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Common mistakes when building a website.Starting Too Big! Building successful websites takes a lot of work – much more than people imagine. You may have plans to be bigger than Google or MSN, and you should do your best to make those dreams come true. And, if you want to be successful, start small. Get experience. Learn what it takes to get pages up, and working perfectly. Learn what it takes to market your site successfully to get lots of traffic. Learn what it takes to convert those visitors to customers or loyal readers. Recreating the wheel The web is technically mature, and almost all the tools you need are available. Programming for the web can become very complex, very fast – which means, your project may never get completed, or it will cost 10 times more than you imagined or it can be full of bugs or all of the above. Getting bogged down in the design Building the site is easiest and quickest part of the process. The real job of making a website – is running it. Marketing is the life blood of your site, and so is the user experience once you get visitors to come. Want to be successful – build a small site very quickly, and then go market like crazy. You will learn how to be successful by running the site, not by picking the color of the icons. The Star Trek Syndrome (Boldly going where no man has gone before.) If you want to be successful, then model success. We all have our private dreams of making 'The Next Big Thing'. The reality is that those big hits are very rare. If you have a new product or a new service, great! Start small and don't bet the bank on it. Pierre Omidyar started eBay with around 700 lines of Perl code written over the weekend, and the first product he sold was a broken laser printer he had in his house. After the first week, he got 2 bids on the last day - and it rolled from there. He didn't try to build NASA to start with. If you want to make money on the web, then model after successful businesses. If you want to do something new, start very small, and take it one step at a time. The Picasso Syndrome When making a website, many times, people without any design experience want to join into the design process. As if suddenly they received Divine inspiration and have a sharp sense for what people respond to best. -- It't not true. Good design comes from experience. If you want to do it right, use a professional. We all have that artistic urge inside, but the place to express that urge is on your own personal website or blog, not on a website critical to your business. Web Super Man/Woman "Jack of all trades, master of none." - A good website takes different types of talents: writers, graphic artists, technical/programming. Usually these skill sets do not overlap. If you want a really great website, you need people who specialize in those areas to help you.
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