10 Things You Need to Know Before You Build Your Website
A website has become a de facto standard for businesses to amp up their brand. Websites have time and again proved to be extremely rewarding by bringing in revenue, creating interest in the readers (who may be potential buyers), and steadily building online traffic which can eventually be converted into leads.
The single most important factor for a website to stand out is “planning.” As the saying goes “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”, the same truly applies for website development.
Businesses must first put in a good amount of time to strategically plan the specific elements that need to be put in while developing a website, failure of which can be a real cause of concern.
Following are 10 things you need to know before you build your website:
- Purpose: Following are questions that need to be pondered upon:
- What will I derive from this website?
- Will it help grow my business/brand?
- Am I really interested to go for a professional website?
- In what way is my website going to benefit?
- Logo and tagline: For a professional website to stand out, a properly designed logo along with a creative and impactful tagline really counts. A skilled graphic designer and a copywriter can work wonders for helping you design a logo and create a tagline copy that is both meaningful and catchy.A logo and tagline will only help in boosting up your brand name which in fact is very much required in today’s competitive business world.
- Well thought out domain name: A domain name works on both emotional and logical factors, hence a trendy and worthwhile domain name will go a long way. Either you as an individual can come up with a domain name, or take the help of your colleagues whom you trust and admire.
- Design and designer: Designing a website is one of the most important factors for developing a successful website. A visually enchanting website only makes the website more grand and appealing to the visitors.Hence colors, formatting, images, audio, and video should be in perfect alignment with what you offer.To design a spotless website, the role of a web designer comes in. A web designer must be provided with all the necessary inputs required to build a website. A proper communication channel needs to be established so that all the doubts and queries between the designer and the website owner are solved.
- Organizing content: What content needs to be developed for the Home page, About us page, Services page, etc., needs to be carefully planned in order to deliver the message clearly devoid of confusion.
Content needs to be crisp, to the point, and well–articulated, so that a reader gets to know about you in the first glance itself. Headlines, sub-headlines should be used as and where required, and each page should have content that truly justifies what the topic for that page is all about.
- In-depth keyword research: Keyword density needs to be worked out tactically based on the structure and pages of your website. A list of short-tail and long-tail keywords need to be built by the SEO team that is completely in sync with your business/
You can visit those companies’ websites that are offering something similar and try to understand what type of keywords they are focusing on. You can also build a list of well– researched keywords through keyword generator tools and other online keyword generator sites that may help you in your journey of building power-packed keywords that will ensure that your website is SEO driven and can eventually build traffic.
- Basic technical proficiency: Having some basic technical know-how of your website will only help you in managing your website more
A little knowledge of HTML, Image formatting, page layout structuring, landing page, inner page development, content formatting, audio, and video capabilities, etc., will give you the confidence to handle your website in a better manner.
- Outsource or Inhouse: If you have a team of skilled and experienced designers, developers, SEO analysts, and writers who precisely know what goes into building an awesome website, then you can go for “Inhouse.”
On the contrary, your management might have put aside a decent budget for website development of your business and is looking forward to outsourcing to those companies whose core expertise lies in website development and has worked for a bevy of web projects successfully.
- Blogging strategy: Adding a blog page is like “icing on the cake” for your website. It will only add value and make your website SEO friendly.
What needs to be focused upon is that every week at least one blog post needs to be posted on a continual basis for months, and results can be seen in terms of increased traffic. Over a period of time, if the blogs are really engaging and worthwhile, the rate of subscriber base will increase, which will help your website to perform even better.
- SEO Guidelines: A website that is built around a proper SEO framework truly stands out. The SEO team must prepare a well-defined SEO strategy for your website so that your website is fully in line with SEO guidelines.
Eventually, Google rewards websites that stringently follow website SEO guidelines set up by them.
A landing page should be developed in such a way that it should be able to capture the attention of the readers and create interest in them to know more about your offerings.
The goal must be to make a visitor stay on your website for more amount of time than usual. This can happen provided planned efforts are being put in by a competent team for creating a remarkable landing page.