INSIGHTS & NEWS

6 things to consider before building your website

Table of contents

So, you’ve decided that you want to redevelop your existing website or develop a new website for your business – great! Now, where do you begin? 

Your website is your most important lead generation tool and without a clear plan in place you run the risk of missing the most important elements for your business’ success. 

Define the purpose for your website and the target audience

Will you be selling products online and e-commerce is the most important aspect of your business? Are you a local family law firm and you’re targeting a specific geographical area and service that you wish to promote? These are things to start thinking about. Without a clear vision in place you won’t generate the results you are looking for.

Research your competitors and how they differ to your business

Before you fall down the rabbit hole of competitor research you should first identify what you actually want to learn from your competition. Start your competitor research with a specific goal in mind. Are you trying to:

  • increase your website traffic?
  • differentiate yourself from the competition?
  • improve your search engine rankings?
  • identify how well they are perceived online?

Start collecting all your brand collateral and assets

Start organising things you’ll need for your website and getting your brand collateral in order. Personally we prefer anything and everything that you can throw our way, it helps us when designing your website that your online presence matches your physical presence. 

Brand assets you can look at getting together include things like logos, fonts, brochures, pdf’s, booklets, photography and style guides.

Professional photography vs. stock photography

This is a big one and can play a huge role on the outcome of your website. Not just how professionally polished your website can look but also how trust-worthy your business looks online. 

If your budget allows we will ALWAYS recommend hiring a professional to capture your business. It’s one of the easiest things you can do to separate your business from your competition. There are thousands of businesses that are all using similar if not the same stock photography and if you can capture your business with real photos of your location, team and brand throughout your website it can dramatically increase engagement and trustworthiness when visitors are looking at your website.

D.I.Y content or hire a copywriter

This stage of the website process can add a huge delay to when your website is ready to go live. It might sound easy on paper but when it actually comes down to start putting together content for your website a lot of people get writer’s block. 

Before you start looking at getting a new website try your hand at writing 400-500 words per service that you offer. If you get stuck 100 words in you may want to look at hiring a professional copywriter to assist with developing content around your business and services offered.

If you don’t have the budget to hire a professional to write all the content for your website you can always look at writing as much information as you can and then get a professional to look over it and revise as needed. 

What features do you need on your website?

If you run a local small business and you’re just looking to improve your online web presence a static website with a simple enquiry form will generally be enough. 

Maybe you run an e-commerce business that ships throughout Australia and you need to have multiple postage and shipping charges available depending on the customers postcode.

Are you a high-traffic e-commerce store and require a third-party payment gateway like Afterpay or Zippay?

These things (and many more) are all things we identify at the beginning of a new website project to ensure the goals of the website aligns with the goals of your business.

How to get the ball rolling

These are some of the simple things that can help prepare your business for a new website. If you’d like some help to get the ball rolling be sure to checkout our website packages brochure or get in touch with us.

WHAT’S NEXT?

If you like this post you’re gonna love…

post-button-prev post-button-next