How to plan before starting with custom website designing

The decisions you make at the initial process of your custom website designing is going to be the most crucial ones. If you are planning to design a website for your business, you must be looking for the top-notch website designers and developers in your area. We understand it is most exciting time of the whole process as you want to share lots of ideas that you have and want to know what your designer is willing to offer! While these things can be very hard to resist, here are some planning steps that can help you with the custom website designing process.

What is the Purpose of Your Website?

There are a variety of businesses in the market and the website should be built keeping in mind the nature of business. So, instead of going with the mix and match, choose what you want from these options-

Sales of products and services- if you got a business of selling, you must keep in mind that this will need a complex website especially if you are dealing with a wide variety of products and services. Complex websites take long time to design, test and maintain.

Create Leads- Once you know how to generate leads and what will you need for it, Development and marketing of these kinds of websites will be easy and cost effective.

Create a Web Design Specification

It is very important for your developers and designers to understand what your project needs, and a proper web specification will enable this.

Another important point you will notice is the pricing. This will vary according to scope of work as each company offers different things to its clients. So, before you decide who will design your website, you should be very clear with what all services are included in the package to avoid any disagreements in future.

Know your Target Audience

A good knowledge of who all you are targeting will lead to a successful website creation. Market knowledge is the first step while entering the market. Knowing your target audience will help you in many ways in terms of decisions like how to approach them? What medium will be chosen? And many more.

Knowing your target audience will help you with-

• SEO
• Google Ads
• Promotions
• Digital Marketing

Consider Your Timeframe

One of the questions your custom web designing company will ask you is when do you want your project completed? Or simply what are the timelines ? And you can only answer them when you know it yourself. Many companies already come up with a time frame within which they want their custom website completed, others plan promotions or events so before that they want their website completed. Well if you haven’t decided the time frame you need to consider the fact that you should have realistic expectations from the web development company as per your project as quality is very important.

Do Your Research

When it comes to researching, it is applicable in every aspect of your website designing process. Research in terms of credibility of the agencies you are working with on your project. Research may be about the concept based on which the websites will be designed. Have you searched about the competition you are going to face or the legal framework for your online business? Most important research is about the company you hire for building your website as coordination and accountability is important, but values and beliefs should also match. Ask these questions to yourself and plan accordingly.

Web Hosting

When it comes to webhosting, no company offers 100% uptime, but you need to make sure that they offer maximum. The best real-life example was of Amazon. Once amazon website went down for like 40 minutes due to hosting issues and it lost 4.7 million revenue. So, what hosting service does will have a direct impact on your revenue.

Your hosting provider should be very dynamic when the website traffic grows, as scalability is very important. Once you gain traction then You can then switch to dedicated server. You must have a hosting provider offering 24/7 accessibility to support your technical problems.

Performance and Speed-

Visitor’s engagement is dependent upon the loading speed. Retention and conversion comes after engagement. Customer satisfaction is directly proportional to the less loading time. So, speed optimization is very important. Various elements on your website decide how much load period it will take. Here are some speed optimization hacks-

• Compressed images with proper format and size
• Usage of Content Delivery Network (CDN) can increase your page rank and boost performance.
• The smarter the code the less time it will take to process. It improves efficiency in delivery time.
• If you are using plugins in a wordpress framework, try and reduce the number of plugins.
• Try optimizing databases.

On-Site Gyaan (information)

It may seem irrelevant to some business types, but blogs brings more visitors to the website through organic search. This is the free yet important traffic. When each blog surfaces on another indexed page, it develops an opportunity to come on the SERP. People love to read blogs online and they even share it on social media if they like it. It creates more exposure for your website. The more is the helpful content, the more it attracts customers.

Tracking and Analytics-

Tracking and analytics answers your questions such as

• What are the visitors looking at in your website?
• How are they using your website?
• How are they landing on your website?
• What is the stay time?
• Where they left?
• Information of the visitors like age groups, gender, demographic, etc.

This can be done by analyzing the patterns in the data. There are many paid or free analytics available. What you choose depends upon your budget and needs.

Website Maintenance

Like your car, your website too needs maintenance. Planning for the website maintenance is very important. Here is the checklist for your maintenance needs

• Fixing of forms for them to work the way they should.
• Checkup for broken links.
• Regular backups.
• Regular Software updates
• Reviewing and resolving the issues with emails sent from the web server.
• Removal of spam accounts or comments.
• Checking the website loading speed.
• Reviewing of your search visibility.

Important: Take good Time to Do it Right-

Well, of course you want to get your website running as soon as possible, but take some time with what you need and with proper planning and implementation you can get the base right. And if the base is right big things can be built on it.