How to design and develop a good website

Your website is your most powerful marketing, lead generation, and sales tool.

The website, in fact:

• is often the first point of contact between a potential new customer and your company: it’s therefore required in lead generation, because it can turn the simple visitor into a lead;
• it provides content through which to inform and educate the lead: it therefore performs a fundamental function of lead nurturing and conversion, because it helps to convert the lead into a prospect and then convert the prospect into a customer;
• all this, of course, without forgetting that you can publish promotions and product launches on your website: it therefore also plays a key role in sales;
• and if it has a blog function, it helps cementing the relationship with customers, inducing them to come back periodically to draw on new content, information, promotions, etc…

Although it can be a significant investment, it doesn’t have to be a pompous tool. The most important thing is that it allows you to communicate effectively with your market.

 

Designing a website

Here’s how to proceed if you want to make sure you design a useful website:

 

1. Define your needs

Take pen and paper (not keyboard and mouse: I said pen and paper), and first decide the purpose of the website:

• Your main goals;
• How do you want the website to support your offline and online marketing campaigns?
• How the website will help generate leads, develop and qualify prospects, communicate with the market, process orders, etc…
• The information and features you think you need;
• Whether a standard design is enough, or you need something more sought-after.

The WordPress platform, for example, allows you to create websites with free layouts, simple, pleasant and functional, or to buy customizations (the so-called “themes”), which are even richer in features and graphics sophistication. But even the first ones (the free ones) can be fine.

 

2. Think about your customers: it will help you develop interesting content

If you want your website to be full of interesting content (and you MUST WANT it, because it’s a very important thing), do the following:

• List all possible visitors to your website: new prospects landing for the first time on the website; returning prospects; customers; partner companies; media, newspapers, trade magazines; suppliers; candidates interested in sending a resume, etc…
• Write down the list of contents that each visitor may want to find on the website;
• Study the competitors’ websites, to see how they behave regarding what is written above;
• Visit the websites of trade associations, independent organizations, trade journals, to take some further cues.

 

3. Organize your content

Now it’s time to think about how you’d like to organize your content.

If you had a shop, would you know how to arrange the different items for sale?

Try to identify yourself with a visitor who lands on your website, and make sure that he quickly finds what he’s looking for, whether he lands on the home page, or on any other internal page.

 

4. Make a list of the features you need

Don’t worry about the technical aspects, don’t worry about the functional aspects.

What do you want your website to “do“?

• Do you need a “shopping cart” to show your products and get orders?
• An automatic messaging system?
• Do you want visitors to register and access a reserved area?
• Do you want to be able to manage movies and audio recordings?
• Will you receive support requests? Do you need a help-desk to create a case study of requests, so as to automate part of the work?
• Since you will continuously update the product catalog and content, do you need an administration tool to quickly update the content?
• What reports do you need? What do you want to measure?

 

5. Define requirements and graphic standards

Your logo, product brochures, letterhead, business cards, etc., should already refer to a coordinated corporate image.

The same goes for the website: colours, fonts, etc.

The important thing is that the corporate image is consistent at 360°, online and offline.

At this point, if you have followed the steps, you should have a few dozen pages of notes in your hand, which represent the overall project, the idea of your website.

Now you can finally select who will take care of the development of the website.

 

 

Website development