Your website is you and your company’s virtual representation on the internet; the central hub of all your business conducted online. Unlike physical stores and company offices, people online cannot see you physically, so your website’s goal is to give a good and lasting impression.
To leave a good lasting impression on your website visitors, it is important to take the time to plan out your website. There are many aspects to a website that can get overlooked without planning. When you plan everything out, you can cover the design, proper structure of your content, and ensure the right technologies are used to implement your website.
Does your company have certain colors?
Using colors effectively can make your visitors love or hate looking at your site. You can highlight certain areas of the site and things that you may want to display as featured items or articles using particular colors.
Who is your target audience?
Make sure that your design and layout are appealing to that audience? Is your site easy enough for them to navigate around and browse your site, or are they going to get confused and leave.
Do you have products or services to offer?
How can they be organized in an easy to browse method, even having a way to sort the products can truly make things easier to find for users. The faster someone can find what they are looking for the faster they can purchase it from your site instead of going elsewhere.
What type of media will be used?
You might want to have pictures or videos mixed in with your content to spice the pages up a bit, and make your pages eye-ball friendly, and even exciting. If pictures are worth a thousand words, you can really express a great deal if things are laid out correctly. It is the same as if you are giving a public speech. If you are there just reciting or reading something, you might notice some of your audience nodding off. If you have visual aids with your speech, now you have made it visually appealing and, if you ask your audience questions during the speech, you are keeping them engaged.
How will you engage your audience?
The more that your site engages your audience, and has them watching or doing activities, the more active they become when they are visiting your site. A great many sites are going social, and they have a way to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This is an excellent way to keep visitors connected with your company even when they are not on your website.
The more you take the time to really plan out a website and cover all the details, the greater impact the end result will have to each and every visitor that comes to your website. Planning is a vital part of our lives when we plan out our day with an agenda we get more things accomplished, and the day is organized. The same thing goes for a website and its design. Start planning out your website, and if you need help contact a web designer and see what questions they start asking you.