Top 10 Things To Consider In Website Design Development
October 30, 2014
Do you need a new website? Answer the following questions to see. Do you have to continuously expand the site on your smartphone and scroll left and right to be able to read the content? Does it lack social media plugins for audience interactivity on your site? Was your website developed over 3 years ago? If you answered yes to the above questions, then it would behoove you to get a new website.
Internet and mobile technologies have evolved so rapidly within the past 3 years. This has made the user experience on either desktop or mobile devices more pleasant and interactive. A great user experience with interactivity between the audience and your website is key for your online business from the audience and search engine perspectives, regardless if it is an e-commerce site or just a website to generate leads and provide information.
Consider These 10 Items Before Developing A Site:
1. Desktop + Mobile Web:
In this mobile device world, it is not enough to just have a desktop website. To be legit on the internet and in the mobile device platform, it is necessary to have both a mobile web and a desktop site. As the website represents the online store, think of the mobile web as your mobile browser store. It opens your business reach to both platforms, instead of just the desktop. Remember how frustrating it was when you visited a website from your smartphone that did not have a mobile web. You could not read the content or clearly see images without having to expand the page and scrolling left and right for the text to be legible.
2. Know Your Budget:
Understanding the marketing budget helps you determine whether you need to get just a template site, or a customized one. For small businesses that do not want to redo the entire website to incorporate a mobile web, they can economically get template mobile websites to serve the mobile device market. Disadvantages of a separate mobile web are content changes for these sites will need to be done on 2 separate CMSs, there will be 2 URLs, 2 analytics codes to embed into these sites, and the mobile web will not share the same look and feel as the website. The ideal situation is to get a responsive website to serve both desktop and mobile platforms while using 1 CMS to manage both sites, 1 URL, and 1 analytics code to embed in the site.
3. Determine Your Business Goals:
It is important to understand what your business goals for the website are in order to design and develop it to include items necessary to achieve your goals. Will you need a shopping cart, online community development, landing pages for specific marketing programs, webinar, etc? The more features added to the website, the higher the cost, as is with any other type of service that you procure.
4. Know Your Target:
This helps in the design and features necessary for the website. The look for a younger audience will be different than that for a mature audience. Targeting a B2B audience will require different features than a B2C client.
5. Website Design and Development for a Great User Experience:
The audience and search engines want to have a user-friendly, easy to navigate through, clean, unconfusing site. It boosts readership, traffic, and search engine rankings.
6. Create Audience Interactivity:
Another method for increasing readership is by incorporating interactiveness between the audience and your website. They can easily share, like or comment on things posted on the site to keep them engaged and connected to what the company represents.
7. Incorporate Content Management System (CMS):
For ease of maintenance, having an easy to use backend (CMS) allows the administrator to change content, images and videos at any point in time. They do not have to wait for a vendor to make any updates, and it is more economical.
8. Provide Consistent Fresh Content:
Search engines love fresh, interesting, quality content as it helps to increase traffic, readership, and interactivity with the site. By doing so, it gives credibility to the site. Therefore produce press releases, blogs, and articles with keywords added to your content to attract search engines and your audience.
9. Build Relationships With Your Audience:
Engage visitors by responding to their comments, giving them good content to share with others, creating a forum of interactivity with them and their connections, and build a relationship to generate leads and sales.
10. Embrace Change In Technology:
Do not fear technology, for it can be an economical way to make your marketing more efficient and effective as it opens the door to engaging individuals that you would not have had access to via the traditional route. Be flexible and embrace change to grow your business.
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