I have always loved the idea of building websites but the process can seem very intimidating because there are a lot of moving parts and sometimes you just don't know where to start. So the goal of this article is to give you a process to follow when creating websites for yourself or your clients. 

The key is to not get overwhelmed with all of the moving parts. There’s coding, graphic design, content creation, user experience (UX), search engine optimization (SEO)…the list goes on. The best way I have found not to get overwhelmed by all of these things is to make sure I start with the plan. 

When I got my first web design client I didn’t know where to start. I had a lot of ideas on what I thought the website should look like at the time but I wanted to make sure that the client felt involved at every step of the process. So the first thing I did was send her a list of steps I will be taking to complete the website. At the time it was the “7 simple steps to the web design process” Webflow has on their website. I didn’t have a process of my own so I used theirs. 

To be honest, I still do not think I have a solid process of my own and that is why I am writing this article. To try to put some a method behind the madness. 

The planning and strategy phase is essential and is just about the only thing that can help me stay on schedule when building websites for clients. 

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Researching Your Target Market

When searching for what to include in the planning and strategy phase of building a website, “Research Target Market” came up a lot. Going to let you know right now, that I have never included this step. Mainly because it has research in it and I am a designer, so research sounds very boring. I also haven’t had a client that would truly care about seeing where they match up next to their competitors, they just want something that looks better than what they have now, and they want it as soon as possible. But, As boring as this section is, I do understand the importance of it. 

But for everyone who wants to do this thing the right way, before you start planning and developing your website, it’s important to have an understanding of who your target market is. This will allow you to tailor the design and content of your website to meet their needs. 

Start by researching the demographics of your target market (age, gender, location, etc.) as well as their interests and pain points. Understanding this information will help you create a website that is more likely to connect with your target audience and drive conversions. The more your audience connects with your site the more likely they will engage with your content and with your business. 

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Crafting Your Brand Identity

If you are looking to build a website, you more than likely already have a Brand. Your website should be an extension of your brand identity, and you want to make sure your site fits well with it. 

Some obvious things to consider are, selecting colors, fonts, images, and other design elements that align with the look and feel of your brand. Brand Identity is kind of a buzz word and it is used a lot. A Brand Identity can get very complicated and some brands are picky about not wanting to put stuff out into the world if it doesn’t match their brand identity. I can not explain what brand identity is in this article but a very simple way of putting it is consistently creating assets for the company/brand and making sure that everything looks like it is from the same company. Reusing the elements from earlier, brand colors, fonts, and other elements helps make things look like they are all from the same company. 

I am not a brand designer so I do not create brand identities. I do use brand guidelines to make sure whatever it is that I am creating stays “On Brand” or “Looks like it is from the same company”. 

Additionally, make sure to develop a consistent “tone of voice” for your website – the way you communicate with users should be consistent throughout the entire site. The tone of voice is a job for a copywriter. So you can either assign this task to the client or outsource it to a freelance writer. 

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Crafting an SEO-Friendly Content Marketing Plan

I think that Search engine optimization (SEO) should be a major focus of any website planning and strategy. I believe even more that if the client doesn’t have the time and budget to focus on this section neither should you. SEO is a complicated topic that takes time to get right. I have been asked multiple times if I can build a website that can rank on Google. I know that this is the reason why I lose a lot of work but I tell them I can not because I can't. I have never created a website that has been placed on the first page of Google for any search query or keyword. But I hope to change that with this website in 24-36 months. 

If my SEO content plan works out I will create a recap of exactly what I did and what the results were. But with all realistic SEO plans this involves creating content that is optimized for specific keywords related to your industry, my industry being graphic design. I am also using relevant meta tags meta descriptions, and other technical things to make it easier for Google Bots to Crawl my website. 

The SEO content calendar should be created and used as an outline of how often you should produce content and what keywords each piece of content should include. I forgot about keyword research, very important, do not forget to do your keyword research. 

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Creating a Mobile-Friendly Design

It is a fact, that more and more users are accessing websites from their smartphones, so you need to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. I am not enteirely sure if this is still a thing but, a while back mobile-first design was really popular, and it probably still is. I do not like to take a mobile-first approach. Mainly because my web builder of choice, Webflow, isn’t set up for mobile-first design.

In webflow, you have to design for the larger breakpoint (Desktop) and then work your way down to Tablet and then mobile. Going from Desktop to Mobile is kind of a Subtractive process, removing elements from your design to fit the smaller phone size. Also, I just generally find Desktop size more fun to design. It is a bigger canvas and gives more space to design unique layouts. 

So I will eventually make it mobile-friendly but the desktop version is the priority in my process.

 

Testing and Refining Your Website

The testing phase is when you test out each page to make sure, the design looks good and all of the links work. It is important to do this on as many different devices and web browsers as you can. Some web builders allow you to preview your site in the editor to make it look like it is on the internet. Sometimes that preview is different from what it looks like and functions when it is hosted online, so make sure you publish it to see what it looks like. 

When you publish a site the world can see it, and you might not want it to be seen when you are in this testing phase. If that is the case, you can do one of two things. First, you can put a temporary password protection on your site (if your web browser allows it). Second, you can create a staging domain to host your site. A standing domain is a complicated domain name that no one will be able to get to unless you send them the link. Check out this article from WooCommerce that covers Staging Sites.

Finally, once everything is working properly, you can launch your website and remove the password and or the staging site. It may be a good idea to keep the staging site to continue to test updates to your site before you publish it to the live domain. 

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Evaluating Your Website’s Performance

After your site has been up for a while and you have been updating it and adding content regularly, you need to see if all of your hard work is doing anything. This is where the fancy term KPI comes into play. KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. Pick a few metrics or categories to track so you know that your site is growing and making progress. If you are paying someone to manage and grow your site, make sure you are using KPIs to track the progress that is being made. Without these KPIs, you do not know if what you are paying them to do is working and in some cases, they may not be doing anything to your site at all and still getting paid from you. So, don’t get scammed, Pick KPIs and make sure you are seeing progress. 

I highly recommend looking at all of the different types of metrics you can track for your website. You do not have to track them all, but you should pick a couple that will help you reach your overall goal. I found this article from The Hartford where they go over some of the metrics you could track and give a little details for each.

Page views and Keyword Rankings are two of the metrics I am currently tracking. I picked these two metrics because my overall goal is to drive organic traffic to a website (get more page views), and I think ranking for keywords will help me do that. Once I get more traffic to my site I will probably look at bounce rates and try to keep people on my page longer. 

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Start Planning!

If you are the type of person that skips to the end to find the answer, here it is. YES! Planning and Strategizing for your website is a very important step when developing a website. So make sure you don’t skip any of these steps! I hope this was helpful. 

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