Most of your customers expect to be able to find your business on the internet. Whether you sell your products online or just want to provide information about your business, including contact details or hours, having a website is essential. Does a business without a website really exist these days? Nothing is less sure. Moreover, the vast majority of companies going bankrupt had no online presence.
In addition, the global pandemic is forcing many sectors to digitize their activity, through click and collect, for example.
Whether you want to create a website yourself, or you prefer to surround yourself with professionals, you are going to need to take the following steps.
Table of Contents
Definition of Needs
Preliminary draft
The first step is to define why you need a website.
Even if this makes sense to you and your needs are “straightforward”, you need to think about what you hope to achieve with your website before you start building it:
- Sell online?
- Have a showcase of your business and your activities?
- Obtain new customers?
The answer (s) to this question will largely determine the price of your website!
Think about it
Do some research on the names of your competitors, their digital strategy can help you get a feel for what might be best for your business.
Specifications
This is an important step: you must write a specification. These specifications derive from your project and your ideas, which is why you must first define the website’s objectives.
The drafting of the specifications allows the various stakeholders present during the website’s design (Graphic designers, SEOs, developers, etc.) to list all the tasks they will have to perform and the constraints they will be confronted with to carry out the project well.
Domain Name and Hosting
Domain name
Your domain name should reflect your services or products so that your customers can easily find your business through a search engine. Your customers can also expect your domain name to be that of your business name.
The chosen domain name will also be used for your e-mail address. While you can use a free email address like Gmail, sending an email from a work address sounds more… professional!
To register your domain name, you will need to find an accredited registrar and pay an annual fee. These “ registrars ” are organizations authorized to provide services to people who wish to register a new domain name, renew an existing domain name, or make changes to their domain name record.
Accommodation
You will also need to find a web host. Most of the major domain name providers also offer web hosting services.
To know
Monthly hosting fees vary depending on the size of your website, and the number of visits you receive.
The choice of hosting will also depend on the type of your website:
- Showcase site: Showcase sites do not need a lot of hard disk space, nor a large database. You can therefore reduce costs and move towards a “basic” rate, at a few Euros per month.
- eCommerce: Unlike showcase sites, online sales sites need a significant SQL server and a space that can store the many articles and images on the product sheets of this type of website. The price remains very reasonable, rest assured!
- High audience site: High audience sites receive more than 25,000 visits per day and require a dedicated web server. Prices vary depending on the technical capabilities of the server. The price will vary from several tens to several hundred Euros per month.
If you are not sure where to go or what to choose, you can call on a webmaster for the creation or the daily management of your website, he can register the domain name and choose for you the hosting that will best suit your needs. your project. It will take care of creating your professional e-mail addresses and renew these services on the anniversary date.
Build The Website
Graphical Charter
As its name suggests, the graphic charter of a website is the set of rules that define the graphic identity of a website. By extension, we often abuse the expression of graphic charter to talk about the entire visual identity of a website.
The objective of this graphic charter is to have consistency whatever the page of the website, and whatever the communication medium used, in order to strengthen the brand image. The graphic charter also makes it easier to navigate and read, thanks to the use of constant visual cues.
Warning
For a website, the graphic charter plays a determining role in the first impression and the credibility of your site. You should not neglect this step, the best being to hire a professional graphic designer.
Here is the list of the main elements of the graphic charter of a website.
- Colors: RGB / Hexadecimal references of the different colors used. It is advisable not to exceed two main colors. CMYK references can also generally be specified, in the case of a paper version.
- Typography: List of fonts used, size, and colors for each Hx tag. As for the colors, it is preferable not to exceed 2 fonts: in general, you will have one font for the body of the text and another for the titles.
- Logo: All variants of the logo, on a white/black background, transparent, in black and white, with the colors and in different sizes.
- Icons: It is advisable to use icons from a complete set in order to have graphic consistency. There are a large number of fonts for icons, which it is also advisable to use for their ease of customization (in size, colors, etc.)
Content
You can have the best-looking website in your industry, if your prospects can’t find it with a simple search it won’t matter much.
Whether it’s a homepage, landing page, case study, or any other type of content, you need to take advantage of search engine optimization best practices. Make your content user-friendly by naturally integrating useful and authoritative hyperlinks. Do some research to find relevant keywords and include them in the page titles while taking care to avoid keyword “stuffing”, otherwise your site could be penalized for violating search engine guidelines.
Sometimes, the marketing department of a company has only one person: its manager. If so, you’ll have a hard time creating each piece of content. Not only will you be overwhelmed quickly, but it is easy to make mistakes.
Again, you can hire professional writers. By outsourcing the writing of your web pages and the SEO optimization of your site to freelance writers, you will be more reassured about the ability of your website to reach your target audience as well as its persuasiveness towards prospects.
Development
You have defined your needs, established specifications, found a domain name and hosting. You have a graphic charter and the content of your future site. The construction can begin now.
You can build your website yourself, or have it built by a professional web developer.
- You can use website builder software to create your site yourself. There are a large number of this software, all praising the ease of creating your own site … This is not always the case depending on the solution chosen, or the person working on it … If you choose this solution, our tutorials can help you develop your site properly.
Hiring a professional can be particularly useful if you plan to set up an online store, or offer other services on your website.
Your website should be built in such a way that it can be easily used on smartphones and other tablets.
Warning
A website must be kept up to date, be sure to plan for ongoing maintenance.
Also Read: How To Create Modern Website?
Referencing
Before your pages appear in search engine results, search engines must crawl your website. SEO is slow and the sooner you start, the better off you will be.
Because although Google’s crawlers usually find their way to your website on their own, even without any action on your part, you can speed things up by submitting your sitemap through the console. google search, This is to communicate directly to Google the existence of your website while indicating all the pages it contains.
To appear in search engines and people to find the information or products you provide, you must strive to be neat and authoritative on the web.
Start building a long-term SEO plan as early as possible. Consider if you have the time to learn all the tricks of the trade and do the job yourself, or if you need an SEO professional to help you out.
Whichever path you choose, you must make it a priority and you must have a long-term view of the goals and progress to be made.
Conclusion
A well-designed and easy-to-use website for customers will help your business stand out. Relevant and appropriate content & images will help customers understand your products and services and make them comfortable to buy from you.
However, the creation of a website brings together many very specific professions.
Just as you can choose to do everything on your own, it is possible (and even advisable) to hire a professional to design your site. You can also consider hiring a professional to write and structure its content. A webmaster can maintain it while an SEO consultant will work on SEO.