Website Design & Development is still quite a new industry and is constantly re-inventing itself and this process will probably continue as long as the internet is around. There is quite an intense process one needs to go through before any development is done. This process starts with an idea that an internet website is needed, there must be a clear purpose and goal and a well marked out road to reach it.
Here are a few important points to remember while going through the process of setting up and being part of your new website project:
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Is the short & long term goal of your website and website design the same? If not, then you need to keep this in mind during the design phase so you do not outgrow it, but that your website can keep growing with you and your business/service that you are offering.
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Do you know your market, who are your clients? If your client base & services are very wide then it gets very difficult to focus the website and your bounce rate will increase. The bounce rate is a measurement of the percentage of clients visiting the website leaving after a few seconds due to many factors. The reasons users leave a website soon after reaching it are many. They vary from things such as the website design, the colour of the site, to the page loading speed, to the products/services offered are not what is required and many more.
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Having an understanding of who your clients are or who is going to benefit will point you in the right direction on the look & feel, website design and a host of other requirements.
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Always try look through your clients eyes. What colour will work for your clients, your product , the internet, then comes your own colour preference. Colour is important from both a practical perspective and the emotion/atmosphere it creates within us, and this differs from culture to culture ... so back to the question ... do you know your market?
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How is your site going to be found? Are you happy with a site that is a simple static brochure that is linked to your business card, then it's a simple open and close website design and development .. or is it? I would love to see some stats. on websites versus the spread of traffic, I am pretty sure these stats. if available will fall within the 80/20 rule, like so many other things in life. 20% of most websites get 80% of the traffic, and now with facebook getting 33% of all internet traffic (June 2010). The point is most websites get very little to no traffic at all. The website design needs to incorporate what search engines are looking for. The ever popular SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
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SEO, if this is a term you have just heard about for the 1st time, then you have a lot of catching up to do, but relax, there are specialists that can help you, yes at a cost, another of the many industries that have mushroomed in recent times as the top search engines place their stamp on what they require in a website.
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So what is the most important factor to remember when setting up one or more websites? Well, in my opinion it's all about content, in fact CONTENT IS KING. Google loves fresh, new, none duplicated content. I would even go so far as to say, forget the fancy designs, the flashy flash, moving stuff, and keep it simple, balanced with some graphics, less is more, and lots of juicy content.
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So as you can see there are two major aspects to website marketing: 1) getting the right traffic to your website and 2) keeping them interested so they will come back again and tell others about it. And this is where things start coming together.
- If people like your site, find the information relevant, good & current, then they will tell others and even Blog about your site, and this is what you want, then the Wheel of back links start happening, and it SHOULD happen organically, ie it should happen because of your great content not by link swopping or other artificial means.
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