Building a website is quite common place today. However, getting the right website design is a challenge. Characteristics of a well-designed website are a clean, crisp and professional design, a strong call to action and relevant information on the appropriate pages. The most important page is the home page and the most important trait of a good website is identifying, crafting and communicating the right message to your audience.
The process of arriving at this point is no simple task. It is a work-in-progress. When we think about creating a website the first resource considered is a good web designer. However, a web designer is just one of the resources required. In my opinion, the most important resource is a copywriter to help craft your message.
The steps below will help you reduce the learning curve and time taken to define and communicate the right message to your audience.
- Purpose of Website
So you are going into business. You know what you are about and what you want to achieve. You have a vision of the website and have identified other websites to use as examples. The main thing is to differentiate your website by what it offers, aesthetics (look and feel), ease of navigation, and clarify what your customers need to know.
- Get a Copywriter
A copywriter is a person who will craft the texts on your website to clearly articulate your message, the information your customers need to know and the call to action. This is no simple feat so do not necessarily think that you can do it. Copywriting is a science and there is no substitute for getting the right message across to your audience.
Engage a copywriter and communicate what you want to the person. The copywriter must have experience working with websites and with your type of business.
The body of texts produced by the copywriter for inclusion in your website is called the copy. You can find a copywriter locally or on the freelance service called www.elance.com.
- Do Mockups
Next engage a designer. Before he or she designs the website have the person do mockups of the site. A mockup is a basic sketch version of the site. There are online tools like www.gomockingbird.com that make the task fairly easy. The purpose of this exercise is to show the main pages of the site, layout and navigation. Here you can experiment with different draft layouts using the copy and understand how best to design the site. Include the copywriter in this process.
- Select a Design
Select an appropriate design for your website store front. There is no need to build a store front from scratch. There thousands of themes you can select. They are readily available on the internet. An example of such as site is www.themeforest.com. It will save you time and money.
Work with the copywriter and the designer to select the best theme. If your website has many images it is important that you identify a source for your images. Options include a photographer and stock photos from sites like www.istockphoto.com. Unfortunately, online options for local photos are limited or non-existent. Copying pictures from other sites is a poor long-term strategy.
Next the designer customizes the selected theme. You and the copywriter will review the changes and give feedback until you are satisfied with the modifications.
- Programme the Site
Once the design is complete the programmer will take over to write the backend code to add functionality to the website. Today, depending on the platform use, there are many plugins to make the process fast and less costly.
Having the right resources from the start is crucial to the success of the website. Normally, we focus on the hard skills like design and programming. However, the copywriter is a resource often overlooked to the detriment of the website.