What is the process of designing a custom business website
What are the steps to take to design a small business website? Is it an easy or difficult process to create a web page?
Many will tell you that creating a website for your emerging or already established business is easy. Even today, you can build it on some free platforms like we previously talked on the blog.
The problem with these platforms is that they have too many limitations. To start off, you don’t own the platform, so your website isn’t truly yours. You will also encounter more problems with SEO positioning and UX with a prebuilt website editor rather than paying someone to make a bespoke website for your business.
If you decide to go with one of these platforms, there’s nothing wrong, they also have advantages. However, if you decide you want a tailored website for your business, then we invite you to take the following aspects into account.
1. Analysis
The most important thing in the design of a website is to clearly define our objectives. Decide what type of website we want, know the market in which we are going to move and the most common users in our sector.
Without prior research, you may be able to create a website, but after a while you will realize its deficiencies and your competitors will not sit and watch while you fix them.
2. Strategy design
Once we have spoken with our clients, it is essential to make a strategy on how we are going to create the website.
We can use for example a CMS, such as WordPress or Ghost, or make something custom for the client depending on their needs.
It is also important to decide a good domain name because this can impact SEO long term and the hosting we want to use. Depending on your goals you can save a lot of money on this step.
3. Web architecture
Defining the architecture and the link map of our website is another of the key points that we must take into account.
Depending on whether we have decided to create a custom website or use a CMS, the work may be more or less laborious. But in any case you have to define the architecture of your website, the links between pages it is going to have and what is the procedure that the user must follow to meet a certain objective.
4. Content creation
A website can have a very elegant and attractive design, but you need content. Point three was the construction of the skeleton of the web. You can fill that web perfectly with texts “lorem ipsum” and with images by default to have a general view on how it will turn out.
But here we already enter fully into one of the most important aspects; and it is to define what content (images, texts, videos …) we are going to use. The choice of content is essential for one simple reason: it influences SEO, it influences user experience, and it also influences conversion.
In the content area, we must not forget either the content of a legal nature, to which your website is obliged to comply with the data protection regulations and the cookie law.
If you need content for your website, take a look at our positioning services.
5. Execution of design and programming
Once everything is clear, it is time to design and code. Many times the design will be done with a standard in mind, but other times it will be necessary to carry out tests, study different web models and perform an A / B testing to see which one receives the best results and best meets your objectives.
In the design and programming phase, whether we use a CMS or develop the web from scratch, we must make sure that everything conforms to certain parameters, that we follow a quality standard and that the web really delivers what it promises.
6. Launch and testing
When we develop a website from scratch, we cannot simply make it available to users without first having carried out the appropriate quality tests. It is convenient to test that everything works, analyse the logs file to see what errors occur on the web, as well as see the response of the web to a high number of requests and operations.
This way, we can solve some of the most common errors that may arise before making the website available to users and starting to spread it.
We hope this article has helped you clarify the phases of designing a website. If you want to create a web page for your business, contact us here.