Not knowing who your ideal client is, and who you talking to, in what voice, before you even begin your project. If you don't know who your client is, and you don't know what they want to hear from you, the chances are you going to go completely down the wrong road with your DIY website.

No clear call to action. What do you want the person to do on your website. If you don't know who you're talking to, you probably don't know what you want them to do either. These are things you have to think about before you even start trying to DIY your website.

Thinking your website is about you! Oh my goodness… Unfortunately we all fall into this trap. We all want our website to be all about us. We want it to be everything we love, the colors we love, the fonts we love, the beautiful words we love, etc. But it's not about you. It's all about your clients. It's a common common mistake people building websites for themselves and not thinking about what the clients want and who their clients are.

Choosing the wrong base. So this can happen quite frequently, especially if you haven't given thought to your medium term goals or your long term goals for your online business. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - What are you going to do about that? How easy will it be for your VA to edit once you grow your business and you have a team of VAs working underneath you? All these sorts of questions needs to be thought about before you decide what base you're going to build your website on. So before you jump into that Squarespace landing page, think about where you're going with your business and whether the square space website will be able to actually achieve those goals you think you may be wanting to achieve in a year's time.

Taking advice from the wrong people or not doing your own research. Whilst I love your auntie Sue or cousin Bob's nephew who's building amazing websites from his garage, he may not be the correct person to take advice from when it comes to building your coaching website, for example. So definitely do some research and take advice from people who are already doing what you want to be doing, or who service people who are doing what you want to be doing.

Being distracted by shiny things. Oh my goodness, I'm very much guilty of this one. I love all the new shiny things. I'm constantly trolling Facebook groups and finding all sorts of new shiny things to try out. Much like the old adage of before you walk out the door, take something off, The same applies in your website. So don't go down the trap of installing every new shiny tool that you come across. Give it some thought and only install what you really, really need because the last thing you want is a slow website that's bloated and overloaded with shiny things that are not necessary for your clients.

Bad or no copy. So this is the last thing that many many people think about. You'll often see people going and having amazing branding shoots done coming up with great products or services that they're offering. And they don't pay any attention to the copy. Or even worse, they have a homepage or a sales page that's really just made up of images and headings. You need to add copy, you need to sell your service, you need to tell your story, and you need to make it appealing for everybody to read.

Talking about features over benefits. Do not talk about all the features that you are going to offer in your service or your product. People don't really care about features, they care about the benefit to them. So what do I mean by that? They don't care that they're getting a free PDF that teaches them XYZ. They care that the PDF is going t