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All too often, I see businesses waste the money they spend on their web sites simply because they don’t have a plan to put together all the pieces for a successful web site. Here, I’ll explain the six steps necessary to ensure that your web site is successful.
1. Hosting
The type of hosting account you’ll need for your web site depends on what type of web site you’ll be building and how much traffic you’ll be getting. Often, web sites get very little traffic in the beginning, but with the proper planning, that traffic can grow. There’s no need to pay for an expensive hosting account at the beginning unless you anticipate getting a lot of traffic to your site really quickly.
Your hosting account does matter – you need to know that if you run a successful promotion that sends a lot of traffic to your site in a very short amount of time, that your site will hold up to the traffic and you won’t find yourself with a broken or temporarily unavailable web site just when you need it most. You should also make sure that your web host has fast and friendly customer service available 24-7-365 because you never know when you’ll need it. Ideally, they should also run and keep regular backups of your site so that it can be restored quickly and easily if anything happens.
For more information on hosting, please see our article, “Hosting Your Web Site Demystified“.
2. Domain Name
Your domain name is the address where your customers will find your web site. It should be as short as possible, easy to remember and type, and it should contain the name of your business and/or the name of your most prominent product or service. That not only helps people remember or figure out what address they should visit if they want to find your site, but can help search engines find their way to you as well. Choose your domain name carefully, and don’t hesitate to buy multiple domain names if more than one name fits and is available. They can all be configured to point at the same web site.
For more information on domain names, please see our article, “How to Name Your Web Site“.
3. Plan, Design, and Build
You can go it alone and use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, or one of many tools available online for building your site without learning code, or you can hire a professional to carry out most of this step for you. If you hire a professional, be aware that much of the work will still fall on your lap – you’ll have to provide the content for the site and teach the web designer all about you and your business so that your web site is a good fit for your business.
Your web site should be nicely designed, usable, accessible to people with disabilities and search engine optimized.
4. Marketing and Promotion
Many people get the first three steps completed and think they’re done. But they’re only halfway there. There’s still a lot of work to be done after the site is built to make sure that it’s successful.
Print the address of your web site on anything you print for your business – t-shirts, pens, business cards, postcards, brochures, signage, etc. Mention your web address in your email signature. If you have the budget, you might look at buying advertising online to promote your business, such as Google AdWords. If you belong to any social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, make sure your web address is always mentioned on your profile.
5. Metrics and Analytics
Throughout the planning and building phase, you and your web designer made many decisions about how to present information and what copy should appear on each page – but how do you know it’s actually working? How do you know which of your efforts to promote the site are successful?
You know by collecting metrics and analytics on your web site. Properly set up, analytics software, like Google Analytics, can tell you which promotions are bringing the most traffic to your site and which efforts aren’t performing as well as you had hoped. Metrics can tell you which content on your site is the most popular and it can tell you basic information about the people who are visiting your site, how long they stay, how many pages they view, etc. All of this information can be used to test new ideas, identify areas of the web site that need to be improved and determine which promotions are successful.
6. Maintenance Plan
Of course, collecting up all that information about your site doesn’t help you much unless you have a plan in place for acting on it. If you’re maintaining your web site yourself, reserve time in your calendar on a regular basis to go through your site, update any outdated content, and refresh photos. Study your metrics and analytics and decide what parts of the site need to be worked on to perform better. Figure out which marketing efforts are working best and work on improving the performance of those even more.
Developing and sticking to a regular maintenance plan is one the most crucial steps for a successful web site, but it’s also the step that’s most likely to be ignored and forgotten. Don’t let the time and money spent to build your site go to waste.
