The 7 essential steps to creating your small business website
our handy guide to the mysteries of the website creation process
You need a website for your great idea or simply to give your small business an online storefront, you’ve found an agency you are happy with and you feel you can work with, but what comes next?
The website development process is obviously a bit of a mystery to most small business owners - it isn’t your area of expertise so why should you know?
Well, as with anything else in your small business, it is important you have a grasp of what to expect from your web developer, what your web developer should expect from you, and how to successfully navigate the development process so the final result will be exactly what you set out to achieve, and more.
Step 1 - Define your Goals
There are literally millions of websites which simply exist without any reason for doing so. Some of them are awesome in their simplicity and artistic merit and give viewers a lot of pleasure, some are not and don’t.
Existing for the sake of art or pleasure isn’t a luxury most small businesses have, and therefore it is vital that your new website has a clearly defined and valid reason for being. Without a definition of the ultimate goals of your website - commonly to increase turnover, efficiency, market visibility and your customer base, both numerically and geographically - your web developer may not be aware of your absolute intentions and could develop a website that while technically and visually excellent, does not do what it was oiginally intended to.
Write a couple of concise sentences describing exactly what you would like your new website to achieve, and discuss your intentions with your developer, who should be able to throw a few more ideas your way, and give you more solutions and ideas to ensure your website is a success and your goals are met.
Step 2 - Architecture & Sitemap
Once your goals are documented, you will need to work with your developer who will design your site architecture, which can be described as-
- The structure and type of content you will be delivering
How much textual, photographic, video, audio, pdf content will you be offering to your visitors?
Will the website allow for interaction via a forum, a blog or users uploading images?
How often, and by whom, will the website content be updated? - The navigation style and flow
Who is your target demographic, and how would they expect to navigate your website? - user’s don’t like navigational surprises!
Can you group related content in logical categories?
Can the website’s proposed content be defined in a clearly heirarchical structure - Sections or Categories, Sub-sections or Sub-categories, and Pages - or does a blog style website suit your business better - where any page or “Post” can be linked to many different categories of information?
Do you see the number of sections in your website increasing in the future as you add more content?
How do you want your website to be searched? - The website functionality
Is the website going to sell goods or services online?
Will there be FAQs, a knowledge base, a comments or forum section?
Do you want to link your website to any of your existing business management tools, for example an inventory management system, accounting system, or maybe a shared google calendar?
Are you planning on updating your website visitors via an e-newsletter?
What extended functionality do you need to develop alongside your website, for example a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, event booking or ticketing system, or any of your common business management tasks that could be performed online?
Your web developer should ask you all of the above questions, and talk you through anything you don’t understand. They should also give you options and ideas of functionality and structure you may not have thought about, that will help your website reach its goals.
At the conclusion of Step 2, your developer should also provide you with a functional and technical specification document, that will define all the processes and data flows contained within your website, and ensure the development team know exactly what is required during the build process. The content of this document may well be highly technical in nature, but a good agency will be able to describe to you in plain english these technical concepts.
If you feel any functionality is missing, you MUST raise this with your developer, as once you have signed off on the architecture, sitemap and technical spec. document, additional functionality may well not be included in the cost of development, or may not fit in with the developed architecture - this is akin to realising you needed an elevator from your garage to your loungeroom in your brand-new, multi-million dollar house after the final coat of paint has dried!
Step 3 - Wireframes & Palettes
Things are getting exciting now with the visual development of your website.
If you are unsure as to why your designer has laid your website out a particular way, make sure you communicate this with them at this stage. They should be able to give you plenty of reasons why the wireframe they have proposed fits your website structure and requirements, and if you still feel uneasy and would like to make changes to the layout, this is most definitely the step in which to make those changes. Layout changes further into the development process have the potential of costing you much more.
The palette should give you an idea of how much of each particular colour is going to be used, and possibly what fonts they recommend - if you have strong feelings against a particular colour, make sure you tell your designer! While some colour changes are easily done later on in the development process, some are not, so raising your objections now could also save you some money down the track.
Step 4 - Design
Your website starts to really take shape.
Your designer should also recommend the core fonts used for the website, and the detailed concepts will also show the relationship between the fonts, the sizes, whitespace areas and interface elements.
The design concepts that are developed in Step 4 are usually flat images in jpeg format, created using an application such as Photoshop, or Fireworks, so while you will get to see your website design taking shape, you will need to bear in mind that at this stage nothing is “active” or “clickable”, which sometimes causes a design to take on a slight lack of depth, and often causes confusion from clients who expect underlined links or navigation items to do something when clicked or rolled over.
Unless you have already provided some content to your developer, the design concepts will often contain large or small areas of nonsense text, sometimes in the form of gibberish latin or “Lorum Ipsum”. This allows a more realistic view of the final design, without unrelated “real” words detracting from the most important feature of this step, the visual appeal.
At this stage, however, your navigation items should contain the actual text for the final website, as documented in your sitemap and your wireframes.
Most agencies will include in the overall cost of your project, a number of “rounds” of design changes, usually two, during which you have the opportunity to request design tweaks. After the initial concepts are delivered to you, make a note of the areas or items of concern and talk them through, face to face if possible, with your designer. It often helps to print off the designs and make notes directly on the printouts, making copies for everyone’s records.
Major layout revisions should have been raised during the Wireframe & Palette stage, and could cost you extra later in the project timeline, so ensure you are completely happy at every step before signing off.
Step 5 - Templates
Once you have signed off on the final design of your new website, your designer will create a series of templates, through which your content will eventually be delivered.
A single web page consists of many different files: some containing html code, some textual content, usually some image files - both graphic and photographic, and also what are known as Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS files. These files are responsible for defining how your page elements look - for example the colour of your links; how your page is laid out - for example the number and size of any columns; and crucially, they allow for the separation of content and design, an essential philosophy of best practice web design.
It is at this stage that your CSS files are developed, and your website layout can finally be viewed within the context of a browser.
Step 6 - The Build
While your role in the actual website build is limited, you should still have an idea on what is happening behind the scenes, and what you can expect at the end of this step.
Firstly, your developer will work directly from the technical specification document to build the file and folder structure of your website, and if required, the database structure.
Your developer will probably be building your website on what is often referred to as a development server, or testing server, and if that server is connected to the internet, may allow to you view the development as it progresses. Don’t be alarmed if while you are viewing the website on this server, things appear broken, or you see a variety of confusing error messages, or the template simply doesn’t look like the one you approved - this is completely normal!
For Content Managed websites, the build process includes the installation, integration and customisation of the chosen Content Management System, or alternatively the development of the custom CMS.
It is a very good idea to have written and sent to your developer, at least a minimum amount of real content with which to start populating the website at this stage. The build process for content managed websites is generally much easier when there is an amount of real content that can be used for testing purposes.
Towards the end of the build process, the website’s functionality and design will finally come together and you’ll be ready to tackle the final step before sending your website live.
Step 7 - Testing, Testing, Testing
You’re almost there, with one of the most important steps to go.
It is absolutely essential that your new website goes through a well documented and structured testing process, carried out not only by your developer, but also by yourself. The more complex the functionality, the more extensive this testing regime should be.
Initially - and this goes for even the most basic of websites - your website should be put through a rigorous browser testing program, where it’s design is viewed and its functionality tested on a variety of different browsers, using a variety of different operating systems. This ensures that your lovingly created design is displayed as intended for anyone viewing your website.
For websites with more complex functionality, every feature should also be thoroughly tested on a variety of browsers, and if possible, by a variety of users - different users will often find different flaws.
To assist your developer, make sure that any errors you find are documented, if possible with a screenshot of the error, and with a description of what you were doing when you encountered it. It is simply not possible for a developer to accurately debug a website without knowing exactly what errors were encountered, where and how, so go into as much detail as you can - simply saying “it doesn’t work” will not only annoy your lovely developer, but also add much precious time to the testing phase.
It is also during this stage, that your carefully written and search engine optimised content needs to be added via the Content Management System, if your website has been developed to use one. For non-content managed sites, the content should already be in place.
Once you have finished testing and populating the site, it will be ready to be sent live with a “soft launch” - meaning while the site will be live, no promotion or active search engine marketing will be done. During this period you and your developer can iron out any additional small errors or make any small content changes.
What happens next?
This is generally entirely down to the effectiveness of your website promotion. Without an effective search engine and online marketing plan, it is very likely that you’ll need to wait months for your traffic to naturally increase to such a level as to start bringing in the dollars.
Many things you can do are free:
- get your website listed in well regarded industry directories
- ensure all your friends, business associates, family members and their friends and business associates know your spanking new website is now live
- use social networking tools such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Del.icio.us to get your address out there
- contact your local newspaper and see if they are willing to write a short artical about your business launch
- submit industry related articles to popular websites to show you are an expert in your field
Other things will cost you money, but the return on investment can be great, and rapid:
- Launch a series of Google Adwords campaigns and sponsor a small set of specific keywords
- Place print advertisements in industry magazines
- Setup a regular email marketing campaign that keeps not only your clients informed of industry related news and updates to your website, but allows them to refer you to their friends quickly and easily.
- If you are selling goods or services via an online shop, setup an affiliate program and let others do the marketing for you for a small commission
Most importantly of all however, your website should remain up to date, informative and easy to navigate, increasing your chances of repeat business, and therefore raising the potential life-time income of each of your customers.
If you can turn your customers into your advocates by providing excellent online, and offline service, your marketing costs will shrink, while your sales will go through the roof!
For more information regarding these 7 steps, or to find out how findshorty can help you with your website development project, why not send us a note using our short contact form.
cforms contact form by delicious:days
page tags
wild::spirit
Manuro Shores
