Transform your business from presence to profit!
Website designing is a complex process. We have clearly explained the six important steps of the website design right on our home page.
Lets discuss issues and solutions to have a seamless and fast website design process that fulfills your business needs.
We have seen a lot of times that the purpose and planning of the website is unclear. The business owners are somewhat unclear as to what exactly they want the website for! Some of the questions to ask are;
Is the website only for online presence with minimum requirements? Do you need membership portfolio? How many forms are to be processed? Do you need an online booking system? Is there an online registration system? Is it a service oriented website? Are you going to sell online? Is your business account and payment processor account ready in case you plan to sell on line? Do you want to utilize SEO and PPC and Social Media Marketing or no need at all? Do you want to use your website actively for lead generation? Is it a sales page that you want?
Solution: Have a clear purpose of the website. Spend time in deciding beforehand rather than changing the project later. It saves your time as a business owner. If you are planning to sell online, have your bank accounts ready. If you are planning to use SEO etc, let your planners/stakeholders know it in advance. Don’t contract an online payment processing company without discussing it with the experienced website / e-commerce designers.
There are 4 components involved during the preparation cycle.
Domain name: Decide the domain extension you want. Now a days a lot of domain extensions are available that clearly distinguish your business. An example, if you are a lawyer, you can have domain johndoe.lawyer rather than johndoe.com. This way people clearly know they are on a lawyers website. You dont need a .com extension because you are not going to use it for commerce. Same idea can be used by other professionals such as .doctor, .accountant, .dentist, etc.
You get the idea. (You can check over 700 domain extensions here)
Type of hosting: The regular shared hosting is sufficient for start up businesses. It is not suitable for the established businesses, specifically if you are using SEO, PPC, Social Media etc. to drive traffic to your website. The specifics called inode will throw your website out pretty soon. (research what is inode). It is good to plan proper hosting resources right from the beginning. Hosting is not costly anymore.
Our VPS hosting starts just as low as $14.79/month!
INODE definition: INODES represent the amount of all the files located on your hosting account. For example, a mail stored in your account will be 1 inode, a mail which contained 2 attachments will be 3 inodes.
SSL: Secured Socket Layers, (SSL) used to encrypt your data. We don’t even design a website and hosting without it now.
Our SSL certificate starts just as low as $15.79/year! And we give SSL free with our managed hosting.
Emails: Very important thing to decide in preparation phase. How many emails you need? Free emails are just to get you started. The price for paid email services is very low. (As low as $1.5/pm) It is not worth to go again and pay for email migration six months down the road. It is way better to buy emails now. If you need many emails and book them on yearly basis, there are considerable discounts available.
Check our email pricing.
(Business email, 5gb each account) (Enterprise email, 25gb each account) (G Suite by Google, 25gb each account)
The main issue faced during the design phase is, if the website is responsive for all gadgets? Does it work on tablets, phones and what not for all the different screen sizes. Sometimes it is important to change what is visible on phone to mange the screen space effectively as compared to on a tablet or laptop.
Another important factor to check is what type of and how many call for action buttons and elements are used on your different pages? Are the pages designed for your needs or it is generic for the industry you are in? Are all the forms you decided in the “Choose” phases taken care of?
I believe the best solution to a avoid the design phase issues is to connect your “Choose” phase to the “Design” phase and keep sampling the work quite often to solve the issues as they arise.
I cannot emphasize enough issues in this phase of website designing. I have personally seen numerous websites that have the social media icons on the front page but are not linked to any further active social media page. What good a Facebook icon is if it is not linking to your Facebook business page? It is actually harmful to your website. It is required to have proper connections to social media pages.
When we design your website, we ensure that all social media pages are made for you right from the start so that you never have the above noted issue. If you already have social media pages, we ensure that they are linked properly and the links are not connected back to your home page or none of the link is broken.
A lot of times we don’t keep marketing budget for our website thinking that it is already online and people know about it!
Well it is not the case.
There are over a billion blogs and websites on the web with 100s of billions of web pages. It is impossible to find the needle in the stack.
You want to show your website to your business prospects when they want it and more importantly when you want it as well.
For that you need to utilize the paid marketing in addition to the free marketing.
There are enormous marketing options available for your websites. Websites actually have a job to do. Non e-commerce websites should be able to drive leads to you and e-commerce websites should be able to expedite the sales.
You can utilize a lot of free online marketing channels. Some of them are Kijiji, Google My business, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. To use the main paid channels, we encourage you to explore SEO, PPC, Social Media, Email Marketing and Chat-bots. Each paid marketing solution has a specific purpose.
Don’t forget your local channels of friends and family and business network organizations. Also find a good printer and utilize the print media budget effectively. As a general number, 70% of the monthly marketing budget is to be spent on online and 25% on offline printed media.
The issue we see is that business owners don’t keep any budget for the maintenance of the website not knowing that everything updates now. Software, hardware, support programs, all change and improve with time. If you are not maintaining your website accordingly, most likely it will fall short of performance when needed most.
You see in the step 5 above, there is reference to keep 70% monthly marketing budget for online marketing, 25% for offline marketing. It totals up to 95%. Where does the rest of 5% monthly marketing budget go?
Yes you are right! It goes to maintaining your website and keeping it ready for the traffic that 95% of the marketing budget drives to your website. There is no fun in wasting 95% of the marketing budget if 5% is not spend on maintaining and it crashes when actually is required to run!
Keep your website well maintained! We have different maintenance packages infused with hosting packages. Check them here.
Have a great website!
Questions? Contact us.
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