Whilst it is the web designers that you choose who will do the bulk of the work to design and build your new business website, that does not mean that you have no part to play in its creation. There are several decisions and tasks you must undertake for web designers to be able to complete their work.
Before you panic, thinking that you are going to have to learn website programming or code, rest easy. Whilst having some knowledge of how websites are designed is useful, those are not the tasks we are referring to. Instead, these are tasks related to some of the services required, some decisions about the appearance of your website, and how you can maximise your website’s effectiveness. Here are all ten of them.
Choose A Domain Name: This should match your name or the name of your business. As for the suffix, dot com should be your first choice, although many of these are already taken. Otherwise opt for dot net, dot org, or your country’s domain suffix.
Decide Which Hosting Service You Are Using: Many of the performance measures of your website, such as reliability and load speeds, will be influenced by your hosting company and the quality of its servers, so opt for one with a proven track record.
Decide Upon An Email Autoresponder Service: Assuming you want your business to benefit from the many advantages that email marketing can provide, then you need an email autoresponder service. This is where your subscriber list data is stored, and where you create and schedule your emails.
Create Your Lead Magnet For Attracting Email Subscribers: To attract the email subscribers we just mentioned you need a means of encouraging them to give you their email addresses. A proven method is to offer something free such as a downloadable report or eBook which you need to create.
Choose Your Brand Colours: To design your new website, web designers will need to know what colour palette they should use. This will either be based on your current branding or done from scratch if you are creating a new brand.
Choose Your Fonts: As with the colour palette, your web designers will need to discuss with you what typography is to be used throughout your website. This should tie in with your branding fonts, and the best practice is not to exceed 3 different fonts within your website.
Select Your Images: Continuing with the tasks required to create the appearance of your website, you now need to choose the images. These can include infographics, diagrams, illustrations, or photos and can either be original creations or taken from a royalty-free image service.
Create Copy And Content For Your Website Pages: Next, we have the text that visitors to your website will see, and hopefully read. This will be a combination of interesting and useful content, sales copy, and calls to action encouraging visitors to do something, such as click a button.
Prepare Your Social Media Links For Social Media Icons: Your final task is to collate the links for your social media pages so that they can be added to the social media icons that your web designers will feature on most, if not all, of your website’s pages.