You need a fantastic website to be successful in the digital age. This can be hard to achieve because the majority of people don’t have the skills or resources to build one themselves. Of course, you can pay a developer to do this for you and pay freelancers to fill your site up with related content.
The cost of these services make this option unlikely for many new companies and small business owners. However, to be frank, even when people employ third party services to build their website, it isn’t always a successful endeavour. The main cause of it is that people don’t know what they need when they start. Everyone needs a project brief template to build things on top of it.
Any project no matter the size, should have a definite goal and structured thought process before people start working on it. There are 5 major steps to consider before building a website. When you follow these steps, you’ll be able to save yourself a ton of time, money, and frustration. Without further ado, let’s get going.
Strategise
The first step is developing a strategic plan of action! This is the stage where most people struggle the most, but once you’re past it, you’ve overcome a major hurdle. Many people often have just a vague idea about the purpose of their website and nothing more. When you take out the time to map out what you really want to achieve through your website, you can hope to see much better results.
To make your website successful you should think about who you are, what you’re interested in, and what are the core values of your business are. If you aren’t really sure about who you are, then how will you know what to create?A website without a clear layout and a call to action is not just confusing for the developers and designers, it is also a major pain point for users. For a website to be successful, it needs to be able to get a clear and concise message across to its audience. Now that message itself can vary from reading a blog post to signing up for an email newsletter to something like buying a product!
A Customer’s Journey
Once you have set up the important things and are sure about the message you want to send out to people visiting the site, you should be able to envision the look and feel of your site. You can start to think about the user experience and the type of journey you want your customers to embark on.
To start with, you will want to consider what the visitor’s first takeaway will be when they are at your homepage. After all, first impressions do a great job at selling to customers, don’t they? Therefore, this is an important detail to consider as you’re planning your website. Again, this should be based on a single important message that you are focused on communicating with the people through your website.
Knowing your audience is very critical as they’re the source of traffic and income for any website. Who is it that you want to target and who will get the biggest advantage of your product or service? A lot of these will be based on the answers to this question.
You would need to consider your primary visitors and think about what would make them stay on your site longer. That determines the type of content you will include in your site.
If stats show that young men and women are spending a large amount of their time on YouTube, watching videos. Then that means that, your target audience is primarily younger consumers, you might want to get them to interact with your site better if you include more videos than just written, text based content.
Sitemaps
As you are planning your website and considering the user experience, you’ll map out all the pages you want to be included. You should have a basic idea as to what pages are the best for your site. Putting pen to paper and drawing it out will give you a bird’s eye view of what pages to build. You should always use programs like Sketch to give you a visual mockup, but there’s a lot more value to putting a pen to paper and sketching it out.
Build a mind map or a flow chart to see how you’re planning your website page by page. Of course, you’ll be able to draw a mind map on anything from a piece of paper to a napkin, but if you’re still keen on using a computer to save your ideas, you can use a myriad of mind mapping tools including most word processing programs.
Check out project plan templates to get an idea of how to plan it out. A good way to start would be figuring out the main categories to be listed in your top-level menu. Then, take the time to map out what pages should be included in each section of your website. Be sure when you’re mapping out your site, put in the time to think about the user experience as well.
Wireframes
The next step of the design process is building your site with wireframes. People find this step difficult, but the secret is to keep it simple. Each website page should have one clear objective. This will prevent confusion as they’re navigating the site. If your customer is confused they won’t buy. Each page needs to make it easy for the user to find what they need and purchase your product or service.
Content
The content you provide is the ultimate key to the success of your website. If it’s valuable, it’ll make people stay longer and interact with your brand. This can have a positive effect on your conversion metrics leading to better income as well as customer satisfaction which in turn boosts revenue. In addition to that, good quality content will help your business stand out amongst competition by gaining higher rankings in search engines and help you to establish yourself as an authority in your industry.
Pay close attention to who your users are and what type of content they’re likely to read. It’s good to see a mixture of well written content, images, and video. As you plan your website and its content, take the time to think about the message you want to convey about the brand.
Conclusion
I hope that you can put the growth hacks that we discussed in this article to good use and take your online presence and business to new heights. There are so many possibilities that are unlocked with this. Make the most of it. If you have any doubts, drop us an email or leave a comment down below-we’d be happy to help you out!
Do you have any other reservations against trying these steps in your process? Are you using any other framework? If you have a website, what were your initial plans when you created it? How does it compare with the structured process that we discussed today? Drop us an email and let us know, we highly value your feedback!