subject: How Much Work and Attention to Detail is Advised in a Website Design Strategy? [print this page] How Much Work and Attention to Detail is Advised in a Website Design Strategy?
Most people are more concerned about whether they will make a safe landing when flying than whether they will arrive safely at their destination when driving their car. This is despite the chances of dying in a road accident out-weighing the chances of dying from a plane crash. It is the same in business i.e. business owners are similarly unaware of the risks involved and how to prioritise and manage their contingency plans.
Have you got adequate strategies for dealing with staff illness, hard drive failure or running out of ink when a critical document needs to be printed off?
And what about the strategy for your website design? Too many businesses are taking short cuts with their presence on the web, even though there are even more channels than ever leading to your website (such as the link in your LinkedIn profile, a re-tweeted shortened link, a bookmark on a social bookmarking site such as Stumbleupon.com as well as your listing in the Google search results).
A clear plan is absolutely necessary as there are so many aspects to get right if you are going to sell your product or service and make sure visitors understand what your unique selling point is. And even if you are clear on how your site is going to look and feel, how are you going to convey that to your web designer?
For sure, once you go live, people are not going to come to your site at the drop of a hat. It's going to take hard work. So what's your marketing strategy? Who is going to run your marketing? Most importantly, what marketing techniques are they going to employ? Will these use social Media, pay-per-click, organic optimisation, email marketing or a mix of all or several of these? Will the marketing person also be responsible for running the blog (and tweeting and posting Facebook status updates)? How are you going to deal with leads that your site generates?
One major area to plan for is search engine optimisation. Though there is a lot to it and it may require calling in a consultant or investing in books and training courses, it is essentially a matter of getting the keywords right, knowing where to include them on your web pages and ensuring other relevant websites link back to your content (from relevant pages and with a good choice of keywords in the anchor text of the links). Other SEO factors that contribute include making sure your content remains fresh, to have fast loading pages and that your site adheres to W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) guidelines.
These are quite crucial questions to get clear BEFORE you start the website design. So don't just jump in without considering them.
