Creating a website is one of the simplest ways of automating your business. A website can simultaneously act as the face of your business, the marketing department, the salesman, and customer service rep. By taking on multiple roles, a website can become a great asset, but if it fails to deliver it can have a negative impact on your business. So, when creating a website it is important to ask a few important questions, questions which will help you avoid failure.
Creating A Website That Works
- Purpose: What is the websites main purpose? This is the first question that you should be asking. Without a clear purpose, web content tends to exist for the sake of it, making it more likely to be ignored. Creating web content with a clear sense of purpose will make it interesting as the information will have actual value. Also, all webpages should be created to and ultimately lead to this purpose. For example, if lead generation is the main purpose of the website, then all product pages should have a clear call-to-action leading to a form to capture leads from.
- Platform: How do you want to build the website? Unless you are an experienced developer or are going to be contacting a web development company, choosing the platform to create the website from is important. Services like wordpress, and squarespace allow you to create websites that look professional and are easy to manage.
- Design: What should it look like? It is a common occurrence to confuse creating a website with designing a website. A website should be more than the sum of its looks. Design should compliment the purpose of the site and not be distracting. There are millions of sites out there which are all style and no substance, don’t fall into the former.
- SEO: Knowing the fundamentals of SEO is important for any business who wants to compete online, so if you are unfamiliar with the practice then best to read up on it. For those who are creating a website it is important to immediately implement two SEO strategies. The first is to ensure that you have a good list of keyword, keywords which relate to the designed purpose. The second is to make sure each page is optimized early on, as afterwards SEO can become more difficult and time consuming.
- Just Do It: No matter how much planning you do, your website will never be successful unless it is viewed by others. So the faster you can create your website, the faster you can get feedback; allowing you the chance to refine what is good and eliminate what is bad.
It is worth mentioning that one never finished creating a website. This is one reason why just creating a website is as important as planning one, you will always be tinkering with the website in one way or another. So don’t worry about creating a website that isn’t completely flushed out yet, odds are you’re going to be changing it in the future anyways.