Building a website isn’t an easy thing. There are a lot of things to consider, including its appearance, content, how you’ll edit it and many other factors you won’t think about until you’re in the middle of it. It’s kind of like building a house, though – if you go into it with a plan, think about the tools you’ll need before you actually need them and build it with the end in mind, you can wind up with something you’ll be proud of. Many of you know we have a hand in some aspect of hundreds of websites every year, and in every project, we learn something new. So even if you have no intent of asking us to help you develop your online identity, we’ll give you some helpful hints to think about as you go through your web build process. Give site visitors what they want. It’s easy to think about what you want to have on the site. We’ve all got projects we’re proud of and facets of our company that mean a lot to us. But it’s not about us. You need to think about your website as one of the most visible pieces of your marketing plan, and with that you need to know what you stand for (or what your customers think you stand for). Talk to the right people. Do you know why customers call your company? Are they looking for pricing? Directions? Shipping information? How would you ever find that out? A good idea is to talk to your receptionist and find out why people are calling. You might be surprised. Salespeople are a good resource for the same information, as they can help you learn what company information needs to be on the site that’s just not there. What needs to be prioritized? On your home page, you only have a few opportunities to feature something. It’s easy to talk to too many employees and stakeholders and, when you develop your site structure, have too many things sharing priority. Take the site as your opportunity to at least guide some of the conversation, without making it a one-way conversation. As well, this is your chance to funnel people to specific places on the site. The three-click rule. The general rule of thumb is that users need to get to where they want with a maximum of three clicks, otherwise they will become frustrated and leave the site. Think about your site navigation before you build the site. Will it make sense for the site visitor, or are you continually taking people down rabbit holes, confusing them by naming things incorrectly, and taking them into dead ends while they seek some of the most important content on the site? Do you need to edit it? If the site content is something you will need to edit frequently, the page should likely be easy for you to edit. In the case of many of the sites we build at wedü, that means a dynamic page which is driven by an easy-to-use content management system. If you’re building your website yourself, it can mean many things – but if you don’t know HTML, you will want to give yourself an easy way to make edits. How you’ll build the site for SEO. Sure, you want to write content that will help search engines find you. But what else do you need to think about? Turns out, there are lots of things. The names of the images on the site, which text receives priority on the site, which pages are linked internally on the site, the names of the pages… whew. Lots of things play a small part in the overall search engine optimization of the site. Do your homework before you get started, learn more about SEO if you need to, and write and organize your site content with that in mind. How you’ll track site activity – and what you’ll do with that information. There are plenty of methods you can use to track when users are visiting your site, where they’re coming from and how long they stay. All of these can tell you something. By knowing when users are visiting a site, you can see if you might need to have an office staffed if users are on the site at an odd time. The point of entry of the site helps too – you want to have an idea how people are finding you to see if your search engine marketing is having an impact on your site traffic. It doesn’t stop there, but these are a few helpful tips to think about when you’re building your site. If you’ve got questions, contact our team today. We’re always happy to help!