Starting fresh? Then this is the perfect time to do it right.
But first we’ve got some work for you. Don’t worry, when you decide to move ahead on your website design, the first thing we’ll do is schedule time to get to know you and your business and ask you a host of questions. What are your website sales and marketing goals? Who’s your audience? Who’s your competition? What makes your product or service different? What do you want your website to accomplish? And a lot more.
We’ll drill down to find the nuggets of information that set you apart – and our fresh perspective might even uncover things you may not have considered, being so close to your business.
But start off with these suggestions and questions to get your ideas flowing.
What do you want your website to do for you?
Your website should be a lot more than an online billboard or brochure.
I want my website to:
- Act as an online source of information for people who already know about my business.
- Invite and welcome prospects who are searching for my product or service.
- Generate inquiries about my product or service.
- Generate qualified leads who will welcome further information.
- Build relationships with existing customers and qualified prospects.
- Provide tools to speed the sales cycle.
- Offer information to prospects and customers to save my time and my employees’ time.
- Sell products online through e-commerce.
Of course, your website can do any combination of the above. Depending on your target audience, you may even want it to offer certain features for one audience, and different information for others.
Which brings us to…
Define your website’s audience
Define your audience. Get to know your ideal customer and understand his needs. Find out what information she wants from you and what terms she’ll use when searching for our product or service.
Where do your ideal buyers live? What do they do in their spare time? How much do they make?
If you can’t easily define your customer, it’s time to learn more. Use the ideas in this article to really understand what your customers want.
Tell your product’s story
There’s a lot more to your product or service than its basic function.
To craft your website to attract, appeal to, and get action from your customers, we need to understand the story behind your product.
Use this article to learn how to better define your product’s place in your customers’ eyes.
Create your website wish list
You’ve done a lot of the groundwork in building content. Now start thinking about the features and tools you’d like us to build into your new website design.
- I want people to find my website on page one in Google and other search engines.
- I want to be able to update text on my website pages myself.
- I want to be able to easily add photos to my site.
- I want to capture names and email addresses of motivated prospects.
- I want an autoresponder campaign for interested visitors.
- I want a secure, online shopping cart system.
- I want to have a blog.
- I’d like professional photography of my product or service.
- I want video(s).
Make it so
You’ve done the hard part. Now, let us make it happen for you. Here’s what you can expect.
- We’ll talk to you, listen to your ideas, ask you questions and more questions until we understand your business and your needs, and offer suggestions based on years of experience.
- We’ll develop a website plan for your review, including a sitemap giving you a sense of the structure and flow of your site.
- We’ll work with you to determine a website domain name, register it for you, and set you up on a reliable, economical web host.
- We’ll work with you to determine what keywords your prospects will be searching on.
- We’ll write copy and articles as necessary, making sure to optimize the keywords we’ve identified.
- We’ll develop and provide site tools to fulfill your wish list.
- We’ll make edits and changes till you’re happy with your site.
- We’ll provide tips and recommendations to improve your ranking in Google and other search engines.
- And we’ll continue to work with you to make sure your website is working for you the way it should be.
Why you need a WordPress website
For more than a decade, we built our own websites from scratch, coding them from the ground up. Back in 2000, we began using PHP, a powerful scripting language, and MySQL databases to create dynamic websites that allowed for fast addition of informative articles and allowed site owners to make many of their own modifications and updates.
We developed every website with the philosophy that you need to tell a story, you need to provide helpful information, and you need to make it easy for both customers and search engines to find your information. We even coined our own term for it 25 years ago: infomarketing.
Then WordPress came along. It’s like someone read our minds. WordPress took our basic philosophy and injected it with steroids. WordPress began as a blogging platform back in 2003, which makes it easy to publish and organize new articles and information. Essentially it was infomarketing 10.0. But it has evolved over the years into much, much more.
It allows site owners to easily make their own modifications using a simple, intuitive interface. You don’t need a shred of coding ability or HTML knowledge.
WordPress is supported by a vast community of developers who have likely already dreamed up most of what you can imagine needing on your website. And because it is based in PHP and MySQL, the tools we’ve used in our websites for 25 years, it’s easy for us to quickly incorporate these add-ons and apps into your website. Or, if the perfect solution isn’t out there, we can develop custom scripts to make it happen.
WordPress is built to the standards set by Google and other search engines, so your website is immediately more reputable than many business websites. And custom WordPress tools make it easy to improve your website’s ranking as long as you continue to provide good, solid, helpful information aimed at your prospects.