WEBSITE DESIGNING

Earlier most of the businesses tended to acquire space in the brick-and-mortar stores for running the business.

People used to visit personally in stores to get some information about the products and services, but nowadays, the expansion on the technological front has given a new shape to the business world with the help of the World Wide Web (www).

WWW was launched roughly around twenty years ago, almost two decades ago, but looks like people have got the awareness of started making the most use of websites rigorously these days.

To start a new business, the very first thing that is looked into is the – ‘Website’. Of course, the website is the initial source of information that gives us the precise material for what we usually stumble upon on websites.

For all the business owners and entrepreneurs who want to launch their website be it in e-commerce, online marketplaces, design & development, or digital marketing, businesses are taking a rapid upturn as website-making is carrying an exponential growth with the rise in technology advancements.

Why do businesses fail to take off a successful website?

For every unsuccessful website, umpteen reasons could be held responsible if we start counting like improper business strategy, lack of management planning; scarcity of funds, less market research, the unattainability of a good team and so on.

The dedicated, we know that there is nothing more painful than not being able to launch a website on time. To our surprise, there is an eye-opening fact that more than 60% of start-up websites miss the mark to establish their name globally and eventually witness a failure rate.

On the contrary, ample good reasons can make your day if we pitch the right course of track to make a successful website plan. Hence, to avoid mistakes a resourceful, well-thought-out and planned roadmap is a must for launching a website.

We know there is a lot of pressure while making the website for the first time wondering whether it will go right or not.

So, just take a relaxed breath!

Keeping our user thoughts in mind, we have come up with the right step-by-step journey for launching a website that would be the right fit for you.

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1. Get Hold of a Unique Domain Name

A lot of people get confused between wordpress.com and wordpress.org for getting the domain name registered for their website.

As more people are registering website domain names at a rapid pace, the domain name buying on ‘Godaddy’ reached 49.98% as of December 2018 and the domain buying is dynamically growing 3.5% year on year without fail.

So, get a hold of a domain name which suits your business niche and is/are easily available to purchase.

Otherwise, you can also increase your pocket value by buying a hefty and expensive domain name as per the availability and choice.

You may visit websites like name.com or godaddy.com to check the availability and buy a domain of your choice.

2. Dedicated and Secure Web Hosting Server

Unbelievably, every year people lose billions of dollars due to slow website performance, which results in conversion rates dropping to 7%.

Do you know why?

Most entrepreneurs and business owners “buy” hosting from local vendors at cheaper rates which ultimately shows adverse results at a later stage.

Advice is to use a solid, reliable and quality web hosting provider who offers enough storage space and secures your entire data with fewer chances of being lost.

There are a few sites that offer reliable, reasonable and scalable web hosting and storage like GoDaddy, Hostinger, Bluehost and others.

3. Pick Your Squad

A team is one whose efforts look up in the work. Indeed you are the owner of your business, and while choosing the people of your taste is what matters the last.

Your selection of team members should be well-versed with the ins & outs of a particular field for which they’re being hired, and their knowledge should be optimum for the growth of your business.

For instance, as you are launching a new website – you require UX/ UI web designers, web developers like WordPress or PHP developers, content writers for writing website content, SEO executives or digital marketing executives, perhaps, etc. You need to analyze the professionals whom you require to be hired.

To run a successful website, you must hire experienced professionals because you can’t invest much time to hire freshers and train them initially.

However, we understand freshers can be hired at a lower salary package but hiring experienced professionals could be like investing a little more money but it would be worth your time and helpful to run the business in the initial stages.

So, choose your crew wisely! We know you won’t risk picking non-fervent people in your team.

4. Well-Designed UX Rich Site

What do you notice first when visiting some websites? Surely, we see the layout, design, overall structuring, content and theme.

Well, an interesting fact revealed that 38 percent of customers showed no interest in website engagement if the layout or content of the website is unattractive or not pleasing.

For instance, a client arrived at your website and to his surprise, he found a prevalent website theme, unsystematic layout pages, very dull colour choices and theme, and less content about your offerings – what do you think, would he like to close a deal with you?

Probably, the answer is No!

Hence, to make a user-centric website, the design and layouts must attract the customer/ visitor in the first go.

5. Create User-Friendly Content

For every website to succeed, its content must be easily readable and understandable by the users.

People prefer reading user-friendlier content which should not hamper their reading convenience.

For instance, if you are reading some articles and at a point, where you feel the content has tough words or jargon, surely you will stop reading the article thereof and leave the page. Isn’t it?

Therefore, always create content which is written keeping in mind your targeted audience that helps to pull readers to your website.

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6. Use of the Right Technology for Better Performace

Well, the right use of technology is a must to enhance your site’s productivity.

About 40% of users tend to leave a page that takes around 3 seconds longer to load than the usual time.

The percentage rate has reached 79 per cent wherein dissatisfied buyers are less expected to purchase again from the same site, as a result of bad or slow site performance.

When you are building a new website right from scratch, you must use modern and user-friendlier technology which is good, secure to operate and easily adaptable for the users.

No user wants to use the website which has challenges in operating that.

So, it is recommended to choose and use technological advancements after a thorough market exploration that suits your requirements.

Better to hire a techy person or take a bit of technical consultant advice to handle this part if you are unaware of this segment.

7. Time for Quality Testing/ Bug Fixing

Every project is incomplete without the complete testing of the website. Otherwise, how would you know snags are persisting and creating an obstacle in between?

The most crucial part is to make the site bug-free and every page is running smoothly without flaws. On top of it, your website should be mobile-friendly so that if any visitor opens the website from a phone, the site should not represent an unsystematic layout or perhaps, the visitor is unable to open all the pages.

So, have you fixed all the bugs after following all the steps above?

If not, then must do it now to avoid blunders at a later stage. Or else, this won’t leave a good impression on the visitor.

8. Set Goals to Generate Traffic

After making the website, the initial question strike is – how to generate traffic?

Certain prevailing trends always dominate the previous strategies.

The most popular and recent content marketing strategies mainly consist of three elements – case studies (64%), and blogging (36%).

You need to make good use of digital marketing solutions to pull traffic, generate leads and increase your brand’s viability effectively.

Now, here the role of digital marketing professionals comes into the picture. Sit with them, strategize your goals, set a target audience to pull traffic and here you go!

9. Embrace Social Media Channels

As we have discussed in the above point, 65% of traffic comes from social media so you need to embrace social media channels closely.

Hire a digital marketer or make yourself fully competent to run your SM platforms to make your presence felt.

The most prevalent social media channels are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and others.

You just need to opt and stay updated on these channels by posting regular updates which are relevant and useful for your audience, to increase your brand reach and awareness.

Moreover, the trend of paid advertising over organic one is whopping the online industry because it brings results very fast and is one of the best ways to increase the reach of your brand. 

The organic reach is somewhat less, and business owners and entrepreneurs are vastly opting the paid and sponsored ads to achieve their goals and objectives. 

As per one survey, 51% (in short- over 240 billion dollars) is anticipated to come from digital media, of all advertisement money that has been spent in 2019 worldwide.

10. Reassure Content Through Analytic Metrics

We know you are almost ready to launch your first site now.

However, have you reassured your content part over and over again? Content is the most regarded part after site layout or theme which leaves the last impression of your offered products or services.

In the B2B community, patrons only focus on your offerings other than how good you have made the site.

The prominent way to check your content performance is easy now. There are various platforms such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Facebook Pixels which help you track the performance of your content.

To create a comprehensive flawless impact on users, make sure you have checked your content carefully before making it live.

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11. Pre-launching Checklist Before Website Launch

So, we have gone through the entire step-by-step guide to making a successful launch of the website. Before proceeding further you must ensure all the check-points or site pre-launch checklist precisely before you launch your site live publically.

IT’S TIME TO KICK-START YOUR WEBSITE

What do you need other than a complete guide to website making on its own?

Do you need a special brick-and-mortar space to run your business – NO!

Would there be affluent money involved to start your website- NO!

Can you launch a website with just a few bucks in the pocket – YES!

To meet the needs of the hour, launching a website successfully is the biggest concern of entrepreneurs and business owners.

These turn-key solutions help to make the website launch cost-effectively, and smoothly to perform better.

After all the checking, you need to create a post-launch checklist wherein your site performance has to be analyzed, site speed is to be monitored, traffic is to be evaluated, leads should be generated, business growth seems to be fair and good maintenance from time to time is essential.

Do you think redesigning your website is all about having a little fun with aesthetics?

Undoubtedly, visuals do all the magic to bring the attention of your audience to your website. But that is not all!

You spend so much of your time and money in creating a flashy website and yet your website is unable to attract the organic search traffic. So, what went wrong?

This happens because while redesigning your website, very often you overlook the importance of what lies under the hood of it.

Now, consider building a restaurant with all the ostentatious interiors and everything flashy. But no one ever visits the restaurant because your prospects don’t really know about it.

This way, you’re never going to do any business and so, the money and efforts that you spent on your restaurant went straight to trash!

The similar scenario happens to your website when your audience does not know about it.

So, what is it that you can do to get your audience know about your website? The answer is simple and you must have often heard about it – SEO!

SEO, the famous Search Engine Optimization, is not a new concept today. With search engines being very picky about their search results, SEO has become mandatory.

Unfortunately, we often overlook the importance of SEO and so it is never rightly worked upon. So, we commit a number of SEO mistakes during the process of website redesigning.

Avoiding any further bustle, let’s move to the 10 SEO mistakes that you need to avoid while you redesign your website:

Mistake #1: Not Introducing the SEO Concept from the Very Beginning

During the redesigning process, if the SEO team is brought to work, it is often too late.

Nothing can be done at this stage because the coding for the website is either being done or probably completed.

So, at this stage, there is nothing much that the SEO experts can do to save your website.

SEO must be ensconced in the strategy of your website design from the very beginning. If you ignore this element in the beginning itself, it will be grueling for you to add it later to the framework of your website.

So, it is always advised to involve the SEO team in the beginning of the process.

“The biggest SEO mistake you can make during a website redesign is to not think about SEO until it’s too late. If you don’t have SEO in mind from the initial strategy session, you’re going to lose what you took so much time and effort to build.

Everything from the structure of your website to the meta description of your website pages is important and should be taken into consideration.” says Laura Hogan, Marketing Director at OverGo Studio.MIGHT ALSO LIKE: How Facebook Ads Can Boost Your Ecommerce Business

 Mistake #2: Not Auditing your Existing Website

Under website redesigning, your new website is obviously going to overthrow the old one. After you revamp your old website, there is no way you can get it back.

But before you decide to tear down your old website which is no longer going to exist, make sure you run an audit on it. The metrics and data from your previous website can be of great help and make sure you don’t lose it without making the best use of it.

Some of the key metrics that you can consider to audit your website are:

• Highest performing keywords
• Number of visitors
• Pages that bring traffic
• Indexed pages
• Inbound linking domains

Studying and auditing these metrics can be of great help while working on SEO during a website redesign.

Content audit is very beneficial when it comes to seeking more conversions and an improved SEO. And so, you must know how to audit your website in the right way, before you move to a new one.

 “Whenever doing a website redesign, I think it’s so important to reassess the purpose of each page. If you don’t learn anything from the page, neither will your viewers!

Building out a navigation map that takes SEO into consideration will save you a lot of heartache throughout your project!” says Samantha Winchell, SEO Analyst at New Breed.

Mistake #3: Failing to Make a Good Use of Keywords

SEO evolves every day and as previously it was all about keywords, now it is not!

So, you cannot simply stuff your website with keywords and steer clear to search ranking.

These days, if Google finds out that you’re being blind at using keywords or that you’re deliberately hiding the keywords on your website, it is going to take a toll on your ranking.

But that doesn’t mean that using keywords is superfluous. You just have to do what Google wants you to do and that is – write for your audience, not for yourself.

Create a high-quality content where you can naturally let the keywords work.

“In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.” says Google.

So, while you redesign your website, you need to work very carefully with words commonly searched by your audience. You can learn how to target your keywords for better rankings. For this, you can use any of the available SEO tools to indentify the target keywords.

“Many marketers are so focused on building out site hierarchy, wireframing and design of the site that they lose site of content development.

SEO is a huge part of content development, but when content becomes an afterthought during web redesign, and the focus is on getting the new site live ASAP, often times marketers will put the content together without deliberate thought to keyword inclusion and smart SEO content strategies.

The result is that post-go-live, marketers begin scrambling to rewrite content that is already live to improve SEO.

Marketers can reduce this additional effort by including an SEO keyword analysis at the front end of a web redesign project – during website strategy development, and then using the findings and recommendations from the keyword analysis to inform content development.

This, coupled with a deliberate focus on content development during the web redesign process (rather than as an afterthought) can help marketers make huge leaps regarding SEO without the post-go-live scramble.” says Denis Goluboff, Senior Web Manager at TREW Marketing.

Mistake #4: Failing to Set up 301 Redirects

What are 301 redirects? A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one of your URLs to another.

During website redesign, it is very crucial to set up the 301 redirects when you’re working on URL restructuring or on site map changing. This will help you transfer your valuable SEO data from the old URL to the new ones.

“Before doing any 301 redirects, create a URL outline of your old site. Excel is a great, simple way to do it: create a tab for each of your main menu sections, and list all menu sub items with their corresponding URL in that tab.

Use this as a road map to creating all 301 redirects, marking off each URL you redirect without leaving any pages behind.” says Shannon Good, Inbound Marketing Consultant at Savvy Panda.

In case you fail to set up your 301 redirects, you might face a great fall in your search rankings and your audience might face a whole lot of “404 Errors” that you’d never want!

Mistake #5: Failing to Adopt the Correct URL Structure

URLs are generally not focused upon and believe it or not, URLs play a great role in SEO.

How is that now, you ask?

It is not only the searchers who are precise about their search on the search engines. The search engines also prefer those pages or websites that have a URL depicting the content of the page. And so, if your website is besieged with the cryptic and lengthy URL’s, you must restructure them during your next website redesign.

These lengthy URL’s usually fail to depict what your website wants to tell its audience and so, it is not recognized by the search engine which in turn has a big hit on your rankings.

“Redesigning your site gives you the perfect opportunity to make sure your URLs are optimized for UX and for search engines. Your URLs play a significant role in your SEO success. Your URLs must contain targeted and relevant keywords.

Your URL structure also needs to follow suit according to your site map. Keep the structure organized for the user experience. Subfolders add value to parent pages.

For instance, don’t have a URL at domain.com/services/ and a services category as domain.com/category-1/. A services category should support the parent services page and should look like domain.com/services/category-1/.” says Eunice David, Marketing Manager at Adhere Creative.

While you’re restructuring your URLs, we advise you to use a dash (-) in place of an underscore (_).

The reason behind this is that Google considers a dash as a word separator and so, the words in your URL will be considered as separate. But underscore is considered as a word connector and so it connects many words as one. With dashes, your URL has better chances to get featured in the search results rather than with underscores. So, you can take a note of it while restructuring your URLs.MIGHT ALSO LIKE: What is White Hat or Ethical SEO and Its Benefits

Mistake #6: Failing to Get Rid of the Crooked Backlinks or Inbound Links

One of the ways to earn good search engine ranking is to get the inbound links or backlinks from some reputable websites.

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But backlinks can sometimes prove out to be toxic for the credibility of your website.

If your website is linked with some of the low-quality websites indulged in spamming, Google can bring your rankings down. This is also known as negative SEO.

Sometimes, to encourage negative SEO for your website, the spammers deliberately link your website with such low quality websites. But, to avoid this, you can use the tools like Google Webmaster Tool.

With the help of this tool, you can tell Google not to pay attention to such spamming backlinks.

“Most marketers focusing on SEO break down SEO into onpage efforts and off-page efforts. And when focusing on off-page efforts, a common SEO mistake marketers make is believing that their site will receive more SEO traffic if only they can find enough websites to build links on.

This is the mistake, a link-building mindset. Stop thinking about link-building. Start thinking about link-earning.

Focus on making your content easy for your audience to consume, understand and share with their audience.” says Bradley Smith, Sr. Marketing Technology Consultant at Digital Relevance.

Mistake #7: Avoiding Responsive Design

Your website’s rankings will recuperate if you manage to keep your audience as well as Google happy!

Your audience will always demand a great browsing experience with every device that they’re using. For delivering such a hassle free experience, Google advises you to use Responsive Design as a configuration for your website to make it mobile-optimized.

The best thing about responsive design is that it allows your website to use the same URLs with any device and all the URLs are structured to serve the same HTML code. This feature is unavailable in the other configurations like implementing dynamic serving or setting up a separate mobile site.

“This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh.” says Google.

Mistake #8: Not Unblocking the Search Engines from Peeking into your Website

After spending all the time in creating the new striking face of your website, it’s time for you to do the honors and Launch!

Now, hours have passed after the launch and you sit there, waiting for Google to show your website in the search results. But nothing happens. Why? What happened?

Go back in time and recall. While you were working on the redesigning of your website, you might have blocked the search engines to take a look at what’s inside it. And then, you forgot to unblock it before the launch!

It can be a great inconvenience and so, make double sure that you’ve unblocked the search engines to peek into your new website’s framework before you launch it.

“A silly issue that causes huge problems — and happens more often than you would think — is that sometimes people forget to unblock robots from crawling and indexing the website after the website goes live.

This often happens when the site is in a dev environment and has robots.txt set to block all search robots, then the site is taken live with the all-exclusive robots.txt file still in place and the site’s search traffic suddenly grinds to a halt.

To avoid this one, make sure to check your robots.txt file once your site goes live. Double check it with Google Webmaster Tools to make sure your site is being indexed.” says David Bascom, Managing Partner at Fit Marketing.

Mistake #9: Failing to Add Analytics Software to the Website

What fun is a website redesign if you never get the idea how your new website is performing against your old one?

You will never get to know that if you fail to add the analytics software to your newly designed website. Adding the analytics software will give you the answers and details for questions like – Is the keyword research working?

Was the audit for the previous website beneficial? Is the new URL structure working as expected?

Your analytics software will track all the insights that can help you answer these questions and work on them later!

“I think one of the biggest and most egregious errors one can make when redesigning a website is to forget to paste the proper Google analytics code on the new website.

It’s pretty difficult to track the success of a new site designed to have a higher conversion rate… without any conversion code or analytics tracking.

We had a client hire a web design agency to redesign their website only to forget to paste the old code on the new site–and you can make sure the SEOs get blamed for everything.

We now make sure to have a website redesign checklist, whether our client uses an external agency or we handle it ourselves!” says Lincoln Chan, Senior Account Manager at LocalTrifecta Internet Marketing.MIGHT ALSO LIKE: How to Launch a Successful Website

Mistake#10: Not Thinking like Your Visitors- The Humans!

Unlike the previous search results that were in accordance with one-word queries or that avoided the whole sentences, Google has now started to respond to the queries that include complete sentences or questions.

And so, with the search results becoming more conversational, you can only win if your website depicts the data that is meant for the visitors – the humans!

So, avoid being just a robotic pool of content. Provide what your audience is looking for and to begin with that, you need to think like a human first!

“The biggest mistake I’ve ever made was designing with SEO at the top of the priority list. It made the site awkward and ineffective. The best way to fix this is to focus on creating value for your personas and delivering the user experience they would like.

When you focus on those items, SEO takes care of itself.” says Doug Davidoff, CEO at Imagine Business Development.

With these most common SEO mistakes during Website Redesign, most of us face a greater crisis with Google ranking and with building the credibility of our newly built websites.

For a better SEO ranking of your newly designed website, make sure you pay as much focus to the insides of your website as you pay to its appearance.

Things will surely work out for the best if you avoid these mistakes and listen to the experts and, of course, to Google!

Stick around for more information on how you can make your redesigned website a huge marketing success!