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Ask yourself
What do you want your website to accomplish and who are your target audience?
Your website should prompt your users to do whatever it is you want them to do! Whether this call to action is to contact you, purchase products, subscribe to a newsletter, download a document, recommend your services to others or something else, you need to make sure your website directs your users to it easily and with minimal effort on their part.
Once you have defined your call to action the next step is to decide who your target audience are and make sure your website will fulfill their immediate needs, as far as building a truly useable website goes this is vital.
Your users immediate needs are like a checklist your website will need to tick off for them before they will perform your call to action. The best way to learn what your users immediate needs are is to put yourself in their shoes, for example if you ran a website design company your users immediate needs may be a series of questions such as: Are they any good? / Can I trust them? / How much do they charge? In order to address these needs you could provide an online portfolio of your work, client testimonials and clearly display your prices, this way it puts your users mind at rest and they are much more likely to respond to your call to action, in other words they get what they want and you get what you want, everyone’s a winner!
Your websites structure
So you’ve defined what you want your website to do and how to go about getting your target audience to do this, the next step is to decide on the structure of your website, this is where you decide what sections and pages you would like on your website and how your user will move around your site.
A good way to do this is to get a pen and some paper and draw a rough diagram or sketch of how you see your websites structure, what pages come off the home page and what pages if any will come off those and so on, even just a list of ideal pages is enough to get this started. For example a standard website could look something like this: Homepage, Products, Services, About us, Contact us. Also consider if your website needs any pages describing any legalities such as Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, Disclaimers, Delivery, Returns.
Content
Start getting together all text for your web pages, preferably in a word document and/or electronic versions of your existing marketing material, plus any logos, images, photos, graphics, downloads and any other media that you may want on your website. We can supply stock images if required on a cost per image basis.
Updates
Ask yourself how often you envisage needing to update your websites content, we offer a range of options depending on your needs, our design team can provide amendment and update services on either a pay-as-you-go or pre-pay basis. We also offer our Content Management System (CMS) solution which enables you to update your websites content yourself, which is perfect for websites that need to be updated regularly, please see our amendments & upgrades section for full details and pricing.
Put your website into production today!
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