It seems every two minutes there’s a new piece of technology on the scene with updated features, new functionality and more things you didn’t even know you needed. That brand new work laptop with a sexy touch screen is the envy of the office, but in no time it’s outdated, clunky and bloated. We’ve got used to this, especially with hardware, we renew frequently to stay efficient, stay effective and keep pace. But when it comes to things less tangible, like software, systems and websites we seem to leave them in our dust. When it comes to your website a lack of updates and refinement can be the road to ruin…

Not only do websites get left to deteriorate, they’re often not even set up correctly in the first place! Like that annoying pop up, poorly setup spreadsheet or programme on your computer that blows a gaping hole in your productivity, your website can fall increasingly short of it’s goals.

So, having seen so many UK Manufacturing Business Websites letting their businesses down we thought we’d pull together a list. This is a list of ways in which your website is LETTING YOU DOWN! Whether it be because of a poor creation or maintenance, here’s a list to check your own website against, see how your website stands up to the test.

Let’s get into it.

1. Having a site built with old code

Your website is basically a bunch of code. TXT. files that, when viewed through a browser (like Google Chrome) displays as a “beautiful” website. The bare bones are typically HTML, with the visual stuff being controlled using CSS. Over time there have been new versions of these codes or “languages” enabling better functionality, more optimisation and performance.

Why does this even matter?

Well over time browsers move to align with latest code languages. This means your once up-to-date website starts to deteriorate. The browsers struggle to display the old code, as they’re designed to process the more up-to-date languages. OK so it doesn’t look as good, so what? Well google is all about delivering quality websites to it’s searchers. If your website is built on old code that doesn’t display or “render” properly there’s no doubt this will have an impact on your google ranking. Any effort to Search Engine Optimise is largely like flogging a dead horse.

Websites built on old code typically don’t use the full width of the screen. Sometimes displaying in a narrow section in the middle of the screen, or worse displaying all off to the side. Not using the width usually results in text being really small and images being squashed. It’s not user friendly it’s difficult to work with, is this how you want your business to come across to potential customers? In some cases this is their first interaction with you. First impressions last!

The solution

Unfortunately the solution to this problem is not one of sticking plasters or quick fixes. If you’re looking at your website through your customers eyes and it’s making you feel like you’re looking back in time, you need to get it rebuilt.

Find a web developer, get an idea of what you need your website to do and get yourself updated. Costs for new websites vary greatly. Spending as little as £499 could get you something suitable that you could manage going forward. On the other hand, the sky is the limit if you want some bells and whistles. For an SME Manufacturing Company in the UK I would suggest a budget of between £1000-3000 would get you something well designed. Keep in mind you still have to write all the content for your website!

That brings us nicely onto...

2. Bad Grammar and Poor Writing

This is where the real expense, but also the real value of a website comes in. Bad grammar reflects on your business, your professionalism and your attention to detail. But hey, we’re not all expert writers. What you are however, is an expert on our Manufacturing Businesses. This means you can’t delegate the writing of your website content fully, you need to provide guidance.

It doesn’t start and end at bad grammar though. Your website should influence, encourage and persuade, this is achieved partially through the design, but mostly through the writing. It’s a real skill to write in a persuasive and informative way. When you get it wrong, it can have the opposite effect; Confusion and boredom.

The Solution

A quick solution to this one would be to tackle the grammar. Find the expert in your office, take it home to your spouse, whatever you need to do. Get the website reviewed, then get it updated. Updating may be done through a content management system, basically the area you login to edit your website. However, if you have an old website or it’s managed by a third party agency, you’ll have to get into contact with them to update it. The latter approach will more than likely cost money.

The more long term solution is to hire a copywriter. That’s right, that’s copywriter with a “w”. These guys know their stuff when it comes to writing persuasive and informative copy or content for your website. Some are better than others, so it’s good to get some references or recommendations. The best place to start looking for a copywriter in our opinion is peopleperhour.com you can filter results so you get people in your local area of the UK. Try and find someone who has written content for other industrial businesses. They’ll be able to understand your requirements a little better if they’ve got experience in the Manufacturing Sector.

Costs for copywriters can vary. As a rule if you spend £1000 on your website design, I’d suggest spending at least that again on the copywriting. However it is possible to get some basic copywriting done for less that £500. It will take a little bit of back and forth between you and them, so be prepared not only to invest the money, but invest the time. Read what’s being written from your customers perspective and ask for alterations and refinements. Budget your time as well as your money.

3. Not mobile friendly

This is a big one, especially as this impacts your Google ranking. Mobile friendly is now not a luxury, it’s a prerequisite. Even in Business to Business sales and marketing, the majority of website visits are performed on mobile devices. Whether that be smartphones or tablet computers.

If you’re website is not mobile friendly it’s difficult to read, difficult to navigate and frustrating to interact with. See where I’m going? Is this how you want the first interaction with your customer to be like this? First impressions last.

And that’s if they even find you. Google ranks websites that are searched for on a mobile device differently to how they rank them on desktop. See for yourself. Do a search on desktop, then do it on your smartphone. The order of the results will be different. Some of this may be to do with your IP address and all sorts of other things, but mobile friendliness is a serious factor. If you’re website is not mobile friendly, you’re website ranking will be impacted negatively. Once again, other search engine optimisation efforts may be futile if you don’t address this problem.

The Solution

It’s not as simple as flicking a switch. Mobile friendly websites are built differently to non-mobile friendly websites. If you have a recently built website, it’s possible you can get it modified but this is quite an extensive process. If your website is a little older, it may simply be a case of building a new site from scratch. The good news; new sites, even those that you can create yourself using something like WordPress.com are typically all mobile friendly automatically. It’s become such a prerequisite, most reputable web development companies won’t sell you something that isn’t mobile friendly. If you do hire a web developer, make it your first question.

4. Too mobile friendly / desktop unfriendly

It doesn't have to be a fight between one and the other, but some do-it-yourself platforms have gone a little overboard with "touch screen" functionality. Have you ever scrolled using the mouse only to find the screen has stopped moving? You are now zooming in and out of a full width map embedded in the site? The design has been made "clean" and sleek but the scrolling bar to the right has toggled to invisible and you’re stuck zooming into the back of beyond!

This usually also happens on your “Contact Us” page, when someone taking steps to get in touch. The point here is that this causes frustration, for some people it may even cause them to abandon your website. How many opportunities could have passed you by? You’ll never know!

The Solution

This issue is easily solved, but you need to recognise it first. The key point here is to test your website on multiple devices and see how it performs. When you find a problem like this you can easily get your web developer to fix the issue with a quick code modification. On the other hand if you self manage your website through a Content Management System, it may be a little more involved. Once again, if you get in contact with a developer they can usually help you to modify your template to solve problems like this. Make sure you find a developer who specialises in websites built on your content management system, for example a WordPress expert.

5. Your social media "widget" is showing tweets from last decade!

This is a big one. We all have high hopes and aspirations to make social media work for us, but work takes over, the customer takes precedence, and bang... Now you have a reel of old tweets that make it look like you went out of business, or just got bored with engaging with your customers! Makes you look like a quitter!

If you’re not sure whether social media is going to work for you, or you’re worried about staying committed don’t put a widget on your website. When I say widget I’m talking about that “Live Twitter Feed” that’s embedded in your web page. This will let your website down, even if the rest of it is super slick.

The Solution

Ditch the widget. If you’re currently getting a website built don’t put it there in the first place, unless you’re sure your Twitter account is going to stay up to date. If you’re self managing the website it may be a case of simply removing the widget. If like most UK Manufacturing Businesses you are using a web development agency, you can quickly request the change and get it removed. This is a pretty easy job for a web developer, certainly less than an hour of chargeable development.

6. The Copyright date is not the current year

This dates your website, its creation date and how up to date it is. This tells the website visitor when it was you last took your website seriously. It’s not something every visitor is going to notice, and the impact could be minimal, especially if the rest of your site is hot. However, this problem is typically combined with the website being built on old code. Essentially all the copyright date does is confirm how old your site is, the visitor is probably already feeling like they’ve traveled back in time.

This can leave some site visitors wondering if you’re even still in business. Do you want this question to cross your potential customers minds? Get on the front foot, get up to date.

The Solution

The very quick and simple solution would be to change the date. You’ll probably need to get a website developer to help you with this, especially if your site is built on old code. My advice, put the money you’d spend changing the date towards getting a new site built! The code can be written so the site simply displays the current year on an ongoing basis. So you don’t need to manage and change this date on a yearly basis, that’s if the site is built correctly.

7. The news page with "coming soon" or “Test Articles”

In combination with the outdated copyright date, this makes it look like you went with the idea of having a news page but never really committed to making anything happen! Web developers will all encourage you to have a news or blog section. This is because the ranking of your website will be influenced heavily by you writing news and content on your website. If you’ve not got any plans to get into content marketing, don’t bother with these sections.

It’s ok to not include the news or blog section when building a site. It’s not ok to have a news or blog section with dummy content or no content at all. This gives the wrong message to your website visitors. It says something about your ability to plan. Putting something in place then never using it shows you didn’t think things through. Even worse, if you’ve got dummy content or test content left on the site by the web developer for you to update, this shows a complete lack of attention to detail.

The Solution

If you have no content, create some. Commit to writing some a short piece of news every week to get yourself some momentum. You may want to trim that back to once a month after a month or two but get something flowing. The same goes for dummy content, replace it with something that makes sense!

This may require you getting back in contact with your developer, maybe just to give you a reminder of how to update it! If you use an agency, firstly give them an earful. Then start a discussion on how you can fix the problem together.

I mentioned content marketing, for those of you new to this blog or you missed our previous article I’d suggest you check this article out on Content Marketing and how it fits into online marketing as a whole. However, I also wrote an article discussing the issues around content marketing for UK Manufacturing Businesses. Whatever you choose to do, content or no content make sure your website only has what you need. Ditch the blog and news section if you aren’t going to maintain them.

8. Broken Links

This is where you get something called a page 404 redirect. Basically, a button or link on your site leads to a dead end. This happens way more often than it should. Your website is not working. If someone has clicked on a button, link or navigation tab on your website and it’s gone to a dead end, you’re missing out on the opportunity to convince them. You’re not delivering the information they are looking for, but even worse than that, you’re building expectations and letting them down.

This isn’t the king of interaction you want with a potential customer. Letting them down before they’ve even spent any money with you is not a great sales strategy. It shows a lack of attention to detail once again and an inability to put yourself in the customers shoes. Google also picks up on broken links. Broken links are a sign of poor quality user experience, so yuo can take a good guess what Google will do to your ranking. So you should solve this one pretty quick.

The Solution

Broken links can occur during the development of your website, code has bugs just like software. The key thing here is that your website needs to be tested during the development. Despite the fact this is the responsibility of the developer, you should also make sure everything works the way it should.

If you’ve got a self managed site through a CMS like WordPress you can usually pretty quickly identify and fix the problems. If you can’t fix the problems you can get in contact with a web developer to fix the problem. If your website is managed by an agency, depending on your service level agreement they should fix this pretty quickly. It shouldn’t take a great deal of time to fix broken link problems, certainly less than an hour of chargeable development.

9. Using grainy images for your logo and banner images

Your logo, and any images you put on your website should be of high quality, not stretched pulled or squashed. How you treat such important elements of your own business identity is an indicator to your customers how serious you are about your business. Professionalism, assurance and confidence can go out the window with this simple slip up.

Strong, consistent and quality brand identity aren’t difficult to achieve. It takes attention to detail and a non-compromising personality when it comes to quality. This IS what you want your customers to be thinking. SME UK Manufacturing Businesses have the opportunity to build strong brand identity backed by their expertise. Grainy branding could indicate grainy expertise…

The Solution

If you had your logo designed by a graphic designer at some point they should have provided you with various file formats such as jpeg, png, gif, svg amongst a bunch of others. jpeg is a compressed file format which you can be uploaded directly to your site. It allows quick loading of your web page and usually provides suitable quality. However, the jpeg file format has a fixed size. That means as you expand or shrink the logo it becomes grainy. The jpeg needs to be saved at the size it displays at on your website, meaning it displays in a crisp manner.

Our suggestion, speak to the graphic designer who designed your logo or find a new designer. Once you’ve found one (you can go on over to peopleperhour.com and find one easily) describe your problem and they’ll be able to provide you with the specific files you need. Once you have the files you can upload them to your site through your CMS.

Alternatively you could find a web developer who can offer a complete solution. Fixing the logo and updating it on your site.

10. Using Images from the dawn of time

Most smartphones can take pretty awesome pictures even compared with the digital cameras of 10 years ago, so why are we still using stock images from the 80's and 90's? This seriously dates your website. Retro is cool in some situations, but this is not one of them. Your customers want to work with someone who is up-to-date. They may want traditional values, but old images just scream “stuck-in-your-ways!”

You all know the images I’m talking about. They’ve probably got a yellowy hue and throwback to times of your dad’s dad. Customers, even in the B2B sector have expectations and they will build a mental picture of your business through these images. Do you want that mental picture to underwhelm them? Or do you want it to draw them in? Obviously if you’re reading this post you want to start making your website perform.

The Solution

Update the images. It’s quite simple. They could be images you take, or get a professional to take. Alternatively you can use stock images available for download from websites all over the web. A couple of examples are CanStock and iStock. For a bit of cash you can download a ton of images (certainly enough for your website).

Update through your Content Management System or get a web developer involved. Either way, get your site screaming “here and now” with some cool images. It’s amazing the impact some well selected images can make on the look and feel of your website, it’s an easy way to refresh your site even if it was built in the last 18 months.

11. Having tiny buttons which have no purpose

The typical application I’m talking about here are social sharing buttons. For some reason they are so small you would need pin-point-accuracy (or bad luck) to select them. Have you tried pressing them with a touch screen? Frustrating. You press them when you don’t want to, they don’t work when you press them!

Add to this, a lot of these social sharing buttons are actually not connected to a social media account. In some really bad cases we’ve even found social sharing buttons on UK Manufacturing Business websites that link to the social accounts of the web developer who created the site. This is really bad for a number of reasons, needless to say this doesn’t give your customer the greatest confidence.

The Solution

If you’re not active on social media, ditch the buttons. They serve no purpose, so get rid of them. If you do use social media, great, but place your social media buttons and links in sensible places and in sensible sizes. A lot of off-the-shelf website templates absolutely flood your website with social media links and buttons. Getting rid of these buttons can be as simple as deselecting a tick box in your WordPress account. On the other hand, it can be a damn sight more difficult.

First things first, take a look at your site and see if you have these pesky little blighters crowding the space for no reason. If you do and you manage your site with a CMS have a quick look around for a tick box that says something like “display social sharing buttons” and untick it. If you can’t find it, it will probably mean a conversation with a developer. This can be as complex as customising the website template slightly through to changing the template all together.

This can be a quick fix, but it can also be tied in with some of the issues already discussed in terms of “old code” and dated templates. If your site is due an update anyway, tell the developer to steer clear of these social sharing buttons if they serve no purpose to you.

12. Images don't relate to your actual capabilities

This is such a common problem it’s almost an epidemic. In some really bad cases the image is displayed next to a heading for a completely different service. For example a picture of a laser cutter displaying next to the heading “CNC Milling”. It makes it look like you don’t even know your own business. Not a great start with today's ever more informed buyers.

This often happens when a bulk template or generic business directory company builds a website. It’s a sure fire indicator that the person building your website doesn't understand the words that are coming out of your mouth. They don't know CNC milling from milling around! This is incongruous and can be highly confusing for a potential customer visiting your website.

The Solution

As these websites are typically built by businesses who offer “Business-sites” it’s highly unlikely you can do any considerable editing. It’s also likely that you’ll get a fixed number of edits to the site per year, if at all. If you’re tied into a contract it may be worth spending a little cash to get the images changed. However, if you’re going to spend cash always compare it to the cost of building a new site. You’ll get a hell of a lot more value out of a new site built on a content management system like WordPress than you will from a generic “Business-site” style website.

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