Seven Steps to Website Success
This short guide will help you have a successful website project. It is not intended to be a complete list of everything involved in website production, but rather hits the points that tend to be overlooked or misunderstood about this unique medium of communication.
1. Write down why you want a website.
HINT: not 'just because everyone else has one'
An effective website is not a quick decision you make on a rainy afternoon to improve your business prospects. Take some time to answer these questions:
- Who is my website for?
- Why would they come to my site?
- What can I give them online that would position me as a valuable resource?
- What do I want them to do after visiting my site?
2. Research your competition online.
Educate yourself - and later your website designer - about how your type of business is presented online and how your competitors are positioning themselves. Make notes about what is effective. Note what is typical. Look at colors, layout and page titles. If it is common in your field to list references, note how others do it effectively. Don't worry about all the things that aren't effective, focus on what works.
3. Figure out what makes you and your business different from your competitors.
Now that you know why you want a website and what is typical in your field, you can do some creative brainstorming with your professional associates and your website designer to position your business in a unique and authentic way. Give your site a professional edge:
- Hire a professional writer. There are amazing differences between professional copy and everyday word usage. Make sure your writer knows how to write for the web.
- Use professional photos of yourself, your products and services.
- Don't wait until your site is done to involve these professionals. An integrated approach will yield the best results.
4. Choose a website designer.
This is the same process you go through choosing any other type of professional services - ask your associates for referrals, review portfolios of designers online, call a couple of designers and ask them to describe how they work.
- Does their portfolio show a range of styles from project to project?
- Does the designer ask questions and show a desire to get to know you and your business?
- Is the designer easy to converse with, do they listen well?
5. Get involved and stay involved in the project
Two-way communication is essential to a successful project. As a client, you are responsible for responding to email and phone communications with the designer during the development of your website. Delays in communication will cause delays in production which leads to an unfocused process where details are dropped, schedules are not met and costs increase.
6. Recognize that websites are not the same as printed media.
Producing material to be read on a monitor has different requirements and challenges than producing printed material.
- All monitors will render colors slightly differently. Don't get hung up on your special shade of taupe. Accept that the colors of your site will be slightly warmer or cooler or lighter or darker for each and every one of your viewers.
- The body of your site should use browser-safe fonts that are available on all computers. If you want to use your favorite font for headings, your designer can make graphics for you but be aware that search engines don't read graphics so you are losing keyword opportunities on the page.
- Realize that your viewers can -and do- adjust their default font size so don't fret about line breaks or paragraph orphans.
- Become educated about browser differences. Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer are all modern browsers but they render code slightly differently. Your designer has to take into consideration these differences. The more complex the layout, the more time required for 'bug-squashing' which means adjusting the code so it works properly in all browsers.
- Recognize that what looks easy on a website may have taken hours to achieve. There are many lines of code behind the scenes for every click you make.
7. Have an ongoing plan.
Getting your website online is a major accomplishment and should be celebrated and promoted in all forms of media to drive traffic to it. But that's not the end of it. Even before your site is done, plan how you will keep it up to date, add useful material, delete outdated material and maintain the value that you have put into it. Talk to your website designer about using a Content Management System (CMS) to make it easy for you to make changes to your site.
Best wishes for an enjoyable process!
Totsie
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