to give them a call to action.

• These landing pages should encourage users to take certain actions,

such as calling your company, signing up for a service, buying a
product, downloading a whitepaper, or doing something else that
benefits your business goals. Give them a noticeable invitation to take
the action: a button, a link, or clear verbiage. Keep it above the fold if
possible so that readers do not have to scroll before finding the call to
action
• 9. Keep your design simple.
• Limit the use of fonts, colors, and GIFs, which can distract and pull the
eyes away from the focus of the webpage. Short paragraphs and
bullet points also make the information more scannable and likely to
be read. Ian Lurie, CEO of internet marketing company Portent Inc.,
suggests keeping paragraphs shorter than six lines.

• This is especially important when it comes to mobile responsiveness

which is a major factor in how Google ranks websites in its algorithm.
The better a website’s ranking, the higher it appears on the search
engine results page (SERP). If a competitor is mobile-friendly and your
website isn’t, you could get pushed down lower in your customers’
search results.
• 10. Get personal.

• Just as brick-and-mortar businesses invest heavily in their storefronts

to represent their brand images, e-commerce retailers need to create
high-quality online experiences in keeping with the brand perception,
as Tom Lounibos, co-founder of SOASTA, told Business News Daily.

• To that end, your About Us page should not be a dry block of text
about your company. Emily Brackett, president of design and branding
firm Visible Logic, recommends including a good photo of yourself or
your team to personalize the experience for your customers
• 11. Make sure your website copy is customer-oriented.
• Potential customers come to your website to get information that is useful to
them. Sometimes they come for educational content on your blog, and other
times they are focused on researching the products and services that you sell.
Either way, you should present relevant information that will engage your
prospects, give them something of value and build their trust in your
expertise.

• When you are planning the content on your website, try to think about it
from the customer’s point of view. If you were a prospective customer, what
information would be helpful to you? What level of knowledge or expertise
would you have already, and what would you need to be explained in more
detail? By focusing on your content from the customer’s perspective, you can
keep them on your site longer and are more likely to create a long-term
relationship with them that results in a sale.

• Not a writer? No problem; just outsource it to a professional copywriter.

• 12. Incorporate SEO best practices.
• You may have the best website in your industry, but it won’t do you a
bit of good if people can’t find it. While you can spend money on ads
to drive prospects to your website, it is more cost-efficient and
effective in the long run to bring free organic search traffic to your
site.
• When people are looking for information online, they go to search
engines, especially Google. Usually, they find what they are looking
for on the first page of the search results, so that is where you want
your company to appear. Google and other search engines have their
own proprietary algorithms that they use to rank sites for search
terms, also called keywords.
• Search engines use three ways to determine where your listing appears:
crawling, indexing and ranking. Crawling means that they find your site
through links from other sites. So, make sure that links to your site
appear on as many outside websites as possible.
• After your site is discovered by the crawling bots, it is indexed, which
means that it is analyzed for content, including keywords, freshness,
relevance, links and multimedia. Make sure that your site has plenty of
new, relevant content relating to the keywords you want to rank for.
• Finally, ranking is how the search engines determine the best results for
a given search. Ranking is based on relevance and authority. Include
plenty of relevant content, such as individual articles on different
aspects of a specific topic. Authority is established by the size of your
site, its traffic, and how many other well-respected sites link to yours.
Small business SEO tools make it easier to optimize your site.