5 Things I Need To Know Before Designing Your Website or Digital Space
Almost every small business I speak to has their priorities wrong when it comes to building a website. Some of the last things you should take into account are design, colour, logo and other cosmetic pieces. While 94% of visitors will judge you based on this (in less than a second, by the way) – a properly built website needs to speak to the traffic coming to the website. This is never easier to do than when you’re first building the site, so in no particular order, here’s 5 things to consider.
1. What's the purpose of the website?
Often the most overlooked part of building a website, but the most absolutely crucial element. What do you want the website to do? Often this is as simple as “I want it to generate leads” – and that’s okay. However a website that’s built as a portfolio, or to solely build credibility is entirely different in spec to growing revenue directly from the web page.
Keep this in mind throughout the entire design process, and you’re on to a winner.
2. Who do you want to target with the website?
Equally as important as the first point, who do you want to target? Verbiage (a word I hate, but use regardless) is really important when it comes to who you want to target.
You want the individual on the website to really resonate with your content and feel like you understand their problem. If you don’t know who you want to target, you really can’t build a solid site that converts well.
3. Why do people pick you over your competitors?
Another often overlooked part in business. Any business school (not that I attended any) or the school of experience will teach you all about USPs (unique selling points) and that they’re why people choose to buy from you than your competitors.
This is key when building a site, you want to pick 3/4 USPs that apply to your business and continually visit them throughout the entire site. This keeps the whole site “on-brand” and reiterates why people should choose you.
4. Who are your competitors, and are they digital?
A great way to understand how to use your site digitally, is to take a look at what your competitors are doing. If 4/5 of your competitors have professionally built websites that aren’t acting as lead generator engines – it probably isn’t worth the investment on that side but is worth building for credibility and further USP positioning (in-direct web revenue vs direct web revenue is a blog post for another time).
This isn’t to say that it’s totally not worth exploring – it just gives you a good idea before the fact.
5. THEN we consider the actual design!
Once we know all of the above – it’s time to push the actual design elements and build the site to brand colours, using logos and lead capture forms. This is the number one factor in people trusting your website as mentioned above, but it’s also really important to get the first 4 steps right sot that this step becomes half the battle.