If you are planning on getting started with a new website project, the following is a list of pitfalls to avoid toensure the successful completion of yourwebsite project:
1. Most beautiful website in theworld - This is the most common pitfall. People spend countless hours creating a“beautiful’ website without considering what is needed for optimal performance.
If you have a business where beautyand creativity of the website is the most important thing and you have adevelopment company that can support you in creating that piece-of-art, thenperhaps the time, money and effort is worth it. Better, though, to create aprofessional, tidy site that works according to your needs, than to spend timeon creating a piece of art.
It takes great effort to generatebusiness from your website. Place your time and effort in marketing and keepingyour website updated.
2. Most feature rich website in theworld - Do not try to add all the possible features in one effort. Websitedevelopment is an evolutionary process. Start with a minimum, required featureset, then plan to add features as your needs grow.
3. Website with richest content -Again, it is not possible to add every single bit of appropriate content at theonset of your project, or to have the best content in one step. Plan to havethe basic content required to make your website functional first. Once your websiteis launched, you should work on constantly updating and adding content.
4. Website with great animation and flash effects- Flash and animation effects looks cool, agreed. But do not overdo it. Flashand other animation effects make websites heavy and it takes longer to load thewebsite. Normal users do not like waiting for websites to load. Even searchengines don’t like slow websites. Flash and animation also add costs todevelopment. I suggest keeping the effects to a minimum.
5. Totally bug-free website atlaunch - No matter how much you test a website, issues will come up on thewebsite when you are ready to launch it. It is better to launch a website whenyou have covered the majority of issues and there are no major functionalproblems on the website. If you are expecting heavy traffic on the websiteimmediately after the launch, plan your website launch so that traffic buildsup slowly and you can work on fixing residual issues or bugs while the initialset of users are on the website. Consider planning a Beta launch with a restrictedset of users who know that they might encounter some issues on the website.Keep reviewing the website after the launch and get the updates done to fix anyissues.
6. Getting the website completed in shortest spanof time - Do not expect or plan to get your website done overnight. Websitedevelopment is an involved and iterative process. From conceptualization tofinal launch, it takes a good amount of time for each step.
You can minimize the time byworking with a project plan, tight set of requirements, and engagingaggressively with the development team. If you attempt to compress the time ittakes for each step, you will end up stressed out and with a poor quality siteon top of it.
The development and launch of yourwebsite is only a small part of a successful web presence. The post- launchprocess is actually much more critical, and time consuming as well.