Laurie Williams of Trumpet Marketing shares five important things to consider when building a website.
There are (at least) five things to consider when creating a new website or redesigning a website in 2022. In the video above, I discuss these, but to reemphasize, you need to take considerations as follows. In the video, I go into each.
- Domain Name & Hosting
- Platform
- Design & Branding
- Messaging to Your Audience
- Search Engine Optimization
Resources mentioned include:
- Siteground for website Hosting: bit.ly/2WvLwcX
- WordPress (.org) WordPress is softward provided by most hosting companies. (Siteground, Godaddy, Bluehost, Hostgator, etc.)
- Woocommerce – eCommerce platform for running an online store.
Responsive Website Design
I would also like to add that the site should be responsive and take into account mobile users! They account for a large portion of our visitors.
Transcript:
I wanted to talk to you a little bit about website design and five things that you need to consider when you start to build a website or you start to do a website redesign for your business.
Domain Name & Hosting
The first thing that you want to take into consideration is your domain name and your hosting. Believe it or not your hosting and the type of account that you host your website on determines how your website performs. You do not want to go with a website host who doesn’t have top-of-the-line servers. You want to find a web hosting provider that will provide you with a robust platform to host your website under. We typically recommend SiteGround. We’ve had a lot of luck with them lately. We’ve moved away from some of the other providers because of performance. It was impacting the success of some of our clients’ websites. If you’re at that stage definitely give SiteGround a look. They really do have a good solution as far as shared hosting goes. When you’re just starting out, You need to have your website on a shared server your domain name is also important your domain name should mirror your business name, if at all possible, or at least describe what it is that you’re selling or promoting.
Website Platform
The next thing that you want to consider after you’ve looked at your domain name and your hosting is what platform you’re going to run your website under. So, there are a number of options here. There are third-party tools out there there’s like Wix that you can use… Squarespace… Some people if they have an eCommerce shop will choose Spotify. Here at Trumpet Marketing, we build the websites from scratch in the e-commerce systems pretty much from the ground up using platforms that we know are scalable and allow us to customize to a level that we can ensure success for our clients and the platform we use is WordPress and within WordPress for e-commerce we use WooCommerce. WordPress is very widely used. Millions of websites use WordPress for their platform — even some of the largest providers out there. So we are a big WordPress shop here. We really believe in WordPress for many many reasons but mostly because it empowers us to allow our customers to be able to take control of their content and post on a regular basis.
Branding And Design
The third thing that we should take into consideration is your branding and the overall design of your website. You need to think that your think about your design and it needs to portray the look and feel of the culture of your organization and depending on what it is — whether you’re a service provider, whether you’re selling t-shirts online — whatever it is — you need to kind of think in the back of your mind “What is my brand how do I want my business to look?” And you need to be able to try to convey that to your web developer or your web designer so that they can try to bring those thoughts to life. Anything that you can provide a web developer, such as a color scheme, maybe you already have a logo, maybe you need a logo, maybe you want a logo, but that can all be part of the whole process. You need to have that in mind or else you’re going to be throwing money and time away until you come up with a really good solution. So if you can think ahead of time even if you’re going through the web and you see things that you like about other sites, jot the ideas down. Make a note of the website URL and that way that will help your website designer get you to where you need to be faster — get you up and running a lot faster .
Messaging
So the next thing is messaging is extremely important you need to make sure you spend some time putting together content — either visual content in the form of graphics and/or text content. Search engines can’t read images. Sure, we can tag images in the HTML of a website or in the back end of the website but if you don’t have a substantial or a decent amount of text on your website, you’re never going to show up in search engines such as Google. So when people are searching for you they’re never going to find you unless you have that content on your website and then when you have that content for your website it has to be presented correctly and it has to be presented in a fashion that tells the search engines what on a page or what on the site is important and what is not and that’s what we refer to
Search Engine Optimization
The last thing that I want to mention today is search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is having your website built in such a way that the search engines will locate you and find you in search results and this depends exactly on how you have your website laid out content-wise. You want to be taking advantage of header tags you want to be taking advantage of links and a linking strategy both internally and externally on the website. You want to make sure that you have all your images to optimize the performance of your website optimize. All these things are factors that go into determining how well you rank with search engines. There are literally hundreds of criteria that Google in particular looks at to determine how relevant your website.
If you have a business and you would like to have a website built and you want all these things taken into consideration and you need a little bit of consulting whatever it is just give us a call I am available most weekdays between 9:00 and 5:00 p.m. and we can schedule a time to discuss what you would like to accomplish with your business online so Trumpet Marketing we do website design. We started out doing website design I’ve been doing it for 24 years. Your website is your ground central and most important but there are so many other things in and around the website these days that contribute to your success or failure as a business online and we’ve also never lived in a time where online marketing can be so lucrative. There are so many opportunities out there to take advantage of and to get business and get leads and we’d love the opportunity to take to help you get to where you need to be so contact us a trumpet marketing today and we’d love to help you with your website strategy.