Six Things Your Website Should Not Do

1. Your website should NOT look unprofessional

That seems simple and basic. However, there are a lot of small businesses where people have done their websites themselves without experience. While that is something admirable, we have to be careful.

If you want to do it alone, ask yourself have you ever done a home project like your house flooring or maybe you redid a wall in your bedroom and it didn’t turn out well? This usually happens during the first time but as you practice and try doing it again, you get a lot better.

When people are building their own website, it doesn't come out as good as it can look not until you do it a few times which is going to take away time and effort. In this case, it is better to ask somebody to take a look and help.

2. Your website should NOT have flash animation

Flash animation is what you see on some websites looking like a little puzzle piece that says “Do you want to install adobe acrobat?”. Flash was discontinued and is no longer supported, so if your website still has that, you should take it off and replace it with an image.

There are other techniques and things you can do to make it look like animation. However, when you have an animation that is not showing up properly, people are going to be missing out on that information that you thought you were providing for them.

3. Your website should NOT have an empty Alt Tag

Did you know that every image that you put on your website can have and should have what is known as an Alt Tag? An alternate tag is for those who are visually impaired using machines to read a website for them. When the machine comes across an image, it's going to use that descriptive text to describe the image to the visually impaired person. Accessibility is a huge factor that is becoming more and more important.

Moreover, it is good for your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so as long as your images have descriptive text preferably with your keywords in them, that's going to give you a double bonus.

4. Your website should NOT have broken links

A broken link is a link on your website that goes to a page that says “Page Not Found”. Google, Yahoo, and all other search engines will see it as a negative factor in your SEO. If you have a lot of broken links, they will assume that either the site is not being maintained properly, you don’t know what you’re doing, or your content has changed. 

If you're linking to another organization, you have no control over when they change their website and pages so it's possible that you can have a good link today and a bad link tomorrow. What you need to do in that case is make sure you're checking your links on a regular basis. If you find that there is a broken link, an option would be to find an alternative that fits that specific category. 

5. Your website should NOT list all your products and services

It's okay to highlight and showcase all your products and services but if you have a lot of them, don't literally list them down. People are going to get bored with it so break it up and make it more readable. Put images, put headings in there. Make it interesting by breaking up your services, listing them out in different areas and making them aesthetically pleasing.

Social media is important these days, so you may have a Facebook account, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Linked In, Reddit, etc. There are so many different social media platforms and depending on what you read, people will tell you that you should have an account on all of these sites so you may end up with 10 different social media accounts. With that, it's good on every page on your website to link to those social media accounts so people can connect with you.

The only time it's not a good idea is if you have links to Twitter for example and you haven't tweeted since 2015. Don't link to social media accounts that you have but are not maintaining. Ideally, develop a following and develop your presence on that platform before you add links to your website. 

6. Your website should NOT be stale

Always add content to your website. You want to add new information so that the search engines know that there is new content on your website. When clients, customers, and prospects come to your website and see an article you wrote two years ago, they are going to wonder if your business is still functioning or not.  

See Related Article Here: Blogging Ideas To Grow Your Business

If somebody scrolls down to the bottom of your website and it says Copyright 2016, you probably want to change that as well. People will look at that and think twice if what they see is old or new information. Some companies want to show when they started, that's why they want to include the year. In that case, it's best to make it “2016 through 2021” and then next year update it to 2022. 

There are a lot of things that you should NOT do. Some of them are very easy to fix, some of them a little bit more technical but fixing those will definitely make a big difference.