EIGHT things to consider when getting a new website designed
Creating a website for your company is an important marketing decision, yet most companies leave everything in the hands of their chosen web design company and renege on the responsibility of ensuring that the website will deliver a significant marketing ROI (Return On Investment) for your company.
Any marketing activity should have a defined ROI at the start of the project, yet most companies slap up an ill-designed website in a few weeks and do not consider the long-term affects that their decisions will have on their company. After all – most companies only have ONE website and if they get it wrong and no one contacts them, then it is not just a waste of resources but the waste of a marketing gateway. When you slam the door shut on your own Internet marketing gateway, by losing focus on the essentials needed to create an effective website, you could be shutting off 40% or more of the potential leads that could come to your company – that is a HUGE loss.
Here are 8 things to consider when you are about to get a website designed.
1. Have you taken just 5 minutes to 100% determine the purpose of your website. Have you written down the top three important things that the site MUST achieve along with the five nice thing it needs to achieve? If you don’t know what you want to achieve with your website then how can you relay this to your web developer.
2. You need to answer the question about edit-ability of content and content volume. Do you need to be able to edit your website content yourself. If you do then you will need to use a CMS (content management system). CMS’s have their own issues but in general are very easy to use and maintain (as long as you select the right one) if you have basic web skills in your team or your web design company will maintain things for you. Content volume is an important consideration. If you are adding two or three content items a months you may want to have a CMS else you may be waiting for a month for a third party company to load your content for you. If your core site never changes then you could opt for a static HTML site but do note that Google does not like web sites that never change – it likes content to be added regularly. In this case consider adding a blog (like WordPress) to your main site and running it off a web address like www.yoursite.com/blog or www.nutsandbolts.com/our-bolts (something more creative and uses the core keyword bolts). You can have a static HTML website and then add a WordPress blog very easily. Now with the blog you can add content easily that is related to your company. As an alternative, if you do not have in-house writing skills, consider a third-party content service (we offer a SEO blog content service as part of our SEO.SIMPLE. service offering).
3. Does your web design company build in SEO (search engine optimisation) elements as standard, such as sitemap.xml, sitemap.html, H1,H2 etc.
4. Are Google Analytics added to your web site as standard. Without great analytics (Google is one of the best) then you cannot fully understand how you can improve your site to make things better.
5. Does your web design company set up a Google Webmaster tools account for you and configure your website properly within the account so that Google will index your website properly.
6. Is your web design company talking to you about ‘calls to action’ or pretty colours! Unless you CONVERT your visitors into prospects and clients your website is not usually doing its work.
7. Does your website design company ask you what you want to achieve with your website. If they are not interested in asking this important question and also getting you to consider what you want your website to do, then you may miss the boat in respect to getting the maximum results possible from your site.
8. If you ask for a 100% Flash site and your web design company does not persuade you to drop the use of Flash, they may not be up with the latest web trends where more and more web visitors are using hand held and portable web browsing devices that do not render Flash very well. On top of that, a 100% Flash web site is very bad for SEO so they should be steering you away from this. Plus at the end of the day unless a lot of money and time is invested into a Flash site, it could destroy your visitors experience instead of enhance it. Cool web dynamic sites can be created with the latest J-scripts (upgrade of AJAX scripts) instead of having to use Flash.
If you would like to learn more about our Web Design services content us today.
