My New Website

Introduction

When I decided I wanted a website for my new business I had no idea of the huge amount of processes involved. Like most people, I thought web design meant deciding on the graphics and the look of the pages and then by some magic it would all happen.

I have a friend who is in the business of website design and website development so I approached him for a quote. As a complete novice who is computer literate up to a point, I was amazed at the depth of initial questioning required to find out exactly what I wanted. I had no idea about the various aspects and the structure of the site and I found it mind blowing when I learned about the amount of work involved. So I thought other people about to embark on the process would be interested to know more about the complications and I have asked my developer to supply the technical information for this article.

Stages in the process

Target Audience

Before building a website there are important questions to consider. I was asked who my target audience was. Who are my customers likely to be? Would they be businesses, home owners, sales people, parents or teenagers?

The objective of the website

Then I was asked, what was the objective of the new website?

Did I want to sell my products online or just use it to market my business and get more leads for possible customers? Maybe I would want to use it as an online brochure to showcase products. Another possibility was to use the website to foster a community so that I was in contact with other like-minded people, with chat rooms, online discussions and having the whole site supported by advertising.

I hadn’t quite realised the scope of a website but as I was asked these questions it became clear that a lot of careful considerations needed to go into the planning before actually building a website.

How to be found on the Web

One of the first questions I was asked was, ‘Do you want your site to be ranked highly by Google and the other search engines?’ If I did then there was a whole process of researhing and establishing the right keywords. So finding the best keywords are vital if you want to be found in Google. The majority of searchers only look at the first 10 results so you will also want to promote your website to get on this page for your chosen keywords. By using a keyword research tool you can find the single most popular keyword for your industry to focus on, and then secondary buying keywords.

Your Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is often quite a a real brain teaser because every name you initially come up with will almost certainly have been taken. Domain names ending in .com are by far the most popular and internationally recognised; the snag is that it’s very popularity means that the majority of the shorter names have already gone.

So looking at names with endings such as .eu .net .org .co.uk or .info may be able to provide you with the domain name you could use. When choosing your domain name it is very important to include one or more of your keywords if possible as this can apparently help with search engine rankings. So although the name of your business is the obvious choice for a domain name, it is not the only option.

Creating a site map

The importance of creating a site map is to get it clear in your mind of all the pages you will have on your website so you can prepare the content for each page and begin to design the flow through the website, such as when a user adds a product to their basket, then enters their delivery and billing address and making the credit card payment in the correct order.  The aim is to make the site as easy and intuitive as possible so that there are no barriers to getting into the website. For that reason often user name and password are set for the customer so that they are not put off from buying.

For a non e-commerce site things are simpler with a contact form which allows you to receive enquiries by email without publishing the email address on the website, thus avoiding your email address getting harvested by junk email systems that trawl websites looking for email addresses to send spam to.

Web forms can be setup to validate the information before you receive it, so ensuring, for example, that the phone number provided does not contain words, and that the email address is in the correct format. These things may sound very technical to us lay-folk but I assure you everything has to be thought about in advance before starting on the construction of the site.

Copy

The next stage is preparing the content. This is not the design of your website - but the words and images you want to have on each of the pages. 

Having gathered all the required information you will need to decide what images you want to use within the website content. As we all know, a picture speaks a thousand words and remains in people’s memory much longer than just words.

For each image one thing that can be done is to have a caption, as the caption under an image is the next most read words on the page after the title on the page. Images and their captions can also be clickable. When you click on a picture it should take you to the next stage in the sales process such as the sales page or the form for placing an enquiry if your website is for lead generation.

Navigation

Another important consideration to think about when building a website is how you want your navigation to work. You can have links within the content of your website, in the text in addition to links from the menu. You will need to decide whether the links will open in a new window, retaining your original page beneath. Next time you go online, you will realise how much thought(or not!) has gone into the way a particular website works.

Website Design

Finally we come to the design of your website. I asked my friend in website development to comment about this and he says it is one of the most difficult stages of the process because design is subjective. What one person might like, another person might not like. If you are setting up a website for yourself then you will probably have some idea of what you want to see on the site. But if, as so often happens, the website is for a company then there will be inputs from many people or departments and you can be sure that they will probably not agree on the same things, so better to get those plans finalised before you engage a designer!

There are a number of ways to approach a website design project but ultimately you need to create a design brief for the graphic designer to work from. Look at other websites in your industry: your competitor’s websites, to find out what you like or dislike. The design brief should give reference to the company logo, any existing brand guidelines, fonts and colour schemes, and it should also detail which pages of the website the designer is being tasked with creating visuals for.

The very best results will be achieved by using a graphic designer, and beware – not all graphic designers are the same. A graphic designer who designs specifically for print is working in a different discipline than a graphic designer who designs for screen and specifically the web. So choose your designer carefully, look at the other work that company has done and decide if you like their style.

If you are working in the big leagues and your budget allows, use multiple graphic designers who have all been given the same design brief and request 3 different concept designs from each designer. If the client themselves also do a graphic design, even if it’s a back of the envelope scribble, you will then have 10 concept designs.  The next step is to get them all together and select the preferred elements from each design. Then give the work to the preferred designer to work up as the final artwork.

The artwork should always be finalised and agreed on by everybody before building of the site begins.

Production

Evenutally all of the preparation has been done and the site is ready to be put together. Now for the more technical stuff! You will need to have decided which programming language to use to build the website. There are two main types for developing a website, one is Unix based, and the other is Windows based. Each one has its pro’s and con’s. If you’re starting from scratch on a brand new website then it probably won’t matter, so you can go with the preference of your professional doing the work.  My website is built on the Linux platform (apparently!) which is the same as many of the more well known websites such as Ebay, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Also your website hosting must be compatible with the development language with which your website is built.

Accessibility and Compliance

The new website has to meet the current standards for website coding and doing so insures that disabled users, such as the visually impaired, can still access all of the website if they are using a Braille web browser, for example.

Website Development

The best way to develop a website is on the web server where the site is ultimately going to be hosted. This way, those involved in reviewing the work can see work in progress and provide their comments and thoughts throughout the development.

Unforeseen  items

There are always some challenges that will arise in every project which you suddenly realise you didn’t think about to begin with, so no matter how well the web developer prepares and asks the right questions, there will always be a last minute change or addition. The main aim is to minimise the number of glitches that might arise because they aren’t calculated in and they could cause extra costs and delays to the date of the site launch.

Going Live With Your New Website

The moment of excitement comes when your site is ready to go live and you see the results of all the thought that has gone into the whole process. I was over the moon to see my work at home website go live. As soon as the site has gone live there is no substitute for real world testing though, so ask as many of your fammily, friends and colleagues to view the website from their computers and give you their views on the work.

Reporting and Monitoring

When your website is live, you will be excited to know how many people visit your website and from that number how many actually buy the products or place an enquiry. From these statistics you can work out the ratio of visits to sales or enquiries and gradually make changes to improve the ratios. There are some reliable statistics packages such as Google Analytics or Web-Stat.com which allow you to collect and review website visitor data in near real time. All you need to do to setup web stats tracking is to have a few lines of code inserted into each web page on your site.

Another useful service that Web-stat.com provides is to monitor the website and warn you by email or text message if the site is ever down.

Marketing

When the website is live there are plenty of things you can do to market your product or service. The first step is to submit it to the search engines and at the same time write articles, and press releases. Getting links to the site from forums, blogs and other social networking spaces are other options. For more on this subject ask your web developer about Search Engine Optimisation.

Conclusion

That was an amazing amount of work! I hadn’t realised when I started the process of having my website built, how complicated it all is and how many factors you have to consider before even designing the website. The phrase web design is really a misnomer, as people often think it’s just about the graphic design on the site, and the branding of the product.  Unless you are a computer expert, most people have no idea how much goes into designing and building a website and the systems that support the work you want it to do. I hope that this article will give readers an understanding and insight into the whole process of website development from start to finish and give you some useful ideas to think on before you start your own project.