It is both exciting and potentially rewarding to launch a website. A well planned site can have a positive effect on your business, with online sales bucking the trend in an otherwise downbeat economy. It can be a very intimidating task to develop a website. The main reasons for this are the vast array of options and difficult to understand jargon. The primary focus of this article is to simplify the planning of your website.
1. Set Your Goals
1st set your goals clearly when planning your website so that you achieve the results you want. The purpose of your website may be to get sales, create sales lists or it may have an altogether different goal. Condense everything into one over all mission statement. Quantifying the goals is also important. How many questions will you get? You will need to consider how much change will happen during the first three years.
2. Establishing A Budget
Although big companies shell out millions of dollars in order to remain online, yet you can have a simple website or blog of your own free of cost these days. What kind of money should you put out for it? Let’s say you have a turnover of 100,000 and you want to invest 8% to give an annual marketing budget of 8000. If you’re an online business you may choose to invest all of this on the web, if not then choose a suitable proportion.
In the movie “Field of Dreams” you may have heard the quote “If you build it, he will come”. This may be true for baseball, but not for new websites which require significant effort and investment in marketing after launch to be successful. You should save about half of your money for marketing after you have your website up.
3. Requesting A Quotation
Assuming that you want to hire a professionals to create your website, the next step is to obtain some quotes. Create a statement of purpose for your site, describe its function, as well as which users you want to attract, and map out a realistic time line that runs to its launch date. The expected things like hosting, support and training can also be included. The document is referred to as an RFP, or “request for proposal”.
When you submit your request for proposal to a web development company you should expect to receive back a list that includes the price, the services and other details. It is more likely that you will get a more accurate quote for exactly what you want if you give more information in your RFP.
4. Creating Content
Content is king when it comes to the web. For the success of your website, the quality and usefulness of the page, images and other media are more critical than how pretty the design is.
If you are not particularly adept at writing, you should probably use the services of a professional copywriter. Choosing photos is trickier than it sounds, and is best left to a professional designer. It’s worth getting started on the website content as soon as possible so it’s ready to populate the website and make the whole project go as smoothly and as quickly as possible.
5. Going Live
Once your website is live and has been submitted to search engines, don’t expect overnight success as it can take months to appear in results pages.
Your web developer can install Google Analytics or a similar statistics package so you can track information about your visitors and how they are finding your website. You can use ‘goals’ within Google Analytics to track exactly where purchases or sales leads are being generated from. Using social media tools such as Facebook and twitter, and through search engine optimization you will have to market your new website.
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