Top 6 Questions to Consider Before Designing Your Website
Your website is a critical part of your business and it can leave an impression on prospective clients, drive sales conversions, and encourage audiences to return for more informative content. With this limitless potential, creating the right website can be quite a challenge.
Keep in mind that even the smallest mistake on your web design can ruin your customer’s experience and can cost you a significant amount of cash. You can develop a great website by considering the following questions.
1️⃣ What Are Your Main Goals For This Project?
Most people go for a new website because they feel that their current one looks outdated and old compared to their competitors. Even though this is a valid reason, you need to know more about your goals for you to design an effective website. You need to know your definition of success, is it to boost the number of visitors, increase your order size or boost users on the web forum. Perhaps you want to encourage better engagement through your blog, encourage people to sign up for your free trial, white paper, or newsletter, or boost your brand visibility. By knowing your pain points and defining the issues you want to solve, you will create a more efficient website.
2️⃣ Who Are Your Target Audience?
The first question you need to ask yourself is who your target or primary users are. Most businesses build their websites without carrying out a proper user profile analysis. For you to create a website that caters to the needs of your audiences, you need to first analyze these people to know who they are and why they are coming to your website. Before you start building your site, you need to narrow down the user audiences and why they are coming to your site. This will help you come up with a website that will meet their unique needs and expectations.
3️⃣ Which Calls-To-Actions Do I Need?
Nothing suppresses the functionality of websites like forgetting to integrate a call-to-action (CTA) on each page. CTA is simply a question or statement that motivates website visitors to do something, for instance, following your social media links, downloading something, making a purchase, fill a form, call a number, and many more. You must ensure that every page of your site has at least one CTA. When you have a CTA on your site, your visitors should be able to complete the action by clicking on a button. Complicated or broken links may leave your users feeling very frustrated and this can cause a higher web page bounce rate that is not good.
4️⃣ How Will You Communicate With Your Customers?
The ability to connect with your target audience should be a major concern when developing your website. After all, you are creating the website for your visitors. You need to determine how visitors will reach you or your business, for instance, online chat, telephone, email, and more. You should also determine the hours you want to be available to clients through the chosen methods of communication. You need to also think about the security measures you will put in place when communicating with customers through your website. You need to consider the communication needs before developing a site and consult your web development company to choose the right options for you.
5️⃣ What Makes You Stand Apart From Your Competitors?
In most cases, your business is not alone in its niche market, unless you have found ways of providing a unique service or product that no other company has. When designing your website, you need to define the different ways that your business differs from the competition. Developing infographics, creating great e-books, and publishing white papers are effective ways of highlighting your authority in your niche field. You should also share case studies because they delve into the complex problems your client’s experience and showcase how your business uses its experience to find effective solutions.
6️⃣ Which Features Your Website Includes?
Designing a website is not only a question about content and visitor targeting. In order to make your website secure and your content appealing both to your visitors and to search engines, some basic rules should always be respected.
At PP Design all websites we design include the following features:
- Responsive design (displaying nicely at any screen size)
- Speed optimization (fast loading pages and website elements)
- SEO optimization (sitemap ready for search engines)
- Secure connectivity with SSL certificates (HTTPS instead of HTTP)
- Online forms (basic forms like contact pages or more elaborate ones)
- Social media sharing buttons (allow your visitors to share your pages)
- Regular backups (easy recovery in case something goes wrong)
- Usage statistics (who visits your website, which pages and when)
- Hosting server optimization (fine-tune your server settings for optimal performance)
- Regular maintenance plan (basic maintenance is always free for our clients)
Having an effective website for your business is not an accident. It is a conscious effort to attract an audience and encourage visitors to take specific actions. Make your business website a measurable success today by asking yourself these six questions as you develop your site. You will definitely get a website that will transform your business immeasurably.
