I believe anyone can build a website with the right direction and tools at their fingertips. The key to a successful website is thorough planning and truly understanding the objective and who the site is for. Your design, your messaging, your navigational flow should be built for your targeted audience. So, getting this right from get go is critical.
Planning & Research
Planning your website out on paper or within a PowerPoint presentation is a great way to simulate how your site can be laid out. The landscape layout can help you envision your site layout.
Ask yourself the following questions and write it down to always reference to make sure you are keeping your initial intention.
- What is the objective of building your website?
- What goals do you want to achieve – macro (ex. Sales) and micro goals (ex. Download of PDF file, watching a video for more than 1/3 of the total, fill in a lead or subscribe form)
- Who is my target audience? Are there any secondary audiences for whom I should be addressing on the site?
- Who are my direct and indirect competitors?
- What is my seed or key keyword phrase I would use to find sites similar to my offerings in Google?
Researching your competitor and allies’ sites and taking notes of what you like, what you don’t like can give you ample of ideas for your own site.
Content
- Look at how your competitors express their content, the way they highlight key topics and titles to move the visitor through their site. Ex. Content buckets with a teaser that links to the full information, animated visual text elements
- Review your competitor menu groupings and see how they group like-minded topics together. Further research on selecting menu titles include keyword research. You can perform keyword research by typing in a seed keyword phrase of your overall topic theme. Take note of “phrase match” keywords as well as “related-semantic” keywords. Take these keywords and eliminate ones that aren’t relevant and then group relevant and related keywords into groupings, which can help you to determine the section title. Example, all keyword phrases related to the subject area. To decide which keyword phrases are good to use within your content text, sort according to keywords that have the most relevance to the intention of the query, search volume high, competition low and cost per click that shows value from a paid keyword viewpoint.
- Look for examples of call to action items. Ex. Click the video, or click to download, arrow buttons, action buttons like “Get Started”, “Go”, “Buy” etc.
Design, Structure, and Layout
If you haven’t got your brand colour scheme yet or your logo, you can go to sites like https://coolors.co/ to choose your primary and secondary colour theme. If you already have a logo, you can sometimes utilize the colours in your logo as your theme colour variation.
Working off an existing template. Whether the template is designed for a business not related to yours, by looking beyond the content, look to see whether you can make the layout and structure work for your business. It is easier to change colours and content, but harder to change around the structured layout. For example, most websites have a header and footer on each page, with the central part of the page as content blocks. Content blocks can be further subdivided into columns. Some website builders are restrictive in being able to move these sections about, other builders, like https://simplifyingtheweb.com gives you the ability to drag and drop section blocks, add/remove columns and adjust horizontal and vertical spacing.
In modern day design template themes, menu navigation typically is at the top sometimes on top of the background image or boxed in on a solid horizontal background. Others have menu positioning down either the right or left side of the screen. Other additional new options are what we call Mega Menus, which offer blocks of menu sections that have multiple links. Images and icons can also be added to these to visually break up the text.
Features, Functionality
This is in relation to programming modules that process a function for your website, for example, Subscription Form, Calendar of Events – Event Management, Password Protected Pages (Membership Management), Searchable Directory, News Management, Image Slider, Lead Funnels, Popup pages, Social Media Feeds, Testimonial or Review Feeds etc. Based on your overall objectives, consider if any of these features are needed on your site. Check your website builder documentation to see what they offer.
Look at your competitor or colleague sites and see whether they are taking advantage of these features or is an opportunity for you to offer your visitors. Investigate the requirements and costs to implement and see whether the return on investment is worth it, or perhaps can be added at a later time, once you have more consistent traffic.
Working with Images and Video
- Preparing images before uploading onto the website it is critical for keeping your website optimized for page load speed. You can use any image editor like Photoshop Lite, or https://pixlr.com to edit your photos. (<-- need FLASH enabled in your browser to use) The rule of thumb is that images for the web should be at a resolution of 72 – 96 d.p.i. (dots per inch). Slider images are the largest and usually span across your site screen left to right and landscape in shape. Therefore, if you are planning on using an image for a slider, make sure it is at least 2400 px in width and crop it accordingly so that you don’t push your page information down too much. Think of the expression in printing, “above the fold”, so on a web screen, what you see before you need to scroll, is the “above the fold”. Ideally, it is good if we can see some text above the fold that leads the visitor’s eye down and hints to scroll further.
- Naming conventions for images are important for the web. First, you want to ensure you name your images according to what the image is about. Also, when naming, do not leave spaces between words and instead put in hyphens, example, german-sheppard.jpg Also keep consistent with keeping all your naming of files in lower-case. Adding hyphens also applies to asset files whether in Word, PDFs, or videos.
- To optimize videos, make sure you have a good title and description of the video that incorporates the keyword phrase you would like visitors to find when searching on Google or YouTube. It is best to keep a short URL (web address) slug. From a branding viewpoint, it is good if you can have a consistent entry and closing along with a bottom third with your name and logo. Store all your videos on your Channel and make sure your channel has a good name, channel icon, and channel art. To be accessible, it is recommended that you include an edited version of the transcript, as Google is unable to index the content within the video, but they can index the transcript if you include it. It also makes it accessible for those using screen readers for the blind.
Metrics & Measurement
- Determine what information is important for you to know to help you understand whether the website is working for you. Is it traffic numbers, is it the number of leads (or lack of), is it number of contact form submissions, or is it only your number of sales? It could be all of these. The key is to ensure that you have a way to measure them and attribute the visitors' flow, source and the actions taken aligns with the result. Learn about the various ways within Google Analytics to set up goals and goal funnels to measure these questions.
- Look to Google Search Console as to what keyword phrase queries visitors are using to drive traffic to your site; look at the individual landing pages and assess whether the relevancy is being met.
- And most of all have a good idea as to how you brought on that new lead or client whether online or offline. Keep track of these figures so that you can best understand your efforts.
As you can see many of the elements of building a website doesn’t incur technological expertise, in fact, a successful website depends on the overall planning of incorporating your business with this online tool. (SimplifyingTheWeb Website Builder Platform). This tool can be your marketing, processing and sales function. Finding a website builder tool that allows you to worry less on the creation of the site and more on how the site can build your business is what you need to consider. Having said that, finding a website builder tool that offers drag and drop technology makes it much easier. Having good documentation with step-by-step instruction and quick responsive customer service makes building your own site very user-friendly, not to mention more affordable and accessible for those who are just starting out or have an old site and want to modernize.