Most people know they need a website in order to publicise and promote their business but very few people know what they want in their website. Fewer still are those who can actually sit down and plan their websites well.
If you don’t plan ahead, problems will crop up later.
For example, who is going to take care of the website? What are the costs involved? Will you have the time to maintain it or should you hire a webmaster?
These and many more reasons should be compelling enough for you to plan your website well now.
Planning your website also ensures that your website fulfills its purpose. It also prepares you financially for the costs of designing and maintaining the website.
Before you go online with a website, here are some issues to consider:
Get a Suitable Domain Name
As a business website owner, your first task is to choose a suitable domain name which reflects your business. A domain name should also be easy to pronounce and easy to remember. To do this, first list down some domain names which you prefer. To project a professional feel, avoid cutesy names or names which have negative connotation. Those in the service or consultancy line might want to use their own names as domains.
Next, check the availability of the domains you’ve chosen at http://www.redboxdiy.com/whois/checkdomain3.php .
Many popular domain names will be taken by now. So what can you do if the domain you chose is already taken? Go for alternatives, such as .net, .org or .biz, if .com is not available.
Once your chosen domain name is available, go ahead and buy it. You can buy more than 1 domain name. In fact, a client of ours (www.sambalsatu.com) has 2 other domain names which point to the same website.
You can buy the domain name on your own (google for domain name registrars) or you can get your web design firm/ web designer to buy it on your behalf. We often help our clients buy their preferred domain names as it is often much more convenient for us than it is for them.
Who Designs The Website: Do It Yourself Or Outsource?
Next you need to get yourself a website. You need to decide whether you want to do it yourself or you want to outsource this job to a website designer.
You may need to look at your budget (how much are you willing to spend to hire a designer), your skills (can you understand basic HTML and use Adobe Photoshop?), your time (do you have enough time to do it yourself?) and your writing skills (can you write content for your website or will you hire a copywriter?).
If you have HTML skills, you can use your knowledge of HTML to create your own website. If you don’t have HTML skills, you can also get yourself a website easily.
You can transform a blog into a website or you can use specially designed websites such as Redbox Easyweb.
Our Redbox Easyweb is a website system that is already pre-designed for you. It gives you, a non-technical user, the freedom to create and edit your own web pages easily. Using this system, even those who do not know HTML or web design can create, update and maintain their own websites. A word of caution though: you need to be 100% involved in updating and maintaining your website when you decide to maintain it on your own.
Define The Purpose Of Your Website
Not every website’s intention is sell to consumers. Some websites are used for prospecting while others are used for education. Define the purpose of your website so that your marketing activities can be better structured to fulfill your purpose.
For example, you intend to sell your products online. How are you planning to do it? Do you want your customers to pay using credit card, direct fund transfer or via some other means? How do you plan to ship the products?
If you want to sell products and services online, ensure you plan e-commerce facilities early into your website. Of course there is nothing wrong if you want to use your website for prospecting, sales and education. However, be sure that there is a strategy for each purpose or you would be losing valuable visitors unnecessarily.
Who Is Your Target Audience?
Knowing whom you are creating the website for will go a long way in helping you market your website later. Think about the age group, geographic location, income level and interests of your audience.
Put yourself in their shoes and imagine you are a visitor to the website.
What would interest you? What would turn you off?
If you cannot imagine your target audience, how about thinking about people who are currently buying your products or services?
What are they like? What age groups do they belong to? What is their geographic location? More importantly, what do they want? What do they need?
Think About Content
The main reason people go online is to find information. Therefore your website should contain information.
But what kinds of information could you provide?
You could offer information about your products and services. You could also offer information about your company and why your customers should do business with you.
Another type of information comes in the form of articles, books, newsletters and reports.
Again, this brings up more questions. How often will you update your information? Will your content be free? Will you be writing the content yourself or will you obtain articles from other websites?
Good quality content is important if you want to attract visitors to browse, read and learn (and bookmark and forward to their friends!).
In the process, they educate themselves and find themselves trusting you and what you market. Besides, writing and providing interesting and useful content in the form of articles, tips and how-to’s is a great way to position yourself as a trustworthy expert and raise your rankings with the search engines.
Plan For Interactive Elements
Interactive elements makes your website come alive and attract visitors. For example, are you planning to offer audio talks or mini videos for visitors to download? Do you want to have a forum where visitors can have discussions? Do you want to enable visitors to talk to you live while both of you are online?
While interactive elements are fun, remember these ‘fun stuff’ suck bandwidth. You might like to discuss this with your web hosting provider about your hosting needs if you intend to include these elements into your website. They may need to charge you more if you have lots of everything on your website.
Get Good Graphics And Images
Good graphics and images are key to making a website look professional and polished. These include product photos, your company logo etc.
What product images do you have? If you do not have good images, consider getting professional shots done. Or you can also consider buying stock photographs but these do not come cheap.
How about logos? Do you have one or do you need to create one? What other images do you need for your website?
Remember that images for the web should be either in .gif, .jpeg or .png formats. Graphics should also be optimized for the web meaning they should not be too large as large graphics tend to make your webpages load too slowly which over time, would turn your visitors off.
Get Web Hosting
Planning for web hosting is another important step. Ensure your web host can support your requirements especially if your website contains a number of interactive elements.
To know more about choosing a good web host, here are factors to consider when choosing a web hosting provider.
While cheap hosts seem to be the logical way forward, not all that’s cheap is good. So do your homework before you sign up with a web hosting provider. You are, after all, looking for reliability when it comes to web hosting. At Redbox Studio, we do host websites but only for clients who engage our web design services.
Remember Website Updates And Maintenance
Do not be mistaken that a website that is completed and live online can be left as it is.
A website can never ‘grow’ by itself.
As a website owner, you need to help it grow. You need to update and maintain the website therefore you must plan and budget for updating and maintenance work for your website. When you help your website grow, your business will grow in tandem too!
How often will your website be updated? Will you be the person who will update and maintain the website?
If you don’t feel you can do this job well, maybe you should think about delegating this work to a webmaster. If you need a webmaster, be sure you calculate into your budget an allocation for webmaster fees. Ask how much you need to pay per update on an annual basis. Decide too what each update covers.
The best thing about having a website is that you can make immediate changes to your website and you see the information in real time, updated and relevant. Unlike printed materials which takes time to be printed and distributed, which by then some information may no longer be relevant, a website enables you to make immediate changes easily and cheaply.
Updating and maintaining your website is also important because it encourages search engines to come and index your website, thus enabling your website to be ranked in the search engines when web users do an online search.
Copyright 2005. RedboxStudio.com
This post is written by Nic Sim, the owner and founder of Redbox Studio where we help you grow your business with your website. See the results our clients have achieved using our premium website design services.
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