Credits: Shirsendu Das

10 things to remember before starting/building your website

If you are running a business and want to spread it globally throughout the internet, website is the best option. A website is an online presence for your business. You can promote your business products, services, contact information and many other important pieces of information under one single roof and most importantly all things will be in your own control. So for helping a company grow, every business must have a website. In today’s blog, I will discuss a few helpful points to remember before starting your own website.

What do you want to do using the website?

Before creating a website, make a proper guideline for your online public face. Many people do not know what, when, why are they creating a website. Your business competitors also have websites, so you decide to follow the same path. This is not the right way. First, you have to think about why you need a website. Then plan the purpose of your site. Then think about how you can gain more business from this website. So first set your goal and purpose, if you think a website can fulfil your goal, purpose and it will help your business growth, then you are ready to build your dream website.

What do your customers want to do?

So now you have decided your goals. Your next step will be to think about how your website will be beneficial for the customer. As we all know that for a business, customer satisfaction is the most important thing. So your website must be customer friendly and customer-oriented. Your customers can easily know about your products, service, and others and can easily contact via website. If you are running a promotion, customers can easily view that. Moreover, always engage with your customers and give informative content about what they are looking for.

Take help from professional

Getting a website made from any non-technical person, who does not know anything about website design, development technology is useless. Though web development technology is not rocket science, still, you must ask a professional to build your first website. Website development needs many years of experience and skills. So find an expert web development professional, discuss your ideas and thoughts with him, then plan everything like features, budget, timeline, looks, etc.

Create basic Wireframes or structure

After discussing with professionals, your next step will be to create a basic layout and structure. Here you can simply take a pen & paper, draw a rough sketch of the website’s front page and other pages as required. You can get some ideas by browsing some reference websites. Note down the website menu structure and other important parts. Then you can again visit web professional and show your layout ideas. By using this step you will be 90% sure about your final product.

Choose your domain name and hosting

After finalizing your website structure, your next step will be to buy a domain name for your business. A domain name is an online representation of your business. People will search and identify your business by this domain name. Examples of domain names are facebook.com, google.com, youtube.com, etc. Before purchasing a domain you have to follow some general technique. You can read this blog before purchasing a domain (http://mediatemple.net/resources/web-hosting-101/10-tips-before-you-buy-a-domain-name/). Hosting is a place where your website files and other important parts are stored. You can read more about hosting here https://shirsendu.com/blogs/web-hosting-and-types/. There are some popular sites where you can buy both like godaddy.com, hostgator.com, etc.

Create good informative content and logo for your website

Any website needs good content for customers or visitors. Without any valuable content, your website is useless for visitors. So write good informative content about your products, services and business. If you are not good at writing, hire a professional web content writer. Remember one thing, writing for the web is completely different from writing an essay or a paper. You can read more about how to write good web content here (https://www.jimdo.com/blog/11-golden-rules-of-writing-website-content/) Having your own logo will ensure your brand is recognizable. So you need to also create a simple, attractive logo for your website.

Mobile-Friendly Website

Make your website accessible for mobile users. Nowadays more than 61.2% of users browse the internet through mobile. You need to capitalize on this huge number and add them to your website visitors list. So consult your website development team and make a mobile-friendly website that supports almost every device. You can read more about mobile-friendly website design here https://shirsendu.com/services/design/responsive-design/.

Trust Indicators

Now you have built a good informative mobile-friendly website. Your next task will be to make the website secure and create a reputation for it. Make sure you are using the best security system on your website while building a website. Even you need to make your website secure with the SSL certificate. Trust Indicators help your visitors to buy any service or product or put any sensitive information into your website. You can read more about how trust indicators help a website here https://neilpatel.com/blog/build-a-trustworthy-website/

Testing Your Website

If you have followed my above 7 steps, then your website is ready to go live. But before making your site live you need to check whole website content, contact information, and functionality. Here you take help from your friends and family members to test its functionality. You need to know what problems your customers will face as they try to navigate your site before you even send the very first spree of traffic to it. Spend time ensuring everything is right and your message is consistent before sending in traffic, or everything that you have up to this point will be useless.

Promotion or Marketing Strategy

By now you have given all your effort and your website is running very good. Next, your task will be promoting your website to targeted customers. For website promotion, you need to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and other marketing tricks implementations. From writing your own high quality, original content to hiring an SEO specialist, and from social media integration to offsite customer reviews and testimonials, there are many aspects of optimization that cannot be ignored if you want your website to be a success. If you are a brand new business then growing your identity through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other likes, or via email marketing – are just a few options.

So here I share my experience, to remember some points before creating your website. We are a web development company based in Kolkata, India. If you need any kind of online business consultation, please contact us. If you have any idea regarding this topic, please comment and share your ideas with us.