The 4 Questions You Need to Ask Before Building a Website
The world of digital marketing is ever-changing, but one thing that has become a staple since the industry’s inception is a strong, attractive website that can drive traffic and conversions to your business. No matter what field you’re in, having an online presence is incredibly important to your company’s success, and a website is the key channel for people to discover and interact with your business. Before you get started on the actual buildout, there are a few important things that you’ll need to ask yourself beforehand in order to make sure that your website does exactly what you need it to, and works in your company’s favor.
1. What goal do you want your website to achieve?
You should probably have an answer to this question already before you start any sort of digital marketing campaign, but at the very least, you should have it figured out before you begin the process of building out your website. Online marketing is all about conversions, and by determining what your main goal conversion is, you can better tailor your website to drive people towards them. While there are many different goal conversions for your business to choose from, common ones across the web tend to be simple, easily trackable options such as; making a purchase through your online store, signing up for something with an email address, or downloading a piece of content. Every little detail of your website should serve in one way or another to drive users to complete your goal conversion, which is why it's so important to have this defined before you begin the design portion of your site.
2. Who is your target audience?
The second thing you need to determine before building a website is: Who is actually going to be using your site?
If you're looking to build a travel blog site, then your target audience may simply be “travelers.” However, if you're building a website for a vintage boat-detailing service, you're going to have a much more refined target audience, namely “high-earning, vintage boat owners,” likely 55+ within 75 miles of your location. While there's nothing necessarily wrong with having a broad target audience, by narrowing your target and finding a niche, you're much more likely to be interacting with high-intent users who are more inclined to convert. By defining this audience, whatever it may be, you can further tailor your website to appeal to the specific wants, needs, interests and pain points of your demographic.
3. How much time and money are you willing to spend on the project?
As is true with everything in the business world, it costs money to make money. Building a website for your company, is no exception. With hundreds of platforms that all allow you to build highly dynamic and unique websites, it should come as no surprise that they all come with different styles, features, and price ranges. A basic website can be built for just a few hundred dollars, while creating an advanced, highly dynamic site with hundreds of pages and custom, interactive content, may cost upwards of tens of thousand of dollars. Different web-building platforms can also affect the cost and quality of a site tremendously; Platforms such as Wix and Wordpress are affordable options with limited customization capabilities, while other platforms such as Dreamweaver or Webflow can create gorgeous, incredibly dynamic, highly-customized sites, but will undoubtedly require a higher investment upfront. Every company's budget is different, and while having a strong web presence should certainly be a high priority, it's important to be realistic on what your business can afford to spend on building and maintaining a website.
4. How much time can you commit to building a website, keeping up with updates, and managing its content?
The last thing you'll need to decide before designing and building your website is: How much time can you commit to building the site, staying on top of updates, and managing its content? Time constraints and team bandwidth are an issue for companies of all sizes. For example, if you're working with a small team, it's important to set more realistic expectations about the frequency of your blog posts than if you were working with a dedicated, in-house copywriter. Also, if you're using a more esoteric web-building platform, you need to account for the fact that it may be more costly to find people who can build and maintain your site than if you were working with one of the more popular, simple platforms. Make sure that you set realistic expectations for you and your team in terms of the frequency and complexity of your web maintenance, and that you know in advance who is able to work on each specific element of your site.
Building a website for your company is an essential step for your business, and the design process is a whole lot of fun! However, before jumping into a project like this, it is critical to understand what exactly your site is trying to accomplish, and what resources you’ll have at your disposal to help make sure that it’s a success. StratDev Digital Marketing understands that this process can be difficult, and can help answer all of these questions, as well as employing a highly skilled team of web experts that can build and maintain your company’s website. A strong online presence is the foundation for any successful digital marketing campaign; are you ready to take the leap?
