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How Should You Design and Build Your First Site

How Should You Design and Build Your First Site

April 26th, 2021

Thanks to globalization and digitization, people now have more access to information as well as to several products and services. With that, it is crucial for business owners like you to have an online presence so that your potential customer can easily locate you.

One of the surefire ways to establish and maintain an online presence is to have your own website. By simply having your own site, you can increase engagement and awareness for your brand. This would even give you a competitive edge over your competitors.

That being said, we have listed a few tips to help you get your website up and running in no time.

Set your goals

As with any plans and strategies, you need to have a clear picture of what you want to achieve with your website. Do you want customers to purchase products directly from your website or do you just want to have a website so that customers can get to know you even better so that they can easily locate your physical store? It is only after you set your objective that you can start coming up with your website design.

Once you lay down and set your goals clearly, you need to come up with an action plan on how you plan to achieve these in the short run and the long run.

Setting your goals and formulating an action goes hand in hand because it would give you a realistic assessment of how long your timeline for each task should be. Even though this might seem like a lot of work for someone like you who is just starting and figuring out the design for your first website, these initial steps are important because they would guide you along the process of creating the best website for your business.

Identify your audience

A good business owner should know who their customers or audience are, as well as their likes, dislikes, age group, preference, mode of communication, and so on. This way, you would be able to tailor-fit your website design for your viewers.

For example, if your customers mainly rely on your website for product information and customer service, then you should really consider adding an email subscribe forms to your website. By doing this, you can generate more leads and you can easily update your existing customers if you have new products or services.

Identifying your audience also allows you to know the latest trends as well as what your competitors are up to. Once you know all of these, you would be able to come up with a design that works well with your business and marketing strategy. You would know which elements, forms, and plugins would work well with your website.

Create a timeframe

Given that it is your first website, you should manage your time more effectively so that you can launch your website on schedule without any delays. This would help keep you and your website developers informed and aligned at every stage of the project.

Creating a timeline does not only help organize work that needs to be done, but it also helps keep track of you and your team’s deliverables. On top of that, it increases work efficiency because you and your team now have a schedule or deadline to follow.

Once you have a rough estimate of how long it takes before the launching of your website, you can adjust your timeline accordingly and buy some time for other aspects that are also important to your business.

Try using an already-made template

Since not everyone is an expert in website building, try looking for alternatives or simpler ways to create a website. While building from scratch is a great idea, it is worth noting that there are a few websites that offer ready-made website templates.

If you are still at the onset of your business and you still do not have enough funding to build a website from scratch, then we highly encourage you to check out WordPress hosting or hire a website builder online. It would help you kickstart and build your first site.

Learn the basics of coding

Nowadays, almost everyone knows a coding language or two. In fact, even coding for kids is starting to gain traction and it is even becoming part of the current school curriculum.

That being said, we highly recommend you to learn even the basics of coding. This way, you would be able to better communicate with your website development team. You do not have to learn and be fluent with coding or programming languages, you just need to understand the basics so that you can relay your ideas, suggestions, or comments to your developers.

Conclusion

All in all, designing and building your website is not just about figuring out the aesthetics and what it would look like. You also need to figure out your goals, audience, timeframe, how you would create the website, and how you would communicate your ideas with your development team.

This would not only allow you to create a visually appealing website but would also allow you to create an effective website that can hopefully transform leads into paying customers.