Before Creating Your Business Website…
By: David Kimutai
Tags: Digital Marketing, SEO, Online Marketing, Website Development, Customer Experience

Every few weeks someone sends me a website link on Whatsapp. The accompanying message may be like “I heard you’re good at SEO, what do you think about my site?”

More often than not, I’m disappointed with the websites.

I believe that at its best, your website is your salesperson.

By no means does the table below show all the important, non-technical aspects of a website (or all you need in a salesperson), but it is a start;

The website should also be fast, user-intuitive, and easy for a non-techie to use. But that is a discussion for a different blog post.

So how should your website creation process look like?

I wish everyone who wanted a website would articulate their objective first.

“I need a website to sell merchandise online”

Or;

“I need a website because clients usually want to check out my portfolio. It is a simple way to showcase my past projects without sending huge envelopes with documents and photos via post office, or scanning pictures and sending grainy (yuck) images via email.”

Not;

“My competitors are online”

Instead, ask;

What is the benefit of competitors being online, are customers going digital or what?…. Clarify the benefit and you’ll find the objectives.

Now create yours.

Then clarify who is the prospective customer that will use your website e.g;

Young parents looking for baby supplies

Hint; Define your buyer or website user persona first in a document.

In the above example, your user persona document needs to specify more about these young parents and how you envision bringing them to the website. And what will make them come again and again.

Then articulate what the website visitors will want. Is it to buy products or services online, or is it to call for an appointment, or is it to check your portfolio then book a meeting?

Then, what will the experience look like?

Put this info in a doc too, e.g, “Visitors to my site will see these brand new phones and order, they will pay and wait for the items to be delivered.”

“ Visitors to my site will see I’ve consulted for these small companies and they grew their revenues by $$$. They will then email or call to book an appointment.”

Good stuff so far, break it down.

The content, design, and structure of the website will all focus on what your website visitors will want.

This depends on what you’re selling.

Map content based on all the user needs to match with what you/ your business does.

How would that look?

A child page is a page that provides more specific information. Product or service pages are usually child pages of category pages which will be quite general, having several products or services. Category pages will often be children of the big papa, the home page.

*Justification column helps keep the process honest.. but is not essential.

Of course, each page must have a call to action too; whether it is “learn more”, “buy now”, or “find help”. This post won’t go into how to create pages, we’ll cover that later.

Now you’re in a good place, you can go ahead to do the SEO, technical specifications, visuals, and content.