5 Key Elements to Consider When Planning a Website
5 Key Elements to Consider When Planning a Website
At Devmac we plan a lot of websites, from personal to corporate and everything in between. More often than not, this helps the owner to look at their business through the eyes of their customers. This helps remove any bias in opinions and greatly impacts decision making.
We all put time and effort into design, copy-writing, technical processes, call to actions, cross-platform performance and navigation & content. All very important and necessary elements. Our view is that it should be done within the framework of 5 objectives. The objectives focus on what the customer needs to understand from your website.
1. Your Identity
Who are you? Your website is usually the first point of contact your prospects have with you and it's important they understand who you are as quickly as possible. You should answer the question "Who are you?" as interestingly and compellingly as possible.
How do you do this? it can be as simple as a quote, banner image or an engaging graphic. The importance here is that you need to be honest, lying about your business and what you do provides no beneficial outcome for both parties.
Your identity also comes down to perception. Whilst you might identify under a select few keywords or principles, your consumers might perceive you as something entirely different.
When creating content for your website, you need to consider "how will this come across to the consumer?". Something might sound impressive and "cool" to you but could create a different opinion to those who read it outside of your team.
Creating the wrong perception can have negatives effects on the business. You will find yourself attracting the wrong type of clients and garnering the views of the wrong audience. revisit your content and read it as if you were your client.
Do you get all the information you need? Do you have a clear idea of what the business does? Do you create the perception that you want to create? Your identity is your starting point, yet, one of the elements that are always up for review.
2. What are you Offering?
Your customers need to know exactly what they're getting from you and what to expect. There have been countless times where we've seen a website and do not know what they're offering. You should make it a priority to plan your homepage to provide at least a general understanding of what you're offering, be it a service or product.
Product pages rely on their product to make a sale, so it will be clear what is being offered. On the other hand, service-based business' don't have something physical they can give. Many service business' are overly concerned about competition and divulging too much information, an aspect we understand being a service business ourselves.
However, consumers will rarely contact a business for missing information, they'll just move on to a competitor.
3. How to Interact with You
You'd be surprised by the number of businesses that are purposefully quiet about their location. There can be many reasons for the secrecy. Here are some of the most common:
These are the most common and we have encountered each one of these during our project meetings. The bottom line is this: contact information provides credibility.
A physical address adds further credibility and trust. If your consumer knows that you have a physical office and they can contact you if they need to, they will feel much more secure about making a purchase. Similarly, just having someone on the other end of a phone call to put their worries at bay goes a long way with business relationships.
If you are one of the examples above that have their cautions with their contact information then we recommend considering one core question:
Are your consumers going to need to contact you at any point?
If you are selling any product or service then the answer will almost always be a yes. They will need to contact you. When this is the case, it can be incredibly difficult to run a legitimate business without any point of contact.
The main workaround you could take would be to only show your email (not personal) and once you are certain that the inquiry is serious, offer them a contactable number. When dealing with both B2B and B2C you will want to have a dedicated business number or landline.
Never give out your mobile number unless you and your client are in agreements to the terms in which they can call you.
4. Why are you Unique?
As the owner, you will have a clear understanding of what your business does. The online environment is becoming increasingly more populated by the day. Chances are there are multiple other businesses' offering the same product/service.
There is a simple question you need to answer "why should customers buy from us and not them?" Focusing more on what you do that no one else does or what you do better.
5. Who is your Audience?
Are you planning your website for yourself or your customer? There is no correct answer to this question but arguably, more success comes from the latter option.
Planning and subsequently, building & maintaining a website is a long-term investment. Over the course of its lifetime who will have viewed it more, you or the customer?
During the planning phase, you should consider every idea in relation to your audience. Will it help them? would this attract the audience we need? Do they need to see this? no-one knows your audience better than you.
The above is not in order of importance. As the owner, you must make the decision of what you believe is important. When we begin planning for the changes we make, we believe these elements should be at the forefront of all website planning.
A few of these objectives can be combined into a personal brand statement. A personal brand statement answers: "What you're best at (value), who you serve (audience) and how you do it uniquely (USP)" The undercover recruiter has created a blog post that provides much more detail on the topic Here
Your opinion may differ, there are many other elements like CTA's, SSL, FAQ pages, Feedback pages, the list goes on. The importance of planning comes down to what you deem the most important. Whilst you are planning your website, it's important to understand that your planning shouldn't stop there.
There are also other key considerations you must take for the wellbeing of your business whilst your website project is underway - There's More Than Just The Website.
We've been helping companies express themselves digitally for more than 16 years.
19 St Christopher's Way
Pride Park
Derby
DE24 8JY