Adventure is just bad planning.
~Roald Amundsen
I don’t know whether Roald Amundsen was just a bad sport or if he said this quote after a regretful situation. In either case, something must have gone terribly awry.
Without the proper planning, website design is an adventure waiting to happen. Whether you are getting your first site or ready to make a big change in your current site, you need to do some planning.
There are a few simple steps that you need to go through in order to plan your perfect website.
1. Determine your #1 Goal
For most websites the goal is going to be Buy, Contact, or Make a Reservation/Appointment. Yep, it’s pretty basic. But it’s critical to know how your website should be steering your customers.
2. Know Your Audience
There is a perfect audience for your product or service. (This is who the website should be designed for.) This step will require you to do some real research. Your audience isn’t “whoever will buy my product.” You need to be detailed in order to really reach out to the people who are looking for your products or services.
For example, you might have a recipe site and your ideal audience is:
Sharon, a single working mother who needs some quick recipes that take under 15 minutes to make.Or that same recipe site could be targeting:
Sarah, a wealthy semi-retired doctor who loves to throw dinner parties and wants to impress her colleagues.
You can see from the examples above that you would need very different websites to talk to these different audiences. Knowing your audience will enable you to create a site that speaks to them directly, and differentiates you from the competition.
3. Know How Your Audience Will Find You
Spend some time doing keyword research, even if you’re not going to sign up for a full Search Engine Optimization plan. Keywords can also help to differentiate you from your competitors. If “Running Shoes” is a popular search, maybe you can use “Jogging Shoes” on your site and rank for a great keyword that your competitors aren’t. This step will also help you when it comes to writing content for your site.
4. Take Some Time to Brand
You need to stand out from your competitors. Find the ways in which you are better or different. In order to capitalize on these differences you need to have a strong logo, a unique selling proposition (or tagline), and again, know the audience you are serving (see number 2).
5. Sort the Nuts and Bolts
On the surface, website are simple– just a few buttons and some copy with pretty pictures, right? But there are details that you, as the site owner, need to decide on in order get what you really need.
- How many pages will your site need?
- Will you want to make updates to the site yourself?
- Who will be writing the copy?
- Will you be furnishing images? Will a photographer need to be hired? Is stock art good enough?
- What will the site need to do? Will there be a special members-only areas? Will you need to calculate pricing based on features chosen?
6. Know Your Budget
A realistic budget for a website should not be determined by how much you have left after you’ve paid for everything else. A website is your company on the Internet. It is a representative of your work, your mission, and your specialties. A website is a true investment in your company and should be treated as if it could make or break your business–because it can. And no matter what you think your ceiling is, be sure to set aside an additional $500 – $1000 in a slush fund. I guarantee things will come up during development that even the best planning isn’t going to catch. So plan for i!
7. Hire a Guide
Can you go at it alone? Yes, when you’re ready to head down the path to a getting a website that sells for you, these tips will keep you out of trouble. But if you want to make sure that your project doesn’t turn into a scene from Into the Wild, hire a professional web designer to help guide you. Contact us today to see how we can help you avoid the adventure and get a great website.
About the author: Jeune Ortiz is VP of Marketing and Creative Director at future-ink. With more than 20 years of experience in graphic design and marketing, Jeune brings extensive knowledge and creativity to each website and internet marketing solution to grow your business.
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1 Comment
Kitchen Benchtops | January 11, 2012
Impressive!