Building a website for your startup can take a great deal of foresight, market knowledge and simple common sense.
As can only be expected in a complex endeavor, startups tend to make one of several mistakes with their first websites.
Try to make sure that your website design process stays clear of these unfortunate oversights.
Trying too hard to give your website an identity
Your business website is supposed to reflect your identity as a business. Startups setting up their first website often have the problem that they don’t have a clear identity just yet. Many make the mistake of designing their website to reflect their identity as they see it at the time. Unfortunately, startups are fluid entities. The way startup owners see the identity of their business is subject to change.
The company logo is an example of an area where reaching too hard for an identity can be expensive. Designing a logo can often cost a few thousand dollars. Often, the design of a business website follows the theme and color ideas suggested by the logo. A startup that is too quick out of the gates finding a logo could change its mind about the path to follow a few months down the line. Their logo could appear all wrong then.
The font that your website uses could be another identity issue. Different fonts express personality differently. Many startup websites make the mistake of picking a font to go with their initial idea of who they are. They then need to change fonts when they begin to see their business differently over time. In the end, their website ends up as a horrendous mishmash of fonts.
Adopting a seat-of-the-pants approach
Startups often launch their websites with whatever material they have on hand in the beginning. They add pages each day from that point forward as they see fit. Needless to say, unplanned website extensions can quickly become a tangled mess. You could liken building a website like this to adding extensions to a house willy-nilly. Adding a conservatory or an additional room without much thought to its effect on the general look of the house could have unattractive results.
It would be a far better idea to take all the time you need to work out an idea of what your website should look like a couple of years down the line and build in a way that takes future extensions into account.
Forgetting that the people involved in building the website are not the target audience
When startup owners and their designers get to work on their startup websites, they often only aim for a design that appeals to them. They simply neglect to consider testing their designs on their target audiences to see if their ideas work as intended. Not only does a website need to adopt design elements that appeal to the target audience, it needs sensitive UX (User eXperience) design, as well. The designer needs to research the ways in which the website is meant to be used and address those needs. This is what results in a cohesive, user-centric design.
