New year, New site – a guide to planning your new website
New year’s resolutions are a great way to kick start a project and establish your goals; if you’re creating a new website, then why not start now?
Here’s how you can create a successful project and consider the critical areas of the new build:
Strategy
Having a strategy is an essential first step because it helps define the purpose of your new website. You need to know what your business goals are and what role your website plays in this. Ask yourself, who are your target audience? Get to know who they are and why they have come to your site so you can understand how to reach them effectively. You may already have this information, but if not, then you can use tools such as google analytics to find out where your website visitors come from and what they are searching for.
Once you know what you want your website to do, you should define what the most important thing is and why your website should communicate to your audience. A website is part of your marketing strategy and needs to be supported with content, images, and overall functionality, so keep this in mind when you set your goals.
Content
Creating a new website may mean reviewing the content you already have to decide whether any of it can be used. You may also have to choose whether your content fits in with your new website pages or whether new content needs to be written or created. Photography and videography are incredibly important; if the images and videos you have are of good quality, then it will speak for itself on your website.
Writing clear and concise content requires a skill that not everyone has, try to create a content plan with types of content and their points of interest. There are multiple ways to present content on a website and your content can illustrate how you intend your web pages to come across to your audience. The purpose of your content is to support the mission of the site, so remember why the site is being built, this is vital when designing the web pages.
Functionality
When working with your web designers, it’s important to be as clear as possible about what functionality you want. Perhaps you want images, think about how you will present them, for example, thumbnails, multipage gallery or a grid of images. Define each type of content on your website; you want to be as specific as you can with content elements. Also, consider whether you need to integrate third-party systems such as Mailchimp or google maps.
Design
The design of your website should incorporate your brand identity; this includes your logo, brand colours, image style and web content tone of voice. To help your designers it is useful to compile a list of websites and brands that you like the look of and why you like them, so they’ve got an idea of your inspiration.
Seeing page layouts with real content and photos along with your brand logo and colours will bring your vision to life. Creating mock-ups or prototypes in the development stage makes changed easier than when amending a whole website.
Now that you have your website planned out, you can see your potential traffic and how your site will work. With potential traffic, you’ll be able to plan what to focus on and how to convert your visitors. With our professional website design company in Wigan, you can be sure that your website has a solid foundation you will be able to build and grow with.
