Let's start from known life dicta that have not accidentally become so popular, no matter how familiar and clichéd they sound. They say something has been confirmed every day generation after generation. "You can learn more from your mistakes than from your successes." Overall, this dictum summarizes most of the prominent thoughts related to gaining experience and learning good practices. One step up, however, is the thought that the clever man learns from his own mistakes but the wise man learns from the mistakes of the others. Here we are to the third dictum and we should be very careful with it as we could not ever get to those mentioned above: "It is human to err, but only a donkey could repeat its errors and be pleased with them!" I mean that many people make their mistakes again.
To summarize – when you get to something new, you continually make mistakes. And everything develops so fast in the Internet that any established practice grows old before it is recognised. Personal mistakes make us look around and search other people’s experience and share ours.
So, life's dicta apply to the Internet. But we should see what are the most common mistakes to go from step one to step three. So, go for it!
1. Using a cheap hosting. Just because it is inexpensive does not mean it is better. The suitable word here actually is reliable. The investment you would make in terms of time, money and efforts could easily be turned upside down if you find out that you are not online. Consider carefully the traffic type and volume, the technology you would use, what are the limitations of the various hosting plans that would stop and slow you down, where the primary target audience of your site is (in which country, continent).
Obviously, such a simple thing that is usually left for the last minute could have a huge impact on your new site.
2. You think your site design is great. The Internet has it all nowadays – lessons, tutorials, books ... There is hardly a man willing to make his own site without trying Photoshop or other options.
Repeating a few lessons and your handiness with vector or bitmap programs don’t make you design experts.
Another very important point is to adjust the content of the site and its type. If you make the site first and then decide to upload the content it is very likely to end up having a site that does not meet your needs, having spent the money for it and having wasted your time.
3. Getting involved in trafficking schemes. Bringing users to your site is essential. Actually, this is your main goal – your site to be visited. The purpose is people to know about you and to read your site whether you make a blog, news site or corporate site. We will not go into great detail on your site optimization to make it searchable by search engines (search engine optimization = SEO) like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. Many people are keen at the beginning; spend lots of money in bringing the so-called traffic. It is much more important to think about how to hold your visitors’ interest and make them remember your site to visit it again. Yes, targeted ads, quality backlinks and all that you could benefit from the SEO is an absolute must but without quality content your site will become a cost for bringing in traffic from visitors that can not be kept. Quality = interesting, useful and unique.
4. Using opportunity after opportunity. Or in other words – do not spend your efforts, time and your money in a variety of marketing and advertising initiatives each of which seems to be very promising. Everyone wants to do everything. But even the richest companies that launch a new site do not avail unlimited budget. You have to decide very well what is best for your site that you can do with the money you have. Local advertising? Google AdWords advertising? SEO? Any expert would tell you that there are mandatory steps just like in chess and then follow the moves that you would have to take. You must try to make the most general and basic steps and do your research for the next and try them. Don’t be rambling and without a clear purpose and answer of the question: "What do I want to achieve with this particular ad campaign or website optimization?"
5. Time underestimation. Time as a basic resource which we should consider was mentioned several times above. There are many good technologies that give very good results but are they applicable for you if you want to start your project on schedule? It still surprises me when people say that they will begin writing their own content managing system (CMS) for their site. The question has always been whether something is worth to be done, not whether it can be done.
You'll be surprised how many ventures have failed because their key elements were implemented indefinitely just for the satisfaction that you will have your own unique product. It doesn’t make sense to invest efforts, risk and time if you do not intend to develop your business on the base of this planned product.
You should use finished, popular and established products and invest the time you have saved in something more efficient. You will benefit from the fact that you have guaranteed support. And widespread open source products make you independent of a particular company.
6. Do not overcomplicate your email life. Have you ever come across a site that has at least 5 e-mails that make you wonder which one to use? And only one person is behind most of them. Segment your e-mail into two accounts: one for newsletters and various forms and one for the important e-mails. Remember to use filters and rules to control the flow of incoming e-mail.
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