Learn How to Build a Great website
Before you draw the first graphic object or write your first line of code, you must decide the website’s purpose, the target audience, design and navigation, the site’s content, and finally your budget. And when that’s all done you must find ways to bring visitors to your site.
It sounds easy, but you’d be amazed at how many bad websites are out there. Yours don’t have to be this way. If you just pay attention to the rest of this article everything should be just fine.
Website’s Design
Website design has changed over the last couple of years, because today search engines ignore graphics in websites and give priority to text and information. If you look at some of the high rank websites you will see that in many cases the only graphic on the web site is the company’s logo. Search engines now give higher preference to websites that offer information, over flashy graphics.
Website’s Navigation
Bad navigation is the main reason the visitors abandon a website. Navigation refers to the links the visitor uses to find their way around your site. If your site has too few or too many links or is simply impossible to navigate around, your visitors will leave fast. If it takes a visitor more than 2 clicks to get to any of your pages on your site, you need to improve things.
Web site’s Purpose
Purpose is everything: The purpose to inform, to educate, to entertain, to generate leads, to sell, or a combination thereof. If you fail to define the purpose of the website, all else is just wasted time.
Website’s Target Audience
Your target audience refers to that group of the public that you hope to attract to the site. For example if you sell baby clothes, your target audience would be anyone with babies. Taking it a step further, if you only sold baby’s girl’s clothes your target audience would be people with baby girls. Find your target audience, and then figure what is the best way to serve them.
Website’s Content
Content is the information on your website. This can be the graphics, the text, downloadable items, etc. Since the search engines don’t use HTML Meta tag data any more to index websites. It’s very important that your website contains plenty of text, well-written, to appeal to the search engine spiders.
Website’s Build Method
Who will build the website for you? Are you going to do it yourself using one of the point and click website builders or will you hire a professional? Calculate your budget and don’t forget when it comes to website design, you get what you pay for.
Website’s Promotion
So you did all the above and now you have build a great website. Will anyone ever find it? The answer is not. At least not, without a good marketing campaign. You need to put all your efforts to promote your website online and offline.
Include the website address on your business cards, brochures, letterhead, e-mails, in your ads, prints. If you are going to do online marketing, find out where your target audience surfs and advertise there.
If you don’t know anything about marketing, do yourself a favour and call in an expert. Many businesses fail to succeed because they do not know how to market their products and services right.
