If you do not have a website for your business, then you may decide that now is the time to take action. With much of the UK spending the last 12 months in lockdown, many businesses would of struggled to survive was it not for them being able to continue trading through their site.
When it comes it having a website designed and developed, you need to ensure that you take the time to get the strategy right. Making changes to a website further on down the line, when it is already in development is likely to result in delays and additional costs.
- Do your market research – find out who your competitors are, what they offer in terms of products and services, what they charge and what you can do on their website. This will help you establish what you may need to do in order to complete or what you could offer that would give you an advantage over them.
- Look at other sites and come up with some ideas of sites that you like and work well. This will help your web designer understand what it is you are looking for.
- Make a clear plan as to what functionality you want to include on your website. This will ensure that you can get an accurate quotation for the site and that everyone understands from the start what the main focus is.
- Work closely with your web agency or programmer to create a wireframe of the site or a flow chart. By doing this, you will have a detailed plan of what pages need to be included in your site and how each page or section will link to each other.
- Once you have your wireframe, you can then create a time line of what should be completed and when. You can also make a list of what is needed from you such as content and images and when it is needed for in order to stick to the timeline.
- As soon as the website has gone into development, try to avoid too many changes. If you later decide you want to build in additional functionality, you may be better to hold fire and do that as a phase two which could be started once the site has been built.
- Once your site is built and ready to go live, ensure that it is tested in great detail and any issues rectified.