Creating A New Website? Follow These Rules To Get It Right First Time.

It has never been easier to get online and create a new website, however if you don’t get it right you can create a site which will do your organisation no favours. Follow some simple steps to ensure that your new website is world-class first time, every time!

Step 1 – Plan your site on paper

Before you sit down in front of a computer grab a big sheet of paper and start to doodle what you want from your website.

This is an opportunity to think what you want the focus of the site to be and also how you would like your users to navigate through the content, and it is considerably more simple to change ideas and experiment with a pencil and eraser.

You need to be sure you have the basics, a call to action, a way to communicate and relevant and authoritative information. Remember that your content will be viewed on a variety of platforms from PC’s to tablets and mobile phones, in fact your site will likely be viewed more often on a mobile device than the type of machine you are using to create the content.

Step 2 – Understand what you need it to do?

Ask yourself a question, ‘What does my website need to do?’

This sounds simple but it is a vital question to answer, all too often a web presence is a confusing mish-mash of pages with no overall direction. You may consider your site to be:

• A location to promote my product or services
• Somewhere to inform customers about who we are and what we do
• Providing a location where existing customers can find information
• Providing location information, contact details and opening hours

Of course your site may cover more than one of these, but having a clear definition of what you are hoping to achieve will prevent ‘bloat’ where your site becomes confused and over complex.

Step 3 – Consider how you want it to look?

When you have your content planned you need to look at the look of the site, it is good to have a clean and easily readable design and there are many design principles you can use and many professionals who can advise you. However, ensure that it looks great to all of your users.

Remember I said that most of your web traffic may come from mobile devices, ensure that you view your content on a variety of devices to make sure that your shiny site that looks great on Google Chrome on a PC also works effectively on a tablet.

Step 4 – Ensure that it is accessible to all?

Additionally you should consider accessibility for people who have disabilities to ensure that they can also use your website. It means that people with disabilities can understand and navigate the content. This is a benefit also for people who may have changing abilities, such as older people.

You can take advice from accessibility professionals or read the very well created content at the Web Accessibility Initiative  where you can find out how you can ensure your site is built to be compatible and find tools to help you test accessibility for a wide variety of users.

Step 5 – Make sure people can find it

In order for your new website to be found you will need to ensure that it is visible to the major search engines. This is carried out via a process called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. This is a set of techniques used to increase the number of visitors to a website by ensuring the page has a high-ranking in the main search engine results. To understand how to ensure your website is seen by as many people as possible you need to understand how a search engine operates.

Search engines at their simplest level ‘crawl’ the web, exploring every single page it encounters and then ‘indexing’ the content that it finds within those pages. When the internet was new this was all that search engines did and your ranking within the search results was purely based on the indexing. Today search engines use highly complex algorithms to provide information to users based on ‘relevance’ and ‘popularity’

Once a page could be seen as being relevant for a search if the word was contained many times within the content. This lead to abuses and so now the search engines use a wide variety of techniques to establish the relevance of the content. An SEO expert understands and can employ methods to best engage with the search engine. The exact details of the ranking algorithms are highly confidential and not released by the search engine providers, however our team of specialists use their knowledge and experience to understand the most likely techniques to ensure that a web page ranking is maintained as the search algorithms evolve over time.

Google recommends that you make your content primarily for users and not for the search engines, useful. relevant and well written content is vital as this will develop your popularity and relevance. There should be a clear site hierarchy and text links allowing both human users and the search engines to find the content easily.

Step 6 – Employ great SEO

The majority of web users will select one of the top search results when they complete a search, if your website is not correctly optimised it will not be within this crucial set of high ranking results and the traffic you require will be going to your competitors.

Our professional SEO consultants will work with you to ensure that your website gains the highest possible search engine rankings.

Step 7 – Create your site

There are a number of ways to create a website, you do not have to be an expert in coding to present some good looking content as there are a number of drag and drop website building tools you can use. These are very useful if you have the time to develop your own simple site however you can find that there will be limitations if you need additional functionality or to use bespoke designs.

If you want to do more than a basic site you are best looking to engage the services of a professional web design company who can create a professional site, specifically built for your requirements.

Introducing Tom Maynard

Tom runs a UK based web design and development agency based in the UK. With over twenty years experience in the industry will work to learn your business and explore where you need to go, providing suggestions and listening to your ideas to come up with a shared vision for your online presence. They will provide you with a simple, honest quotation. When you decide to go ahead you will be assigned a specific project manager who will support you throughout the process so that you are always kept up to date.

The design team can work with your existing branding guidelines or create a new look and feel for your organisation. They use a collaborative process allowing us to visualise and produce a range of logos, branding concepts and online models for you to review before we create the final agreed designs.

Once the branding, layout and content of the site have been agreed the highly skilled developers will create a site which is both Google and mobile friendly so that you can be sure it will look great, whatever the device or browser. Your project manager will work with you to ensure you are regularly informed on progress.

When your site has been completed and passed the rigorous in house testing phase the implementation date will be agreed ensuring that your team have any training or support they require for back-end systems or content management. Your project manager will have been with you every step of the way so we can be confident that you will be happy with what we deliver.

The SEO consultants will work with you to understand and develop your site creating highly effective content with powerful keywords, we can then maintain your web presence delivering you a monthly report detailing your sites performance.

Private message me for no obligation advice and quotes if required.