Who wouldn’t want to have a successful website when your customers depend on it?
You would think everyone, but I’ve been surprised lately by the amount of small businesses who either don’t have a website or the ones who do have a website are in a major need of a website redesign.
A recent small business survey showed that 29% of small businesses still don’t have a website. This is shocking in today’s world.
Let’s face it, no one uses the yellow pages anymore. To be honest, I’m surprised they’re still in existence at all.
With that in mind, how do you think people find your business?
If you guessed online, you’re right. They’ll either do a quick voice search on their phone or a Google search of your business name, and voila your business information appears.
So, what does this mean exactly?
Well, back in the day when you ran an ad in the yellow pages your ad would never change. It would look visually the same for an entire year until the next version was printed and distributed.
This is not the case anymore, think of the search engines as your new online yellow pages ad. It changes constantly, customers leave reviews, Google changes the appearance of how the search results are displayed, and this is how your business is presented to new and existing customers.
You want your business to look professional, right?
This is why you need a professional appearance online and you shouldn’t neglect your website.
The purpose of this article is to serve as a roadmap to creating a successful website and avoiding the costly mistakes that I’ve encountered over the years.
In this post I use some technical terms that might seem like a foreign language to you. If so, you can reference our digital marketing glossary for more info.
Creating a successful website starts with a well-thought-out plan and documented goals.
What Goals Do You Have for Your Website?
If you’re creating a website, you should have documented goals for what you would like to achieve once it’s online for the world to see.
If your goal is to drive more leads and sales through search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing strategies, then you’ll need a marketing plan to help you reach these goals.
How would you like to boost your website traffic using proven SEO strategies? Download our free SEO guide with step-by-step strategies here
If your goal is to attract more local business, then make sure you have a plan to optimize your website for Local SEO.
Driving local business to your website goes beyond website optimization, you’ll also need to focus on your local listings and reviews. One of your goals should include being listed in the Local 3 Pack. Below is an example of the Local 3 Pack and ranking here will greatly improve your local search visibility.
Once you have your goals documented, it’s time to create a well thought out plan.
Start With a Well Thought Out Plan
Building a successful website that aligns with your goals, starts with a great plan to work from.
Here are a few things you need to think about when mapping out your plan:
- Your website architecture
- The user experience
- Choosing the best content management system for your needs
- Consistent branding
- Your blog design
- Optimizing your website for the search engines
- Integrating your website with your customer relationship management (CRM) system and marketing automation software
- Installing tracking scripts to allow you to monitor your key performance indicators (KPI)
I elaborate with more detail on all of these points throughout this post but you should map these items out before starting your website design. If not, it could cost you more money and wasted time down the road.
Believe me, I’ve done it both ways before and starting without a plan is not the most productive route to take.
Building a Website With User Experience (UX) in Mind
Have you ever noticed how well run retail stores pay so much attention to the way items are placed in the store, during checkout, and so on? This is because they’ve spent a lot of time testing and measuring what their buyers want and make it easy for them to find these items.
You should think of your website in the same way.
Designing a website with a great user experience is essential to helping your visitors find what they’re looking for quickly.
Building a website that is easy to navigate will have a huge impact on your conversion rate and how many sales you generate from it.
This is why it’s so important to start with a plan and map out your website architecture with the customer in mind.
Think of constructing a building with a poor architecture drawing. Do you think this will cost the owner of that building more money down the road?
Absolutely, and your website is no different.
Designing the architecture of your website usually starts with wireframes and user flow layouts. You can use these diagrams to build your website from.
Always put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer visiting your website when creating your user flow diagrams.
Choosing a Content Management System (CMS)
A content management system is a software application that allows you and other users to manage all of your content with different permission levels.
Your CMS is the foundation of your website, everything depends on it.
Changing your CMS down the road is not an easy or cheap task, so it’s important to choose wisely.
Here’s a list of the most popular CMS Systems but there are many more than this to choose from:
- WordPress
- Joomla!
- Drupal
- Magento
- Shopify
Here are a few things you should consider when choosing a CMS:
Make Sure You Have Complete Control
There are some out of the box website solutions for specific industries that make it easy for you to get your website up and running.
As appealing as these solutions look, I would avoid them at all costs.
They will usually limit the control you have over your website and in some circumstances could own everything on your website, your content, your domain name, and so on. So for example if you try to move your website away from the company managing it, they will charge you a ridiculously high cost to leave their services.
This creates an unrealistic option for most small businesses and you end up being held hostage by the company hosting your website. Being in a situation like this can curb the growth of your company because of the limited control you have over your website.
If you’re looking for a company to manage your website so you can have more free time to focus on what you do best, that’s fine just make sure you have full access and control to all parts of your website. It’s also important to verify you have complete ownership of your content, domain name, and so on.
Flexible Design and Page Changes
Make sure you can change the layout of pages easily without having to change the template you’re working with. This allows you to create different landing pages easily with different layouts for A/B split testing.
You also might want to add a navigation menu to the right or left column of some pages. Choosing a CMS system and template/theme that supports this is very important for your digital marketing efforts and will save you from having to do a major site change down the road.
Easy to Use
Not everyone on your team will be tech savvy and they will need to use the system too. You might have writers and publishers who will need to publish content on a regular basis, if the system is complex this will only cause problems down the road.
While it’s important that the system be easy to use, you want to make sure the core functionality and features are available as well.
Security
Some CMS systems are more secure than others and have fewer security risks. I can’t stress how important this is, the last thing you want to deal with is getting hacked, and someone installing malware on your website, or blocking your team from accessing the server or the backend of your CMS system.
This is a nightmare to deal with and sometimes very costly. There are many other factors that go into security as well besides just the CMS system, so make sure you consult with an expert on this if it’s not your area of expertise.
SEO and Website Optimization
Most CMS systems have made many advancements in these areas over the last few years and there are plenty of third party plugins that help in this area. I’ll discuss a few of them later in this article.
Here are a few things you should consider before choosing a CMS system from a SEO standpoint:
- Have the ability to create customizable Meta Titles and Descriptions
- Create customized URLs
- Custom heading tags (h1, h2, etc.)
- Add alt attributes to your images
- Have the option to add rel=canonical tags
Third Party Plugins and Add-ons
CMS systems usually come with the option to install third party plugins, this makes it easy to add custom features to your site without having to hire a developer to create a custom application.
You should tread lightly here though. I’ll explain this later in the article but having too many plugins could cause security issues and slow your site down which would have a negative impact on your SEO and content marketing efforts.
Ecommerce integrations
If you’re planning on selling products online, then you need to make sure the CMS system that you choose will support the type of online store you want to build.
This is why it’s important to map these features out in the planning stage before you start development. This will help you pick the best CMS system that will support the features you are looking for.
Creating Site Architecture for SEO and UX
Your site structure and architecture is one of the most important elements to your SEO success and user experience.
If you create a great user experience then you should also be seeing excellent SEO results.
Google and other search engines are focused on providing their users with the best experience possible. So they’ll always be making changes to their algorithm to deliver the best results possible to their users.
If users can’t find what they’re looking for on your website easy, then your SEO will also be impacted by this.
A good site architecture will help the search engines easily crawl your website, which increases your odds of getting of your content indexed and discovered.
You should map out your website architecture and internal linking during the planning stage. Also plan for growth, how will pages be added and linked to internally in the future.
One last note here, try to keep all of your pages accessible within 2-3 clicks. If it takes more clicks than this to reach a page, then you should start rethinking your site architecture.
Website Design and Having Consistent Branding
Your website design and branding will clearly demonstrate the type of business you are. If your website is outdated or looks poorly designed, this is how your website visitors will view your company.
Don’t take any shortcuts here!
You want your site to stand out and make an impact on visitors when they visit it. This is usually the first impression they get of your company and it should give them the feeling that they want to do business with you.
Use images to break up text on your site, this helps give a nice visual appearance.
Make your text easy to read, usually the default font types are small fonts and hard to read. So you’ll need to update these default font CSS styles with larger font types, add some extra padding to your paragraph breaks, and so on.
Keep your website color theme consistent with your brand colors, this will help with your overall company branding.
It’s best to experiment with different styles during the development of your website until you find a style that you and your team can agree on.
Creating Style Guides for Your Blog Design
Your blog should be thought of differently than the rest of your site. It should still share the same branding colors but the content in your blog will most likely be much longer than the content on the rest of your pages.
So you need to make it very easy for users to skim through this content and find what they’re looking for.
I suggest creating style guides for your writers and publishers to follow.
Try breaking up the post with headings for each section, this allows users to skim through the content to find what they are looking for quickly.
You can create specific CSS styles for your h1, h2, and h3 tags that will give the visual appearance you are looking for. So your style guidelines might look something like this: Use the h1 tag for the main title, and use the h2 tag for all subheadings. This will make it easy for your writers/publishers to follow these guidelines and you will get a consistent look and feel for each blog post.
You should use lots of images, I suggest using an image for each subheading at minimum. Add this to the style guidelines as well.
You could use a tool such as design pickle to create these images for you for a flat fee each month. This is a good option if you’re creating a lot of content every month, if not a more cost effective option would be signing up for a stock photo account.
You should also monitor the time it takes you to find these photos, it takes more time than you would think and your time is worth something.
The thing I like about design pickle, I just give them the heading and have them find or create custom images for each heading. It saves quite a bit of time vs. researching each image yourself.
You should have style guidelines for your images, for example: cover photos should be a minimum of 1920px wide and all sub heading images should be a minimum of 600px wide. Also include how the images should be inserted into each post, how they will be aligned, and so on.
Having guidelines like this to follow will make it easier on everyone.
Setting your blog up like this will also allow you to make quick changes to the design layout of every blog post by making a few changes to your CSS styles. This will help with testing and measuring design tweaks to improve bounce rates down the road.
Creating a Website With Fast Page Speeds
Have you ever visited a website that takes forever to load?
Chances are if you’re like me, you have little patience for sites like this.
Well, this is why Google and other search engines are pushing website owners to improve their site speeds because they want to provide a better experience to their users.
I’m sure page speed will have a bigger impact on your SEO down the road.
Remember earlier when I talked about one of Google’s main goals is to improve their user’s experience? This would make sense why page speed will probably play a bigger part in SEO in the near future.
Here are some things you can do to optimize your website for faster load times.
Google PageSpeed Insights
This is a free tool that will give you suggestions on how you can optimize your website and improve your PageSpeed for both mobile and desktop.
Keep in mind that things constantly change with your site and the search engines, so it’s important to check this and optimize your website on a regular basis.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
AMP pages are designed to load pages lightning quick on mobile devices. There are certain guidelines you have to follow which is why these pages load so fast.
Most popular CMS systems such as WordPress and Joomla! have plugins for this, which make it easier to add AMP pages to your site.
CMS Template
When setting up your CMS system you will choose a template/theme you want to work with. Most people think of this only from a design standpoint but it also will be a factor in how fast your website loads.
Outdated templates can cause a poor site performance and a number of other things.
Plugins and Add-ons
One of the best things about CMS systems is the ability to search for plugins that third party vendors have created and quickly install them on your CMS system. This gives new features and functionality that you didn’t have before.
Sounds great right?
Well, all good things have their downsides too. You should choose these plugins wisely because the developers of these plugins don’t always update them as often as they should. This can cause your site to become sluggish and also open up potential security risks.
Website Hosting
This plays a huge part in your entire site speed. Spend some time researching and choosing your hosting provider because not only will it play a factor in how fast your web pages load, it also will have an impact on your site uptime too.
If your website is always going down because your server is crashing, this provides a poor user experience and can have a negative impact on your conversions.
Image Sizes
Make sure you optimize your images and don’t upload large file size images to your website. This can be a time consuming fix down the road and will play a factor in how fast your pages load.
Save yourself the headaches of optimizing your images in the future and come up with a game plan from the start. This should go in your style guidelines as described above, if you have the person publishing your content follow these guidelines, you should reduce the risk of encountering this problem.
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