How To Plan a Website For Your Company

Do you really need to plan a website? We have all seen the adverts for templated website builders which require no coding skills to allow people to drag and drop their websites together. So designing a website should be really easy to do, right?

Probably not.

In this simple guide we will take a look into some of the aspects of planning a website. Some of the topics we will highlight are not always obvious until you have built several websites and learned from your mistakes and gained experience.

Let’s assume that it’s a business website you’re looking to build yourself, because that is by far and away the most popular and the most relevant as they’re the ones we have the most experience in working with.

How to Plan a Website

It’s relatively simple to do. You might think its abundantly clear and obvious what your website is going to be for. You might think it’ll be obvious to everyone else. You might even think you can skip the planning and go straight into building the website, without a plan.

Bu if you don’t start with a plan, any project is unlikely to be a success. If you don’t know where you’re going how can you know what the destination will look like?

So let’s just establish that the primary objective of most websites is to take the users on a journey that turns traffic into revenue.

If your website doesn’t meet this primary objective, it has failed. Surely it’s better to plan to avoid failure before you put the effort in.

Done right, this can happen for you, you just need to apply the right methods.

Without customers, you have no business. In some way, your website is going to have to make customers out of users. So before you do anything, anything, you need to work out how your website is going to get those users.

If you don’t identify your intended audience, you cannot possibly build a website to cater to them.

It’s not an easy process, but you should try:

• Thinking about the main purpose of your website and the interests of people you believe would benefit from it.
• Ask friends, family, or colleagues who might fit into your envisioned audience what they look for in similar websites.
• Social media platforms can also be a great place to observe conversations and see what potential users are interested in or struggling with.
• Consider creating a basic online survey to gather feedback from a wider audience.

This user-centric approach not only enhances user engagement and satisfaction but also increases the likelihood of achieving the website’s objectives, whether they be generating sales, disseminating information, or building a community.

Additionally, understanding the users helps in creating accessible and inclusive websites that are compliant with UK standards, ensuring that the website is usable and accessible to people with a wide range of abilities.

Take some time to note down all the things you want to the website to represent to those people:

• who you are,
• what you do,
• where you do it,
• why it would work for your users,
• how long you have been doing it,
• what you do well,
• what you do best,
• what you have any accolades or awards for.

Keep all that in mind because all of that is going to be part of the story you want your website to tell. Next think very carefully about what you want the website for.

• What function is it to perform?
• Is it to showcase and educate?
• Raise awareness? IGenerate appointments, leads or bookings
• or is it to sell goods online with a shopping cart and a checkout?

Once you know this you can start to think about what pages you would need and what your menu will look like, even if at this point is is just a simple wireframe sketched out on a napkin. Any plan is better than none.

Page Types and Calls to Action

The primary objective of a website is to turn traffic into revenue, or visitors into leads or sales. So now go back to your plan and think about where you want what message to be, in which part of the website.

The menus are usually something resembling

• Home
• About Us
• Services / Store – expands into sub menus and / or more pages.
• Learning Zone / Blog / News
• Contact Us

The home page is to introduce you and state what the website is for. People visiting should know straight away whether or not they are in the right place. They need to know were looking for it here. If a user feels they are in the right place they’ll stay. A home page needs calls to action but not at the cost of that deeper engagement. The home page is just the start of the journey from unaware to loyal. There are no shortcuts.

On each page it’s important to lead the user. The aim is that, by the time they reach the foot of each page they will be more engaged, more brand aware. They should know more about you than they did before. But the chances are they have skim read everything as they scrolled down on their smartphone so the appropriate call to action at this point would be to more relevant content or a converting trigger (“Buy Now”, “Contact Us”, “Subscribe”).

There will always be visitors who would rather reach out and talk to you straight away. If you are happy for people to contact you this early in the customer journey then a button that says “get in touch” is what you’ll need. Bear in mind, this those leads will be unqualified, if you want a high conversion rate on sales from inbound calls .You may want be mindful how much or how little information you give them before they can engage with your teams.

What is User Experience? (UX)

User Experience is the glide path through each page and also page to page through the website. It takes the visitor from unawareness to awareness, through consideration to conversion and then into loyalty so you can get repeat business from lifelong clients and customers.

The steps along the way are known as AIDA, the acronym meaning

This goes back to the days of newspaper headlines. You need the attention grabbling headline to be “above the fold” which represents the top half of the page.

After the attention grabber you then need to give the user the right kind of information enough information to keep that initial interest peaked and to make them want to read on, dear reader.. and start to give features, advantages and benefits of the products and services so they can start to formulate a sense of liking what they see.

In the desire stage “I like this” needs to become “I want this” so this is the process of making sure that you qualify out anyone who isn’t right for this along the way and then continue adding trust and quality to those who are still with you and they will have made a decision, to which the appropiate thing to do at this point is let them know what to do next.

By letting the user clearly see what they need to do next, you will alleviate having any dead ends on your user experience. So by having the right call to action (CTA) at this point will enable the user to either learn more, find out how, submit a form or make a phone call, or buy now.

That is where lots of people think they are done. But that is just where the work starts. After that you need to service them impeccably to get them through the stages of buyers remorse around the loyalty loop and then they (hopefully / if serviced adequately) become customers for life who are only too happy to leave excellent reviews and recommend your products and services.