Sarumbear can help you create a beautiful looking and functional website. How well it will work for your business depends largely on the preparation you make beforehand. Your website is part of your business’s overall marketing strategy and needs to be treated with the same consideration as any other type of marketing.
If you want it to be successful, you are going to need a plan. (Note: Our definition of a plan is something in writing. If it isn’t in writing, it’s an idea, not a plan.) When making your plan, ask yourself these three simple questions:
- Why?
- For who?
- How?
1. Why?
Why are you building a website for your business?
Every website serves a purpose, whether to create awareness of your company or sell your business’s products. Knowing what you expect of yours will help you determine which features and functions the site should have.
A site intended to generate leads for your sales force may need landing pages with forms that collect visitor information, whereas if you plan to sell products through the site, you will need a site that can display your inventory and handle sales, taxes and shipping. An e-commerce site based on the WordPress platform may be a more suitable choice than a standard HTML site.
You may want a site that does more than one thing. Prioritizing the aims of the site will help you decide on what format to use and how to structure the site so that it meets the needs of different audiences, which leads us to…
2. Who?
Who do you want to visit your site?
Who are your customers? Do they come from other businesses or are they members of the public? Are they technically savvy? Are they comfortable shopping on the Web? How old are they? What percentages are male or female? Are they educated?
Knowing your off-line (real world) customers can help you cater for the online visitors. It can be hard to be objective, so if you aren’t sure, ask your customers how they identify themselves. You may need to ask more than one person to get the best picture.
If you don’t know whom you are talking to, it is difficult to know how to talk to them. Your site needs to speak to your visitor in ways they understand and want to be spoken to. From the tone of voice to the size of the fonts, knowing your audience is important to making sure your site is working for you and not against you. You certainly don’t want to drive potential customers away!
3. How?
What do you want people to do once they get to the site?
The answer to this question ties in directly with the first question. What’s the site’s purpose? If you want to drive online sales, you should make it easy for visitors to see your most popular products and services and make their purchases.
If your site is more promotional, decide which information is the most important to feature on the home page and allow visitors to click through to other pages for more detailed information.
Sarumbear can help with all your marketing needs. We have many years of experience in marketing through television and online campaigns through close collaboration with our sister production company, Ethem Media. We turn your ideas into reality, but there are obviously costs involved with us spending time with you, analysing your business to develop a marketing plan that meets your needs.
Taking a little time to ask yourself these three simple questions can help you plan a great website, saving you both time and money. With the information you’ve collected (and written down), you should be able to sketch out your basic site structure for the pages you want and how they are navigated. You should also have the basic outline for writing the bulk of the site’s content. Armed with this information, Sarumbear will be happy to transform your plan into action, building you the successful website you deserve.
