There are lots of people who have great idea. The problem with ideas is if you have to execute on them. For every successful ecommerce store and website there are literally hundreds for failed sites that simply aren’t getting anywhere. When we talk with people or evaluate their sites for either SEO, social media or website development we invariably find a few reasons why their sites aren’t working.

• Old technology. Websites have come a long way in the last few years so building a Dreamweaver site or using some crappy ecommerce store if not going to get you anywhere. You can’t build a house on sand, so you need to make sure you have a rock solid foundation that can grow as you grow. This is why we build everything in Drupal
• I built it why aren’t they coming? This is almost always a brick and mortar problem. When someone has a store and then they want to do ecommerce, they immediately think that people will come to the store like a store on the street. It’s actually quite a bit different online. You need to have a plan and some money to make sure you get traffic to your site. If you don’t have a plan and just hope, it’s unlikely anyone is going to show up.
• We started doing a digital strategy but we gave up after a month or I don’t have time to do this. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’s going to take anywhere from 3 -6 months to get a decent amount of traffic to your website if you rely on blogging or content updates. You can get more traffic via PPC, but it will cost you money.
• What does this site do? Sometimes people will explain a site to us and we will look at them and ask them so what does it do? When we ask that question the answer has to be short and very easy to understand. This site sells Auto Parts or this site is my business website and I want to collect leads or this site is a social media site for surfers to hang out. It needs a goal.
• Bad coding. Building and developing websites is pretty hard. You can actually end up spending more money if you get code that it is bad. One of the best example we have seen is a customer who had a custom site built the the developer didn’t put in any code for Google to index the site so Google wasn’t sending them any traffic.

Conclusion

The bottom line is you need to have a goal, a plan and budget for your website. If you don’t have any of the three, you are going to end up wasting both time and money.