If you have a business, you need a website. That’s almost a fact in this digital age, since each and every potential customer expects to find your business online. Building a website sounds so easy that most people don’t even realize how much effort it requires. Some people think it’s just finding some images and creating texts. We often forget that if you want to get results, you have to put effort in it by creating compelling content, modern design and individual aspects.
While building a website is a time-consuming process that requires certain expertise, everyone should have common knowledge about how the websites are made. High-quality website can really help your business grow. To reach your goals, you have to keep the following things in mind:
- Strategy
- Content
- Design
- Development
- Performance
- Launch
- Ongoing Maintenance
While development stage is the responsibility of development company, the other stages can be executed by the clients. The price of the project largely depends on what part of the above factors are completed by client and development company. In order to help you understand what you can do on your own and what you should outsource, we broke down the 7 steps of building a website:
Strategy
Strategy is the key aspect of your online presence. In order to build a successful website, first of all you need to determine your strategy. You can create the strategy by answering following questions:
Who is your website for? Why should people visit? What is the main goal of the website? How does a website fit into your business model? How does it fit into your marketing campaigns? What are your competitors doing online?
Answering these questions will make it easy for you to determine overall strategy. You might have a beautiful website but without a strategy it’s just an online content without purpose. You should create a website fitted for your business, in order to expand and reach your goals. Strategy helps you build a website that works and delivers results.
Content
Website content is every single media and word that will be on your website. This includes: images, videos, graphics, blogs, product descriptions and etc.
It’s important that the content on your website is created according to your strategy. Every single piece of content should serve the main purpose of your website. Ultimately it is the content on your website that will differentiate you from your competitors and determine whether or not a user engages and takes action. Besides content being unique, you should consider other factors as well: Search Engine Optimization, structure and ability to persuade visitors take action.
Many business owners try to save money by creating content on their own, using already used graphics or uploading low-quality images. You have to keep in mind, even if you save money today, you will have to pay eventually for all the missed opportunities caused by amateur content creation. Content creation is a huge part of website building process and you should take it very seriously.
Design
Design is eventually the part that mostly appeals to users. It is such an important part in website building, that sometimes people use “design” as an overall description of website creation. primary focus of web design is to create the layout and visual elements of how your website will look. We’ll sometimes reference these visual aspects as “User Interface” or “UI”.
Another factor to consider in design is the “User Experience” or “UX”. UX is primarily focused on usability, ease of use, and how customers feel when using your site. Both UX and UI need to be considered when designing a website, as many of their functions have a strong overlap.
Development
Website development is taking the design concepts and putting them into functional use within a web browser. This process the one of the main parts of the execution. In the development stage you have to make sure site is well-coded and structure, that it can perform well at a peak level.
During the development process, the developer must take into account your strategy, content and design in order to build a website that can function well and display everything that is important for your business. Developer must make sure that website can work on different devices and has high level of responsiveness.
Performance
The performance of website is crucial to your success. Hosting is one of the key factors when it comes to website performance. There are a wide variety of hosting options available, but any option you choose will have strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to take into consideration your strategy, content, design, and development stack to ensure you have the proper infrastructure in place.
Additionally, you’ll want to make sure you have the proper security and backup schedule in place to ensure your website continues to perform without interruption. Among other factors that influence the performance are: Coding standards, server, heavy CSS and JavaScript use, widgets and plugins and etc.
Validation
All the decisions you made leading up to the launch of your website have been based on research and experience. Until you publish the website and get the live traffic, you will not know how things really work. Validation is the step when you measure your website’s effectiveness and collect data. You can then use these analytics to make strategic decisions to make adjustments to your strategy, content, design, development, and performance based on real user data.
Continuous iteration is important because people, technology, and your business constantly evolves over time. In order to stay relevant and continue to operate a successful website, you’ll want to continue to invest in your online presence for the life of your website.
Ongoing Maintenance
As we mentioned above business constantly evolves. So, you have to make sure your website has ongoing maintenance and continuous improvements. Building a website is an investment and if you don’t provide maintenance, it will just be waste of your money and resources.
If you’re going to have a website built in the first place, you have to consider the ongoing support and maintenance it will take to keep your site bringing in customers. Without proper maintenance, your website can become vulnerable to hacks, security breaches, or simply become unusable. If you haven’t already, check out our care plans at https://thor.care/
Wrapping Up
A website is more than just one thing— as we discussed in this article it’s actually many things all working in coordination to get you to your ultimate goal.
Making sure your website is created by experienced developers who can help you excel is critical. You might consider trying DIY websites such as Wix, Weebly or Squarespace but a template that is supposed to be for everyone, can never be fit for one business. Working on a website requires a lot of work, but the process can be very enjoyable. After all, you are launching the most important part of your online presence that can bring wonderful things for your business. But, there are many more things to consider as outlined above and that is where we come in. For a customised solution for your business, get in touch with us today!
