This is Part 1 of our series on planning and creating a fantastic website which drives business to your company. To learn more about Price Engines web services, visit our Web Services Page or fill in the enquiry form and we’ll be in touch to discuss further.
Picture: bucklava
Whether you’re experienced enough to build your own website or your using an outside agency to design the site for you, it’s important to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve from that website, and the message you want it to put across before you start.
Here, Jonathan from the Price Engines Ltd I.T Dept looks at some of the things you should consider before the website design work begins:
“I read somewhere that if you go well prepared into the jungle, the drunken elephant can’t fall on you. Quite what this tells us about jungle travel I shudder to think, but if applied to building a website, it makes perfect sense.
Before the first block of text is even written, you need to have a very clear idea about what function your website is going to have. Is it just there to inform people about your company and its services? Is it a means of directly generating business by capturing visitor information or is it full on e-commerce site where customers are going to buy your products directly?
The answer to this dictates the design of the site. It’s all very well having a very corporate looking website with lots of information and company background but if your aim was to capture visitor information, then you need to be a little more direct. Remember, the more information there is, the harder you make it for visitors to find what you really want them to find. Don’t be shy of marketing directly to people – they know you’re a company and that you’re making a sale.
Once you’ve decided on the main ‘thrust’ or direction of the website, it’s time to think about how you want to put that across. Remember, your designers may have their own ideas, but it’s your company and your product – no-one knows it better. Look for your products strongest, most appealing selling points and pitch those directly at visitors.
The most important thing is to serve the needs of your customers, and explain the benefits of your product over your competition. If your product meets the visitors needs, and the benefits are enough to induce them to enquire further or buy there and then, the website has done its job.
Next, you need to make the process of capturing the visitors information or leading them to an online sale as easy as possible – it should take as few clicks as possible to make a sale. The fewer the clicks, the more chance you’ll stand of achieving your objectives. If you just want to capture a vistor’s contact details, it’s useful to give them a clear benefit of leaving that information – as an example, our Price Engine sites offer free online quotes in return for providing some contact details.
Once you know what you want your website to achieve, you can start writing some text for the website. Again, since you know your company and your products better than anybody else does you should be deeply involved in the process of writing copy for your site, whether you’re designing yourself or hiring a professional designer.
If we’re starting to talk about website copy, we should also be considering topics like search engine optimisation, keywords and key-phrases. That’s what Part 2 will be covering, along with using images, pictures, logos and illustrations effectively in your design.â€
Jonathan.
Price Engines Top Tip: Websites built using ‘Flash’ may look great, but they’re a nightmare for search engines to index properly. If being visible is important to your website, then there are other ways of creating great looking websites.
