Websites: The Foundation of A Successful Marketing Campaign. Potential business comes first and foremost from your website. Your website will be visited by media, competitors, investors and customers who want to learn more about your organisation and the product or service you provide. So marketers need to take a lead role in website redesign project. Within the first few seconds, people interested in using your product or service will know if your website is useful or not, so making clear on what you do and how to access that information is important.
So to redesign a website we have devised a step by step guide to help you construct a successful one:
1. Preparation is key
Gathering all information before starting is a necessity, you do not want to be searching for items during the creation of the site. Some of the items include:
- Contact information for current website- like email addresses and main office address.
- Analytics tracking codes- for optimisation purposes.
- Logo file- this is like your official company ID!
- Branding guidelines- this will shape the identity of your business.
- Codes for Yahoo site explorer, Google and Bing webmaster central- again, for SEO or optimisation purposes.
2. Define the most important aspects of your site.
Work in partnership with all stakeholders involved in the website. These may include:
- Website Objectives
- Colour of website pages
- Buyer persona – What influences your buyers
- Page Layout and design
- functionality of your site and its features
- Call to action – requesting a visitor to your site to perform an action like signing up for a newsletter, filling out a questionnaire or purchasing a product.
3. Designing your Site
The design and structure of your website is vital, you need to communicate your vision by developing a brief and detailing everything in step 2
The brief could include:
- Mind maps, graphic maps outlining all pages on your site
- Navigation points, hyperlinks
- Page layout
Your web design team can use this as a guide to build your website
4. Make sure your page engages your target audience.
The content needs to be clear and deliver key messages quickly which will in turn make visitors catch your call to action. Do not get distracted by fancy designs and navigation that makes your site unique, just make sure your website is easily accessible or navigable and could easily attract the viewer’s attention. More than that provide content that are surely useful and relatable to your target market.
5. Test your site and declare it functional.
You need to complete a thorough review of your website to make sure all links work and everything is displayed correctly from texts, graphics and videos if any. Make sure there are no “404” or “page not found” errors. If this occurs after you have officially launched your website, tendency is Google might de-index you website for grounds of broken or damaged links.
To structure your upload process:
- Before you load all your content, it would be advisable to create all your pages and organise them as you agreed in your graphic maps.
- Use your Content Management System (CMS) to upload all images graphics in a folder so that when you need to add them to your page you have them all in one place.
- Finally, perform a quality check to make sure all images, links, navigation buttons are displayed correctly across pages.
6. Your site is ready to go
Launch your website and make sure it is indexed correctly by all search engines. This may also take some time since search engines still need to crawl over your site and other linked pages.
Hints and Tips:
Make sure to research and use keywords that are relevant to your niche. Keywords are essential since these are the words that your target market may possibly type in search engines and if you don’t make use of them, then you might be left behind by your competitors.
You can go a step further if needed by defining the type of content and developing a rough draft of it. By combining the content and design, you create the best finished product. Remember, in today’s digital marketing, content plays a very vital role in shaping your businesses or website’s credibility and authority.
