The 7 Deadly Sins Of Getting A New Website Built

We’ve all seen them. Websites that look stunning, load in the blink of an eye, and feature slick, modern navigation. On paper, they are technical masterpieces.

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In reality? They achieve absolutely nothing.

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For small businesses and charities, a website shouldn't just be an expensive digital brochure. It needs to be an active tool that drives growth, secures donations, or generates leads. And yet, every year, hundreds of organisations invest thousands of pounds into new sites only to wonder why the phone isn't ringing.

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If you’re about to commission a new website, you need to avoid the 7 Deadly Sins of Getting A New Website Built. Here is what to look out for, along with the exact checklists you need to stay on track.

1. The "Ghost Ship" Website (Lacking Purpose & ROI)

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The Problem: “Our website looks beautiful, but we have no idea if it’s actually growing our organisation or helping our cause.”

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The biggest mistake happens before a single line of code is written. Organisations often focus entirely on aesthetics and completely forget to ask: "What is this website actually for, and how will we measure its success?" If you don’t define your return on investment (ROI) early, you’re just guessing.

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Your Avoidance Checklist:

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• Define one primary action you want a visitor to take (e.g., call us, buy a product, book a consultation, or donate)

• Establish 2–3 clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) before signing off on the design

• Ensure Google Analytics (or a privacy-focused alternative) is set up to track those specific conversion goals, not just generic web traffic

2. The "Me, Me, Me" Trap (Audience Misalignment)

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The Problem: “Our website is a digital archive of everything we care about, but visitors leave within seconds because they can't find what they need.”

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It’s easy to design a website that you love. But your website isn't for you, it’s for your audience. When a site focuses too heavily on internal organisational structures, history, or self-congratulatory copy, it fails to connect with the user’s immediate needs.

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Your Avoidance Checklist:

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• Identify your top two target audiences (e.g., ideal customers vs. recurring donors) and list their primary reasons for visiting your site (what are they wanting from it?)

• Flip your copywriting from "What we do" to "How we solve your problem"

• Design the navigation menu based on user intent, not your internal company hierarchy

3. The "If You Build It, They Will Come" Fallacy (Traffic Blindness)

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The Problem: “We spent our entire budget on a stunning new website, but nobody is visiting it.”

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A new website is like a brilliant billboard erected in the middle of a remote and very dense forest. If nobody knows it's there, it doesn't matter how good it looks. Too many organisations spend 100% of their budget on the build, leaving £0 for promotion.

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Your Avoidance Checklist:

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• Bake foundational Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) into the build phase, rather than treating it as an afterthought

• Build a post-launch traffic plan involving email marketing, social media, and Google Business Profile updates (you can't rely on organic search alone, especially in a world where AI increasingly steals search traffic)

• Ringfence a portion of your budget specifically for driving traffic (e.g., local SEO or paid ads) once the site goes live

4. The "Set It and Forget It" Mistake (The Maintenance Trap)

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The Problem: “We launched our website a few years ago, and now it’s full of broken links, outdated staff members, and events from 2024.”

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A website is a living digital asset, not a printed brochure. The moment it launches, it begins to age. Without regular updates, security patches, and fresh content, your site will quickly become a liability that damages your credibility.

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Warning: If you ask a web agency to build you a new website, 9 times out of 10, that's what they'll do, to your specification, but that's it - once handed over, it's yours and they just move on to the next project. If you want ongoing maintenance and technical support, you'll have to specify that at the outset too, don't just assume it's built into the price you pay for the initial website construction.

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Your Avoidance Checklist:

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• Assign a specific internal owner who is responsible for weekly or monthly website checks

• Create a realistic content calendar (e.g., committing to one high-quality update a month is better than aiming for three a week and burning out)

• Budget for ongoing technical maintenance, security patches, and plugin updates with your partner agency (most web agencies default to WordPress which needs a lot of this kind of TLC, whereas more modern alternatives exist where you pay a small monthly subscription to host your website on their platform, where security and maintenance are all taken care of)

5. The "Feature Creep" Money Pit (Over-Engineering)

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The Problem: “We wanted a simple website, but we kept adding features during development. Now we’re way over budget, past our deadline, and the site is too complicated to use.”

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It starts innocently enough "Oh, can we add a forum? What about an interactive map? Can we integrate this bespoke booking system?" But feature creep suffocates web projects. If you're not careful, it ends up diluting the user experience, leaves you with a bloated site that's harder to maintain and - crucially - loads too slowly, and all whilst sneakily running down your budget and creating a long-term drain on your financial resources.

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Fun fact: We were once invited to create a new website for an organisation with a helicopter, that asked us if we could build some extra functionality into the site to show a live location of the aircraft. Our first questions - "Who will be interested in that, are they all going to sit and avidly watch that tracker, and what value will it provide to website visitors and to you?" It quickly became evident that the client saw this as a gimmick, not fully appreciating all the negative implications.

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Your Avoidance Checklist:

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• Aim for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - what do you absolutely need for your new website to start delivering value (launch vs. what can wait for 'Phase Two')?

• Prioritise functionality based on real user data, not just because a competitor has a flashy widget

• Establish a strict 'change order' policy with your web team to keep budget adjustments transparent

6. The "Content Last" Pipe Blockage (Project Delays)

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The Problem: “The design is fully approved, but the entire project has ground to a halt because we haven't written the copy or gathered our imagery yet.”

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Content is the fuel that makes your website run. Designing a website before you have the content is like building a house frame without knowing how many rooms you need. It leads to layout changes, delayed launches, and rushed, poor-quality writing at the final hour.

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Your Avoidance Checklist:
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• Treat content creation as the first step of the web project, not the last

• Audit your existing assets (photos, logos, and text testimonials) before the design phase begins. Look at what's missing, and be ruthless about quality

• Be honest about your internal writing capacity - if you don't have the time, hire a professional to handle it

Bonus tip: You need to differentiate between 'copy' and 'content' when writing for your website, where copy = 'words that sell' and content = 'words that tell'. Pages that speak directly to your audience with the aim of demonstrating how you can help them should be populated with persuasive copy designed to elicit action, whereas pages that are intended to showcase credibility and build trust (blogs, explainers, testimonial pages etc) should be populated with content designed to inform and inspire confidence.

7. The "Siloed Specialist" Blindspot (The Developer vs. Marketer Gap)

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The Problem: “We hired a brilliant development agency to code our website, but it operates in a vacuum. It doesn't connect to our wider marketing ecosystem, and technical updates keep breaking our advertising tracking.”

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This is perhaps the most dangerous sin of all. Web designers are excellent at aesthetics. Web developers are genius at code. But neither group is traditionally trained in holistic digital and traditional marketing.

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When a website is built without a marketer’s eye, critical business infrastructure gets missed.

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A real-world cautionary tale: We recently stepped in to help an organisation whose pure web agency allowed their Consent Management Platform (CMP/cookie banner) to lapse. Because the web team didn't understand the wider marketing ecosystem and evolving privacy landscape, they didn't realise this lapse instantly blinded the brand's Meta ad campaigns, tanking their performance. To make matters worse, when the web agency tried to fix the banner, they accidentally wiped out the Meta Conversions API (CAPI) tracking altogether. It required our broad-spectrum marketing team to step in, diagnose the issue, and rebuild the tracking architecture from scratch.

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If your web partner doesn't understand how a website fits into paid advertising, email automations, compliance, and CRM integrations, you are building on shaky foundations.

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Your Avoidance Checklist:

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• Involve a broad-spectrum digital marketer or strategist before any design or coding begins

• Ensure your project brief clearly outlines how the website must integrate with your existing marketing stack (e.g., CRM, Brevo/Mailchimp, Meta Pixel, and Google Tag Manager)

• When vetting website partners, ask to see case studies of how their sites performed commercially, not just how pretty they look

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Summary: Look At The Bigger Picture When Commissioning A New Website
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Building a website shouldn't be treated as an isolated IT project. It is the central hub of your entire marketing engine. By steering clear of these seven sins and ensuring your next build is guided by strategic marketing expertise, you’ll ensure your website actively makes money or drives your cause - rather than just looking good while sitting idle.

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Feature creep is almost certainly one of the biggest causes of project and cost overruns, but so is not having your brief and specification fully nailed down early on.

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If you are going to send traffic to your website with paid ads to secure conversions (purchases/donations, lead signups etc) keep in mind that if you use embedded forms from email software products like Mailchimp, CRM platforms such as Copper, Salesforce, or Beacon (used by charities) or donation platforms such as Donorfy, you will create what we call a 'cross-domain hop'. This will break the tracking capabilities of your chosen ad tech platforms, making it impossible for them to properly attribute conversions to your ads and to optimise your campaigns - where possible, host the entire conversion process on your own domain with your own forms and then bundle the data to your email/CRM/donation platform aftewards using its API functionality where available, or make sure you devise an alternative tracking strategy.

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Enjoyed readlng this blog? Found it useful? If so, do us a favour and send it to colleagues who could benefit from reading it too, and share it on your socials! Want some expert help with a new website project so you avoid these seven pitfalls? Get in touch today, → click here.

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