08 July 2024

How to Plan Your Website

CALL ONLINE INNOVATIONS!

While that might seem like the easiest solution to launching your new website, there are a few things that you need to consider before you meet with our Online Innovations team. While we are excellent at developing and designing beautiful websites with effortless Content Management Systems, we do need some information before turning your dream website into reality.

Planning Your Website

This might be sending you into a frenzied panic at this stage. BREATHE and let us guide you through the kinds of things that make our job easier as web designers and developers and will have your website live by launch day.

1. Domain Name

Your domain name is the address people type into the search bar of a search engine to access your website e.g. www.yourcompanyname.co.za. This is top of the list because it’s often something left to the last minute and there is a possibility that your domain name might not be available. Trying to find an available domain name later in the planning process may delay your planning.

2. Identify Your Goal

Adding a great-looking website to cyberspace isn’t the same as adding a successful website to cyberspace. Before you meet with the Online Innovations team, you need to identify your goals for your website. E.g. increase sales, share more information on your services, increase brand awareness, generate leads, etc.

3. Identify Your Target Audience 

This affects everything on your website from graphics, typography and information hierarchy. A website for arthritis medication will look a lot different to a website for an energy drink.

4. Define Your Unique Selling Point

Time to get up on that stage and brag! Your unique selling point will, essentially, be the loudest voice on your website. So, don’t be modest, identify what makes your product or service better than your competitors and let us drive that into every page of your website.

5. Create a Sitemap

Don’t Google sitemap just yet! Read a little further before the panic sets in. Your sitemap is as basic as which page you want to be placed where. The good news is that every sitemap starts on the home page from there, your core pages on every website are your ‘about us’, ‘staff’ and ‘contact’ pages. That’s already 4 pages done! From there, you need to list your products and/or services and decide how to group them. Those groups become your menu items and help you decide what kind of content you would like to add to your menu items.

6. Collect Design Elements

Your design elements include your branding guidelines: logo, brand colour palette and typography. Don’t have a branding guideline yet? Have a look at what you’ll need to create one on this HubSpot Blog.

7. Gather Images

Not just of your products, but your staff and building too. Being able to see the faces of the people in your business adds a personal touch to your website. Being able to see what the outside of your building looks like makes it easier to identify when physically going there and a few snapshots inside the building, can make the space more familiar to customers or clients wanting to visit you.

8. Gather Content for Your Core Pages

This can be quite time-consuming, but gathering information on your business, products and/or services makes it a lot easier for us to place your content on the right pages and to offer up-to-date and correct information on your website.

9. Identify Your SEO Strategy 

Here is where all those fancy words like ‘algorithms’, ‘keywords’, ‘backlinks’ and ‘backend architecture’ come in. We can help you with this but, if you want to get a head-start: all you need to do is, identify keywords that you would like your website to be associated with so that it is front and centre when someone types it into their search engine. For example, if you are creating a website for your ice cream shop, keywords that you might want to add to your website and its content would be things like ‘ice cream’, ‘ice cream shop near me’ or ‘ice cream near me’. 

Where there’s a plan, there’s action and we love putting a plan into action! Your website’s success is a team effort between us at Online Innovations and you. So, if you’re ready to elevate your online presence, give us a call or pop us an email and we’ll set up a time for coffee and a chat.