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Planning Your Website For Success
Why Do I Want A Website? What Is The Purpose?
The first step to actually creating a website should be to identify the main and secondary purpose of the site. Do you want to find new clients or customers? Do you need to pre-qualify prospects? Whatever the purpose, the site should be designed with these goals in mind right from the beginning.
Here are some of the more common reasons for having a website:
- Attract new customers/clients
- Sell products/services online
- Educate clients about additional services you offer
- Pre-qualify prospects
- Get feedback or do market research
- Meet the needs of clients/provide support
- Educate people & answer questions
- Prepare prospects for visits with forms and guidance
What's a Domain Name?
A domain name is the name and address of your website.
How do I pick a domain name?
There are four main strategies that appear to have the best results, both in terms of ease-of-remembrance and search engine visibility. These are:
- Use the name of your business (bobandcompany.com)
- Use a combination of portions of your business name and abbreviations (bobco.com)
- Use a name that reflects what people are looking for. (powertools.com, mypowertools.com, bestpowertools.com)
- Use a combination of numbers 1 and 3 (bobspowertools.com)
What about the .COM, .NET, .ORG extension? Which one should I use?
These are called Top Level Domains, or TLDs for short. The answer to this is on the one hand simple, and can be more complicated behind the scenes. The main TLDs are:
- COM, used for commercial (business) websites
- ORG, used for organization websites
- NET, used for Internet-related websites (not for sites that are on the Internet - they all are)
- INFO, used for informational websites
- BIZ, used for business websites
- Individual country websites
While the above architecture is fine in principal, as many people found that their .COMs weren't available they rapidly shifted to other TLDs.
Try to follow the above chart as much as possible. People may get irritated to find that a .org or .info site really exists to try to sell something, for instance. If you're a commercial enterprise, .COM is the best and is still the one that people associate first with a website. Your second choice should probably be .BIZ. Most of the .COMs are gone and the others are going fast.
I recommend staying away from most of the country TLDs since you're more likely to be held over a barrel someday if the country decides to triple the price. That includes some that have been marketed as being something other than they are. The .TV TLD for instance is the country of Torvali, not 'television', and .WS is Western Samoa, not 'website'.
When should I register my domain name?
It's important to register your domain name as soon as you've identified your name and can find an available domain name. According to Network Solutions, on average approximately 123,000 domain names were registered every day last year. That means two main things:
- It may be a bit difficult to find the name you want.
- The longer you wait to get your domain name, the less likely it'll still be there.
Note: If you don't have a place to register your domain name, you can go here and register it for less than $14.00/year: eye4image.
How elaborate does my website need to be?
From a size perspective, most businesses that are just starting out may only need a simple website of five or so pages. Five is a good number to start with; search engines may pay significantly less attention to smaller sites for a number of reasons.
As far as the complexity and professionalism of the design, that's going to largely depend on your industry, your company's image, and how much you want to spend. A home-based business probably is better off using a template-based design. An established business may want something more distinctive. In either case you probably want something that looks professional, which often means don't try to design it yourself unless you're a graphic designer.
The main point here is that you want something that will connect in a positive way with your audience, and it doesn't need to wow them. Some of the most powerful sites on the web are also some of the plainest.
Plan specific goals for your website
Do you have specific things you want visitors to do on your website? On specific pages? Here are a few suggestions:
- Sign up for your newsletter
- Pick up the phone and call you
- Send you an email
- Click to follow a link
- Fill out a survey
- Buy something
- Submit something, such as articles or suggestions
Map Out Your Website Pages
Identify the pages that you want on your website. Here are a few examples of common pages:
- Home - Capture the visitor's interest.
- About - philosophy, staff, history, and so forth.
- Products/Services - Focus on benefits first.
- Contact Us - Online contact form, hours of operation, telephone number, address, e-email address, possible staff contacts.
- Find Us - map and directions.
- FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions.
- Other topics - news articles, how-to's, creative ways to use your product/service, detailed services or product pages, credentials, partner or resource businesses, warnings and alerts.
After you've completed these steps you -may- be ready to start designing the perfect page.
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