Time and time again I speak with business people that are bewildered as to why after spending a sizeable amount of money on a website, it simply isn’t working for them. The reality I tell them is that not enough planning was done from the outset. Here are some simple steps to follow before you even start building your website to ensure the best possible chaance of success.

1. Your Website Strategy

• Choosing your domain name - if you have a well established brand name that has enjoyed plenty of offline and online marketing activity then go with that but if you haven’t had any real marketing activity to date then consider using a domain name that incorporates the keywords that people are using to search for the products or services you sell e.g. www.organicseoservice.co.uk. Why? Well this will give you a major boost in the search engines for those keywords, there are of course other SEO factors to consider but it will give you a head start.

• Your website objectives - Be completely clear as to what you want your website to achieve. Outline the objectives of the website and also the critical success factors. This might be as simple as getting traffic to your site and visitors to read your infomation but often will include, generating leads or enquiries, online sales, registrations, subscriptions and so on. Once you are clear as to what you want your website to achieve you can sensibly work how to do it.

• All things to all men - There is a tendency when building a website to try to be all things to all men or to try out new fads and technology often completely unecessarily. Don’t over complicate your proposition - keep it simple. Make sure you understand what type of website you are; information-based, e-commerce or social media. You can of course be all three but make sure it’s what your audience want and needs before doing it. Think about what you want people to do when they visit your site and give them the cleanest, simplest path to doing it without too many distractions!

• Define your target audience - it is absolutley imperative that you understand from the outset who your target audience or customers are. You will need to understand their wants and their needs and this will help you shape your website and define a tone of voice, design and structure to meet their needs. I wouldn’t ever advise trying to target the whole world wide web, you would need some serious marketing spend to achieve this. Your target audience may be defined by location or by gender, age etc. Once you understand who your target audience is as well as making sure that your website meets their needs you can also conduct customer research to better enhance your online proposition, product or service.

• Who are your competitors? - You must be aware of both your online and offline competition, remember they can be different and your offline competition without an online presence can always be a threat in the future so keep an eye on them.

In researching your online competition you can better undertsand how to differentiate your product or service from theirs, whether you have a clear cut USP (Unique Selling Point) and/or whether there is a gap in the market that you could fill. In addition you can gain a better understanding or how your competition are promoting themselves online and what you’re going to need to do to do better - particularly in terms of SEO as you can see which keywords they are currently being found for in the search engines and armed with that information and what search words your target audience are using you can incorporate the right keywords within your heading tags, navigation, links and content from the word go.

• The bad news - To get a website right from the outset will either cost you money or cost you time before a designer or a developer have got anywhere near it. Be clear who is responsible for what from the day the project commences and use a project tool like Basecamp (which is free) to facilitate and manage the project.

• The good news - Getting it right from the outset with save you a small fortune later on and position you for the best chance of success when your website goes live!

2. Your Website Design

• Your creative concept - Ensure you have a creative concept in place, a vision for how the website should look and feel but make sure that you take into account any existing branding and how that will work online (offline branding may not always work well online) as well as your customer and competitor research - get customers to tell you what they want and cherry pick the best aspects of your competitors websites (so long as they’re successful). Make sure you have a clear and confident brand identity that is not over complicated or confusing. My a advice is to always pick simplicity and sensibility over cool and cute. Your creative concept should cover branding, website style, colours and format.

• Be realistic with web design - Web design can be expensive but I wouldn’t advise settling for just one design but perhaps start with two or maybe even three homepage designs. One design should be very much on brand and following your creative concept and the other could be left to your designers creative licence but in finalising your design make sure you are benchmarking it against your objectives, your creative concept and your competitors. Also, run the design past, colleagues, friends, family and your prospective audience before going into the second stage design and again before final sign-off. It is also worth getting your team to offer up online brands and website designs that they like and ask them to tell you why.

A useful exercise is to write down all of the keywords and phrases which best describe your company, product or service and also what emotional feelings you want to invoke in those people using your website - all of this will help your web designer get things right for you much earlier on rather than throwing money down the drain by creating design after design in the hope that one of them will be right! One last thing, I wouldn’t look to get every page of your website designed as this can get very expensive and is unecessary just focus on the main template pages.

• Graphic assets & image library – do you have all the graphics, photos and imagery required for the site? If not, get them together and label them for your designer. If you do not have any graphics or imagery of your own you will need to allocate a separate budget for these.

I like to use istockphoto library which I find to be one of the cheapest around but be very careful not to just take imagery or graphics from the web without knowing whether they are rights managed or not, if you do, don’t be surprised if you receive a letter through the post from a company like Getty Images demanding several thousands of pounds for the use of imagery which is rights managed by them. If left to your web designer always ask them where they are sourcing the imagery from and expect to have to pay for it.

3. Your Website Development

• Website structure - create a clear site structure (sitemap) and user-flow diagram outlining the paths you want users to take, remember you want to get your visitors to an action point in less than 3 clicks and make sure that important links and calls-to-action are within immediate screen view so that users don’t have to scroll to find them. Again, get input from potential users if possible.

For larger, more complicated websites and if your budget permits you might want to consider creating workable wireframes (without design) which will enable you to determine where and how functionality should work and also clarify user paths.

• Website functionality - What additional functionality do you want on the website and where? i.e data capture, registration, refer-a-friend etc. Make sure this is clear from the outset and make sure everything is useful and has a specific purpose. As I mention earlier don’t just add functionality for the sake of it!

• Pretty flash animation - My advice, stay away from flash intros altogether, use flash sparingly within your site by all means but do not build your website in flash, search enigines will not be able to read the content of your site unless you duplicate it in html, a very expensive approach.

• Website technology - Do not just leave it to your developer to decide what technology should be used to build your website. You need to ensure that whatever technology used is easily transferrable between servers and is accepted by most mainstream web browsers without any problem. The technology used must also be search engine friendly and never build your website using ‘frames’, make sure your website is going to be hard-coded.

Do not fall into the trap of using the very latest technology, developers may encourage you to as it is often more fun for them but go with a technology that is tried and tested like php for example. Also, make sure that the technology is widely used by developers so that it will not be difficult to replace a developer if necessary.

• Content Management System (CMS) - I would always advise having a content management system if you don’t have a full time web developer to hand. Although initiallly more expensive it will save you money in the long run as your content will always need to be evolving to better enhance the user experience, creating and adapting calls-to-action, enhancing the sales process and managing your content for SEO.

• Website testing - This completely depends on the complexity of the site and on more complicated sites businesses will launch with a ‘beta’ version of the site alerting users that there may be glitches and that the website is in it’s testing phase still - this of course is a great way of getting user feedback and the public to test your site for you. On the whole though for smaller websites a testing strategy should be agreed between you and your developer, the more people involved the better.

• Website hosting - Make sure you know where you are going to have your website hosted, I would advise you to arrange the hosting yourself and ensure that it has the necessary software installed on it for your developer. In allowing your web developer or agency to organise your hosting you can find yourself being beholden to them and their charges for additional work, fixes etc. A small website is fine on a shared server, larger websites may well require a dedicated server. Make sure your server is backed up regularly, daily if data capture is involved.

4. Website Content

• Worry about the content later - is the worst thing you could do and one of the biggest mistakes companies make when creating a website. I often see brand new websites lying dormant for months if not a year plus because no strategy was put in place for content generation. Develop a clear content generation plan at the start of the project clarifying who is responsible for what with clear timeframes for delivery, be prepared to hire an online copywriter if neecessary and don’t make the mistake of hiring a print only copywriter.

• Content creation - it is important that your content has a clear and concise ‘tone of voice’ which can relate and push the right buttons in your target audiences mind. Make sure your content always leads to a strong call-to-action and make sure if you are selling that you follow a tried and tested sales principle like AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action). Ensure that you have indentified which Keywords and Phrases you are going to use to optimise your website within the search engines as these will need to be incorporated within to the content from the very start. Again you will either need to pay someone to do this for you or do it yourself but it does need to be done properly.

Content Management - It is unlikely you will get your content completely right from the outset and it will need to evolve. As you monitor your website analytics you will be able to monitor where people are coming into your website, what they are doing whilst there and where they exit, this information will give you insight to which content is working for you and which isn’t. You will also be able see which keywords people are using to find you within the search engines which can help you further with your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

5. Online Marketing & Analysis

• If we build it they will come - I wish it was that easy, sadly not. Building a well designed and well structured website with good content is only the first part of the battle you must have clearly defined online marketing objectives which are in synergy with your website objectives i.e. How many sales do you want to achieve month on month? What’s your conversion rate going to be like (usually around 2%) therefore how much traffic will you need to achieve those sales? Where is that traffic going to come from? Armed with this information you can decide the best methods of driving traffic to your site and I will address these at later date in more depth but the main solutions are SEM (Search Engine Marketing) which is either SEO (organic Search Engine Optimisation) or PPC (Pay-per-click), SMM (Social Media Marketing), Online Advertising and Online PR.

• Marketing budget - One way or another marketing your website will cost you either in terms of your time or in fiscal terms so be prepared for that! However the good news is that in my view all online marketing spend should be able to be measured against a calculated ROI (Return on Investment) - don’t let anybody tell you otherwise!

• Website Analytics - You must have a good website analytics package attached to your website otherwise you are quite simply flying blind! I really like Google Analytics as it has everything you need and above all else is free!

Following these guidelines will be a good start to getting your website right first time.

Did you find this article useful? Let me know. Feel free to contact me with any queries you have around this area.

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