a Checklist to Build a Website

The importance of having a website, if you own a business of any type, is nothing to doubt about these days. Having a professional website not only helps you to increase the number of your loyal customers and grow your business, but creates credibility for your business. In other words, the most important advantage of having a website is trust and credibility. Therefore, if a business doesn’t have a professional website, no trust and credibility should be expected! However, having a website is necessary but not sufficient for a business to grow as the quality of the website is even more important. 

Even though the quality of a website covers a wide range of different subjects, we, through this article, will outline the basic elements that should be considered, when planning to build your own website.

Basic Web Design Checklist

• Register your domain name

As the first step, you must register the domain name for your website. Preferably, the domain name should be your business name, however if it is taken already, you can add some other simple elements such as your location to the domain name. Also, as for DotCom, the most respectable is .com and .org, if available to register for your business. You must choose the right name for your domain as it will play a crucial role for your business to grow organically. 

• Understand and Define your goals clearly

Even though you have a final goal in your mind when deciding to build your own website, there are some smaller goals that will shape your final goal. For example, assume that you are intending to build an informational website to provide information on a specific subject and make money through Ads, when you have an appropriate number of users visiting your website on a daily basis. In this case, you must think of your sources to get relevant information on a daily basis. On top of that, you must design your website in a way that the Ads that will be on your website in the future, don’t bother your visitors. Hence, you must have your goals clearly on your mind and know where exactly you will be standing in a year’s time for instance.

• Plan for the required Features on your website

According to the nature of your website, your audiences and your goal, your website needs some features. It is important to analyse the needed features for your website, as not having the necessary features and in contrast, having unnecessary features on your website, will either reduce your visitors or cost you extra time and money that is not needed at all! You can read “Corporate Website Features” and “Ecommerce Website Features” to find out more.

• Decide on your CMS

WordPress works very well as a CMS for most websites. However, for some other type of websites, a dedicated CMS should be designed and applied. Therefore, you must choose a CMS that suits your needs, before starting to develop and build your own website.

• Choose the Visual Elements

Fonts, colouring, templates, wireframing, prototype, logo and some other visual elements also need to be chosen, before going through the design and developing process. These elements also play an important role in attracting more users on your website and consequently growing your business. You can find more by reading the “UI/UX” article.

• Marketing Strategy

Based on the nature of your business, you must have a proper marketing strategy in place, when you start to create your website. Given the fact that doing business online is very competitive these days, the importance of a professional marketing strategy becomes bolder. Creating appropriate and relevant contents, choosing strategic keywords, online Ads, etc. are all a part of your marketing strategy which needs to be put together professionally and precisely before building your website. Search Engine Optimisation is also recommended as a part of your marketing strategy. 

• Set up your privacy and security policies and regulations

In terms of your credibility and trustworthiness, you must disclose how you protect data and user’s information as well as the security of your website. You must set up your SSL certificate and also comply with rules and regulations in terms of privacy and security. 

• Choose a professional web design and digital marketing service provider

Here is the most important part of your journey to build your website. Choosing an appropriate web design company to work with, is absolutely important, as all steps mentioned above, if not executed by a professional and experienced team are worthless.  

Final Words

Building a website for your business costs you time and money. Therefore, you must be very careful to do it properly. On top of having your checklist ready and considering all important elements to be on your checklist, having an experienced, professional and reputable team of designers to implement your website is even more important. We would like to highly recommend not being tempted by low cost offers coming from freelancers and unknown or unregistered companies as in most cases, you will end up with spending more money to redo the whole job! Look for registered web design companies who have a proven track record of delivering quality websites to multiple clients, so you can rest assured that you will have a quality website that suits your needs best.