TL;DR
Outline your website’s purpose, goals, and target audience
- Choose a website building approach that suits your needs
- Create quality content and visuals for improved visibility
- Ensure responsive design for seamless cross-device experience
- Expect ongoing maintenance and updates for continuous improvement
Define the website needs
Before taking any action, a website should always begin by defining its purpose, goals, and target audience. If you choose Healthy Pixels as your website provider, we will collaborate to plan out the necessary pages and structure for your website.
This phase involves conducting research on competitors and industry trends, as well as considering your SEO strategy, including site structure and content types. Depending on the type of company, you might need a complex application for lead generation, an online shop to sell products, a frequently updated blog, or just a portfolio. Defining the type of website you need is an essential first step.
Who will build the website?
Consider the website build early in the process. If you’ve already made a choice, you can proceed to the next step. If you’re still unsure, your default design options include the following:
- Hire a professional
- Hire a cheap developer or a student via platforms like Fiverr
- Do it yourself using a website builder such as Wix
For your website build, I recommend avoiding hiring through Fiverr. You never know what kind of people you end up working with, and you have no guarantee that they will be available for support in the future should you experience any technical issues, or just need help in updating and/or maintaining the website.
To build your website, I recommend opting for learning a platform or hiring a professional developer who can provide ongoing support.
Register your domain and find a hosting provider
Your website needs to exist somewhere and must be accessible through a URL.
Before your website goes live, register your domain and set up hosting. Most of the time this can be done a couple of weeks before launching your website, but it’s advisable to spend some time researching which host and domain you wish to go with early on in the process.
For more information, I have a more in-depth article on domain and hosting, which helps you choose a domain name and hosting provider wisely.
Get your content together
Content preparation is crucial before design and development. Think of your website as a house – a strong foundation of content is essential before we can paint the walls.
A solid SEO strategy is pivotal. With a sitemap in place, populate it with high-quality text and visuals that engage users. Remember that users tend to skim content, making high-quality and relevant visuals essential.
Unless you have experience with website, I would recommend you don’t do this alone. The right structure – and content that is optimised for search engines – will help increase traffic to your site as well as improve the user experience when people do land on the site.
At Healthy Pixels, I will be happy to help you get your initial content strategy together. While I’m no SEO expert, I have plenty of experience building websites with SEO in mind.
Design and development
The design and development phase’s structure generally follows a pattern. At Healthy Pixels, I employ the following approach:
- Wireframing: With content in place, translate this into a wireframe, a layout without colours and visuals. This blueprint maps out the overall flow, ensuring the pace and structure is consistent yet dynamic.
- Adding colours and visuals: With the wireframe approved, we add colours and visuals to develop your website theme while adhering to your brand’s identity.
- Responsive design: Depending on your user group, you might have more traffic on one device type (mobile is increasing in popularity across many industries), but it’s essential to ensure your website is responsive and adapts seamlessly.
Do I need to know any coding?
This varies based on your chosen development method. While website builders simplify the process, understanding coding basics can help you certain customise elements. If you choose an existing theme, you might need to adjust it to truly reflect your brand’s visual identity, and this might require some coding skills.
Professional developers normally utilise user-friendly content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, eliminating the need for coding expertise for you as the user. All Healthy Pixels websites use a personal click-and-select builder, allowing you to use layouts specifically created for you. This means you will not need to know any coding to add or update content. If you need to add new layouts to your site in the future, I will be more than happy to assist you with this.
Launch and marketing
Before launching, ensure thorough testing has been successfully completed across devises and browsers.
After launch, don’t just wait and expect the traffic to magically appear. Use social media, email, word of mouth, printed marketing material, and so on to promote your site. Get some traffic onto it to show off the work that’s been done, and to generate the leads, sales, enquiries or what else your goal might be.
Maintenance and updates
Expect ongoing maintenance to keep your site functional and up-to-date. The frequency of this will depend on the type of website and its size, but it can include updating plugins, builds and forms, and fixing bugs, etc.
Consider how often you want to update or add new content (such as a blog). Keeping content fresh is important to help your website stay relevant.
Analysing user behaviour and optimising the site based on insights ensure a seamless user experience. This involves analysing how long users spend on each page, which pages they go to and which they abandon, and so on. This could include AB testing and churning out new content.
At Healthy Pixels, I can facilitate with all of the above.
Conclusion
Don’t aim to rush your website project; instead, expect it to span from 1 to 6 months for completion, excluding maintenance and updates. By dedicating time to each step outlined above, you will have a website that effectively communicates your business and serves your customers. Your website could become an essential marketing asset, and should therefore be invested in properly.
Do you want to get your website project started with Healthy Pixels? Contact me for a no-obligation chat about your project needs!
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