5 Things You Should Know Before Getting A Website

Your website is an important part of your business, so it is essential for us to understand your goals and what you envision your website to achieve. Further there are a few additional factors for you to consider when having a website designed - from colours, website layout, content and features, that way we can make a tailor-made website for your requirements. So here are some tips to consider when having a website done so you can be sure your website is right first time!

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1) Purpose Of Your Website?

This is the most important decision for your website and your business. From here you need to establish what type of website you would like to have. A website that is for advertising your business and services? Or an e-commerce website that allows customers to purchase your products and services online? From here we can decide the best way forward in developing your website. Different types of websites require different strategies in planning, building and testing.

It is a good idea to think of your end vision, mission objective - do you want your website to be a portfolio and showcase your projects? Regardless of the type, the main purpose of your website should be to generate traffic which in turn will result in more enquiries.

Once you know what type of website, it will be easier for you to convey your vision and message to us.

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2) Your Audience?

Once you have identified the purpose of your website, the next step is to identify your target audience. You need to know who your target audience is! Who will be visiting your site? And what do they want to get out of your site? The answers for these will help you understand your website goals and will help us to design and develop an effective website.

For example, you have identified the purpose of your site to selling Handbags. You will have an idea who you will want your products, so you can easily identify your target audience and age group. Your audience does not have to be limited, and it can appeal to everyone. Once you establish this, we can then build the website around your audience making it more appealing to them. We can add call to action areas and pop-ups that gain the eyes of your audience and will encourage more website activity and may result in more enquiries.

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3) Domain & Hosting

The next step in your planning is to choose a domain that matches your business name and purpose. For example if we continue our illustration of selling handbags, you could select a domain such as - handbags.co.uk. Alternatively, you could just use your brand business name. From our experience, and what we recommend is using a .co.uk domain, and if unavailable go for just a .uk or a .com domain. You may find that many domains are already taken but you could add your location in the domain name, which of course becomes a keyword but also may help towards your Google ranking.

During a consultation with us, we can provide options for you and even if you have just purchased your domains, we can migrate this to our servers.

Hosting is another important factor. Every website is made of 2 main things - A Domain and secondly Hosting. When users type your domain into the search engine or browser it will fetch your website which is stored on a server with the domain and hosting company.

Don't get ripped off, some companies provide high costs with little features. Some are cost effective such as GoDaddy, 123Reg etc but their servers may not be in the UK, neither their customer support, and you may find your website loading time slow because of the type of server they use.

We use LiteSpeed servers that are based in St Albans and there are no call centres when dealing with us.

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5) Website Text

This is a very important step and cannot be taken lightly. Why do we say that? The website text is what will attract and draw people in, as well as Google. Having decent copywriting will make sure your visitors who have searched for a product or service you provide to bring your website up, and once on there - they can remain on the page and read on. That is what they searching and hoping to find. If you don't have the information, the visitor will lose confidence, and may go elsewhere.

You should talk about the history of your company or brand, years of experience, your previous customers, and talk about how new customers can benefit from your services or products.  Providing compelling reasons to why they need it, will have more an affect than just writing about what you do.

Website text is crucial. Within the text content, keywords can be placed (short or longtail) and will help towards Google ranking. For example, again with the illustration of a handbag website, you could add into the page text that you provide "leather handbags in Norwhich". When people search for that term, your website will show up. That is a very brief summery, and this will be explored in more detail and depth. Perhaps you may need additional keyword research to see what terms gain traffic, which provide better click ratios, and then add that in. Sounds complicated, it can be, but does not have to be if you use the right web agency, seo planner and copywriter.

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