Three parts to designing a successful website
There are a few things you may not know or may not have thought about when you want to design a website. How your website looks is usually a big deal, but there are other far more important matters like content, and does it get your message across so your users are inspired to use your services. While there is a lot of detail in between each process, designing a good useable website can be broken down into three major pieces: Look & Feel, Content Content Content and Marketing.
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Create a graphic website design
This can involve the design of your logo, and decides how your business's online brand will look and feel. This is an important stage of establishing a successful identity on the web. Next the design of the web site is created to complement your brand and be appealing to you and your customers. The graphic part of your web site's design will usually identify how your content will be displayed in your finished live site.
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Layout and code your website, add your content
This is where your design gets implemented into a format, namely [X]HTML, that can then be downloaded with a web browser and displayed on screen.
At this stage, your website pages are created and your content is added. We prefer only the most modern and finest quality techniques to build a hand crafted website. This is important to get good natural search results showing in the best search engines.
If you have a lot of changing content you wish to publish, there are some very strong concepts and methods for handling your website management.
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Market and share the website
One often overlooked, but an extremely key aspect, is marketing. Getting your pages indexed in Google is one thing, but there are many other ways to maximise your website earnings, visitors and popuarity. There are some simple concepts, like making sure you use your website's address on important day-to-day things like documents, letter heads and business cards. There are many other opportunities to push your site to the public, like sponsoring community or online events, sign writing on your company car and free give-aways and promotions. You can go even further with paid advertising, banner ads or pay-per-click advertising to really get targeted traffic to your site.
Content is King!
With many supporting techniques available to promote your site and increase your website revenue, there is still one huge and compelling factor to creating successful websites: Content.
When preparing content for your website, you should think about what your prospective customers or users will want to find: A map to your offices, contact details, and of course the information about your services and/or products. That's all standard isn't it? But what about the information that compels your users to buy from you and instils trust in your brand and your business?
The best natural search results come from your content. It's only natural that you start receiving more visitors to your web site if your website has the information they are looking for. Be honest and informative with your content and more users will find you.
If you don't know how to make your website into and information gold mine that your users will love, why not think about some of the following:
- Write articles about what your company does and what you can achieve. You don't have to always put on The Big Sell to your readers, and you could always sponsor and endorse your own articles.
- Publish recipies, hints and tips, how-to articles and tutorials that help your customers.
- Take the time to publish a case study or two on what makes your organisation successful and what it has achieved.
- Get your company's news, events and press releases online.
- Start writing a blog that puts your goals, ideas and plans on the web. Write about your company successes and business events, and get your staff involved.
For more insight into choosing the right web design company, read one of our key articles, questions and opinions you should ask your web design partner before deciding to build a website.
Articles on website design
- Read our latest web design guide, questions and opinions you should ask of your web designers before you decide to build a website.
- Why choose Singular for your website design?
