Building a website can be quite hard and overwhelming.

There are many things you have to keep in mind, and a lot of them can be forgotten quite easily.

However, a bad website usually has a pretty negative effect on your business.

That’s why in this article, we’re going to take a look at 4 steps to create a flawless website to help you generate more leads and sales.

Read our review of the cheapest website builders as well as the best website design practices for startups.

1. Understand Your Needs

Before you start building anything (or get someone to do it for you), you must understand your needs.

Different businesses need different types of websites.

While some businesses may only need a 5-page website with a contact form, others might need eCommerce functionality or even some type of membership site. It all depends on the business and that’s why it’s important to understand your needs first before jumping in and building the website.

Think about:

✅ Why are you building the website? (Business Goals)

✅ What is this website for? (Purpose)

✅ Who are the people that will use the website? (Target Customers/Audience)

✅ Why do your customers/audience need this website? (Customer Needs)

✅ What can users do on the website? (Functionality)

✅ How many pages do you need designed? (Pages)

If you’re not very technical yourself, you can also explain your business to a web designer and they can help make suggestions.

2. Optimise For Conversions

Typically, the main point of your website is to help you generate more sales & leads. To achieve this, people that visit your website will need to perform a task or conversion. This can be things like complete a form, click to make a phone call or purchase from your e-commerce store.

That’s why you have to optimise for conversions.

It takes a deep understanding of your business, audience, and their behavior. This means, the people creating your website need to understand communications and have a good knowledge of Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).

Asking questions about CRO when choosing the person or agency you want to work with on your website will drastically improve the results.

3. Stay True To Your Brand

Something that is also extremely important is that you stay true to your brand.

You can do this by staying consistent in the editorial style, colors, and fonts on your website. Think about how you want your brand to be portrayed and that should give you a good idea of your website’s elements and how you want them to look.

Again, depending on whether you’re looking to build this website yourself or work with a web design agency, you should know which steps to take from here.

4. Get The Technical Things Right.

Last, but not least you’ll also want to get the technical things right. There are a lot of them, but not having them set up the correct way could damage your growth.

This includes:

  • Mobile-friendliness
  • SEO
  • Site Speed
  • Making sure actions run smoothly i.e collecting emails, etc.

So, make sure that you research all of these extensively, and also test them out. For example, don’t just test your device on your mobile, but also other types of devices like tablets. This way, you can be sure that it runs well.

Creating a Website: What Else Do I need To Keep In Mind?

  • CMS/Back-end management
    Of course, you’ll need to manage the website on the back-end. For this, you’ll need a content-management-system. There are many out there, but our preferred option is WordPress which hosts around 58.7% of the web.
  • Blog?
    Something to also keep in mind is whether you want a blog or not. Because you don’t want to use a CMS that doesn’t work well for blogging, but then, later on, notice that you want a blog. Publishing regular content (like this blog!) can also help improve your Google rankings.
  • Analytics
    You’ll also need to set up your analytics to make sure you are tracking the right metrics.
  • Updating frequently
    Last but not least you’ll also want to update your website frequently. This is something that you want to do once you have your website set up, but it’s still extremely important.

Read More on Web Design & SEO

If you enjoyed this article, make sure to check out some of our recent posts below. Or, if you are looking for help you can also contact us, and check out our web design and SEO services.

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