subject: Top Ideas For Great Web Design [print this page] Top Ideas For Great Web Design Top Ideas For Great Web Design
Launching a website is both exciting and potentially beneficial. Even with a less than stellar economy, a well prepared website is a great way to jumpstart your business. Creating a website can also be a daunting task, with so many options to choose from and jargon to sift through. The tips below can help you prepare a smart plan for getting your website going as quick as possible without all the difficulty and stress, based upon our very own experience throughout a variety of niches from lavender farming, record labels, web design Bristol street furniture and more.
1. Determine Your Goals
The first stage in planning your website is so simple it is often overlooked: set clear goals of what you want your website to achieve.
This may be to generate sales leads, sell products, or anything else you can imagine. Whatever it is, boil it down to one mission statement. Setting numeric goals with specific figures is a great idea. How many enquiries do you want to obtain? What will the turnover be in each of the first three years?
2. Making A Budget
You can create a simple website or blog for free these days, but large companies pump millions into their online presence. What amount should you spend on your site?
Assume your turnover is ?100,000 and your annual marketing investments are set at 8%; that would make your marketing budget ?8000. If you're an online business you may choose to invest all of this on the web, if not then choose a suitable proportion.
Most likely you know the infamous "If you build it, he will come" quote from Field of Dreams. This may be true for baseball, but not for new websites which require significant effort and investment in marketing after launch to be successful. After you get your website live, it would be smart to use 50% of your web budget on web marketing.
3. Ask For A Quote
Assuming that you would like to hire a professional to create your website, the next step is to obtain some quotes. Write a document setting out what you want the website to achieve, what it will do, who the target audience will be, and a time scale for completion. You may also include what you want in terms of training, support, and hosting. When you are done, you will have prepared an RFP, short for "Request For Proposal".
Locate a few web developers and send them your RFP; they will get back to you with a quote that includes all prices and an extensive proposal for your project. The more specific you are with your expectations in the RFP, the better since that will allow the web developers to formulate a more extensive estimate.
4. Getting Content
There's an old saying on the web that "content is king". Regardless of how beautiful the design, the quality and usefulness of the copy, images and other media are critical to the success of your website.
Professional copywriters can help you if you have trouble with writing. It can be quite hard to pick out good photos for your site, so professional designers are your best option for that task.
You want to begin working on your web content as soon as possible so that your site can look full and complete as soon as it goes live.
5. Going Live
Once your website is live and has been submitted to search engines, don't expect overnight success as it can take months to show up in results pages.
Tracking information on your website's visitors is easy, just ask your designer to install Google Analytics or another program that works in a similar way. The goals feature of Google Analytics lets you find out how sales are being generated on your site and where those successful leads are coming from.
You will also need to market your new website, perhaps using social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click adverts, or email marketing.
