Today, in the digital world specially for website design, consumers go through a 4 step process called the buyer’s journey before buying goods or services online; awareness, consideration, decision.
The awareness stage (active research) mostly concerns the search engines, whereas consideration and decision stages often occur at a business website.
That’s why website design is mission-critical for those planning to convert visitors into leads and close those leads into customers, eventually building a healthy sales funnel.
Building a simple website has surely become hassle-free in the last decade. But before designing your website, why don’t you go through our 5 essentials before building your website?
This compact guide will be a great help if you are on the lookout for a starting point with your website design project.
Go Through These 5 Essentials Before Building Your Website
1- Decide on Your Brand Identity
We care about branding a lot. For our purposes here, though, we would like to underline the importance of brand identity and working with an expert graphic designer.
According to HubSpot, your brand identity is the personality of your business and a promise to your customers.
That’s why before starting with your web design, it’s essential to work on core elements such as the logo, colors, and fonts of your brand.
By doing that, you could have great harmony at your website, which would allow you to be more consistent with your brand.
More consistency often results in revenue boost for SMEs in the long run.
2- Make a Short List of Your Main Business Offers
As a marketing agency, we often witness that most business websites don’t reflect the main business offers.
What’s more interesting is that most businesses don’t have a list of the main business offers in their minds.
You don’t have to have a dozen of them, but having a clear line of business in mind is crucial before designing your website.
The reason is that main business offers must be translated into landing pages at your business sites and published.
These are the top priority pages often ranked by search engines or used in digital advertising.
That’s why brainstorming these offerings with your team before your website building is also essential.
3- Choose an Easy to Use Web-Building Platform
Today, there are a few different ways to get your business website up and running.
The easiest way is using DIY website builders such as wix.com or Squarespace. If you are low on budget and have no one else to turn to, you could publish your website in a couple of days.
But these platforms could be costly in the long run, plus they aren’t as digital marketing-friendly as custom-built websites.
Also, transferring your domain and building a new website later on could be a painful process for your business.
Alternatively, you could hire a web developer or a web agency and get a tailor-made website.
We recommend using WordPress because of its highly customizable design and SEO friendliness if you go this way.
After a quick WordPress training, your marketing team can start updating your design and content, which is another great advantage.
WordPress also enables you to publish blog posts frictionless, helping you rank better in search engines.
4- Learn SEO Basics & Understand Ranking Factors
SEO (search engine optimization) is a digital marketing method to increase a website’s ranking on search engines. SEO includes on-site and off-site work.
If you are a business owner, investing in learning SEO basics would be a great help. SEO-friendly websites perform far better and result in more revenue for your business in the mid&long run.
Also, knowing the basics of SEO, you could communicate with your digital agency or SEO specialist far better and eventually build a high-ranking website without breaking the bank.
5- Follow a Mobile-First Approach
According to statcounter research, 40% of all the web traffic is mobile in Australia. This is a considerable number, but it’s not the exact reason to follow a mobile-first approach.
Consumers often prefer researching via mobile but purchasing via desktop or tablet. This is mainly because of the ease of use on a bigger screen.
Since the number of researchers for a given product is always bigger than the purchasers, optimizing your mobile site for search would give you a solid competitive edge.
When it comes to the mobile version of your website, it’s also worth looking at a technology called AMP and integrating necessary plugins into your WordPress site with the help of your web developer.
As you can see, there are key factors to consider before building your website;
Before you do anything, decide on your brand identity. Then make a shortlist of your main business offers.
Next, decide on your website’s infrastructure. Once that’s done, start learning the basics of SEO.
Finally, don’t neglect mobile and always follow a mobile-first approach.
If you are on the look for a smooth website design process for your business, just make a note of our simple steps, and you are good to go.