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You might think that building and developing a website could be something you could do over a weekend, but you’d be wrong. A good website has a well-planned strategy set out before it even gets to the building stage, and a truly excellent website is never finished and always in a state of flux.
Many people fall into the first category of believing ‘IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME!”. This may of been true 15 years ago but today, competition is stiff in any business and if your competitors have mastered the planning of their website, you’ll probably start to feel it in your bottom line in no time. Nobody wants their website to work against them when it could be working for them!
However, you’ve come to to the right place! Because we’re going to walk you through how you can avoid the pitfalls of web development with no strategy, and go to bed at night knowing that your businesses website is pulling its weight.
Plan out timeframes
Don’t rush. All masterpieces take time and your website is no different. Before getting your developers to jump headfirst into the build, lay out all the tasks that need to be done, break them down into stages and allocate the tasks out with set deadlines.
Don’t spread the job too thin
Create a set team to work on your website development and keep it to these people. These are the ones who are in the loop and are all working towards the same common goals.
Spreading the task too widely throughout your marketing or development team often means that the work will be all over the place, with different people on different pages, who don’t understand the core messages of the website.
Know your goals
You wouldn’t send your sales teams out into the world to wander around aimlessly without any goals to work towards, so why should you treat your website any different? Your website craves meaning as much as the rest of us, and it can’t fulfil its purpose if you haven’t given it a job to do.
Plan your website around the achievable goals you want see from it and once launched started measuring the performance of those goals and always be making changes to your website accordingly.
Understand your SEO
SEO plays a key role in your website - how it’s built and how it’s written. Google is reading your website meticulously and is judging how worthy it is to appear in its search results. Is your website good enough to make page 1?
Make sure you know what keywords you want your website to rank high for when creating content and writing copy, and make sure you mention them in your page title, H1 heading, image alt text, URL and body text.
Have you made sure your website is mobile responsive and you’ve optimised your page loading speed? These are all things Google will take into consideration when ranking your website in their search results. Don’t get lost on page 2…
Define your audience and give them the content they need
Who is your website meant for? If you don’t know, you have a problem. It’s all good saying “My website is for people buying X” but WHO ARE THEY?
Your website should be built with those people in mind, and you content should absolutely be aimed at them and their challenges. Give them a reason to visit to your website, and that means even if they don’t yet know your product is the solution to their problem.
Content should be structured around the needs of your buyers and not just about selling your product. Building content that offers value and insight will build trust between you and your audience, aid your SEO, and help new buyers find you and grow your brand awareness.
Functionality over Fashion
We’ve all been on websites that look incredible and very professional but when it comes down to it, offer absolutely no value. All style and no substance! A webpage for the sake of a webpage isn’t winning any friends anytime soon.
A website that looks good only impresses for a moment, but a website that works well (and is easy on the eyes) has a much longer effect. Your website should offer value and information, be easy to navigate and even easier to get in contact with you at any given time.
It can all seem a bit daunting, but once you understand the basics of developing a website strategy and have planned out your needs and time frames, your team can be out to work and your website can start generating leads and traffic.
Once your website is live, it’s important to remember that a good website is always in development! Start putting your website to the test and change the things that just aren’t working regularly. You can gain an understanding of your website’s performance through regular reporting of marketing metrics.
