5 Mistakes To Avoid When Building Your Website (That Will Save You Years Of Frustration)

When you find yourself constantly making excuses for the state of your website, for an embarrassingly long period of time, you know it’s time to make a change.
For us, we’d excitedly talk with someone new about our travels and mention that we are travel bloggers. Then we’d hit that obviously-coming-but-we-still-dreaded-it moment where they’d ask for the blog’s URL.
Our excitement would diminish noticeably, and we’d awkwardly say something along the lines of, “It’s digitalnomadfamily.com . … it’s a work in progress though” or something else that downplayed the site and almost discouraged them from visiting it.
Have you ever been embarrassed by your website? Or just been disappointed in the results you’ve gotten with it?
That doesn’t exactly do wonders for your confidence in your brand… or for building a successful business.
If your website isn’t engaging your audience, isn’t converting leads or sales, and otherwise is an embarrassment to your business, here are 5 reasons (that were true of our site) that may be contributing to how much it sucks:

- Lack Of Visual Appeal
In the case of our previous blog, our site was built on Squarespace, and it just wasn’t working for us.
For starters, our blog was ugly.
We visibly cringed whenever we looked at our own site. Our website wasn’t visually cohesive and simply wasn’t pleasing to the eye. We wanted to look away from it instead of scrolling further down the page.
2. Difficult To Customize
It should be easy to make a travel blog look great — just fill it up with amazing pictures of all the fantastic places you’ve visited, right?
Well, not on Squarespace. We were stuck working within their template, which is surprisingly difficult to customize.
This is true for many websites that are built in a template… you think it’s going to help ensure that you make a great-looking site, but the template ends up trapping you and stifling your creativity, because it doesn’t give you options to customize it.
On our site, I couldn’t even figure out how to increase the font size on the text for our blog posts. I resorted to typing in all caps and bolding the text just so that it looked slightly larger on the page. Our blog posts were a hot mess.
3. Difficult For Audience To Use
We were also limited to Squarespace’s preset options for how to display our main blog page and the list of posts. This meant that we ended up with a giant scrolling page that was basically one full blog post after another.
It was overwhelming and unusable for readers… who are obviously the lifeblood of a successful blog.
4. You Can’t Afford A Developer
The only way to make our Squarespace site functional and beautiful, from our experience, is to hire a developer to make your site and then to update any changes that you want made later on.
Using a platform that requires you to use a developer to maintain your site is both expensive and frustrating. You don’t want to be dependent on someone else for creating your vision, and if your business is still struggling to get off the ground, you most likely don’t have much room in your budget for an ongoing developer.
Plus, assuming you don’t know how to code, you don’t want to be incapable of making the tiniest change or improvement to your site. That renders you helpless, which is not a viable way of running your business.
5. You Don’t Know What Else To Do
So once we made the decision to leave Squarespace, what did we do?
Not go to Wordpress, that’s for sure. That’s an even bigger headache than Squarespace!
And I know, it seems like those are two of your main options for building a great website. So you stick with your disgrace of a website because you don’t know what other action to take. You figure that a bad website is better than no website at all.
But we found another option…
We switched from Squarespace to ClickFunnels, and it is everything that we were missing before.
I can’t believe we didn’t make this change sooner.
We always thought ClickFunnels was just for building sales funnels and landing pages, so it hadn’t crossed our minds to build our website on it. While that might have been its original purpose, the platform is so versatile that you can build any type of website on it now.
This has breathed new life into our business.
ClickFunnels has a dead simple drag-and-drop editor that allows you to easily customize your website design with the exact elements that you want on the page. There’s no need for hiring an expensive developer to build your site for you and wasting time on back-and-forth conversations trying to explain to him exactly what you want done.
I built our homepage in less than three hours, and it looks a hundred times better than our Squarespace site ever looked.

I added in parallax scrolling sections with a single click on a dropdown menu. Another menu click animated our call-to-action button so that it draws the reader’s attention better. And I can make the text any size I want!
The site looks clean and modern, and all of a sudden, we’re proud to share our blog with people.
We seriously hated our website before, when it was on Squarespace. It made us cringe, and we were ashamed to tell people about it.
Now that we’ve built our site on ClickFunnels, we are so excited for people to see it. Plus, we’ve eliminated all 5 obstacles and reasons for a horrible website.
Can you imagine what that’s done for our brand? To finally want to send more people to our blog?
Can you imagine what it would do for your brand? To be excited to increase your traffic and know that you’re sending them to an awesome website that’s going to convert?
I despise the cliched marketing expression, “it’s a gamechanger,” but I know this actually has changed the game for DigitalNomadFamily, our brand, and our blog. Who knew that all we needed was a platform change??
If you want your website to stop sucking, you need to get away from frustrating, expense-laden platforms like Squarespace and Wordpress, and try a free 14-day trial of ClickFunnels.
You can have a brand-new, gorgeous website just a few hours from now that will capture and hold your audience’s attention. Your improved site will increase your engagement, opt-ins, conversions, and sales. It will be a source of pride (and revenue!) for your business.
Abandon your headache of a website and switch to ClickFunnels now to feel the same excitement and relief that we feel about our blog and see a dramatic improvement in your website’s performance.

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DigitalNomadFamily.com publishes stories and videos, that make smart nomads smarter. We’ve taken our experiences traveling around the world for the last four years with our three little girls as a digital nomad family! You can start your own journey here.

