Process To Design Website
Process To Design Website
Creating a new website redesigning or modifying an existing website or updating your website can be broken down into four major steps. The four steps are:
Step 1 Planning
Step 2 Implementation
Step 3 Site Promotion and
Step 4 Maintenance
Step 1 Planning
This step mainly involves you the customer. You have numerous questions to answer and information to gather in this phase.
1. Every website must have a goal or purpose. Define the goal of your website.
2. What is your target audience what do they want and what will make them return to your website. What ways can be used to bring in new visitors and have visitors return.
3. Define your website content. What information and sections will your website need.
4. What is your budget. You will need to include the following:
o Cost to initially implement the website
o Cost to maintain the website
o Yearly domain name registration cost
o Yearly web hosting costs
o Yearly Internet connection costs
5. Do your research. Visit as many websites as you can particularly ones of competitors or sites that are doing or have similar products to yours. Make notes of what content they include that you think you need what you like about their site what you dislike about their site. Pay attention to color schemes layouts navigation content presentation and note what you like and dislike and why.
6. Get organized:
o make an outline for the website with notes
o make a list of online competitors and/or similiar websites to yours
o gather a hard copy of promotional materials you currently have including brochures business card photographs catalogues company logo written materials etc.
o gather a digital copy of promotional materials such as text files digitized company logos images photographs etc.
o list any questions that you still have and need answers to
Step 2 Implementation
This is the phase that your web design company becomes involved.
1. Using the information that you have gathered in step 1 the sitemap for the website is designed along with the layout for the pages. Using what you liked and disliked about other websites the page layout the look amp; feel for the website and the site navigation is designed.
2. A few pages are built with the designed layout and using our Website Guidelines.
3. These pages are uploaded to a test website for you to evaluate and provide feedback. Your feedback is used to go back and make changes and steps 1 to 3 are repeated until you are satisfied with the website layout look amp; feel and site navigation.
4. Using the text that you provide the rest of the website pages are implemented.
5. Pages are uploaded to the test website for evaluation and feedback.
6. Changes are made based on the feedback and steps 4 through 6 are repeated until you are satisfied with the website and give final approval.
7. The website is uploaded to your web server ready to go live.
Step 3 Site Promotion
This is a very important part of any website design. Without website promotion you will not have any traffic to your website. Here are ways to promote your website:
1. Submit your website to major search engines.
2. Add your website and email address to all your promotional materials correspondence and advertising.
3. Send announcements or initiate other advertising of your website.
4. Use other ideas to bring visitors to your site such as promotions contests joke of the day etc.
Step 4 Maintenance
1. Keep your information on your site uptodate and provide new information as it comes available. Websites need to have fresh content in order to entice visitors to return. Remember that your visitor is only one click away from leaving your site so what is going to make him stay on your website.
2. Have reasons for new visitors to visit your website.
3. Continue to check search engine rankings and make changes to pages that are not ranking well anymore.
4. Continue to actively promote your website.
About the writer: Pallavi is an executive of Wensil i technologies.
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