An In-Depth Guide to Creating
a Website From Scratch
Creating a website from scratch is a great deal of hard work. You need to make sure you cover a variety of aspects so that it reaches its full potential. You not only need to wow your audience with the design, but with the way it works also. Not to mention your product or service. This in-depth guide will give you some valuable information on starting your website from scratch. Remember, the first version of your site doesn’t need to be 100% perfect. You can tweak it and change it as you go and see how people are responding to you. Eventually, you’ll have a website you’re really happy with. Just make sure you keep up with changes in your industry. You might need to makeover your site more often than you think to make it successful.
Know What Your Audience Wants
Before you build your site, you should have a good idea of what your audience really wants. This way you can try to tailor the site to them in the design, colors, language, and everything else that you need to consider. After all, you’re trying to sell to them before anyone else. You can’t please everyone, so start with your target audience. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what they’d like to see. You could even survey them to get a few answers to your questions before you begin. If you’re aiming your website at parents of young children, you’re going to want to make the site very child friendly too. If you’re aiming it at elderly people, making sure everything is easy to read and see may be important. Knowing your audience is the key to making your site a success.
Research Your Competitors
Knowing what your competitors are up to is a must as well. You want to make sure that you’re not flagging behind when it comes to what you’re doing. If possible, you also want to think of a way you can do whatever it is better than them. Make sure you do plenty of research so you’re well clued up on what’s going on in the industry. Remember, it’s not about imitating your competitors. You want to be the best version of your business you can possibly be. Knowing what they are doing will help you, but ultimately you need to focus on your individual business and how you can change the game.
Outline The Goals Of Your Site
Another task before you begin building your site: Outline your main goals. When you know your goals, you can build with them in mind and your site is bound to make more of an impact. Do you want people to listen to the songs you’ve been creating? Do you want to sell your product? Maybe you want to raise awareness for a cause you care about. Whatever they are, make sure you define them so you can begin creating the site to meet those goals.
Create A Detailed Site Map To Help You
One of the most important aspects of your website is the site map. The site map outlines how your site is going to work. What headings, subheadings, and pages you’ll have. Plus, the content that will be on those pages. Try sketching out your own detailed site map, with all of the pages you want and all of the smaller pages that will be on there. This will give you a better idea of how your site will work when it’s up and running, and help you to smooth out any flaws in your ideas.
Come Up With The Design And Style
When you know what your goals are and how you want the site map to look, you can come up with the design and style of your site. The design and style are very important, as they will reflect what you’re about as a brand. Your design and style should speak to your customers, and show off your brand personality. Many companies are opting for a more ‘minimalistic’ approach to web design these days, but that part is completely up to you. In general, you don’t want your design to be too busy or distracting.
Work Out How You’ll Use Images
Imaging is a very important part of any web design. You need to work out how you’ll use images for your site, and whether you’ll take them yourself. Will your site be heavy on images, or not? Usually, people tend to be more interested in sites that break up text with nice imagery. All of the images you use should be of the highest quality.
Coming Up With Content
Coming up with content for your site before you start the important task of building it could be a good idea. Try to come up with not only your longer paragraphs, but also the topics you plan on writing for your call to action buttons and so on. This will help you to see how your site is coming together. Nothing is set in stone; you’ll be able to change this as you go along. It’ll just give you a better idea of how your site is turning out as you put it together.
Marketing
It isn’t enough to build a great looking site and hope that people find it. If you do that, you can expect little to no results from your efforts. You must focus on marketing your site also. You can do this by looking at PPC, SEO and other types of online marketing to spread the word of your site. By looking at an SEO audit checklist, you’ll be able to make sure your site has everything it needs to be found in the search engines.
Finding Companies To Help You
Sometimes you can build a site by yourself providing you do the research. You might need to use templates, and it might take you a long time to produce anything of quality. This is why most people find reputable companies to help them build their website. You can find web designers, but it’s important they know how to make the backend of your site work too. As mentioned earlier, a site doesn’t help you if it isn’t showing up in the search engines. Do your research on reputable companies to give you a hand, and chat with them about your needs. Make sure they don’t try to dazzle you with fancy lingo. They should be upfront with you about what you can expect to achieve with them.
Having A Responsive Site
A responsive site is a website that shows up on just about any web browser or platform. Having a site like this is a must have today, as many people use different devices to browse the web. More and more people are using mobile devices to browse, so if your site isn’t fitting their screen like it should, you could be losing traffic. It’ll take more time to build a responsive site, but it will be worth it. At the very least, you should create a mobile version of your site with just the most important information included. You’ll need to condense it as much as you can to make it fit.
Split Testing
Sometimes, you just can’t know how well your site is doing without split testing. Split testing allows you to send one version of your site out to one group of people, and another version out to another group of people. You can then see which version received the better results and make changes accordingly. The key is to only change one small item at a time so you don’t confuse yourself, and you know what you need to do when changing your site. It might be something simple like the position of the call to action, or the font that’s used. Maybe even the size of the font, or the color of your buttons. There are many aspects that can change how well you do. Split testing is an ongoing process, not just something you do once. Try it and you might be able to make some amazing changes to your site.
Building your website isn’t something that will take you a few hours to complete if you really care about it. You could knock up any old site in that amount of time, but you want this one to really work for you. If you want this site to help you to achieve your goals, then you must take your time and use the tips in this guide. If you’re completely new to it all, one of the best things you can do is take your time when researching what it is you need to do. The more you know about building a site, your industry, your competitors, the better prepared you’ll be. Do you have any tips of your own you’d like to share? Leave a comment below.
