You may not have an online presence yet and I can’t help but wonder why, or you may have an online presence and claim it does not work. Well if you have an online presence and it does not work, then why? Is the design correct? Is it easy to use? We will help you with this.
We believe that there are 9 simple steps to follow in designing and developing the online presence that works.
Lets take you through the steps:
1. What is your websites purpose?
You must determine the main purpose of your
website design , is it to sell goods? Is it to provide information or is it to provide a service? Once we can determine the points of your website then we can move to the next step.
2. Who is your targeted audience?
Now you know the purpose of your site, you can now determine the audience that will be viewing the site, this is absolutely essential to design and ease of use of your site. For example, it’s an Aston Martin dealer; well the site is going to be elegant and classy.
3. The design
Now that you know the purpose of the site and the audience this will have a knock on effect as to the design of the site. As mentioned above in point 2. The design will reflect the audience. We will sit down with you and understand your market and realise what type of website design you will need for the right audience. You only have to look at for example the biggest fashion industries in the world to realise, an example of this would be Chanel and Gucci’s websites have a very elegant and flash design (lovely websites actually) to them as this is the target market.
4. Ease of use
At Find Me, we always stand by one principal – simplicity and ease of use.
If you want a complicated website which is hard to navigate around then don’t come to use because we just won’t do it. We want the user to be able to navigate around the web with ease and not be scratching their head because they can’t find how they contact you. You only have to view the portfolio of our work to understand what we mean. Your user will enjoy using your website and come back again and again and again.
5. The pages
Ok now we have found out the purpose of your site, the audience and the design. We will now discuss the pages. This is important because going back to the ease of use cramming too many pages into the site and not navigating it properly will confuse the user. You need to have enough pages and content but being careful not to over do it and having a huge site that is impossible to navigate around. We will tie in this point and point 4 when getting an ease of use in the site. So if you happen to have a site with many pages then we will make sure it’s simple and effective to navigate through.
6. Search Engines must like your website
Right we have covered the design, feel and navigation of the site so the user will like it and want to use it. What about Google? What about Bing? What about all the major search engines?
Anyone with a little bit of practise can build a web page. But a webpage that search engines love to visit and index is vital if you expect your site to get any traffic, you need a well structured coding and the correct tags within it and the correct advice, ok there is a little more to it but no need to go into depth just yet. Get in touch for more details on how we work this.
7. The Content
Ok we have created a search engine friendly website, a user friendly website, what is next?
Simple – content!
The site looks good, feels good, its easy to use, the coding is search engine friendly but now you need content, this is a long daunting process for your first website as the content is new and you need to write it, afraid we don’t do that for you, only you know what you want to write. We will read it over and give you our expert advice on how to make the content entice the user and help in search engines.
8. Customer Communication
Websites are two-way, interactive communication systems. You communicate your company's marketing message to potential customers and make it easy for them to communicate back with you. The better the communication, the more trust increases, and customers feel comfortable to do business with you.
You start with basics here and that is your contact us page. Have a full means of communication here, for example:
• Name
• Telephone number
• Address
• Email
We will also ensure that your contact us page is always extremely accessible around the entire site.
One key communication tool on your website is to have a “contact us” form that the user fills out. This is key in catching the users details, such as name, address, telephone number etc, don’t forget to give the user a confirmation of their enquiry and deal with it promptly, don’t sit on it, you are only doing more harm than good. Now that you have your potential customer’s details you can help your business and increase sales, with a phone number you can call the customer and really show you care about their business – customer service! It helps!
9. Triple M
It’s a little ludicrous I know but it means Maintain Maintain Maintain, basically this means don’t just build a site and that’s it your job is done. Get a contract is place with your web design company to make monthly/weekly updates or have them build you a Content Management System so you can always make changes, amendments, have news, change images etc, you need to maintain the site, keep it fresh and new at all times.
To conclude a well managed, designed, developed and search engine friendly website, your site needs to be:
• Clean
• Simple
• Target the correct audience
• Built to a high standard to search engines to like
• Easy for users to contact you
• Keep it updated
Get in touch today and let’s see what we can do for you.
