It seems like there are more and more things that can go wrong with a website every day. With each new advancement in technology and each new feature or functionality comes more lines of code or script to get broken. As a company that specializes in solving website development problems for many types of businesses and many types of sites, Blayzer is very familiar with this struggle. In recent months we’ve tackled everything from security and hacking issues to mis-coded mobile responsive layouts and broken shopping carts. For this article we analyzed our most frequent requests from the last few years and made a list of the top five website development problems we’ve been fixing for clients new and old.
01.
The Site is not Functioning for the User
There are a few main things that can go wrong on the user’s side of the website. Layout problems can impede the flow of a website’s user experience, especially with a mobile-friendly interface. A web-based application can be extremely problematic when converting to a mobile-friendly screen. Navigating the website is important for users because this is how they find things like links, contact information, and where to purchase products or services. If navigation is too difficult or confusing, the conversion from viewer to customer fails. Broken links are a particularly troublesome problem, making it difficult for users to complete an action such as Buy Now, Contact Us, or continue to another page.
02.
The Site is not Functioning for the Business
Even more frustrating than your users not being able to use your website is when it fails on the administrative end. This causes you to be unable to update your pages, see who updates the pages, or approve the update of pages. It can stop the development of new pages and content and hinder the upload of important files and documents to the website. It all adds up to one big headache and a website that stagnates and becomes outdated from lack of proper administration.
03.
Integrations are Broken or Missing
This can be connected with number 2 on our list, but it has some different issues worth exploring. Integration in website development is the ability of your website to work in cohesion with your other business software and web utilities. Between your Customer Relationship Management software, Enterprise Resource Management software, and accounting software, it’s no wonder your services have a hard time keeping up. Add in some broken social feeds and unusable widgets to manage those feeds (retrieve the most recent tweets, posts, comments, and reviews) and all bets are off.
04.
The Site is Underperforming
Poor site performance encompasses a few different problems. It means that your website isn’t doing as good a job as you had expected at drawing traffic and leading users down your conversion path. Maybe your pages and images are slow to load, or maybe they don’t load at all. Or your website hosting might not be reliable for the amount of traffic it’s receiving, which can cause a total site shutdown. Coinciding with number 1 on our list, these problems can deter potential customers and reduce sales.
05.
The Site has been Hacked or there was a Security Breach
Website security, particularly for WordPress sites, has been an erupting problem in recent years. It seems like no one is safe from the insatiable hackers, but you don’t have to accept your website’s vulnerability. There are ways to protect your information and, more importantly, your users. Blayzer has been working hard on this issue and we have come up with a solution for WordPress security. Read about it here.
BUT HOW do you fix these website development issues?
With so much invested already in building your problematic site, you probably aren’t entirely sure who you can trust. Agencies have a reputation of seeing your budget and not your business. They try to up-sell everything, and you end up with the super-ultra-premium build with 42 different widgets and functions you’ll never need. They often seem to take three times longer than anticipated to fix the problems, and it ends up costing you more time and money than you had ever thought you would need to spend. But you feel like you can’t trust freelancers, either. They have a reputation of being flaky, always there on payday, but when you need help or have questions, they are nowhere to be found. As a mid-sized marketing firm, we sometimes outsource to freelance workers and can attest to this kind of behavior.
Because we are a mid-sized web and marketing firm, Blayzer provides agency-level services with the personalized attention you deserve. Our cost is far less than you may expect, even if the problem seems huge. That’s one of the many benefits of our lean team and Midwestern location. We don’t just want to do some work for you — we want to work with you and help you to understand everything we are doing and why. We will take the time to listen to you and walk you through step by step to find a solution that works best for your company needs. That’s the approach that has kept us in business since 1998 and has kept our longtime clients coming back to us for over a decade and counting.
