Whether you are just wanting to update your website or you are getting a website for the very first time determining a look and feel that will be successful and create branding is an overwhelming task. There are things you can ask yourself and steps you can take to make this less of a daunting task. As a Scottsdale web development company that has been in business for over 10 years, we have developed a process as a guide to help our customers become as successful as possible.
- Step 1 Who is your target audience? ? Knowing and understanding your target audience is key. Let?s take HireAWiz, for example, we are a Scottsdale web development company and our target audience is generally business owners of some type. If we were to create a website that was targeted towards teenagers how successful do you think our website would be converting customers? Probably not very successful. Take the time to understand your target audience.
- Step 2 What are you trying to accomplish? ? Are you trying to sell products or services? Or are you a nonprofit organization just attempting to get the word out about your organization and collect donations? Whatever the case you must know what it is that you are trying to accomplish before you can determine what type of website you need.
- Step 3 Selecting a logo ? You may already have a company logo and that is great. For those of you who are looking at creating a logo the best advice I can give is keep it simple. So often companies try to design this over the top logo that is more of a piece of art than a logo. Think about some of the logo?s that you know of are there any complex ones? Now think of all the simple ones such as the Nike Swoosh, The LaCoste Gator, and Coca Cola is simply their name in a fancy font. Remember you are trying to create a logo that people will remember.
- Step 4 Choosing your colors ? When selecting the colors you want to use for your website keep in mind the type of photo?s you will be using in your slider and on other parts of the website. Let?s say you are building a website for a golf course you are likely to have a lot of green grass in your photo?s you will probably want to avoid colors that look hideous with green.
- Step 5 Content and Keywords ? Before you begin building your website you need to determine what keywords you are going to try to rank on the search engines. You will determine this by doing your research on the competitiveness of each keyword and come up with a strategy. The second thing you need to determine who and how you are going to keep your content new and fresh. Content is huge in obtaining good search engine optimization. I personally would consider having a blog on my website but there are many other ways of accomplishing new content.
- Step 6 Have a tracking system ? I would recommend using Google Analytics but there are many other tools you can use to track your customers. This will show you how many people have visited your website, what pages they have visited and for how long, what region the majority of your customers have come from, and much much more.
- Step 7 Test Test Test ? Begin coming up with different marketing campaigns and tracking their results. Narrow down what is working and what isn?t working so that you know what marketing strategy to invest in. Before you dive into building a website determine some of these things and have a plan in place. Having a plan will save you a ton of money and will get you the website you are needing the first time instead of figuring out months down the road you need to add or change something.