Website Design Brisbane | Website Design Melbourne | Responsive Web Design
What makes marketing effective? A carefully considered strategy. Websites are no different.
Ultimately, your website is one of your best tools in your marketing arsenal, so it’s important that it’s done well. So, what do you need to think about before you build a (great) website?
1. What goals do you have for your website?
Ask yourself, what do I want to get out of my website? For many people this will be something like increased brand awareness, and increased sales or inquiries. It could also be to streamline your sales process or to cut down on phone calls.
Before you can even think about how your website is going to look and function, you need to know what your goals are, and it’s a good idea to write them down so every design and content decision refers back to these goals.
Doing it in this order will lead to a strategically designed website that satisfies all your needs, rather than leaving them as an afterthought.
2. How will your website achieve your goals?
Look through the goals you have written down and start thinking about how your website will achieve these goals.
If you answered that you want increased inquiries, you might need an online form that makes it easy for your audience to get in touch with you.
If you answered that you want increased sales, will these be in store or online? If they’re in store you may want to offer coupons or catalogues, and if they’re online then you’ll need an eCommerce platform.
You don’t need to know all the fine details at this stage, but by answering question two, a picture will start to form of how your website needs to function.
3. Who will use your website?
To know how to go about achieving your goals, you need to know who will be using the website.
Who is your target audience? How old are they? Are they male or female, or a mix? Are they technologically-savvy?
Knowing what demographic you’re targeting has a major impact on the design. Being able to tell your web designer the answers to the above questions will let them know what colours, style, font sizes, and layout need to be used to achieve your goals.
You also need to know who will be using the backend of your website. Will you or someone in your office be maintaining the website or will you outsource the maintenance to a developer? Your answer to this will help you know whether you need a Content Management System that’s user friendly, or if it can be built from scratch.
4. Where will the website be?
Before your website can go live you’ll need to figure out what your domain (or domains) will be, and where it will be hosted. If your website heavily features photography or videos, you’ll need a good hosting solution to ensure adequate load times. However if it’s a simple landing page, this aspect won’t be as important.
As you can see, there is a lot to consider before building a website, especially if you want to do it well. If you don’t go through this process you can end up with a website that doesn’t appeal to your target audience, or that simply doesn’t have a good return on investment.
Want a great website? Give us a call on (07) 3186 0566 and we’ll talk you through the process.
If you have any other creative design projects, we can help!
