Commissioning A New Website: 5 Tips

When planning a new website, far too many people get stuck only thinking about the design and how the end product will look. Whilst this is really important, there are many more things you should be considering if your website is to be a success. Website structure, the routes through the site, what your audience wants and so much more all need to be thought about. This article advises you on how to go through the proccess of designing your new website.

1. What Do Your Customers Want?

This is the first thing to consider. Most traffic that visits your website via a link or a search engine listing will probably spend around about ten seconds before they leave. That is of course unless they find exactly what they want as soon as they land on your website. Finding this out and displaying it efficiently is perhaps the secret to online success.

2. How Can I Divide Up My Content?

Once you know what you want to say, you must then start to think about how you can efficiently spread that information around your website. This can be quite a challenge if you are trying to say or sell lots of different things, but try to make sure your products or information is divided up into logical sections.

3. How Many Pages

Pages should only be created for a purpose. Every page on your website have it's own focus, don't' just add pages for the sake of having a large site. This will result in you having a website that is bigger than needed, and a dilluted message that is hard to find. Less is almost more in some respects, just make sure everything exists for a reason.

4. Navigational Route

Making sure your visitors can flow through your website is vital when trying to prevent people leaving half-way through the process of purchasing one of your products, or signing up for your service. Make the route through your website as simple as is humanly possible, any slight barrier or confusing page could push people away to another website. The smallest of faults or problems can lose you business.

5. Design

And finally, design! As mentioned right at the beginning, design is important but I believe the items discussed are more important, and often the things that get forgotten. A good design serves a purpose, it doesn't just look pretty. A good design will fit in with all of your existing branding, and create the right 'feel' for the website. It will also help in building up trust between you and the consumer.