I built 317 websites and learned this

Did you think making a website was going to be easy? Yeah, so did everybody else. People come to me every day after tearing their air out with Wix or Squarespace or another crap agency that's ripped them off and left them with a dud website. And to be honest, I'm sick of it and that's why this video exists. I've run a web agency for over 15 years now and I've been in the game for over 20 years designing and building worldclass websites.

And I've made every mistake you could possibly make that's in the book. So, here's 24 brutal truths I wish I would have known earlier about designing and building websites. We've all been there before. You want a lovely design and beautiful website. My client was no different.

They asked us to design a website with intricate animations and lovely looking graphics. The problem was when it went live, it took six seconds to load and conversions were atrocious because of it. Users just left the website before they even saw anything. So, the intricate illustrations, the nice animations, all of it was for nothing. The lesson here, remember, looks don't matter if your website doesn't work.

Form should always be put above function. A beautiful website that doesn't convert is useless. I had another client come to me who was totally disillusioned with the web industry. They came to me and said, "Craig, I've spent £3,000 on two separate websites, and both of them have been utter shit." This is a common thing I come up against. People telling me how the web industry is and assuming I'm the same.

And whenever I have a meeting with a client for the first time, I have to prove to them that I'm not a scammer like the rest of the industry. It's tiresome. Honestly, I explained to him simply, "You haven't spent enough money. £3,000, £3,000, whatever way you want to put it, is simply not enough money for a good website. You're in the danger zone at that price.

You're probably going to get a scammer who buys a WordPress theme for $50 and then resells you it for $3,000. And to top it all off, it won't even last a year and you'll be back to square one spending £3,000 or dollars again. Genius division are reasonably priced. Our average website for a custom designed and built website is8 to 12,000. That's a good range for a completely custom website built to your exact specifications.

The lesson here, a good website costs good money. If you want a quality product, you're going to have to pay for it, and you should be investing between 2 to 5% of your annual turnover on your marketing budget. Your website should be a small proportion of that. Do me a favor and go Google this term, hide the pain, Harold. I'll wait.

It's okay. Got it up. Cool. You'll see an image that you've probably seen a thousand times before now. And the reason for that is is because it's on a thousand bloody websites.

That guy's turned into internet celebrity, but only because he started as a stock image model. And despite all that, despite him being a celebrity now, you can still go on to shutter stock today and go buy an image of Hide the Pain Harold, who has since become a meme as well as an actual stock photo. And then despite all that, you'll still find it on hundreds of corporate websites out there that have got no personality. What's the lesson that I'm getting at here? Websites with stock photos just look generic.

They look fake and untrustworthy. Please don't fill your website full of stock photos. Create your own photography and video. It'll be a million times better. And it'll have your staff and your people and your stamp on it.

Do your own photography and video or hire an expert. Just don't use stock photography. We recently had a client come to us wanting to build an innovative new navigation for their new website. We thought we'd cracked it. It looked good.

It was nice and it was fairly easy to use. The problem that we discovered as soon as the website went live, looking at the heat maps, users just didn't get it. They were struggling to navigate the website. They couldn't find the information they wanted to find. It was a complete disaster and I wish we'd not done it.

After that, we switched to a simple navigation that users understood straight away. And immediately within days, all traffic shot back up. user retention was better and more people were staying on the website and converting into interesting leads. It's boring, but websites have become a design convention. They're meant to look a certain way.

They're also meant to work a certain way, and people expect logos and navigations and all these kind of things to be in certain places when they're using websites. You know, regular doors, if you walk up to a door and it doesn't work how you expect a door to work, you'd be confused. It's the same with a website. A website is a tool, not a fancy art exhibition. The lesson here is websites should all look the same despite it being boring.

Stick to conventions. Users don't want to have to relearn basic navigation. And in fact, they won't. They'll just click off and go to a different website. We recently built a beautiful and detailed and featurerich homepage for a client.

It was really nice. You scroll down it, there was images popping up everywhere, lovely bits of content, lovely custom photography, even a bit of video. It was really, really nice. But there was a problem. When we reviewed the website after it launched, we realized that nobody was scrolling it.

Nobody was going down to the bottom of the homepage. In fact, most people made one screen. Most people clicked on the navigation. And when people were coming from Google, they weren't even landing on the homepage anyway. So all that effort that we went to on the homepage was pretty much going unseen.

Nobody cared about the majority of the time that had been put into the homepage, but they did care about the rest of the website. The client had spent hours writing this beautiful copy, but the truth was nobody was reading it. The lesson here is nobody reads your website. They scan it. People look at websites in an F pattern.

They look along the top, down the side, and then they scan bits of content as they go down. They'll read headings. They'll look at images. Maybe glance at a video, but they ain't reading the war and peace that you've put on your homepage. So, don't waste time writing it.

Structure your site for scanning. Use bullet points, use bold words, use plenty of subheaded and headings. That's the way you get people to read your website by not getting them to read the website because nobody reads websites. They scan them. We look after around 100 active websites at any one time.

And every month when I check the analytics, most websites are hovering around 70 to 90% mobile traffic. That means desktop traffic, people using laptops or computers, account for 20 or 30% of all traffic on a website. However, most people still pay more attention to the desktop design and the way a website works on a desktop than they do on a mobile device, even though the analytics show that that doesn't even matter anymore. Since 2010, we were one of the first agencies in the UK to start taking responsive web design seriously when the rest of the world were calling it a fad. You need to take mobile design seriously.

It's the only thing that matters. Most of your users, a vast proportion of them are using mobile and tablet devices. They're not using computers. So, stop paying it so much attention. The lesson here is mobile isn't an afterthought.

It is the main event. design mobile first and if it works on mobile, it'll work everywhere else. We worked on a website quite some time ago where the company was insistent on putting things like vision statements, missions, and goals, and all that that nobody cares about onto the homepage of their website. And not only did they want to put it on the homepage, they wanted to put it on the about page. They wanted to fill their socials with it.

All they cared about was this damn vision statement that they'd spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on. I kept telling them in the politest possible way that I could muster, nobody cares about this But they didn't listen. It proved true when the site launches, as it always does. The least viewed sections on the website were the bits about mission statements, vision, values, and the staff bios. Nobody was viewing them because they couldn't understand them.

They were corporate goggled. The lesson here is that most websites are built for the boss rather than the customer. But make sure your website isn't one of them. Your website isn't about you. It's about your customer and it's for your customer.

Design for them and not your ego. After doing some studies, Amazon found that every 100 millisecond delay on their website cost them 1% of their sales. We ran a similar experiment with one of our clients. We cut the loading time by 2 seconds and conversions increased by 17%. The lesson is simple here.

Fast websites make more money. Make your website faster, make more money. Optimize your website for speed. compress images, use lazy loading, and look at Google page speed to find out the issues with your website. A website we took over, but we didn't design had a stupid long loading spinner on it.

You know, you've seen the websites before. They're usually hotel websites where you go on the homepage, some fancy loading spinner pops up that says, "Welcome to this experience." And you sit there and wait. You don't sit there and wait for long, though. And that's what this client found out when we took over the website. Users were leaving the website before the fake loading spinner ever finished.

The lesson here is that designers want to design fancy websites, but users don't want to use them. Get rid of the fancy loading spinners, the scrolljacking, the slowing down of anything. Just get rid of all the silly stuff that looks good, but users don't appreciate. They want a fast website that loads instantly. That's what matters.

I see this one so often from clients. Clients get a new website and instead of calling their about page, they want to call it something fancy. They'll call it something like inside the makery and they'll call their work section fancy lovely little things. The problem is you'll know what it means, but your users won't. So get rid of that as soon as you can.

Call your about page an about page. Call your work section work, our work or portfolio, something like that. The lesson here is keep your navigation standard and simple. Clear, simple navigation wins the day every single day. Don't leave users hunting for what they want.

Let's be honest, nobody's going to fill out the sign up for updates newsletter section on your website that you've dumped in the footer. Nobody's interested. Why would somebody give you your email address when you're not showing them what value they're going to get for it? They just won't do it. when we had a client appear on BBC's Dragon's Den in the UK, we needed to take advantage of the opportunity of getting millions of views to the website whilst it was on TV.

So, to do it, we created a quick email sign up on the homepage. It looks something like this. It just said, "Grab your free manual and are you ready to start? Fill your email address in here and we'll send you the free manual." Within days of that TV appearance, we had 1,000 new email signups to their list. And it was all because we'd given people a reason to sign up.

And we made this lead magnet in a rush. You can probably think of better ones. Give away good value in exchange for an email address. The lesson here is give people a reason to give you their email. Don't ask for an email address without providing value.

Give them something useful. People will give you the email address in return. We were looking after a fairly modest website in a particular niche and we were running Google ads to it. It was getting around 1 to three leads every single day. The client asked to add a seventh field to the form.

After the seventh field was added, the leads dropped to zero every day with nothing else changing. The issue was that the new form field that had been added was ambiguous but also required. So when somebody came to the website to fill the form out after following a Google ad, they weren't sure what to do with the seventh field that's been added. So they just didn't fill it out. We lost leads for a couple of days and it was a huge mistake for the client to ask us to add it.

We quickly remove that field as well as three other fields and now we're averaging 5 to 10 leads every single day on the same website. The lesson here is most forms are far too long and they're going to cost you dearly in the long run. Keep forms simple. Only ask for information that you need and if you're running Google ads to it, keep it as basic as possible. Keep the barrier low.

SEO isn't the same as it used to be. It's no longer about filling your website with lots of content. It's no longer about creating location pages for locations you don't work in. All of those tactics are gone dead and don't work anymore. Except when they do, which is really annoying.

The point I'm getting at is that Google has changed. The game has changed. Social media is more important than ever. And it isn't as simple. SEO doesn't work how it used to.

You can't game the system in the same way that you once could. I once had a client doing something called turbo blogging where they were writing 10 articles a day. That worked well for them until it didn't anymore and they got spammed by Google. All we do now is ask our clients to do something very simple but time consuming. Create valuable content over and over and over on their website.

That content positions them as an expert in Google's eyes, but it takes time and there is no shortcut to it. You just have to get in, do it, or choose not to do it and just spend money on Google ads as well. In fact, you do also have to spend money on Google ads, but that's a different conversation for a different time. You have to now match the search intent of a user. What is a user intending by the search they've just performed on Google?

Is a user looking to find out what a prenup agreement is? If they are, let's create an ultimate guide to prenup agreements. Is a user just looking for your opening hours? If they are, we don't need to tell them about the concept of time and how clocks work. We just have to show the opening and closing hours, don't we?

That's what search intent is. And that's what a lot of people are getting wrong, to be honest. They're missing that bit out and providing far too much content because they think that's what Google expects and it isn't. The lesson here is SEO isn't dead, but it's different. SEO isn't about hacks any longer.

It's just about helping users find the information that they need. I've had so many clients over the 20 years that I've been doing this that it's actually tedious for me to explain the next thing I'm going to explain. Let me give you a specific but anonymous example. And you're going to find out why in a minute. A client recently came to us to build them a lovely new high-end luxury e-commerce website.

Their products was lovely. Their price was lovely. They had everything right. Even the photography looked good. We design and build the website.

We get it done. It goes online. The client's happy. We're happy. It looks nice.

Everybody did a good job. The issue is the site goes live. And then no sales happen. The client begins to blame us. We begin to blame the client.

Who's right in this situation? I end up having a meeting with them. They ask me to explain the issues with the current website and I say yes there's a very glaring large issue with your brand new website. They say to me what is it? I tell them very plainly you haven't spent any time promoting your new website.

I ask them have you run any ads to it? No, we're not ready for that. They say I asked them well have you made any social posts about your new website? Have you let your existing client base know that you've got a new website? No, we haven't had time to do that.

The client says, "Getting more frustrated with the situation." I ask them very directly, "Have you done anything to promote your new website?" The client kind of looks around glum and says, "No, we haven't." The lesson is obvious here. Build it and they will come is a lie. A website is just the beginning of the marketing journey. If you don't promote it, nobody will find it. You're going to have to run ads.

You're going to have to be blogging. You're going to have to be making social content. You're going to have to be making YouTube videos. Whatever way you choose, you need to tell people and be showering it from the rooftops that you have a website. If you don't do any marketing activity to drive traffic to it, how can you expect anybody to find it?

I once had a client who asked me to take over their existing website to help them rank it better in Google. I found it weird when I looked at the website. It was about 5 years old. It looked fairly good, but it was only ranking for eight keywords in Google, which is pretty unusual for a website, even for a low traffic website. I couldn't really understand it.

They apparently had an SEO person working on the site, but still it wasn't ranking very well. What the hell was wrong with this website? What is this beast of a thing I'd just chosen to take on? I looked at it a little bit further and I saw the answer in the hundreds of blog posts that they've been written on the website. Or should I say written, they'd been made with AI.

The website was full of hundreds of AI generated blog posts and Google had decided to pay no attention to them. Not only that, what I think had happened is Google had flagged them as a potential spam website under Google's spam policies. If you look in there, there's a section about using AI content to gain search rankings. And I think that's what had happened with their website. The website looked okay.

It had decent photography on it. Majority of the content was good. But the only issue was they' chosen to write lots of blog posts by using AI. The lesson here is using AI generated content may get you ignored by Google. Use it very carefully.

Use it for ideas. Use it to come up with content, but don't let it write the blog posts and then copy and paste them to your website. You are at a real risk of getting flagged as a spam website by Google. It's not a line I'd choose to tread. Be careful.

I once remember working with a company who had a very complicated business, a very technical business. Even I didn't understand it when I first started working with them. And because of that, they chosen to write very complicated content. So when you looked at the homepage of the website and the about page and the services page, they explained everything with lots of jargon that was very difficult to understand. Nobody could understand what they did.

People were bouncing off the website instantly. So we took a radical approach. We decided to rewrite the homepage in plain English. Within a couple of months, conversions doubled and their on page time doubled as well. The lesson rhymes here.

If you confuse, you lose. Go read a book called Don't Make Me Think: Keep Your Website Simple, Clear, and Direct. And don't use jargon. A couple of years back now, an organization brought us in to build them a new website because it had been hacked. The website was 8 years old.

It was very unloved. It wasn't being looked after, and that's why it got hacked. They asked us to design and build a brand spanking new website, which we did, in my opinion, to a very good effect. Unfortunately, roll on eight or nine years on, they've made the same mistake again. They haven't come back to us to update the website.

It's been the same website for eight or nine years. And whilst it hasn't been hacked, it's got very old. The content is out of date. There's lots of missing links on there. It's just a real mess.

It doesn't reflect well on us anymore. It doesn't reflect well on them anymore. The website's horrible. It now looks old-fashioned, out of date, and they're back in the same situation they are again. But worst of all, they found themselves penalized by an industry body because the website wasn't accessible anymore because it was built with such old technologies.

If they would have chosen to update it more regularly, let's say every 3 to 5 years, they wouldn't have found themselves in this situation again. The lesson here is every website will eventually need a redesign. It's not just about your website looking out of date. Technologies change very quickly too. You should be targeting every 3 to 5 years for a website refresh.

Don't leave it eight years like my client did. After 5 years, especially, your website is definitely getting outdated. Let's go back to the previous example. I touched on it just then. The website had become outdated and they've been flagged by an industry body.

But not only had they been flagged by an industry body, the website had become so out of date that it didn't even meet W3C accessibility standards anymore, which it had to do because it was a public body. It was mandatory for them to be at least compliant to W3C standards, especially doubleA standard, and they weren't meeting it. In the UK at least, it's mandatory now for public bodies to meet W3C compliance to double A standard because of the DDA Act of 1995. That's a mouthful, that, isn't it? The lesson here, accessibility isn't optional anymore.

W3C compliance isn't just ethical, it's a requirement for your business. When we're designing a new website, I encourage every single one of our clients to answer one simple question as high up on the homepage as possible. What do you do? If you can't answer it at the top of your homepage, people are instantly going to leave it because they don't know what you do. And that's the whole point of the website.

When people are in a research state of mind, which they often are with websites, they're not carefully reading the website. They're scanning it. So, you have to tell them in plain English immediately what it is you do and why they should be on your website. Just keep it simple, keep it plain, and tell me what you do in a straightforward way. The lesson here is if you haven't worked it out already, always tell somebody what you do.

That's it. Every single website we design or build, I make sure my client uses social proof in some kind of way. Be that testimonials, video testimonials, Google reviews, Trust Pilot, whatever we can get our hands on. There's no better convincer for potential clients than showing existing clients that have used your service who are happy with what you've done for them. And the easiest way to do that is just put your customers words on your website, "These guys are brilliant.

Five stars." Simple as that. If you've got Google reviews, stick them on your website. If you've not got any Google reviews, why haven't you got any Google reviews? Go get Google reviews and then put them on your website. The lesson here is social proof is more persuasive than any marketing and you need to do it.

Go get Google reviews. Any client of ours that is using our better afterare website package has me and our team looking at their website every month and monitoring Google page speed scores amongst many other things. But Google page speed's important. The reason Google page speed is important is because Google gives you a score out of 100 every single month on mobile and desktop devices. The closer to 100 that score is, the faster and more performant your website is.

If they think your website is a one out of a 100, for example, they're definitely going to downrank it versus a website that is a 100 out of 100. It also shows whether your website is loading quickly, which is another really important thing in Google's eyes. Google don't want to send traffic to websites that are slow to use. They only care about fast loading websites because they know if it's a fast loading website and someone clicks on a link in Google, a user will be satisfied with the result that they find. If somebody clicks on a link in Google and it takes 10 second to load, they're going to be annoyed with Google and with your website.

If your website is currently taking longer than 1 second to load, I guarantee you are losing sales through it. The lesson here is bad hosting equals a bad website. You can have a really nicely designed website, but if it takes four years to load, no one's going to buy from it. The one thing I don't actively encourage is autoplay video. Even when autoplay video is muted, it's still quite annoying and some users still don't like it.

So, wherever possible, I try to convince clients not to use autoplay video. Websites should always be about choice. You should be giving users a choice. Nothing should happen on there that they have no control over. Say for example, an autoplay video.

Unless it's background information, it's not particularly interesting. Load a video and then let a user choose to play it or not. The lesson here is autoplaying videos annoy users more than they engage. Don't force content on users. Give them a choice.

Put a play button in front of them. A business we work with recently had been using Squarespace for about 10 years. They were very happy with it. It did a job for them and it looked, you know, pretty nice. They initially came to us to make some tweaks to their Squarespace website.

They wanted to add custom animations to it and all this other fancy stuff. I told them that we were going to end up spending just as much time making custom design elements for Squarespace than we would to build them a completely custom website that's specific to their needs. A hosted solution like Squarespace leaves you stuck in their ecosystem forever. And if you have fairly basic needs, that can be fine. But whenever you want to go outside of that ecosystem and you want to do something a little bit different or you want to customize it, it just won't be possible and you'll find yourself having to build yourself a new website.

Eventually, you're probably going to need something better. The lesson here is you will only get so far with DIY website builders. Website builders are great until you need to go something beyond the basics. And when you do, get a custom website and pay well for it. When a client recently came to work with us, they were spending over 5K a month on Google Ads.

That's a lot of money to be spending on Google Ads, especially when it was returning zero leads through their website. I spotted the problem with the website almost straight away. Half of the time, the website didn't even load. Google ads won't send as much traffic to your website, especially when it tries to access it, the website doesn't load. And the users that do get there from a Google ad, half of the time, the website wouldn't load for them, so they wouldn't come back or purchase.

The only solution was to build a new website. So, we designed and built them a new website, and then as soon as they got a new website, the sales blew up. an average month on their new website now generates 40 to 60 new leads every single month. That's gone from zero to 60 leads in an average month. All because the website was too slow and didn't work properly.

They could have chosen to spend £30,000 a month on Google Ads and they still wouldn't have got any leads because they were driving it to a website that didn't work properly. The lesson here is spending more money on ads won't fix a bad website. Fix the website first, otherwise you're wasting every single penny of that ad money. So, that's it. 24 powerful and sometimes brutal truths about websites you probably should have already known.

Making a world-class website isn't easy. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes time to find the right images or make the right images. It takes time to write the right content.

It takes time to design and build a good one. And that's before you even put any of the other stuff aside like performance, how fast it should be. Building a world-class website these days is not an easy task. So bearing all that in mind, I hope those 24 tips help you next time when you have to design and build a world-class website. And if you're interested in knowing more tips like this, well, YouTube is recommending you one of my best videos right now.

So feed the algorithm and go watch that one.