With the advancement of technology and communication dynamics, the world has almost reached the brink of becoming a single global market. This new economy order, characterized by high competition and extending from startups to SMEs and large-scale companies, has brought the opportunity and even the necessity to introduce your organization to a much wider audience.
In this era of communication, we can easily say that websites are the milestone. Today, almost every company owns a website, and some are striving to make these sites more equipped and user-friendly, recognizing the opportunities early. It's clear that these investments will add value to the company in the medium and long term...
What would you expect from a good website? Can a website be equipped with various software to perform complex functions? Or can it become a member of your team?
What Should You Consider When Preparing a Successful Website?
Define Your Purpose
When preparing your website, you must decide on its exact purpose. Is it an e-commerce site? Consulting? What benefit do you hope to gain from your website? If you just want people to access your address and phone number, that's one thing, but if you want to use it for much more advanced setups, that's another.
Therefore, asking "Why?" at the beginning is quite important. When defining your purpose, consider your passion and target audience, and ask yourself what you will sell or write on your website and why it is important. Keep asking for a while. Consider the strategies you will follow in marketing and brand communication and determine where/how much your website will fit into this.
Websites, while offering an interface for customers and third parties, can also have backend modules that work behind the scenes. With these software developed specifically for your needs, you can monitor and manage your company's internal processes, working methods, reports, and much more. Actually, this is where I reveal what I meant at the beginning of my writing. When I asked if your website could be a part of your team, this is what I meant. My answer: Yes, it can!
Indeed, software developed specifically for your business can make you more effective in every area. I have implemented this in companies I have worked with before. After absorbing all the dynamics of the company, we identified common and different needs by consulting with everyone and patiently developed our product. It saved us from uncertainty, excel documents, "where is this" and "when was that." It helped us know what we were doing and, more importantly, what we would do.
Know Your Target Audience
When designing a user experience for a website, we use a fictional profile called a persona, which is very close to the average customer profile of the brand; this way, the suitability of the work for customers is highly tested. Initially, determining your target audience can be a bit of trial and error. However, after a while, you can capture an audience for which you can specially optimize your language and content.
You should consider your target audience when planning what you intend to do, understanding their reactions to past events. Not everything in business life goes as it does in theories. A general rule about user experience may not be suitable for your audience. Therefore, it would be wiser to test the changes you want to make using focus groups and A/B tests.
UX/UI Design is Important
In addition, your website must have a healthy design in terms of UX (user experience). If you have the budget, I recommend working with an experienced agency in this area. Everyone in our field claims to be the right agency to work with. The sound of the drum is sweet from a distance, don't believe everything you hear in the agency ecosystem.
UX and UI design is a field of expertise in its own right, and a good UX designer cannot just be a designer. People who can think interdisciplinary and have trained themselves in marketing, psychology, digital innovation, and many other areas can achieve this title.
If your budget does not allow for such a collaboration, you can provide some things yourself. You can find helpful information in many of our articles, starting with what user experience is and how to improve it.
Budget is Quite Determining
The budget you allocate for the website you want to own is an important factor that can alone fill the right scale of the balance. As in every field, you can encounter a wide price range in website design and web-based software development services.
In recent years, there has been a Responsive design storm all over the world. This was a very important development for web design. Now, without bearing large budgets, we could ensure that our website looked appropriate on almost every device.
I have to suggest even better if you can allocate a budget, use Adaptive design technology to use a separate design for mobile devices and another for desktop devices. The usage statistics of mobile devices in the web world are increasing every day, and this gives us a reason to do something different from everyone else. The early bird catches the worm!
In short, the broader the budget you can allocate, the more you can work with a team consisting of an experienced project manager, UX/UI designers, front-end and back-end developers. When working with a top-tier digital agency, you won't need to think about all these optimization elements. As the experience of the team you work with decreases, more stressful days loom on the horizon for you.
Are Your Keywords Ready?
As you know, SEO has become very important in recent years. Using both on-page and off-page SEO, with conscious and persistent work, it is quite possible to reach the positions you want in search results. When developing your website, just as you determine your target audience, you should also think about which search queries they will use to find you.
Search engine optimization is an indispensable part of digital marketing. People conduct 82% of their product or service searches without a brand name. This proves that a good SEO score can greatly contribute to achieving your goals...
Don't Forget Hosting and Other Details!
Before starting to prepare your website, finding a good domain name is important. Established companies that secured their domain names in their respective sectors in the past have greatly benefited from them.
You've prepared your website, tested it, and now it's ready to go live! Hosting is also one of the important elements to consider... There are dozens of hosting companies you can work with in this area. If you value your business, do a little research to find the right company. Work with a hosting company that has minimal (preferably no) downtime, regular backups, and high solution speed to minimize your risk.
We would be happy to help if you have any questions.
Take care.
“Writing is seeing the future.” Paul Valéry