Buying a new website is not easy, there are so many choices available to you, once you do some research, you may not survive the never ending rabbit hole that you will go down!
There are two different scenarios that I will cover such as starting a new business and rebranding an existing website, both of which are covered in any of my web design packages.
Starting a new business
It’s so exciting starting a new business, from being your own boss to all that cash coming in, woohoo! With all the excitement it’s easy to get carried away with spending money unnecessarily, you know the one, remember when you started the gym and brought all that gym gear, protein shakes and all natural peanut butter? There’s no point getting carried away in the intention of doing things, get your priorities in order first such as:
- Really understand your target audience, who are they, where are they, what problems do they have that you fix?
- Work out what makes you different, how do you stand out from all the others, it’s called a Unique Selling Point (USP) and you may have many of them.
- Find out how to write a Value Proposition and make that your mantra moving forward.
Align your advertising using the Sales Funnel, what is it, how does it work and how will you use it to structure your offering.
Branding
The branding strategy should be part of the website build but it doesn’t have to be, I’ve created lots of websites where the client already had a brand identity. In any case you really should have a House Style agreed so that all your marketing can use the House Style therefore creating a consistent brand across everything in the public. Elements could include the following:
- Logo(s)
- Colour scheme
- Font(s)
- Symbols
- Tag lines
- USP’s
- Contact details
Domain name(s)
Your domain name will be given out in conversations, email addresses and all your marketing therefore it needs to be fairly memorable and as short as possible. Your business name could be anything, it could be a word in Latin that has meaning, it could include your name or even describe the business in some way. Either way, you need to write down your preferred option then find out if the domain name is available using something like 123reg.com.
You also need to decide upon your TLD, .uk is the new norm but you can still go for .co.uk or .com. Do not use .org unless you are a charity and .gov is for… the government! It’s worth knowing that there are new TLD’s on the market these days but they can be a bit pricey, now your can have .doctor, .taxi, .construction, there are TLD’s for most industries.
The main takeaway here is that your need to ensure that your domain name is available before you go and register your business at Companies House. Yes, that’s another thing that you have to do whether you are a Sole Trader or a Limited Business and yes you guessed it, the name needs to be available there too!
Short & Easy to remember business name… Check!
Domain name available… Check
Available to register at companies house… Check
Let’s move on…
Re branding a Business
You know all about Domain names, Hosting and Branding so let’s get straight to it! Why do you want to change your existing website? You could just want a newer looking website which is fine but in saying that, are you really saying that your existing website looks old and therefore it does not work for you? If so you need to be clear about your goals and what problems need to be fixed.
Understanding how your website is performing now will allow you to understand what you need to improve upon. Looking at your website statistics is the best place to start. Personally I would want to understand the following:
- How many visitors view the website
- How many unique visitors visit the website
- What are the demographics of the visitors, e.g. age, location, gender etc
- What is the bounce rate (visitors who click on the back button)
- What percentage breakdown of visitor devices, e.g. mobile, desktop etc
- What pages/products are popular
You may also want to speak to your customers, find out what they do on your website, do they have any issues that are not fulfilled or general frustrations.
Strategically think about your website
Obviously if you’re not a techie or that way includes at all, you may leave all of this to your web designer, however in my experience the more that you understand what you would like, the better chance you get something that you are happy with at the end. Believe me there are some seriously shady “web Designers” out there that will try to baffle you with marketing or technology jargon and you simply won’t have a clue what they are going on about.
Goals
What objectives need to be achieved, e.g. more leads, better user engagement? What problems need to be fixed e.g. not being mobile friendly. The more goals or objectives that you fully understand, the better the entire process will be. Remember speaking to existing customers, looking at current website statistics or researching rival companies will help you understand what your goals are. Lastly you should understand what success looks like, the website will be a success if it does a, b and c. By the way, if all this sounds out of your comfort zone then we can take care of the whole process, get in touch here.
Content
Although you will be guided regarding content by your web designer, you should take time to consider what kind of content you would like and also where the content fits into the Sales Funnel but don’t worry about the latter as your web designer will know this (ask them before you sign anything!).
When thinking about you content, think about the content that your customer will need when they want to find out what you offer, how you do business and why they should trust you. If you want to increase your Google Rank, you should consider including a Blog and integration with any social media channel that you use.
Look and Feel
This is a subjective one but try to do some research into websites or competitors and find some websites that you like. This will help you when talking to your new web designer in terms of features that you require as the technical details will alter the price of the website considerably.
There are lots of different styles of websites these days and trends that you won’t be privy to, therefore if you do want something cutting edge then you should do your homework and find out what you like, e.g. Micro animation, Image free Hero spaces and large Typography.
Misconceptions
For start ups in particular, the website isn’t the only thing that you need to get sorted to be up and running as a business. It won’t suddenly find all your leads and convert them into customers, your phone won’t be constantly ringing and everyone won’t know you suddenly exist!
SEO
All of these points can be achieved through understanding your customers better, knowing how you are unique and marketing and refining your website. For example, even though we do lots of SEO on your website when we build it, the chances are that your competitors do SEO in order to appear on the first page of Google. If you want to be found too then you will need to do some SEO, just like your competitors.
Features
The website will not perform any features unless you specify them at the start, do not presume that features will be present unless you state them during the initial conversations. Chances are that features will cost money as they take time to implement. If you hired a building to build a wall and at the end, you expected 2 walls then the building isn’t going to build that second wall without charging you for it. A website is no different, seriously don’t presume anything! With that said, I specialise in the WordPress platform which is the most widely used platform in the world, it makes up over a 3rd of the internet and it offers a massive amount of features out of the box.
Hosting
Your website has to “live” somewhere, that somewhere is a data center where web servers are set up and maintained by companies 24/7, this service is called Hosting. From the moment your domain is purchased, your emails are set up and your maintenance page is live, your website Hosting is chargeable so expect to pay for this service almost straight away. Just because your website is not fully “live” it doesn’t mean that your hosting payments should not be paid.
Properly Responsive
Most web designers will say that your website will be mobile friendly, however there are levels of responsiveness. Out of the box, most websites will be mobile friendly in some capacity because the frameworks that they are built on provide layouts that respond to different screen sizes. However if you care about your Google rank then it’s much more complex than that.
On July 1st 2019 Google made one of the biggest changes in its history. Google knows that people access the internet more on their mobile devices than traditional computers, therefore ranking a website on how it performs on a desktop computer no longer makes sense. Therefore, Google will rank your website based on how it loads on a mobile device, this is called Mobile First. Web designers have to design your website for lots of different screen sizes, this takes time and extra work has to be completed in order for pages to display content properly. In addition to that, Google has stipulated that best practices are completed otherwise they will lower your Google rank.
Final thoughts
I haven’t even scraped the surface but hopefully I have given you a flavour of what to consider when starting a new website whether you are a start up or rebranding an existing business. The main takeaway to managing a successful website is to understand what the website will do, what problems it will fix and what success will look like.
Make sure that you understand how your website will perform on a mobile device and what best practices you would like to implement.
Your website should be hosting in the UK and be optimised for whatever platform you decide to choose, if you don’t care about the platform, choose WordPress and you won’t go wrong. Whatever you do, (imho) I would steer clear from hosted website builders as they do not offer the same flexibility or long term strategic capabilities as having a “normal” website.
One other thing that you should understand is that website are not all equal, if you had never seen a car and were then served with a Mercedes and a Ford, on face value you may not be able to understand which is the better car. However, understanding how the cars were built and with which materials/technology, you would then be able to consider where the superiority comes into play. The same is with your website, we carefully consider Goals, Content and the Look and feel of a website before we design it, we also use the world’s best platform (WordPress) and we craft your website using best practices, at the end your website will perform better, solve problems better and provide the best performance. This can only be achieved by what’s going on underneath the hood, the bit that you don’t see.