You had the great idea to start designing a website for your business. Today, online presence remains the best way to increase your business' visibility. It’s also a great tool to make your brand more credible and easier to reach by your audience.
Thinking of creating a website? You don't have to worry, although it's not always easy, especially when you want a professional website. We are going to give you 5 key steps to get you started successfully in creating your website.
1. Determine your goals and objectives with this new website
Behind every website are well-defined goals. The goal here is why you want to build your website. In other words, what is the goal you want to achieve?
It may, for example, be a question of a commercial objective. Goals should be defined based on your targets and the results you want to achieve. You need to be able to measure the results to make decisions and adapt your website. Do you want to sell your products or services on the internet or do you just want to provide informations to your customers?
2. Plan the content you want on your website
There you go, you have successfully completed the first step. You now have a clearer understanding of the needs and expectations of your website. Now's the time to ask yourself what actions do you want people to do on your website. Did you create it for:
- To sell products?
- Share blog posts?
- Get more subscribers or get new customers?
The answers to these questions will help you determine what your website will look like and what the website content should be. The idea here is to know what you want to say, how to say it and most importantly what format to use to achieve it effectively. It'll then be necessary to organize the page taking into account the elements necessary for Internet users' navigation, so that they interact with the expected action.
3. Rethink your branding
At this stage, you need to take care of the “visual” of your website. It's a question here of thinking concretely about the design and the ergonomics of the site: the colors, the font, the typography, the animations, the images, etc… This task generally for the web designer.
This step allows you to draw the desired look between each element of the site. It determines the ease of navigation for the Internet user and plays an important role in the consistency of your website. It’s a tricky step. We recommend that you update the branding of your site as you add new features to it. Indeed, branding is the tool of elegance of your website and helps to arouse the interest of your audience.
4. Determine the CMS that suits your needs
The CMS (Content Management System) is software that allows you to create, manage and animate content on a website, without having specialized technical knowledge. The CMS you need depends on what you want to do with your website. Let's go over some of the most popular CMS, including Wordpress and Drupal.
a. Wordpress
Wordpress is a free, self-hosted, open-source, technically free CMS. It gives you complete control over the composition and appearance of your website. It's not completely free, because you will have to pay for hosting, domain name, and some plugins in their more advanced features, etc. Wordpress has mobile and desktop apps that make it easy to create on mobile or desktop.
b. Drupal
Drupal is also a free and open-source CMS. It's a powerful website development platform, being released under the GNU Public License. It has advantages in terms of cost, flexibility, freedom, security and responsibility. Drupal makes it easy to create and publish your content, whether text or multimedia, and also offers you easily accessible authoring and editing tools. It fits into modern programming models.
After choosing the content management system, you can now think about developing and publishing your website.
5. Find the agency that fit your needs
If you want to create a professional and optimal website taking into account the quality of the design, the functional richness and meeting all your needs, it's advisable to find a good web design agency.
A web agency is a real pool of diverse skills that brings your web project to life. It's a good way to propel your website towards its success.
At 8P Design, we put our talents and skills at the service of bloggers, entrepreneurs and various professionals to bring life to their website design project. If, like some of our clients, creating a professional website is not within reach for you, do not hesitate to tell us about your project. We guarantee you a fairly quick response!