I will use the analogy of a new business owner who opens a store without any prior experience.

This entrepreneur opens this great store that has low prices and great service yet has no customers.  He made the mistaken assumption that just by opening a store, people were going to flock to it and he would quickly experience success.

You don’t realize how naive you are about running a business until after you have learned from these stupid beginner mistakes.  Before long, the business owner begins to realize why all of these other retailers spend money to distribute flyers, have a solid online presence and circulars that advertise their store’s products and services. They begin to understand the need for various types of advertising and they come to the realization that they need to have a website.

In the process of creating a website they normally do make these mistakes:

# 1- HIRING A GRAPHIC DESIGNER:

Graphic designers are important for the creation of an aesthetically pleasing website, however often are the times that they lack the knowledge on how to create a BUSINESS website.

They were trained/educated to design print or create electronic forms of visual information, as for an advertisement, publication (business cards, postcards, banners, etc.), or website (look and feel) and/or company logo.

# 2: HIRING A HOSTING COMPANY:

In simple terms hosting companies offer storage services to host or store files, images, games and websites.

Hosting companies in other words give your website a storage space and necessary services so that your website can be viewed in the internet. Other important services such as system website platform updates, backups will be your responsibility, in order to achieve them you will need to learn IT techniques or pay someone.

# 3: USING OPEN SOURCE APPLICATIONS TO CREATE A WEBSITE:

These are free license applications that can be downloaded to create a website, and are commonly used among graphic designers and hosting companies.

The downside of using an open source application to create a website, in order to add functionalities or applications additional "Plug-ins" need to be downloaded and installed. These open source applications and plug-ins must be updated constantly in order to keep them secured.

Some of these could happen:

• After updating the website platform, you will find out that there is no update for the "plug-in", and it will require you to get a new plug-in: Additional cost
• If your website uses a template theme for the design, you might find out that the template theme is not compatible with new updated release of your website open source platform.
• In order to perform these updates, you will need to learn how to do download, install, update, or you will hire to someone.

# 4 TRYING TO CREATE THE WEBSITE YOURSELF:

Do you know HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, MySQL, Photoshop, PHP, asp .NET among others ?

If you don't know what the above names mean or do, let me tell you those are some programing languages needed to create a website or an online application. An it takes us many years to go to school and learn them and many additional years to master them.

# 5: CREATING A FEW PAGES AND SOME IMAGES IN YOUR WEBSITE IT IS ENOUGH:

Some graphic designers & internet hosting companies will tell you that creating your website is only a matter of picking a domain name, hosting it and then building your site with a few clicks on some pre-designed template, and in a short time your website will start ranking within the first pages of main search engines.

Sometimes we hear from some business owners  "A tittle and a picture is good enough!... my customers will understand what we do after they see the picture" Well, this is not how it works for search engines!

In order for your business website to improve the ranking within the search engine's page results, the search engine needs to find: W3C compatible HTML coding structure, optimized head section, optimized meta tags, relevant content.

Search engines recommends that your website, must receive constantly new content, and be optimized in accordance to their recommendations.

# 6: "I'M JUST LOOKING FOR A SIMPLE WEBSITE"

Most business owners believe that by creating a website with a few web pages, some pictures and very little content will give the business the exposure they are looking for, to allow them to generate leads and sales - big mistake!

Not too long ago a website was used to direct customers to read about their products and services. Nowadays business websites are gaining more relevance within the structure of any company.

Websites most of the time are the first point of contact with leads regardless of the products/services the company offers. Customers can now book for a service (carpet cleaning, pet grooming, house cleaning, air plane ticket, etc.) or buy a product (a car, electronic, furniture, etc.) without having to meet the salesman in person.

If you want your business to capitalize out of the internet, you will NOT BE ABLE TO DO SO with a just a website.

A business website needs to have a back office infrastructure that will allow the business to react, engage, book and ultimately achieve sales.

Click here to learn, why brochure websites don't work?