So you've decided to build a new website or update your old site? Great decision! A professionally built, modern website is the main digital marketing strategy that will encourage potential clients to purchase your products or services.
Don't know where to start? You may be feeling daunted about how to set up a website for your business, but this doesn't need to be the case. WebSofa aims to make the process as smooth as possible and we've put together the following checklist to help you get started on your project.
Before the project starts, you should be clear on what goals you want your website to achieve. By thinking about these steps before commencing your project, you're going a long way towards avoiding unnecessary confusion and delays during the build process as well as ensuring you get the end result you're looking for. So let's get started!
Before getting down to details and thinking in solution mode, take a step backwards to think about your business and the environment it operates in.
Now translate these ideas into a page structure for your website content (see below).
What type of business image are you trying to project? Will your website be content rich with textual information or will it be more focused on visual appeal?
Even decisions on colour schemes can provide a message about your business.
Do you know what the key demographics typically are for your clients? What style of website do you think would appeal to them?
How do you want clients to contact you? Do you prefer to receive phone calls, emails or do you want to include a contact form on your website.
In simple terms, your domain is the address for your website. If you're building a new website, choice of domain is important. The domain name doesn't need to directly match your business name but the following factors are important.
For someone visiting your website by typing your domain in directly, your domain should:
For someone finding your website via an internet search it will help if your domain incorporates a key search term and/or a location. These inclusions can help with rankings but don't sweat if that's not possible, there are many other opportunities that should be followed to make your website rank highly in internet searches.
If you have an existing domain, WebSofa will happily transfer your domain in order for the website to be hosted by us. Just provide us with the domain password and we'll do the rest.
And one last word on this subject – you may wish to consider purchasing additional domains/domain extensions in order to protect your brand from market competitors.
Web hosting refers to the server environment which houses the files and any software required to make your website functional. You'll need to make a decision on how you wish to host your site – whether you leave it with us (our preferred option) or do it yourself.
WebSofa offers highly competitive hosting packages provided through a third party hosting provider. In that way, we can provide a turn-key service so you take delivery of a website that is published by us and maintained in a high quality, secure environment. We take care of all the actions that are required to go live.
If you're thinking about hosting your website independently, you will need to consider pricing as well as a range of technical factors:
You'll also need to check that the host environment is compatible with the language/platforms used to build the site.
For any clients wishing to provide their own hosting, WebSofa will provide all website files it has written in order for the client to arrange publishing. However, for the reasons above, WebSofa cannot provide any performance guarantee for the website in this situation.
What do you think potential clients would use as search terms to discover your business?
Now you've thought about this, send us a list of search keywords for your business.
We'll ensure these keywords are included throughout your website content and in the meta tags that are used behind the scenes by the search engine bots that “crawl” websites to rank them.
WebSofa doesn't normally generate content for a client's website since the content is describing your business - therefore you're in the best position to do this work. We'll ask you to provide text and images for each page.
Choose content that is going to engage your audience. It needs to be specific to your business and demonstrate the benefits that potential clients wil derive from buying your products/services.
Our cost estimates routinely include an allowance for:
However, if you don't feel comfortable writing content or don't have the time, we can provide a copywriting service at our standard hourly rate. You will still be required to provide dot points of key information so we can incorporate that in the written text.
When generating content, keep in mind the need to write original text and not plagiarise other material. Google rewards rich content, meaning that you should have approximately 500 words of text per page.
When supplying images, please observe copyright restrictions on their use if these are not your own images.
We ask you to have all text and images made available to us before we start building your website.
In order to reduce costs to clients, WebSofa doesn't produce a formal graphic design for your website. We will build your website based on any specific requirements for layout that you provide to us, such as examples from other websites. We will also suggest layout options to you for your consideration.
During the build process we will also ask you for finer details such as colour themes, logo and font details.
