Plan your web design

You’ll get much greater benefits from a website that’s well planned with specific goals in mind. Obviously much of it is the designer’s job, but the more thought you put into it at the beginning the more you’ll get out of it – whoever you get to design your site, it will be better if you can answer some of these questions…

Your content is crucial

What are you going to say and show people on your site?

People won’t stay at even the most beautiful site if the choice and organisation of its words and pictures aren’t interesting or relevant, if it doesn’t answer their questions.

We have to think about how your content will contribute to the outcomes you want from your site, and why your visitors will come in the first place.

Things to start thinking about…

  • What do you want a website for?
  • Who do you want to look at your site?
  • What things do you want them to do while they’re there or straight after they leave? Learn something? Place an order? Call or email you?
  • What words and pictures do you think will help achieve these goals?
  • What do you think your visitors will want from your site?
  • Is your writing concise and scannable?
  • How are you hoping to attract visitors to your site? Search engines? Advertising?
  • Who is going to update the site?

If you contact me I’ll ask you about all those, as well as:

  • Do you already have a business logo or colour scheme?
  • What are some other sites you like?
  • What are your competitors' sites?
  • If you already have a site what do you like and dislike about it?
  • What’s your timeframe?
  • What’s your budget?

Things I think about…

  • Are the main tasks easy to accomplish? Are answers easy to find? Is it easy to use, intuitive, logical, unfrustrating?
  • Does it look good?
  • Does it load quickly?
  • Can search engines find and index it easily?
  • Will it be accessible to most people? For example will visually impaired people that use screen readers be able to easily navigate around the site?

What’s next?

You’ll need to choose a domain name and where to host your site.

And if you answered ‘yes’ to attracting visitors via search engines you should read about how to be found in google.

Or are you just wondering how much? My pricing page has a rough guide and explains how I quote.

next step

After we design your site we need to host it somewhere. Don’t care about the details? You can contact me now.