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The right steps to success

Creating a successful website involves a series of steps where you and your web designer work together. This article attempts to explain each step.

1 The planning stage
Planning a website begins with asking ourselves what we want our website to accomplish. Of course we want it to generate more business, but that should happen automatically once the project has been put together properly.
There are a lot of questions to be answered BEFORE we can put together a plan of action. Who is your target audience? What information might they be looking for? Who are your competitors? Etc. Your web designer should have enough marketing experience to help you with this. Once you've decided what all you may need to put on your website, it's time for a strategy.

2 The Strategy
Just putting a whole pile of information on your site is not enough. One important aspect of using a strategy is to understand your target audience. Younger people expect a different environment than that of an older crowd. If your business caters to both, then we'll want a combination of both. Even if they like the site, they'll need an extra push to take action. Again, your web designer's marketing experience will come in handy for this task.

3 Assembly
Now that we know what we want to accomplish with our site and we've come up with a strategy, it is time to collect the ingredients. First of all, we need copy that is easy to read, to the point and informative. If you're not much of a copywriter, just put your thoughts down in point-form and if your web designer has the skills, he/she can do the writing for you. Next we need a good copy of your corporate identification (logo) and perhaps a few pictures (to tell a thousand words). It is important that the text is clear, concise and free of spelling mistakes. (Although I've probably left a few in this site to see if you'll catch them). Logo's, photo's and any graphics should be of good quality and optimized for the web - your web designer should check and correct them if they are not.

4 Design
This is what your web designer does. He or she will take all the materials available and organize, place and put it all together to build a website that visitors will feel comfortable with. It is often a good idea to let your web designer know what type of websites appeal to you by giving him/her the addresses of a few that you like. While they may be different than what your designer feels will work for you, most often there is a happy medium.

5 Programming
The design and programming go hand in hand. This is where you web designer does all the work. There are plenty of technical issues to deal with here that are way beyond the scope of this article. Your best bet in avoiding problems with your site is to make sure you hire a professional, skilled web designer.

6 Testing
Making sure everything works as planned. As mentioned in the Programming Step above, there are technical issues to deal with. A good web designer will test your site for functionality in a variety of browsers and operating systems BEFORE giving the go ahead for public launch. You certainly would not want your visitors to have problems.

7 The Launch
Once everything has been checked over and you are satisfied with what your designer has built for you, it is time to 'Go Live!' Launching your new website is a great excuse for blowing the horn. Let all of your customers know the new site is open for business by putting signs in your store or placing an ad in the local newspaper. To see if your site passes the grade, ask your clients if they've seen it and what they think of it.

Now what?
Once your site is up and running, it's time to submit it to the search engines.
This is something you can do yourself or have your designer do it for you. Speaking of 'Search Engines', you might have heard about 'Search Engine Optimization'. This is a subject that can easily cover onother article. If you really want to know more about SEO, just give us a call, we'll explain it to you.

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