Mistake Number 1: Bad Hosting - Perhaps because hosting has become such a cheap commodity, people think all hosting companies are the same and they all just work the same. Well the fact of the matter is, they don’t all just work, and sometimes a bad host can destroy your business.

For example, if your hosting company takes down your website everyday for a little downtime, it could be during your busiest visiting hours and will make your visitors angry, since they cannot access your website when they wanted to. You wouldn’t think a host would do that, but I have been through several of them that have cost me thousands of dollars in lost customers and advertising revenue.

There are also other factors to consider, like your website getting put on the front page of a social media website, or another highly trafficked website. This in return will get your website bombarded by thousands of visitors in a short amount of time. With a bad hosting company, your websites server will crash and show an error immediately afterwards that will require you to fix it before your visitors can see your site again.

Not to mention that getting all these visitors takes up more bandwidth, which in return cost more money. If you go over your host’s bandwidth quota, your website will no longer display and it will just show an error message.

Mistake Number 2: Messy HTML/CSS Coding - As a general rule of thumb, good programmers know to make their code neatly organized and readable with the human eye. Messy code can make your website and online forms/applications take longer to load and process. This in return makes for an unpleasant visitor experience, and they most likely will not be back.

Mistake Number 3: Not Optimizing Your Website for the Search Engines - Most beginners know this one, but still do not do it correctly. It’s real simple you see, if you are selling “computer desks” on your website, then on the main page you would write content, and display products that had the word “computer desks” in it. You also would continually add more pages to your website, that are on the topics of and have the keywords of related categories to “computer desks”.

Simply put, just keep building onto your website, adding more and more content. Whether that content be text, videos, music, animations, more products, or whatever else fits. It’s your website, get creative, or let us for you.

Mistake Number 4: No link trade directory - Link trading one on one with other websites may now not be as effective as it use to be, since the search engines caught on and look for one way incoming links now. But these days people are smarter and doing things like having another website in which they put the websites link details on that they are trading with.

The site they are trading with then puts a link on their website, linking to your original website that you really care about. This way each website gets a one way link pointing towards it, which is what the search engines love.

It may seem like cheating the system, but really niche link directories are useful resources for internet surfers, and anyways once your website gets on a roll with continually getting visitors, people will start linking to your website naturally, and you would no longer have to trade links that way. If your website isn’t good enough though, then less people will link to your website naturally, which means it will be less successful.

Mistake Number 5: No easy Contact Method - Depending on what your website is for, an easy to fill out and use contact form can make or break your success with customers or clients. While this mainly matters for local service websites, or international businesses that perform services and really need to make contact with the customer, even an informational website should allow for the visitors to contact the owner or support technician easily.

Getting information from a website, while also knowing their is a live person behind it all, really makes a lot of visitors feel nice, which entices them to return for more.

Well I hope you enjoyed my list, and be sure to add anything else you think I have forgotten. Like I said, the internet is always changing, and eventually this blog post will be out of date.

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