1. What's The "Big" Idea?
Why are you creating a website? If you have decided to start a website, or re-design an old website, there is a main reason or reasons behind your decision. Take this reason, or idea, and qualify it: what do you want from this website? How to you want your audience to react? Every website should embody an main "objective." Try this exercise: pick one or two emotions that you want your visitors to feel when they visit your site, or, adjectives you want your audience to use to describe your site. At every step of the process, go back these emotions and adjectives, and ask: what will best embody my main objective? For examples, will this color make my audience feel happy? Will this content make my visitors feel informed? Make decisions that revolve around your "big idea;" this will help your website on track, and also within budget.
2. Set Your Goals
Do NOT skip this step! Make a list of quantitative goals that you want to reach at your 90 day, 120 day, and 180 day marker. Consider these statistics to track:- Unique visitors per month or day
- Bounce rate
- Average page visits per sessions
- Leads per month
- New clients gained per month
- Revenue gained per month
- Return on investment (R.O.I.)
Make your goals SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time specific. If you fail to meet any of your goals after launching your website, do not panic! Simply create a list of two to three action items to put your website back on track to reach that goal. For example, if you do not reach a goal of 30 qualified leads per month, consider increasing your blog posts per month, or re-thinking your monthly content's theme to be more specific to your target audience.
3. Create a Project Timeline
Come up with a realistic list of deadlines for the website, and stick to those deadlines as best you can. If multiple people are involved with the website, be sure to include all action items and deadlines with the appropriate personnel assigned. Hold everyone accountable, and schedule weekly or monthly meeting to keep your project on track.4. Calculate a Budget
So many companies make the mistake of assuming that a do-it-yourself approach will always be cheaper; however, this is NOT always the case. Time is money, so estimate the time it will take you or your co-worker(s) to create the site, and calculate the labor cost of this time. It might surprise you what the cost of designing your website turn out to be.While a budget will be different for everyone, make sure to include:
- Labor (Cost/ Hour)
- URL Hosting
- Graphics and Images
- WordPress Template
- Additional Software or Plug-ins
- Future Maintenance, Updates and Training
If the time and effort estimated to create your website exceeds what you want to spend, you may consider creating a request for proposal, setting your budget, and opening the proposal up to bids for experts to build your website.
5. Design A Site Structure
In the technical world, this is known as your website's "information architecture" or IA. If you want to seem like you know more about websites, feel free to use this term, and fit it into as many sentences as possible. To form your information architecture, create with a diagram (get as fancy as you want, and time permits) that shows the page static structure of the website, as well as how each page links to each either. Do you best to follow the "golden rule" that a visitor can get from one page to any other page in less than four clicks. Some advice: keep it simple! Also, do you best to lead the visitor through your content towards the contact form. This is known as your website's "funnel."
6. Organize Your Content
Organizing content, copy, images, testimonials, white papers, and any other marketing material is a critical step to creating your website. Once you have everything organized, you can make a list of new content you will need for the website, and which materials may need to re-design or updated to fit with the feel of the website. Organize your content by page so that when it comes time to fill in your website template, all of those resources are at your fingertips.
7. Choose the Perfect Template
Templates can be great resources for small businesses. A simple WordPress template is perfectly suitable for a business looking for a very simple information architecture, and very easy site navigation. There are many factors to consider when choosing the right template, including design, format, page structure, and functionality. But the most important aspect of a template to consider is the accessibility of the creator. Not all WordPress template are created equal, and many only showcase the homepage in the "live preview." Make sure that the theme you choose is not only a perfect visual match for what you are looking for, but also make sure that you consider the theme's functionality, ability to support necessary plug-ins, and the ability to contact the theme creator if you run into any issues or have trouble with the theme (which happens more often than you would think!).Here are some WordPress theme retailers:
When selecting your theme, also understand that the more simple the theme, the more effort that will be necessary to customize the website with structured page designs for the site, potentially with custom coding. Working within a complex theme, however, can be difficult if the theme is not easily editable, or not not work nicely with the plug-ins that you need. Your theme will be the life blood of your website for the year's to come... At the risk of sounding dramatic, choose your theme in the same manner as choosing a mate for life.
8. Find The Right Plug-ins
Your next step is finding the right plug-ins for the site. Plug-ins give you the ability to create advanced web features with no actual coding. WordPress has tons of options for contact forms, image sliders, social media sharing, newsletter sign-ups as well as many options for software integration with popular software like Salesforce and Constant Contact. Take advantage of as many as you can, but do so strategically - customizing certain plug-ins, like image sliders, take a lot of time and effort to implement successfully.9. Set-Up Tracking
Google Analytics is a simple and easy way to track the visitors to your website. It will give you information on everything from visitor demographics, location, search methods, your website's sales funnel and more. For WordPress sites, you can easily download a plug-in that allows you to embed the Google Analytics tracking code on every page without messing with any code.Most importantly, do not forget to set up conversion tracking. From Google Analytics, you can easily set up conversation tracking in the Admin tab: go to View > Goals > + New Goals, and add the URL of the "thank you" page that your contact form(s) lead to. No matter what WordPress contact form you download, there will be an option to create a static "thank you" page. E.g. "wordpress.com/thank-you." Add this page to your goal tracking and you will gain immense insight on the path that visitors take before contacting you, as well as data on type of visitor that is most likely to contact you. This is information is worth its weight in marketing gold when it comes to understanding how potential customers find and use your website.
10. Put It All Together... And Go Live!
Once you have all the content you need organized and structured, the process of uploading your content should be quick and easy. Be sure to leave the necessary amount of time to read over and preview every aspect of your website with a fine tooth comb. If possible, bring in loyal customers and brand ambassadors to give you feedback.Depending on your hosting structure, "going live" with your website could mean buying and hosting your website URL for a new site, or transferring your website to a new host for a re-designed site (see more details here). Either way, this is a big moment! Announce your efforts to the world and share the news!
Finally, don't forget: your new website will not automatically perform to perfection; track your goals, but give them time and do not expect to rank on the first page of Google for your target keywords overnight! (Haha...) As long as the proper website structure is in place, reaching your long term goals is achievable, but it is certainly not a "one and done" process. Updating your content with new blog posts, articles, and news, and sharing your content online, in email, with social media, and other marketing avenues is necessary to keeping your website relevant and attractive to Google's search engines.
