How to plan building your website

if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Creating and launching a website is a very important and interesting moment in the life cycle of your business

1. Start by a competitor research
2. Set the website goals
3. Create website structure
4. Identify target audience
5. Set your budget
6. Purchase your domain and host
7. Create a content strategy
8. Create a marketing strategy

1- Start by a competitor research

The first step you need to do about building your website is actually far from your website, whether you are new to the business or new to the online business or even revamping your online presence, you first need to know what others are doing because we’re not going to reinvent the wheel, we just need to improve it to serve us better.
You need and have to take a deep look at your competitors' websites to see what they are doing good, what you can benefit from, where do they excel, just analyze their websites to get the big picture and start within the competition

2- Set the website goals

Now after you conducted your competitor research, You need to set the purpose and goals of the website, because not all websites goals are similar, if your website is an e-commerce one then the goal is clear, you need to sell your products, but for other types like service providers, for example, there might be different objective depending on what you want to accomplish, the goals might be something like:
- Increase customer engagement.
- Increase brand awareness.
- Generate more leads.
While we all know that we want to sell more at the end of the day. It is still a useful and helpful practice to divide your goal into small, and SMART milestones. And we all know that SMART means:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound
Write down your goals because it will help you in the next step

3- Create website structure

While the structure of ordinary service providers might be clear, like there is a home page, contact, about, and then some pages for every service they provide. Yet, your website needs to be more advanced, you need to structure how the home page looks, Are there different industries and different services and products, do they interfere? Like are there products that serve multiple industries, do you offer different types of services.
You need to analyze how your business work to be able to structure your website depending on the goals you set before. The structure must be easy to understand by ordinary users, you are going to need the help of a UX designer of course.
The website structure also defines all the features you are going to need and the types of call to action and where you are going to use these calls to action.

4- Identify target audience

Maybe this should be step number 3, I would give them both number 3 because they are of the same importance and priority.
Once we identify our website goal and its structure we need to understand clearly our target audience. We are not going to sell to anyone, we need to focus on a targeted or expected audience. There’s a common mistake made by inexperienced business owners when planning their website is that they think they will build it and sell it to everybody. This will lead to failure. We need to create a buyer persona or maybe multiple buyer personas, and we don’t have to be accurate the first time so it’s ok. The buyer persona will tell us how to talk to our audience or expected customers or we won’t be able to identify their needs and why they would want to purchase our product or service.
Without personas also we will attract the wrong customers, we won’t be clear or won’t have effective presence between our competitors.
We will never be able to build customer loyalty or make targeted marketing effective.
Without buyer persona, we will fail at all of these and more simply we should not talk to a grown businessman and funky guy in the same way. They might both want our product but they will definitely have different reasons and different ways to convince them.

5- Set your budget

The market pricing range varies differently, so you need to decide on your budget. You can set a number in your mind when starting the planning process. when you set a range for your website cost you also define in your mind whether you are going to build it yourself using a website builder or you are going to hire a freelancer or an agency to build it for you, every one of them has it’s pros and cons. Also, the time you have available is a matter, we also wrote a post about the cost of creating a website that can be a reference when planning.

6- Purchase your domain and host

After deciding the budget and the way you are going to build the website, we advise that. You purchase the host and the domain, it’s not so hard even if you are not so technical. You just need to understand the technology the freelancer or the agency is going to use, then you purchase it from one of the tons of options available online, you can also ask your developer for a reference or if they suggest or prefer any hosting provider.
If you don’t understand them it’s easy. The host is simply the place where you will put your files and your database. It’s like a hard drive but online. And the domain is the name you want your audience to type to reach your website. They can be purchased or separately, from one hosting provider or from 2 but in case it’s your first website or you don’t have enough knowledge we think it’s better to purchase them from the same place, this will make it easier to handle any records like DNS records that tell where the internet should look for your domain. This part is so technical so we will skip it from here but it’s easy to purchase and handle and also the host provider support will guide you through any needed help.

7- Create a content strategy

your business's approach to creating and distributing content for your target audience.

- Lauren Reed.

Writing content on your website is a long-lasting task that you will be always doing. it is what you present to your audience or visitors so you need to take care of it. At this time the website should be getting ready, use this time to create a content strategy and plan what type of content you need to introduce and when.
And by content we don’t mean only your blog, the blog is a must but still, it’s a part of your content, the strategy should focus on the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content.
Without content, your website will go nowhere. The strategy is needed in order to make sure that you attract the right leads that will convert later, in your strategy you will give them helpful information and also tell them between the lines the benefits of your products and why they should purchase them.

8- Create a marketing strategy

A marketing strategy is a plan of action designed to promote and sell a product or service, it refers to how you going to find your audience, bring them to your website, and turn them into customers.
Without a marketing strategy, your website will be lost on the internet. You need to know how your target audience will reach your website or else you will be like someone who builds a beautiful building but no one knows it even exists. It’s dead.
The internet is full of resources that will guide you through creating a website marketing strategy and a lot of ways to get traffic

Summary

Even if it’s your first business and first website, you should not go all in without planning ahead, if you don’t know who your competitors are, or what are they doing if you don’t know your target audience, or what you are going to give them, or how to bring them to your website, then you probably should not start now. You don’t need to plan everything ahead but at least have a clear vision of the whole picture. And you can also let us guide you through the journey, by the way, we also wrote another post about things that you should do once your website is ready online, check it, we hope it will be helpful to you.
Last but not least, thank you for your reading time, and wish you a happy successful business journey

“IT IS A LONG FACT THAT A READER WILL BE DISTRACTED BY THE READABLE CONTENT OF A PAGE WHEN LOOKING AT ITS LAYOUT.”

Md Sumon Mia