Introduction
When I decided I needed a website for my business I had no idea of the very many processes involved. Like most people, I thought web design meant deciding on the graphics and the look of the pages and then by some magic it would all happen.
I have a friend who is in the business of SEO web design and website development so I approached him for a quote. As a complete novice who is computer literate up to a point, I was amazed at the depth of initial questioning required to find out exactly what I wanted to achieve.
I had no idea about the various elements and the structure of the site and I found it mind blowing when I learnt about the amount of work involved. So I thought other people would be interested to know more about this complicated process particularly if you consider yourself a non computer person and have to get a website built. I have asked my SEO friend to supply the technical information for this article.
Stages in the Process
Target Audience
Before building a website there are important questions to consider. I was asked who would be my target audience. Who are my customers likely to be? Would they be children, businesses, home owners, sales people, parents or teenagers and so on? If you are not clear on your target audience then you are not going to be able to set the tone of the site correctly so this is a very important consideration.
The Objective of the Website
Then I was asked, what was the purpose of my website? Did I want to sell products on line or use it to market my business and get more leads for potential customers? Maybe I would want to use the site as an online brochure to showcase my services. Another possibility was to use the website to foster a community so that I was in contact with other like-minded people, with chat rooms, online discussions and being supported by advertising on the site. This didn’t really apply to my business, although I did think about offering to advertise allied services!
I hadn’t quite realised the scope of a website but as I was asked these questions it became clear that a lot of careful planning went into the preparation before building a website.
Creating a Site Map
The importance of creating a site map is to get it clear in your mind of all the pages you will have on your website so you can prepare the content for each page and begin to design the flow through the website, such as when a user adds a product to their basket, then enters their delivery and billing address and makes the credit card payment in the correct order.
Before you can get involved in latter projects like copy writing or SEO you first of all must spend time on creating the sitemap. Even if it is just done on the back of an envelope, or scribbled on a pad, you need to have a clear idea of all the pages you are going to have on your website and which sections they are going to be in.
The aim is to make the site as user friendly as possible so that there are no barriers to getting into the website or making a purchase. For that reason often user name and passwords are set for the customer so that they are not put off making a purchase by having to register.
For a non e-commerce site things are simpler with a contact form which allows you to receive enquiries by email without publishing your email address on the website, thus avoiding junk email.Web forms can also validate the information before you receive it, so ensuring that the phone number provided does not contain words, and that the email address is in the correct format, for example. These things may sound very technical to us lay-folk but I assure you everything has to be decided in advance before starting on the construction of the site.
Your Domain Name
Choosing a domain name is often quite a challenge because every name you initially come up with will almost certainly have been taken. Domain names ending in .com are by far the most popular and internationally recognised; the snag is that it’s very popularity means that the majority of the shorter names have probably already been registered. Purchasing an existing .com domain name from its registered user can be fraught with problems and the best way to do this is through an escrow process monitored by a third party. However, you can usually think of some domain name that is available, which is much less time consuming than trying to purchase a previously registered domain name from its existing owner, most of the time just contacting them, and getting a reply is a challenge.
So looking at names with endings such as .net; .org .co.uk or .info may be able to provide you with the domain name you would like to have. When choosing your domain name it is very important to include one or more of your keywords if possible as this can apparently help with search engine rankings. So although the name of your business is the obvious choice for a domain name, it is not necessarily the only option. You will no doubt have heard the Hoover/vacuum cleaner story, where Hoover is actually a brand name of a certain type of vacuum cleaner, but these days most people still say they are doing the ‘hoovering’ ! This is an important concept to bear in mind when choosing your domain name as hoovers4u.com might be a much better domain name than discountvaccuumcleaners.com, also vacuum is a tricky word to spell so think about things like that too. Also how easy is it to give out your domain name over the telephone for example? Classic examples of this are paydotcom.com and Slashdot.org confusing or what?
Copy
The next stage is preparing the content. This is not the design of your website – just the words and visuals you want to have one each of the pages.
Having gathered all the previous information you will need to decide what imagery you want to use within the website content. As we all know, a picture speaks a thousand words and remains in people’s memory far longer than just words. It is a popular concept that people don’t read, and is even more true on the web today, so use as many images, diagrams, cartoons and illustrations as possible.
For each image you could also have a caption, as the caption of an image is the next ‘most read’ words on the page after the page title. Images and their captions need to be clickable. When you click on a picture it should take you to the next stage of the process such as the sale page or placing an enquiry if your website is for lead generation. All images should also have alternative text or alt tags. Alt tags will display the hover text when you position your mouse over the picture, but also they are used by screen readers to assist visually impaired users know what the image is about. See the section below on Accessibility and Compliance.
Website Design
Finally we come to the design of your website.
A web design unlike something technical, it is not black and white, it is up to the person viewing the designs if they like it or not. This can make the actual design stage a bit tricky because there is no clear right or wrong.
There are a number of ways to approach web design but ultimately you need to create a design brief for the designer(s) to work from. Look at other websites and your competitor’s websites to find out what you like or dislike. The design brief should give reference to the logo, any existing brand guidelines or schemes and fonts and colour schemes, and should also detail which pages of the website that the designer is being tasked with creating visuals for. See the Sitemap section below.
The very best results will be achieved by using a graphic designer, and beware – not all graphic designers are the same. A graphic designer who designs specifically for print is working in a different discipline than a graphic designer who designs for screen and specifically the web. So choose your designer carefully, look at other work that person has done and determine whether or not you like their style.
If you are working in the big time and budget allows, use multiple graphic designers who have all been given the same design brief and request three concept designs from each designer. If the client themselves also do a graphic design, even if it’s a back of the envelope scribble, you will then have 10 concept designs. The next step is to get them all together and select the preferred elements from each design. Then give the work to the selected graphic designer to work up as the final artwork.
The artwork should be finalised and agreed on by everybody before development of the site begins. Otherwise it can lead to costly and time consuming changes and frustration for both the developer and the client.
Navigation
Another important consideration when building a website is how you want your navigation to work. You can have links within the content of your website, in the text, so there are not just links from the menu. You will need to decide whether the links will open into a new window, retaining your original page open or just change the page to the one clicked on. Next time you go online, you will realise how much thought has gone into the way in which a website works.
Production
Finally the preparation has been done and the site is ready to be constructed. Now for the more technical stuff! You will need to have decided which programming language to use to build the website. There are two main types for developing a website, one is Unix based, and the other is Windows based. Each one has pros and cons. If you are starting from scratch then it probably won’t matter, so you can go with the preference of your professional doing the work. My website is built on the Unix platform (apparently!) which is the same as many of the more well known websites such as Ebay, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Also your website hosting must be compatible with the development language with which your website is built.
Work In Progress
The best way to build a website and be able to monitor work in progress is on the web server where the site is ultimately going to live. This way, those involved in reviewing the work can see work in progress and provide comments throughout the development.
Launching Your New Website
The moment of excitement comes when your site finally is published to the internet and you see the results of all the thought that has gone into the whole process.
When the demolition company website for my firm eventually went live I was really pleased, but also relieved that it was eventually done!
As soon as the site has gone live there is no substitute for real world testing though, so ask as many of your friends and colleagues to view the website from their own offices and give you their thoughts.
Accessibility and Compliance
The website has to meet the current standards for website coding and doing so insures that disabled users, such as the visually impaired, can still access the entire website if they are using a screen reader. It is also a good idea to also discuss conformance moving forward, particularly if you have a web content management system, because and accessible of compliant site may become un-accessible after six months of being edited by you if you do not add or edit the website content in an accessible manner.
Unforeseen Items
There are always things that arise in any project which you suddenly realise you have forgotten, so no matter how well the website designer prepares and asks the right questions, there is bound to be a last minute change of mind or addition to the site. The main aim is to minimise the number of glitches that might arise because they aren’t calculated in at the start and they could cause extra costs and delays on the date of the web site going live.As a general rule it is always a good idea to get he site live to the original plans and then look at an update after it has gone live, unless it is a very small deviation from the initial plans.
Reporting and Monitoring
Once your website is up and running, you will want to know how many people visit your website and from that number how many actually buy the products or place an enquiry. From these statistics you can work out the ratio of visits to sales and gradually make changes to improve the ratios. There are some reliable statistics packages such as Google Analytics or Web-Stat.com which allow you to collect and review website visitor data in near real time. All you need to do this is to have a small block of code inserted into each web page on your site.Using web stats programs is also invaluable for SEO keyword reviews after your site has been live for a while because it tells you what phrases have been typed into the search engines by users before they visited your website.
Another useful service that Web-stat.com provides is to monitor the website and warn you by email or text message if the site is offline.
Marketing
Once the website is live there are lots of things you can do to market your product or service. The first step is to submit it to the search engines and at the same time write articles, and press releases. Getting links to the site from forums, blogs and other social networking spaces are other options. For more on this subject ask your developer about SEO, remember that’s search engine optimisation.
How to be Found on the Web
One of the first questions I was asked was, ‘Do you want it to be found by Google the main search engine ?’ If I did then there was a whole process of establishing Keywords. So finding the best keywords are vital if you want to be found in Google. He says there are two main types of keywords. The first is the trophy, or generic, keyword for the industry which in my industry is simply ‘demolition’. The second kind of keyword is the long tail keyword. These are not searched for as frequently but if you can get a match then they are much more likely to convert into customers. A good example of this in my industry is ‘factory demolition company Derby’. So it is very important to do a lot of research on keywords to find both those that are the most popular and the most specific. Generally most users only look at the first page of results so you will want to get your website promoted so as to get on this page for your chosen keywords. By using a keyword research tool such as the keyword lookup in the Google Web Master Tools kit you can find the single most popular keyword for your industry.
Conclusion
Wheww. What an amazing amount of work! I hadn’t realised when I started the process of getting a website up and running, how complicated it all is and how many factors you have to consider before even designing the website. The word web design is really a misnomer, as people often think it’s just about the graphic design on the home page, and the branding of the product. Unless you are a computer whizz, most people have no idea how much goes into designing and building a website and the systems that support the work you want it to do. I hope that this article gives you an understanding and insight into the whole process of website development from start to finish.
Tags:
search engine ,
target audience ,
selected graphic designer ,
web content management system ,
Work In Progress ,
main search engine ,
website designer
I found these links to help you fully understand this subject matter. Feel free to check them out...
Work In Progress Work In Progress Dictionary Reference
[keywords] News