Tags: 5 Steps | Design | Developing | hosting | Promoting | Research and Analysis

How to incorporate 5 steps toward building a successful website.

If you’re doing business in 2011 you’ll eventually need a website in one form or another.  Whether your site is purely informational or a highly dynamic site with e-commerce functionality you need to take the appropriate steps to ensure that you take the path in creating a successful website.

Step 1 - Research and Analysis

You need to conduct an analysis of several factors that will impact your site.  You need to ask yourself several questions.  Would you want your site to do?  Who is the target audience?  How would you want them to interact with your site?  What type of functionality does your site need to have?  Does your site fit into your overall business plan?

If you do not yet have a business plan stop reading here.  A business plan is a set of business objectives, why you believe your objectives will work, and these objectives are attained.  Basically a business plan is a road map explaining how you’re going to get from an idea to a viable business.

You need to research who your competition is and what they are doing on the Internet.  Don’t necessarily look to compete with them head to head, especially if they’re a large company and you can’t match their advertising budget, look at what they’re not doing.  Try to exploit what they’re not offer and or a different angle to what they are offering.  Always try to be different on the Internet.

Also take a look at sites that you like.  Pay close attention to why you like these sites.  Look at the color schemes, navigation and its overall structure.

Step 2 – Site Design

This is where you sketch out your concept of how you want your site to look.  Although it’s low tech there’s nothing better than a sheet of white paper and pencil.  As you sketch out your concept pay close attention to navigation.  If your visitors cannot find information they need they’ll simply go to another site.  Make it as easy as possible for your visitors to navigate.  The rule of thumb is that it should not take more than three clicks to find what you are looking for.  Anything more than that may frustrate your visitors and they may go to another website to find what they need.

Just because you can do things with your website doesn’t always mean you should do them.  What I mean is if you like neon colors, allot of animated motion or music on your site you may be hurting your chances of a successful website.  You don’t want to build the site that has a lot of ancillary components that distract from your website’s message and content.  Remember you may like something, but it may repulse your target market.

Step 3 – Developing Your Site

This is a topic all to itself, but I’ll try to summarize.  You have two options when developing your site.  Either you hire a developer or you build the site yourself.  Depending upon how much time you have in the day to dedicate to building your own site is up to you.  And because time is money there is a cost for the time it takes you to learn how to design and develop your own site.  Make sure you choose the development technology that you are comfortable with, such as ASP, ASP.net, PHP, HTML etc.  Plan everything out.  The more you plan out your website the easier it will come together.

If you choose a web developer or a web design company to put your site together make sure that you are comfortable with their capabilities, terms and get everything in writing.

Step 4 - Choose a Hosting Company

Once you site is built you will need to choose the hosting company so that visitors can find you on the Internet.  This is an important step and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.  There are three important factors are when choosing the hosting company, 1) make sure you choose a company that is reputable, 2) make sure they’ve been in business for a long time, and 3) make sure they have a 99.99% up-time.

There are a lot of hosting companies out there and sometimes it’s hard to tell who is a legitimate company and who is a 16 year old with a computer in his basement from Arkansas.

Step 5 – Promote Your Website

Once you’re up and running you need to advertise your site so people can find you on the Internet.  Just because your website is up doesn’t mean people know how to find you.  Your website and the internet are sort of like being shipwrecked on a raft in the middle of the ocean.   Without the GPS transmitter and/or a flare gun you may not be noticed.  The same holds true when you put your site online and without some promotion your target audience may never know you exist.

Register with the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Also look at other marketing alternatives such as pay-per-click advertising, email blasts or contextually targeted ads.

Although these steps will not guarantee that you will have a successful website, it does provide a good place to start.