Summary
Building a website requires some key skills if it is to be effective in meeting the needs of users and the business.
Building a website requires understanding your customers and what they want. It also requires a range of other skills to make sure it meets both your customers’ and business needs.
Your website is an important customer communications channel – perhaps it’s your most important channel.
It’s a great channel for influencing the perception of your brand and for driving:
- Consideration of your products (or services)
- Trial of your product
- Purchase of your product
- Retention of customers
- Cross-sell and/or up-sell of products
Given its importance, it is paramount to get its design and development right.
Would you outsource the building of your key offline store or corporate office to only a mason?
You would want a team of professionals with the right skill sets to handle such a project, wouldn’t you?
Shouldn’t you treat building your website (one of your most important channels) same?
The skills required in designing an effective website include:
- Web Analytics
- Digital marketing planning and content strategy
- User-centered design and usability
- Visual design
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Web copywriting and persuasion
- Web project management
For a site for startups and SMBs, the budget for specialists with these skills might not be available.
In such situations, knowing the basics of these skill sets will greatly benefit you. And help you build a website that gets you amazing results.
Building your website should start with……
Web Analytics and Understanding of Your Digital Customers
The Digital Analytics Association defines web analytics as:
You do want to understand and optimize your website usage don’t you?
Digital marketing planning and effective website design should start with your customers. With your understanding of your customers online and what they could want from your site.
Web analytics helps answers the following questions as regards your website:
- What are users of your website doing on your website?
- Why do users do the things they do on your website?
- What is their motivation for engaging with your website?
Answers to these question help you build your site to meet both the needs of users and your business needs.
Web analytics involves using the following to understand what and why site users do what they do:
- Using site-generated data usually from analytics systems to understand what users do
- Surveying your customers to understand why they do what they do and their needs online. Your survey could be oral if you are running a micro or small business
- Using panels to study possible action online (Usability testing)
- Thinking like your customers by putting yourself in their shoes (Heuristic evaluations)
- Following customers home to view how they use your site in their natural environment (follow-me-homes)
Besides these, understanding your customers online also involves using third-party data sources. And using various other types of panels.
Digital Marketing Planning and Content Strategy
Your digital marketing plan and your content strategy should prompt your website design.
Your digital marketing plan should consider the opportunities digital marketing avails. It should define strategies that make the most of such opportunities.
Your content strategy is one of those strategies that you should define. Your website content strategy should help you meet the needs of your users and those of your business.
Your website building process must fit into your digital marketing and integrated marketing plan. When building a website, you should:
- Set goals for the site based on your marketing goals
- Define your website content strategy to meet such set goals
- Design and make the site
- Promote the site
- Evaluate and improve its performance
User-Centered Design and Usability
Again your website design should start with knowing the website users and what they will want from it.
User-centered design is all about creating a user-friendly website. A website where visitors can most efficiently find what they need and have a great experience. Providing a great experience for your visitors means value for your organization.
Satisfied visitors become customers and may refer others to you.
User-centered design involves such task as:
- Creating user personas
- Mapping out their journey within the site
- Creating relevant content they might be seeking (informed by your content strategy)
It also involves:
- Structuring site information in such a way that users can easily find what they need. Usually through standard navigation and on-site search
- Knowing how to write for the web and labeling content in heading and navigation
- Usability testing to find out areas that might need improvement
Accessibility is important in user-centered design.
Accessibility
Accessibility refers to making information accessible to everyone that might need it. It’s a legal need in some countries and fall under the disability and discrimination law.
Users using different browsers and different devices should be able to use your site. Users that are visually impaired or have other disabilities should also have easy access.
It should be a business decision to make your website accessible, not just a legal one. This is because of the potential increase in users and the user experience of current users.
Making your site accessible also helps in search engine optimization.
Visual Design
Your website needs to project the brand and needs to be visually appealing. You need to make your site memorable through energizing visual designs. Visual designs that fits with your visitor’s expectation of a brand such as yours.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When designing your website, you want your content to appear high on search result pages. Result pages of the major search engines especially Google.
SEO is a structured process for achieving high rankings for relevant key phrase searches.
It involves making sure relevant content is indexed. And the relevance of such content is clear.
Web Copy Writing and Persuasion Design
Copywriting and persuasion design aims at creating content and copy that converts visitors. Converting visitors refer to driving visitors to perform required outcomes while on a website. Such outcomes are usually key performance indicators and signify business success.
Your website content strategy should inform your copywriting and persuasion design.
Web Project Management
Building a website, being a project, needs to be properly managed. That is if it is to meet the needs and expectations of the people involved in or affected by the website.
Note that web projects need a project management approach that supports:
- Evolving requirements
- Putting the focus on the end customer
- Collaboration between different skill sets
- Managing stakeholder expectations