Things to consider BEFORE creating your business website!
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!