The 3 ingredients of a successful site
Anyone can cobble together a half-decent website, but to create a compelling online presence that achieves your goals, you need a web design agency with expertise in three key areas: web strategy, web design and web development.
1. Strategy
Any business venture needs a plan, and your website is no different. Working out how to approach the people that matter so that they can get what they want as easily as possible involves prioritising your marketing message. If you simply put everything there is about your business online and expect the reader to pick out what is important to them – they won’t. To create a successful site you need to plan your content so that it achieves the goals you have set yourself, whether that be to promote products, build a brand or act as a landing page for Google Adwords.
2. Design
With your strategy in mind, you need to think about how your soon-to-be successful site is going to look. A skilled web designer uses typography and colour to accomplish the strategy without including anything that is superfluous or hinders the readers’ progress through the site. While less skilled designers try to impress by including every feature and effect they know of, the mark of a truly talented designer is that every individual element that is deployed contributes towards a common purpose.
3. Development
Like any successful enterprise, a successful site is simple and straightforward on the outside, and a frenzied hive of activity behind the scenes. This is where the developer adds their own particular expertise to the site. Computer coding brings the designer’s visual layouts to life by incorporating buttons, links, sliders, CMS (Content Managed Systems, where clients can update their own content) and numerous other items that make the website work hard for the visitor.
Nowhere is website development more important than behind the scenes of an e-commerce website. Huge databases are managed, login systems are administered, payments are securely processed – all while keeping the site running smoothly without any glitches or crashes.
So when it comes to choosing a team to create your website, make sure they are skilled in each of the three core elements of strategy, design and development. That way, you can be sure that you will get a site that is much more than a superficial success. It will be an online powerhouse that utilises all its resources to achieve your goals.