8 Things You Need to Start Your Website
Congratulations!
You’ve made the decision to take your business and brand to the next level by creating a stunning website!
You have made a great decision by choosing to create a website, but you may feel overwhelmed by the amount of options available to your business/brand. If you have the time and skill to build your own website, DO IT! Its rewarding being able to troubleshoot your own website and content! However, if you have the capital, and value your time, find a talented web designer who can build your site!
A reoccurring theme I have found in my journey to ultimate content creator, is the importance of ownership of your content.
With social media’s & 3rd party vendors being subject to unpredictable maintenance and issues, you want your customers to always be able to access your product or services!
You know my goal is to always pass actionable information to others, so here’s my list of 8 things you will definitely want to have on your side to create a successful website!
This list of 8 things will briefly provide information on systems you will need in place to help your website function at a high capacity! Each concept builds on one another, and should help you follow along for easy explaining for you, or the developer you are seeking!
Niche - What do you do? There is no such thing as saturation of a market. Find your niche, get really good at it, and then develop skills around that niche. Being a photographer, I needed a way to display my photos! I decided I needed a website. Then I discovered I needed to be able to resize images for page performance and led me down a rabbit hole. I’ll tell you what else is down here at the end of this post!
Audience - Who is it that you do it for? A wiseman once said “It’s not about you, it’s about the product” Who is your product or service helping? What problem does it solve? If you’re having difficulties answering who your audience is, you need to check your analytics on your current content!
Domain - Imagine you buy 3 items online, and they all end up at different locations in your city. This is similar to having 2-3 social media pages, and no website. You have tons of mail, with no central mailbox! A good domain is the foundation of your digital home! You definitely want your home as safe as possible, so choosing the right domain host is important! Not all domains offer security as a part of the payment plans.
Features - What makes your site revolve? Do you have blogs? Photo Galleries? A Storefront? A login? These are just a few standard concepts that you find on a webpage.
Sitemap - Imagine building a city, with no grid! That’s what building your website is like, without a planned site map. You end up having multiple pages, that are not connected, leaving yourself open to consumers being confused and leaving your web page!
SEO - SEO Specialist or some other title referring to the ability of knowing how to create phrases and words that trigger your website. Your website is found, and ranked on google based on content provided on your website. This is important in all facets, most importantly because your business NEEDS to be found right?!
Analytics - You can’t measure your growth, without a measurement! This means you will need to know where you’re starting to know where you’re going. If you have a business profile on your respect social media’s or your website, you should have access to the traffic of your website. Analytics teaches you about your audience as mentioned earlier in #2!
User Interface/Experience - Commonly referred as UI/UX, this is closest to the most important aspect your business will need! It is important because it is how your website operates and the experience your consumer feels when accessing your website!
“How do I create a website for my business” and a few other things will land you in the rabbit hole of building your own website. The need to optimize page performance is top priority. Websites with large amounts of files + large size of files usually perform poorly. These are the websites that have blurry images, and load like molasses on a cold day, you know, the ones you run from! Accompany this with a website lacking SEO will surely leave your page at the pits of Google ranking searches!
Some benefits of having a website is that all of your content is localized! Having different social media pages, you are aware that you will have different audiences based on the specific sites that you use. Having a website will allow you to draw all traffic from those varying groups to your web page. Also if you have the proper security enabled, you will be able to gauge for maintenance issues that you cannot foresee on other media giants!
I mentioned the importance of your time! There are many websites that makes it easy for a individual to build a website without writing a single line of code! Some websites free, others paid, all are an option. You can definitely invest the time to watch the tutorials many of these site hosts offers, and other youtube videos on the topic, or you can save yourself time! Find a developer who knows the depths of building a website! Be mindful of pricing for a website, as it requires a large depth of working knowledge! A price too low may indicate that the developer you’re seeking may not be aware of the depth needed to produce a working website!
There are many levels of having an effective online presence, and your website will lead the charge for creating a relationship with your clients and future customers!
