Are you a business owner looking to create a website for your company? Or, do you own a business and want to broaden your audience?
Websites not only make it easier for your audience to engage with your business but they also make it easier for people to find your business in the first place.
There are well over 1 billion websites around the world today and with that, the number of internet users is growing as well. This is why the internet is one of the best places to promote your business. Learning the best website design process will help you to gain a bigger online audience and increase your traffic.
If you want your business to succeed, creating a company website is key. If you want to know how to build a website, check out this guide of everything you need to know about the website design process.
Planning Your Project
The first step in building a website is to figure out what you want your website to accomplish. What goals do you want your website to meet? Who are you trying to reach?
Outline your project to create specific goals for your business. This will help you to keep track of your progress and give you a guide for taking the next steps for designing a website.
Identify your target audience so that you can create and produce content catered to them. This will keep your audience engaged and interested in your business, so this is an important step.
Identify competitor websites and get a feel for what your website can achieve. Knowing what your competition looks like will give you a sense of what works and what doesn’t in your field. This will help you to plan the layout of your website later on.
Make sure you do preliminary SEO and keyword research for your business website so that you can bring in traffic and attract your target audience. Your SEO research is key to having a successful website. Make sure that you identify your exact niche so that you can cater your content to them.
Making a Strategy
Once you identify your goals, you can begin to make a strategy for putting your website together. Planning out what needs to go into your website, how long it will take, and how much money you will spend is an important part of building a website.
Doing this will help you to avoid scope creep, which can be harmful to small business websites. Scope creep is when your project starts to expand beyond your means, taking longer, or costing more than expected.
Having a strategy and defining your scope will keep your website on track, on schedule, and on budget. This will help to keep you from having any unwanted setbacks or hiccups in your website design process.
Wireframes
The next step in the website design process is to build your foundation. Creating a wireframe and sitemap framework will give you an idea of the layout your website will have.
Your wireframe will be a visual guide that shows you where you will be inputting content. This will help you to get an idea of what content to bring in, what size content, and how much.
This will be a template for your entire website. It will be the architecture that you build off of later, so make sure that it suits your needs and looks how you want it to.
Test out a few different options until you find one that you like. You can test it out with sample content to see how your website will look when it is completed so you get a better idea of what you are working with.
Content Collection
The next step is to start collecting and creating content for your website. This is where you can use the SEO and keyword research that you did when planning your project. Creating a content strategy will allow you to keep your website consistent and your audience satisfied.
Make sure that your content is working for you to bring more attention and traffic to your website. Using your keywords throughout your website will help you to appear on search engines, so using them in your content will help to get your website noticed.
Make sure that your content is not too confusing and is accessible to everyone. This will allow more people to engage in your website and can potentially broaden your audience. By following web content accessibility guidelines, you can make sure that your website is usable and accessible to everyone.
Keeping your content simple, accessible, and frequently using your keywords are the keys to a successful website content strategy.
Design Details
Now that you have a content strategy you can start to develop your brand. This will help you to keep your website to look organized and keep your content consistent.
Your brand will serve as a style guide for you to follow. Decide on a few colors to use for your template and be consistent throughout your website. Too many different colors can make your website confusing and look chaotic.
Decide on what fonts you want to use as well. Similar to the colors, too many fonts can be confusing so try to refrain from using too many. Pick one font for all of your headers and one for your text and stick with them throughout your website layout.
Add in your visual elements to your website like media, logos, and banners. Your visual elements should work with your website, not against it. Make sure that your pages are not overcrowded and that your colors work well together.
It is also important to make sure that your visual elements don’t take away from the rest of your website. Think about what the most important elements of your page are. What do you want your audience to see first?
Put your important elements in the most obvious places, and make them the most noticeable part of the page. It may be tempting to add in a lot of flair and stylistic elements to your website, but making sure the most important parts of your page stand out takes priority.
Start adding in your content and make sure that it works with your brand and your layout. Play around with different colors and themes until you find a design that best fits your business.
Test Your Website
Before you can launch your website, you need to test it to make sure that all of the elements are working correctly. You can identify if there are any bugs or errors that need to be fixed before it reaches your audience to reduce the risk of any unwanted confusion.
Testing your website will also help to make sure that your website translates to all devices as well. This is especially important nowadays since so many people use their mobile phones to access the internet.
Making sure that your website adapts to different devices will give you a better chance of reaching a larger audience and bring in more traffic.
Website Launch
Once you have planned, designed, developed, and tested your website you can finally go live. Launching your website for your business can be exciting at first, but your work isn’t quite done yet.
How will you get the word out for your new website? Promoting your website on different media platforms will help you to draw in your target audience and bring traffic in.
There are many options for promoting your website. One popular option is using paid advertisements. This will give you quick and easy exposure, but it may not be right for your business.
Take into account any costs of advertisement to make sure that this option fits into your budget.
You can also gain lots of traffic with your organic SEO, so if you are using your researched keywords you will see results without having to pay for them. That makes SEO an important part of your website promotion.
Maintaining Your Website
Now that your website is open to the world to see, you might notice more bugs or issues that didn’t come up before. As traffic starts to flow in, keep track of your website analytics.
Track your conversions and pay attention to what is working with your target audience and what isn’t working. You may notice that your traffic gets confused by your navigation or doesn’t often leave your homepage.
This could mean that your layout usability is not as good as it should be or your design is not simple enough. This will allow you to make some changes and help you to keep your website running smoothly and efficiently.
You can also keep track of where your audience is scrolling and clicking on your website, or even at what point they decide to leave. By using heat maps, you can see how well your efforts are being received by your audience and if your content is getting engagement.
This will allow you to see what parts of your website may need improvement or if your content is working with your target audience.
Don’t Stop There
Once your website is up and running, it is important to remember to keep up with your audience. Understanding and addressing your audience’s pain points and concerns is the key to having a successful business website.
Your audience will tell you what is working for your business and what is working against it. All you need to do is gather that information.
There are a couple of ways that you can collect feedback from your target audience. Don’t be afraid to try out several different options so that you make sure you are getting accurate results.
You can conduct surveys on your website so that engaging customers or site visitors can respond to how their experience was on your website. This can either be an option after a transaction is completed or it can be placed on your landing page.
Whatever location you decide, a survey on your website is a great way to gather feedback from your audience.
You can also gather feedback by sending out an email to your audience. This is a great way to reach your audience anywhere. While having a survey on your actual website is a great method for people currently engaging with your content, you won’t be able to reach people who have used your website in the past.
That makes email marketing a great method of gathering feedback from your audience. Instead of relying on your audience coming to you, you can reach out to your audience.
Finally, you can utilize social media to gather feedback. You can do research to find what social media platforms your target audience uses the most and use those platforms to reach out to them.
Whether you create a link for a survey on your website or utilize poll options on social media platforms, this is a great, easy way to gather audience feedback.
Website Design Process Made Easy
If you are wanting to create a website for your business but don’t know where to start, don’t worry. The website design process doesn’t have to be difficult. Creating a website for your business can be made easy by following these web design tips.
Make sure you set goals for your business, plan out your strategy, follow your brand style guides, and keep track of your website progress. These tips will help you to create and maintain a successful website for your business and broaden your audience.
Do you want to learn more about creating and designing a website for your company? We got you covered. Reach out today and find out how we can help you design your website!
