Building a website is a daunting process full of potential pitfalls. Discover the top six challenges and how you can overcome them.
In the digital age, every business needs a website. That much is common knowledge, but actually building a website that customers like to visit is another story. Countless “do-it-yourself” website builders exist, but do these services actually help you build a site that your customers will like to visit over and over again? The truth is, even with a drag-and-drop solution, building a website can be a daunting process full of potential pitfalls; but that doesn’t always have to be true. Here are some of the most common challenges that a business owner faces while building their first website, and a little glimpse into how a hassle-free digital future might be within reach.
Building it without coding
As a general rule, most people aren’t natural-born programmers. That’s also true of most business owners, as well. After all, it’s hard to find time to learn how to code websites when you’re too busy fulfilling 100 orders of plant-themed enamel pins, or trying to convince millennials on Facebook that your business is hip with the times. This can make building a website seem out of reach to many small-business owners that aren’t savvy with computers, or who can’t spare the expense of hiring a developer to get their site up and running for them. Tech companies know this; that’s why there are tons of services offering user-friendly, often pre-formatted website builders that allow their users to build websites with just their mouse. These often seem like a solution to a business owner’s digital woes, but these services often present their own problems…
Designing the layout
Once you’ve secured your own domain name, registered an account with a website builder, and sat down with a cup of coffee at your computer, you’ll be thinking about how you want your website to look. Most website builders come loaded with templates, themes, and even entire already-constructed sites that only require customization in the form of images, logos, text, and products. But what if you want your website to look different? In many cases, you can edit these out-of-the-box themes, but many business owners find themselves feeling limited by the tools on these services. Making significant changes to a site’s layout can also sometimes break the page, requiring several exhausting hours of troubleshooting to find out which button or sign-up form has thrown a wrench in the works.
Making it look good
After getting your site to function in a manner that’s at least similar to what you want, you might open it up in your web browser to discover that the final product is, well, ugly.
We’re intimately familiar with this problem at Genesis Digital, which is why we’ve stopped bothering with other services to construct our own pages. Instead, we use our own tool, Karta, which comes with a fully-featured page builder capable of just about any task you can throw at it. Kartra’s page builder, more importantly, isn’t just functional; it produces pages with an emphasis on “what you see is what you get” design philosophy. Every tweak made to the aesthetic appearance of a page looks exactly like it does inside the editor, and best of all, you don’t have to worry about any beautification efforts breaking your page.
Adding the features you want
A beautiful, working website is a sight to behold, but even the most marvelous page in the world is useless without integrating the features that you and your customers expect in a website. Common examples include easy-to-use signup forms, integrated shopping pages, and dynamic features like video content. Many website builders include options for adding these features to your page, but in many cases, some of your favorite website features might be conspicuously absent from the builder’s menu. Worse yet, some page builders nickel-and-dime you for adding functionality to your site that you expected would be included in your base membership fee. Even after adding the features you want to your site, you might run into another problem…
Fixing broken features
Many page builders rely on outdated software, poor hosting services, or third-party services to supply feature-rich content on your website. In these cases, you have no control over how some of these features might work, and if there are issues present on the page builder’s end, you’re stuck with a broken website that doesn’t work. This was kept in mind while we developed Karta; common features that people want on their site are ran inside one, integrated platform. Video hosting? Inside Karta. eCommerce? Built into your page, and ran on Kartra. It’s a self-referential and contained system for running your website that guarantees all your site’s features work as long as your site is working. No more relying on a proprietary video hosting service to make your site come to life!
Connecting it to other services
Once your site is published, full of beautiful imagery and dynamic features, you’ll probably start wondering who’s visiting it. Where are visitors coming from? How does your site rank on Google search results? Answers to these questions are offered by a whole host of independent services that promise an easy connection to your website. So you sign up, and start connecting, only to quickly find out that you now have a large, tangled mess of services, all of which have separate logins, profiles, user interfaces, and their own headaches. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be like this. Just about anything you’d need to know about your website can be viewed within Karta itself, all under one account, one platform, and one easy-to-use user experience. Access your site’s vital signs, like visitor counts, search rankings, and repeat visitors with ease, and never go through the hassle of remembering six different passwords again.
No one ever said that building an exemplary website would be easy. But nobody said that it had to be impossible, either. Give Kartra a try today, and join a digital revolution changing the face of the Internet, for good.
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Choosing the right framework can be a demanding task, and a challenge while developing a website. There are hundreds of frameworks out there. While developing a website, it is a good practice to get your requirements checked with a web developed and then take their suggestion for appropriate framework. It is always good to have a professional’s opinion.