Moving your business online can be a daunting task especially when dealing with the technicalities of putting the puzzle together.
It doesn’t have to be. Here are 4 ways you can get involved and start-off strong in the design and development process.
#1 Refine Your Business Plan.
This is probably the most important step that is most often overlooked by most small business startups. You should have a strong idea of what you would like your online business to accomplish, the strategy behind it, and the resources needed to attain it.
When your business grows, the plan will help guide you in the decision-making process during design and development phases. You’re business plan should be flexible enough to adapt to change, but rigid enough to limit all the guesswork. There are plenty of resources available that help solidify the plan. Hopefully, like “all” plans, it will keep you out of trouble.
#2 Develop Your Marketing Plan.
This is mandatory. As more of your competitors establish themselves online, traditional marketing in combination with SEO strategies will play a major part of gaining traffic. If you don’t execute SEO properly, it would be a challenge for your target audience to find you.
Executing SEO updates to your site regularly will help you increase your market share and profitability in the long-term.
#3 Write and Improve Content.
This is one of the areas that takes up the bulk on a website. The writing should be well written, points should be explained clearly, and spelling must be perfect.
Remember, you’re writing for your target audience. It must engage. Keep in mind what’s important for them to make an informative decision about doing business with you.
There are plenty of resources that talk about writing effectively for the web. We’ve found that the best writing always identifies with client’s problems. To keep the content focused, analyze your target audience. Then create a positioning strategy and use it as guide for all future content development and collaboration with designers.
#4 Voicing Your Input Matters.
Use your business plan and content materials. Begin collaborating with a web designer who understands your initiatives. It would be more valuable to work with a designer who understands business systems, processes, and strategy. You want to get the most value out of your dollars.
Here are some basic starting questions to work with your designer:
Front-End Design
This concerns what your target audience will see on each webpage.
* What graphic and visual elements must it contain? It should reflect your positioning strategy of your marketing efforts. The “look and feel” is the message you’re trying to communicate to your target audience. It should satisfy their emotional needs.
* What kind of navigation system and usability? Helpful Tip: A good way to figure this out is to choose a website that you enjoyed navigating through. In most cases, if you enjoyed the experience, your target audience would too.
* How should your content be displayed? Using proper layouts and good HTML structure will enhance clarity and readability of your webpages.
Back-End Design
This concerns the site programming and back-end process your target audiences don’t see. You aim is to develop proper system flow integration, maximum scalability, security measures, and a search engine friendly URL’s on your website.
Here are some basic starting questions to work with your designer:
* Is the HTML on my webpage search engine friendly? Search engine optimization SEO will need to be applied to your website.
* Do you need to quantify, store, and access information? Start thinking about your database application needs, for example, customer relationship management. Especially when your client base grows, you’ll need a structure that keeps your information easily accessible for tracking and recording purposes.
* Will you need a payment system? If you plan on taking payments online, consider integrating a shopping cart with the proper security measures on your website.
Online business development is an on-going learning discipline. Hopefully, the information presented gives you the insight to make informative business decisions. If you need assistance on your online business development needs, we can help.
We work with online entrepreneurs by helping them develop the necessary tools needed to design, market, and sell onlnine.
