The 10 most common mistakes made when creating and running a web site.

1. Unclear goals, no targets, no measures of success
   
   • Unrealistic expectations
     
     
2. Content related issues
   
   • Too much
   • Not interesting
   • No differentiation from the competition
   • Trying to be all things to all people
   • Overuse of colour and fonts
   • Badly organised
   • Poor structure
   • Out of date
   • Broken links
   • Inappropriate use of moving objects that require plug-ins and slow the site down.
   • Key information hidden away and difficult to find
     
     
3. Poor Structure and Navigation.
   • Easy to get lost
   • Difficult to get back to the home page
   • Not tested with customers and third parties for ease of navigation
     
     
4. Not optimised to produce effective Internet search engines listings.
   • E.g. Nice design, but all done in graphics that search engines find difficult to index, so ignores the web site.
   • No meta information or focus on keyword searchable content
   • No tracking of search engine rankings
     
     
5. Done in isolation of other marketing activities
   • Customers not told about it
   • Not promoted in other marketing, left to fend for itself
   • No incentive to visit the site
   • Not marketed using email or mailing lists
   • Not mentioned in traditional correspondence or newsletters
   • Website enquires not followed up or responded to as efficiently as an inbound phone enquiry
   • The poor relation with little funding for updating and development
     
     
6. Website project seen as solely a "technical" responsibility
   • Often results in poorly conceived Websites
     
     
7. Poor choice of developer / tool
   • Unhappy with the results and experience.
   • Limited ability to deliver.
   • Done in house or by a friend.
     
     
8. Not updated regularly - seen as a one off exercise.
   • Out of date information is a big turn off
   • A news page with the latest news being more than 6 months old?
   • The last online newsletter dated 2000?
     
     
9. Not written conforming to standards - Not tested in different software.
   • It may look fine to you, but to many it may not work at all or look like it isn't finished yet!
   • Different versions of Netscape and Explorer etc.
     
     
10. No monitoring/ assessment of website visitor statistics
    • A key advantage of a web site is the amount of information it can feed back to you about your customers and prospective customer's actions, behaviour and response to your web site. Ignore it at your peril.
    • Decisions made without assessing or measuring the impact on the website.

Problem areas at glance

1. Unclear goals
2. Content
3. Structure
4. Search Engines
5. Marketing
6. Responsiblily for construction
7. Developer
8. Maintenance
9. Multiplatform support
10. Visitor Monitoring