8 Important Steps When Creating A Website
So, you understand the value of the online presence for your business and want to create a great website for your brand or hire a web designer.
Before you get started think about a few points that will make it easier for your web designer to understand what you want, what you need, and what your goals are.
1. A Great Website Starts With The Right Domain Name
Your Domain name describes your business and gives you the online branding you want.
Choose a domain name that is
- Short and simple
- Easy to spell
- Try to keep one keyword in the domain name to get found easily
Things to avoid in a domain name
- Don’t get a hyphenated domain name
- Avoid numbers in the domain name
- Don’t buy a misspelled domain name
2. Hosting
Do your research and find a reliable hosting company or ask your web designer for their hosting and maintenance plans.
Consider –
- The price of web hosting
- Disk space
- Back ups
- Website requirements
- Customer support
- Web hosting control panel
Hosting services can cost anywhere between US $5 to $100+ per month, depending on the kind of technology and support you choose.
3. Purpose & Technology
Define the purpose for your website. Whether you want a business website for your hotel or restaurant, a blog to share information, a booking site, or an e-commerce shop.
Once you established the purpose you can decide on the technology. You can use any CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. If your purpose is clear, it will help your web designer to provide her best services.
We recommend clients not to use services like GoDaddy, Wix or Squarespace. Their platform limitations and constraints are too large and we truly want the best for clients. If only for the reason that with self-hosted WordPress sites you are in control of your sites. With Wix, GoDaddy, or Squarespace, you are stuck with using their services only.
4. Sitemap
Build a clear sitemap and flowchart for easy navigation.
Make sure users can easily find what they are looking for.
5. Branding, Layout & Color
If you already have a corporate identity, this part will be easy as you won’t have to select a color scheme and fonts. However, it may be worth to consider a re-design of your brand at this stage, so you can incorporate the updated corporate identity into your new website.
The colors of your website should be like your business environment, so it is important to choose the right colors. Also, don’t forget to consider color psychology when choosing the colors. You want to make sure to evoke the right emotions in your target audience.
Choose fonts that are easy to read and make sure the size is large enough for mobile.
Keep the layout simple and clean, and don’t forget to make sure your layout is responsive to the various devices, such as mobile phones!
6. Design & Content
A great website has great content. Poorly written content can quickly cause a visitor to leave your site. Create informative content with your audience in mind. Think about what they are searching for when visiting your website. Include photos and videos to tell your story. It is important that the product photos or graphical images and descriptions are clean, crisp and appropriate.
Make sure your graphics are compressed and optimized for fast loading. If your website is slow, search engines like Google will penalize your ranking.
7. Optimize For Search Engines
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a set of practices you apply to your website to ensure search engines index and rank your website appropriately and then show it to search engine users.
Once your website is “crawled” by search engines, it competes with websites that have similar content. The better your website design and content is, the higher your site will show up on search engine result pages.
8. Website Maintenance
Every page on your site should work 100% of the time.
In the event of an issue, however, you have to have some sort of 24-hour support system implemented to ensure that someone can immediately address the problem.
Conclusion
As you can see, creating a website may not be as quick and easy as you might have thought. There’s a lot going into a website behind the scenes.
However, we can help you with your website. It’s as easy as contacting us to schedule a free consultation!
