subject: Website Design Vs Website Development [print this page] Its easy to believe that a fantastic website - and web presence - just appears. As a business owner, its tempting to imagine that you can simply pay for a one-time site construction job. Rather than thinking about creating a website as a complete and finished project, think about business website development as an ongoing evolution.
Website design comes first, with an eye for development
The design of your website is a beginning, foundational stage. It serves several purposes:
Facilitates the development of content in the future
Supports your proprietary programs
Leads your audience clearly through to a decision-making conclusion
Crafts a user experience that engages your visitors intellectually and emotionally
While designing your website, pay attention to how you'll integrate back-end data, management, and tracking systems - and build any proprietary programs you need.
Business website development is an ongoing process
The best site in the world is useless unless people find it! Business website development should aim to get you at the very top of search engine results with solid SEO practices.
When you commit to continual development, your website can do a lot of heavy lifting for your business, including:
capturing and educating your target markets
engaging prospective clients
building a loyal following
getting your website to the top of search engine results
Excellent website development includes:
1) Frequently posting new keyword-rich content
Excellent written content is one of the of the primary factors that contributes to strong SEO. Website management services are usually implemented for this task. Search engine algorithms take meaningful content very seriously.
TIP: The more frequently you post content, the more frequently search engines will crawl your content and make it available online. This is the reason why news sites have articles available every few minutes: theyve trained search engine crawlers by continually posting new content.
2) Continually pursuing outside links between other websites
Search engines count the number of inbound links your website receives, determining how relevant it is by how many people link to your content. Popular and authoritative sites are most desirable, but volume is also key.
TIP: Submit relevant news articles about your business to online magazines like The Huffington Post and Forbes. Building inbound links and traffic from authoritative news sites gives your online presence a huge boost.
3) Improving your visitor interface so its more user-friendly
As you gain feedback from visitors, youll gain an outside perspective on how they interact with it. Set your expectations on crafting a more intuitive, engaging site as an ongoing process.
TIP: Make sure your website is available and easy to interface with handheld devices and multiple server platforms. Theres nothing more frustrating to visitors than trying to access your site on a smartphone and finding it wont work!
4) Adding new elements that creatively engage visitors
Adding multi-media elements is one of the best ways to engage your visitors and boost your online presence. Videos that describe a process, educate, and creatively promote your products should be short, interesting to your target markets, and optimized to generate traffic.
TIP: Stock photos and overly-produced videos often come across as impersonal and cold.
Visitors are more engaged by conversational, friendly videos and photos that convey more of the personality of your business.
5) Expanding the channels through which your website is found by adding media, generating positive PR, and creating elements that go viral in social media circles
These are content-development tricks that build inbound links and massively improve your SEO.
TIP: Google currently uses YouTube and Flickr as their primary video and image search tanks. Developing an optimized presence with your photos and videos makes your site more visible on major search engines.
