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7 Costly mistakes Middle Tennessee businesses should avoid when redesigning their websites

By Dani Wilbert

Remember when shoulder pads were in style? Of course you do. But you stopped wearing that old green turtle neck with shoulder pads 30 years ago. You've updated your fashion. And just as your wardrobe needs revamping, so does your website. The truth is most businesses in Middle Tennessee are stuck in a website time warp along with those shoulder pads. When redesigning your webpage here are 7 costly mistakes to avoid.

1. Setting up an insufficient budget
Let's face it, Middle Tennessee businesses don't focus on their web presence as much as they should. A website brochure that worked 5 to 6 years ago is not enough to stay ahead of your competition anymore. It takes time and a sufficient budget to build a website with sophisticated functions and features. But what is a realistic cost for your business?

With the features like responsive design, content management systems and different graphic elements, websites clearly cost more than they used to. And often, inspiration for features and functionality are drawn from websites of big brands with massive design and development budgets. Don't waste your money with imitating designs on restricting platforms. Your buck goes a lot further with a custom built site.

2. Choosing a platform over custom design
Even a small, one-person business in Middle Tennessee can benefit greatly from the investment into custom web design. The seemingly low cost route maybe tempting, using platforms like (prebuilt word press, WIX and etc.), but these products are built to be lost in the masses and have a lack of individuality in their back and front end. On top of that, several companies using exactly the same themes will make your business look dull and unprofessional. In the great scheme of things, low cost and value design may solve your short term problem, but will be insufficient for a long term solution.

3. Lack of research
Before you throw yourself at the whole process of redesigning your website, spend quality time researching how online presence can make your business more successful. It might be a specific search optimization campaign that is relevant to your business niche, or specific graphic design that heavily focuses on content. The goal of your research is to identify all the things that you need to do as well as things that you should NOT do when redesigning your website.

4. Failing to set the right goals and priorities with the redesign
There is a reason that you are redesigning your website. The redesigning should start with identifying the problems with your old website as well as establishing what you want to accomplish with your new design. Your final
destination is the understanding of what will make your website successful and find the ways to convey it.

5. Unrealistic timeline and launch date
Designing a custom website takes time. Some clients have an unrealistic idea of how long it should take. What a client may not expect is that they themselves might be the one who is late with delivering all the approvals and content changes. What usually happens is the progress of designing or redesigning the project comes to halt because a client is late with producing the content for the website. The desire for a new website shouldn't trump the necessity of getting it right. While launch dates do matter, be sure to set a timeline that is realistic and allows room for flexibility.

6. Designing a website that is not fully responsive
Creating a fully responsive website design requires careful planning, testing and retesting. The effect of fully responsive website design is remarkable – it can be fully viewed on any device. Multi-screen responsiveness makes the website engaging and interactive across all the browsers and devices, thus increasing chances of attracting and landing a lead. A responsive website will help your company meet the growing demands of mobile visitors and provide a good user experience for all of your prospective clients.

7. Focusing on the design more than on content of the website
The biggest mistake you can make is starting the redesigning process with only your design and not the content in mind. This approach can cripple your overall website design. It is important to focus on the content first, targeting your business niche and prospective leads. One of the main reasons for this matter is SEO (search engine optimization), that is mostly focused on key words that benefit your position in search engines. Regardless of your business or industry, content marketing and lead generation should be considerations in your redesign.