Pause For Thought When Planning Your Website

When you initially have a concept in mind for a website or online system spend a great deal of time researching competition and your indented ordinance. This is easy enough to do using search engines and time spent doing this my well send you in a different more profitable direction. The more unique the idea, products or service the better chance of success unless you have a huge budget for initial and ongoing advertising to gain presence over competitors.

When using search engines to do your research and website planning look at the competition not only in the central natural listing but also anyone who may be advertising using the ads on the right. Study their sites and their approach. How can you make your site more appealing? Note any bad points of the competition sites, lack of information, slow to use, poor navigation, quality of images and make sure you don't include those in your website.

Equally as important is to look at the good points and see how you can improve further on these and add them to your design.

An often overlooked area is how much time you have to put into your website. At the beginning adding products and content can be quite time consuming after this you need to allow time for adding products and or content. You can never just complete a website and leave it untouched. If search engine position is important your website will always need refreshing and building on.

Perceived Size and Quality

There is absolutely no reason why a website owned by a one man band working from home cannot look and function as impressively as large website from a blue chip company that most probably cost tens of thousands of pounds. To have a chance of a successful website it needs to look professional which will reflect the business or organisation as a whole. This of course can be done without spending tens of thousands of pounds. It does however mean that you may have to forgo having meetings in a posh office overlooking Canary Wharf.

Giving Confidence to Users

The look and feel of the site gives a certain confidence to the users so unless you are a talented designer it is often best to seek a professional designer that will follow your brief and create a unique, bespoke design but ensuring that certainly in terms of navigation it follows a commonly used and understood format. Going wild and crazy with navigation although perhaps gives your site a unique feel, will undoubtedly put users off.

The Complete Package

Websites that only offer products can sometimes fail especially if the products can be found elsewhere. Short descriptions of these products don't offer the search engines much to go on and remember that images are really only of any use to the human visitor. Think about what else you could supply in terms of content that is related to your products or service and useful to anyone who may be looking for them. For example if you are selling seeds for home growers section off the website into categories.  Vegetable Seeds - Beans - French Beans You may have several varieties of bean seeds to sell so they will be displayed in this category. Along with the products build in some information pages with images if possible i.e.:

How to Grow French Beans - Preparing the ground, When to sew, Constructing Poles etc

Cooking French Beans - The best way to cook various varieties and maybe some recipes.

Adding content like this to complete the package of your website will give long lasting results, show customers and users that you know your stuff and make them remember and return to your website.

Content or information pages also widens the search fields and will attract people to your website from different areas and searches.

Building a Website Brief

Put together everything you have learnt, your ideas and expectations into a document.

Start with and overall picture of what you want the website to do i.e products you wish to sell where the market for these products is located in terms of geographical location and the type of people who will most likely use the website. You can Include realistic goals for the first year and how you see the website developing. 

Highlight examples of competitors and websites you like the design of, or supply a design, even if its roughly constructed.

Technical Design

How you plan on managing the website is important. If you website is going to have products or allot of content you don't want to call a web designer every time you want a page added so make sure that it is supplied with a good CMS. You will want to add pages that are search engine friendly where you can adjust Titles and Key words.

If you wish to add new sections and categories make sure you will be able to do this through the CMS.

For online stores what payment providers you will use. or a combination of several. PayPal, Google, WorldPay etc. Look into the costs of these. If starting slowly you wont want a monthly charge so PayPal or Google would be best as they just take a small percentage of the sale price.

Hosting costs vary so have a look around or ask for advice some do have free domain names included with packages.

How you plan to market the website

If you are going to rely purely on the natural listings of search engines then you will have to factor in possibly a considerable wait for this to fully happen.

If appropriate you may consider magazine advertising, mail outs, flyers, online advertising through Google etc.

Affiliation with other websites and possible links from these sites. Part of this process may be in finding websites that you can affiliate with. Bare in mind this is often a long procedure requiring many hours searching and emailing.