- Get your website built on the cheap so it looks like a road accident involving farm animals. El cheapo comes in several guises: DIY (particularly hazardous); outsourcing to a guy overseas named Charles who contacted you out of the blue; your next-door neighbour’s niece – she’s a first-year multimedia student after all.
- Grossly underestimate the time required to write half-way decent copy for each of your new web pages. Go into task avoidance mode. Alienate your web developer by not responding to requests for content. Launch the website 14 months late.
- Slap $2 stock images across all of your web pages. Chess pieces, balanced rocks, signposts – everyone loves a visual cliché.
- Only let potential customers contact you via a contact form (no-one uses telephones anymore). Get back to enquiries within a week – don’t appear too keen with a timely response.
- Proudly display a swag of social media icon links on your homepage. Too bad you’re not doing much of note in social media for anyone to look at.
- Provide a link to your blog. You’ve only posted on three occasions, all during the first week it went live. A family of possums have since made it their home.
- Run with a site-wide jungle theme… cleverly shape all of your web buttons as bananas, and play a random animal noise every ten seconds or so. Talk about getting cut-through!
Bonus dumb idea: place a QR code on your homepage that if scanned takes people to your homepage. Cool!