When building a website for your business, it’s important to get it right the first time.
Likelihood is, you’ve been through a web build before. Even more likely, you didn’t get it right first time. It’s tempting with a huge project like this to hand it over to an agency and let them deal with it, particularly if you’ve had problems before. But a website is far too important to your business for you to take a back seat.
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Without a properly thought out strategy, your next web build could easily go very wrong. Here are five key considerations to ensure it doesn’t:-
1. Know what you need.
It’s easy to get bogged down in website requirements at a very granular level from the start. ‘We need e-commerce capability’, ‘we need staff logins’, ‘we need social media feeds’. Stop, and take a step back. Don’t start with functionality, start with your business goals. Marry the way your website works with these overall goals, and then delve into functionality. Clarity of purpose is all-important when talking with a web developer.
Your site needs to be ‘alive’ too. Decide what content you need - a blog, industry news, case studies (ideally all three) - and how they’re going to be delivered. A website is not a static beast, and you need functionality to enable you to regular populate it with fresh updates for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes.
Design-wise, look at other websites you like, note the elements that you want to include in your own build, note elements you don’t like. Essentially, don’t go to a web developer empty-handed, they can’t be expected to come to the table with all the ideas.
2. Know what you’re paying for.
Now you’ve got a plan, the next question is, what’s it going to cost? In theory, you could spend millions on a web build. In reality, you can’t. As a rough guide: a very basic six-page site can be built for under £2000, but that’s pretty bare-bones. In general, small sites that require some design (maybe a couple of videos and 20-30 pages) run at £15,000 to £20,000. Initial search engine optimisation (SEO) setup (i.e. engineering the individual pages to attract Google’s attention) will probably run to another £1000-2000 on top of that.
Some agencies will charge for the complete job, others a daily rate and some an hourly fee. The going rate is £500 per page, £400-£500 per day or £50-£70 per hour.
Do your research: Keep a contingency too - costs can build up...
As mentioned, these figures aren’t definitive, but if the price quoted is a lot greater than that, or indeed a lot less, you need to ask why. Do your research. It’s also best to keep a contingency (10% of total cost) to cover the inevitable last-minute design tweaks on launch.
Also factor in the cost of a project manager, without whom the whole project can become a mess. Having a dedicated person taking responsibility for, and managing the build is an absolute must. You might decide that this will be you, but do not underestimate the time you will need to commit to the project.
3. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Websites are built using a content management system (CMS). If you think of your website as a document, the CMS is the Microsoft Word software; the tool for creation. Many an agency will try and dangle the promise of a custom-built, bespoke CMS in front of your eyes. Don’t be hypnotised. After the 15th phone call to get a picture changed or phone number added (or any other small tweak that they will charge for, of course) you’ll regret your decision. Custom content management systems can be a curse and a burden for businesses, and you can be held hostage because of it. In our experience, it can be a costly decision.
Your best option is a third party CMS. Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or concrete5 are the industry standards for web design, although upstarts like Squarespace are increasingly getting a foothold in the market thanks to their ease of use. Again, the platform you use all comes down to requirements.
And don’t think that just because they’re ‘out-of-the-box solutions’ that they can’t be tweaked and tailored to your business too. A site built on Wordpress can be just as bespoke as a site built on a custom CMS. The difference is, these third-party CMSs are intuitively easy to use - no more complicated than Microsoft Word - so you can manage your content yourself rather than calling the web designers in to make small tweaks here and there.
Updates and upgrades to your website are simple, and adding functionality to a Wordpress site, for instance, is simply a matter of adding a plugin that’s likely already been designed. There are thousands.
Out of the box: Solutions such as Wordpress have huge potential
There’s no shame in using pre-designed templates for individual pages, either - they save the agency’s time, which saves you money, and they’re proven to work, visually and in terms of the code that makes them tick.
4. Plan for change.
Websites change. New trends and new technological possibilities mean that websites can date quickly. Over the last two years the conversation around web design has changed from responsive to reactive to liquid to adaptive, essentially different methods by which your web pages adapt to different screens and platforms - mobile, laptop, tablet etc.
You don’t need to learn these terms, the point is that sooner or later the next big thing will come along and your site will need to adapt. A good web developer will have an idea of what on the horizon and be able to future-proof the build.
This is another advantage of using a popular CMS like Wordpress - thousands of developers are au fait with it, so if your existing developer leaves you can always find another.
5. Know how well it’s working.
You’ve already set your goals, and aligned the functionality of the website to match them. You need to be tracking performance. The best way to do this is Google Analytics. Provided it’s integrated into your web page design, Analytics allows you to see all sorts of things. You can discover, at a glance, how many people visited your site, how long they stayed, what they looked at and where they arrived from.
Analytics also lets you set goals for your site - however many hundred or thousand views of the ‘Orders’ page, for example - and track how close you are to that goal, which makes evaluating your web strategy that much easier. We’re talking extremely high-level here by the way, Google Analytics is a huge topic, and one which can take years to master. If you’re interested in learning more, there’s a fantastically in-depth guide by Simply Business here.
But talking generally, if you’re aware of what your website’s doing, you’ll have a much clearer idea of what it needs. Rather than outsourcing things like search engine optimisation, you can create or commission content that will build on your website’s existing strengths - and because you know what they are, you’ll know exactly what to ask for.
6. Take ownership.
Lastly, make sure you own your own domain name, and the domains around it. The domain name is your web address i.e. yourwebaddress.co.uk. But you should look into buying up the .com, .uk.com and other domains close to yours. This domain is a strategic asset and should always be held and managed by your company directly, not through your web supplier.
Planning a web build can be a complex process. The big thing to remember is this: your website has to have an overall strategic goal. Match the build with your goals and you’re off to a great start.
If you’re not sure your website is working, or think you could benefit from a holistic approach to marketing, a part-time marketing director can help: contact us.
Photo credit:
Making A Lidded Jar by J.B via Flickr