Creating a bespoke website for your business has several benefits. It not only gives you a unique identity online that helps you stand out from the crowd but ensures your site is optimised and fully functional, meeting your needs exactly.
When I design and build any website, it’s a collaborative process. The business or person that hires my services plays a huge role in almost every stage. In fact, the more information and collaboration we can introduce into this process, the better the outcomes usually are.
Whenever I’m in the discussion stage for a new website, starting with some basic information and ideas can be a great help.
The following list is not exhaustive, neither is it meant to be limiting. It’s more of a guideline. if you don’t have the information or want to add something else you feel is important please do.
Your Website Goals
It’s important to know as clearly as possible what you want to achieve with your website. Try to avoid vague notions such as increasing revenue or getting more visitors. The more specific you can be the more likely you are to end up with a website that is highly tailored for your business.
You might, for example, want to increase sales by improving your ranking on search engines, producing better-organised content and introducing easier navigation to attractive pages with effective calls to action.
You may want to establish trust with your audience, producing easy to understand and helpful content or improve support for visitors using email marketing lists, providing online support through a chatroom or from content such as webinars and videos.
Think about your ideal visitor and what you would like to deliver for them if you had all the resources you needed.
Sample Content and Imagery
If you’ve gathered content that you want to include on your site or imagery which you may have developed or collected, this can be very useful in understanding the tone and design you are interested in creating.
Messaging ideas & Calls to Actions
Something else that can be useful is what your key messaging points are and any calls to action that you want to include. For example, you may have a value proposition concerning how your brand is better than the competition or how you can help solve the customer’s problem. Calls to action also help to get the vibe of your business and what you are trying to achieve.
Logo and Brand Guidelines If Any, Including Colour Schemes
Most businesses have some kind of logo and brand guidelines and these will need to be incorporated into the design of your website. This includes colour schemes, font choices and layouts. Some smaller businesses may not have a clearly defined brand, however, in which case we need to work together to create a coherent graphic design that works for you.
Sitemap of Pages with Functionality
If you’re a fairly simple business such as a builder or local service with a limited menu, you’ll probably only require a small website with a few pages that highlight what you do. It’s useful to create a site map on a piece of paper or Word doc where you list what you want to cover and what that page is meant to achieve. This helps in organising elements such as navigation more effectively.
If you’re planning an ecommerce site or something more complex, it’s even more important from a design point of view to understand how everything fits together with different pages. The key to good design is that it allows the user to get to the page or information that they want as quickly as possible. Navigation buttons and layout play a huge role in this.
Examples of Websites You Like and Why
You may also like to do a little research at your end. Have a look online and check out different websites. You can do this for businesses in your related sector but these often tend to follow the same pattern. If you want to stand out from the crowd, don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and look at other designs from other industries which could work just as well if not better.
Examples of Website You Do Not Like and Why
It’s just as important to look at sites you don’t like. These can give me a deeper insight into what is likely to work for your business and help me steer away from design mistakes that are unlikely to make you happy.
Working Together
Finally, something which I find generally leads to a great outcome when it comes to web design is to work directly with you. Collaboration ensures that you are kept up to date with design choices and there are no surprises once the final site is unveiled.
You shouldn’t be worried about expressing your opinion and healthy debate is always good for web design. After all, this is your site!
If you’d like to find out how a bespoke website design can help transform your business and make you stand out online, contact me to day to find out more.