Ten Steps to Creating the Most Effective Website for Your Biz
As a small business owner or an executive in any size business, one of the toughest challenges you face is making important decisions on areas outside your core competencies. So when you hire a web designer or digital agency, sometimes you don’t get what you pay for.
Below are ten steps that you and your agency should address during any website creation or redesign to ensure that you have the most effective website possible and that you get a good return on your digital investment.
1. Know (and communicate) thy brand: It all starts with your brand, but many small businesses have trouble communicating their brand message. Here are some key brand questions to address: What is your target market and why? Has your brand architecture been created? What differentiates your company from your competition? What do you do well (and not so well)? Before any web or digital work is started, you need to have a brand foundation and then be consistent with that foundation. Lack of consistency will cause confusion with your customer and less efficiency in your website.
2. Set site direction and goals: Decide upon specific calls to action and the overall site function. What is it that you want your user to do when they get to your site? If you have multiple calls to action (which I recommend that you limit), the most critical action needs to stand out among other possible calls to action, otherwise it can detour a user from what you want them to be doing.
3. Focus on UI and UX design: UI (User Interface) is how a website user interacts with your website. UX (User Experience) is the experience a user has with your website. Human behavior is tricky, making this a challenging area that takes years to understand. The color of a button, a sentence, your logo, placement of your navigation, a link, color/text, can all have an effect on the final outcome of each user’s visit. Your team should be putting a lot of thought into how a user will experience the site and creating the easiest way for that user to get to the desired result, such as a sale or phone call to hire you.
4. Streamline the design process: Only after the first three steps are completed should the design process begin. They will affect choices related to font, the overall color scheme, and process of completion of a user action, and so on. You should be less focused on the design aesthetics and more focused on how to get that user to do exactly what it is that you want them to do. I normally suggest the creation of three designs to start. Too many choices can lead to indecision; too few can hurt your chances of coming up with the best design.
5. Feedback: Given that neither you nor your designer is purchasing your entire product inventory, you want to get the opinions of your target customer. What matters most in your web design is what your target audience responds to. Before any coding takes place, you need to get feedback. Using anonymous polling will garner the most accurate feedback. Plus, the more people who are polled, the more scientifically accurate the results are.
6. Bring on the coding: Coding is incredibly important and done ineffectively a large percentage of the time. I have seen major brand sites with 6 and 7 figure budgets coded in ways that kill the efficacy of the site. If your site isn’t coded correctly, it can affect your SEO, the time it takes to load, the difficulty it is to add on to your site and can lead to areas of your site breaking down.
7. Choosing or creating the CMS: Your CMS (content management system) and the functionality it possesses is an important part of your day-to-day website content changes and add-ons. If the wrong CMS is chosen it can hurt your SEO results, take longer to load the page, and can give you limited access to areas you want to change.
8. Think mobile: I almost always suggest creating a mobile site in tandem to the regular site. If not, the regular website should at least be mobile friendly. A lot of dropdown menus aren’t accessible via touch-screen devices since there is no hovering. Flash isn’t available on the iPhone and iPad and certain CSS design coding doesn’t work properly in certain mobile browsers. With more and more customers using mobile devices to access your site, don’t ignore this element as an important part of the process. Mobile doesn’t have to kill your budget either — our firm creates budget-friendly mobile sites that don’t break the bank.
9. Don’t forget about SEO: Too many times SEO is thought about after the site is fully completed. Your content and site coding should have an SEO focus during its creation. This will ensure that you get the most traffic after you launch.
10. Launch only when ready: Don’t launch too soon. If your site isn’t where it needs to be, it’s simple — don’t launch it. Having a live site that has issues can be a detractor from your brand and user experience. There will always be issues and small fixes that need to be done post-launch, but wait until you have tested the site thoroughly to put it out into the public domain.
Having your web team follow these ten steps will reduce your chances of throwing money into an endless black hole of web development or losing potential site revenue.
This is really a very useful blog for those who want to start their won small business.. :)
Love to follow your steps.. This will definitely make me reduce money waste.. Thanks for posting! :)
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