In order to design and create successful websites, we follow a model that, over the years, we have found to be highly effective. It means exploring some important questions with you, so that we fully understand your business as well as the type of clients you work with before we commence any detailed design work. We believe these are important and necessary steps for you to secure a good ROI on your new website.
Websites promote you 24/7: No employee will do that. – Paul Cookson
Your business and your objectives for your website
As a first stage, we make sure we have thoroughly understood your business and its goals. In conjunction with this, we need to know the objectives you have in mind for your website. These may include some of the following:
- Generate sales
- Generate leads
- Get website visitors to sign up to your newsletter
- Provide information
It is useful if we can quantify these objectives as far as possible, so that we can measure the ROI once the new website has been in place for a period of time.
Website research – Your target customers
In the second stage, we develop our understanding of your target customers. We are particularly keen on the value of developing model personas (fictional character profiles) for each segment of your target market. These personas are detailed specifications of each segment, with information on those customers’ typical job/background, their priorities, what they are influenced by, etc. Using these personas helps us in several ways:
- Get into the mindset of your potential clients, and in particular what they are looking for from your website and the questions they want answered – and what therefore your website needs to provide.
- Prepare the right design for your new website, so visitors take the action you want them to – be it to contact you, sign up to an e-newsletter, download a form, etc.
- Generate topics for your blog and social media programme, to correctly match visitors’ interests and priorities.
- Valuable for exploring other potential market segments.
Next, we will work with you on a detailed investigation of your existing website. The research will examine the website’s strengths and weaknesses, and how the latter need to be addressed. And we will use Google analytics data to get a fuller understanding of your website visitors and their behaviour.
Finally, we also examine your competitors’ websites – so that we can develop insight into your marketplace, and the competition you face. And of course we can learn from ways they engage with their customers.
Once we have done all this, and therefore have a greater understanding of your clients and prospects, we are in a much better position to proceed to the website design stage.
Moving forward
We emphasise the value of going through these preliminary stages. Indeed, our experience of building effective websites is that clients greatly appreciate such a thorough approach – as well as gaining value from the process themselves.
Only by going into this level of detail can we ensure that your new website genuinely appeals to the sort of customers you want to attract, and hence achieves your objectives.
