Planning a website design

Planning your website design will help save you time and money and ensure you get the website you want for your business. This article outlines several key areas to focus on when planning your website.

Know your business

There’s not much point in investing time, money and effort into a website development if you don’t know your business goals, your target audience and what you hope to achieve by building a website.

The first step would be to sit down and make a plan about what you hope to gain by developing a website for your business. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:-

Who is my target market?
What is the average age of my target market?
What are their needs?
Why would they come to my website?

What is the purpose of my website?
Do I need a website to help promote my business via ads or social media?
Do I plan on selling products through my site?
Is my website just a ‘brochure’ site for potential clients to check out my business?
Do I need a website purely for grant or tender applications?

Answering the above questions will ensure you experience a more streamlined website build, as you won’t be ‘changing tack’ throughout the process.

Content and images

We get a lot of clients that come to us wanting a website build, but when it’s time to start the project, they just give us a logo and perhaps a business card or a paragraph or two of text to work from! Without at least some rudimentary content, it’s incredibly difficult to build a website. Here are a few areas you’ll need to focus on when it comes to supplying content to your website developer:-

Sitemap
Plan out what pages you want on your website – a typical sitemap for a basic website would look like this:-

Home
About
Services/Products
   - Service 01
   - Service 02
   - Product 01
   - Product 02
Contact

Content
When writing website page content, focus on how you can help your customers rather than talking about how great your company is – we call this “sell the sizzle, not the steak”. Too many websites contain copy about how long the business has been around, what parts they use, who their distributors are, etc. All your customers care about is how you can help them with your products or services.

Think about clear, concise marketing messages throughout your website – words and phrases that connect emotionally with your users and encourage them to call you, request a quote or buy your products. You’ll need to incorporate appropriate keywords into your copy to help your website rank higher in search engines – more about this further in the article.

Your homepage should provide an overview of what your business does, what you offer, and who you work with and include multiple calls to action – don’t just assume your potential clients will know what to do; you need to tell them where to click or pick up the phone to ‘Call now’ etc.

Images
When choosing images for your website, make sure they are visually appealing to your potential customers, and it’s not always about showing photos of what you do; it’s better to incorporate images that show the benefit of your product or service.

For example, if you own a dental practice, it’s not a great idea to show images of what you do, ie. customers in the chair having work done – it’s better to show pictures of happy, smiling people with healthy teeth.

Images for your website must be high quality in terms of composition and structure – avoid using happy snaps from your iPhone as this will not portray a professional appearance to your users. If using images that contain people, ensure they are a similar demographic to your target market – you’ll have a much better chance of connecting with your audience.

Some stock photography websites offer free or low-cost images – here’s a few:-

• iStock
• Pexels
• Shutterstock
• Adobe Stock

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Most businesses don’t just want a website that sits there and looks pretty – they want it to perform and provide results for their business, which is why ranking highly in search engines is important.

Not only do you need to contain keywords throughout your website content, but your website needs to be set up in such a way that you can optimise title and description tags. Research your keywords and make sure to include them in a natural way when you write the copy – this will give your website a much better chance of ranking higher on Google.

Plan for the types of clicks and users you’re trying to obtain, and make sure your web pages reflect the goal you’re trying to achieve. If you’re not confident in doing this yourself, you can always ask Marketeam to give you some advice.

Hire a website designer

Most websites these days are built using a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress or Joomla. There are many free or low-cost website builders out there, but you won’t necessarily have control over your site in the long run – see our article Cheap website design - What are you really getting for your money? for more info on this topic.

The best option – if budget allows, is to hire a professional website developer. Whilst it’s tempting to hire someone cheap to fit in with your budget, you get what you pay for. Take a look at our affordable website designs page for more info.

A good website designer will get to know what your business is about and who your target market is to create an awesome-looking design that will appeal to your target audience.

Many customers are tempted to start with the look and feel of their website before they organise content and images; however, it’s a much better idea for you to focus on content and images and let your developer take care of the design.

If you follow the above steps in planning your website design when it comes time to hire a website developer, it will be a super streamlined process, and you’ll have your website up and running in no time.

If you’d like some advice about website planning or want to speak with us about a quote, send us an email or fill in our quote request form, and we’ll be happy to help.