Does your website support your business goals?

Every business in every industry will have different goals and take different routes to meet them. At a minimum, there are six things that your website should do well in order to help you meet your goals:

  • Offerings: What does your company do?
    Your site must make it clear to your customers and potential customers what products and services they can obtain from your company.
  • Expertise: What makes you different or better than your competitors?
    Demonstrate why your company has the expertise to do what they need, and differentiate yourself from your competitors.
  • Identity: Who are you, anyway?
    Accurately convey not only what you do, but who you are. What is your company’s personality? Beyond what makes your company better than others (expertise), why will customers enjoy working with you and keep you on the top of their  list?
  • Contact: Is it easy to reach you?
    Your website visitors must be able to easily get in touch, no matter what they need. Once they have that spark of wanting what you offer, don’t let it dim as they hunt for a way to make it happen.
  • Fulfillment: When someone contacts you, what do you do next?
    Your website needs to be supported by business processes to follow through with your contacts. A form or email address on your website is worse than worthless if nobody responds.
  • Support: How do your customers get help?
    This might not apply to all businesses, but many sites also need to be sure it provides a support function for their existing customers.

Web project components

Whether to design a new site from scratch or revamp an existing one, at a minimum, web projects include some or all of the following components — we can help you with as much or as little of this as you need.

  • Research: Examine your current search engine and other stats to learn what we can about your current web visitors: Who currently visits the site, where they are from, what devices and web browsers they use, etc.
  • Asset inventory: We will work with you to create an inventory of your existing content. This inventory allow us to scope the amount of work to be done and will help us identify any content that may be missing.
  • Hierarchy and content: We will propose a site hierarchy, propose how to map content to it, the content for each area, and how areas of the site will be linked.
  • Goals, calls to action, and fulfillment: For each section of the website we need to identify your goals and what you want visitors to do — the call to action. Copy will be written/edited and design decisions will be made to support those goals and inspire the desired actions and, for every call to action, the reaction or fulfillment needs to be understood.
  • Web copy: Content is king: with good copy comes good traffic. We will write and edit your web copy with the approach of less is more: keep web copy brief and to the point.
  • Look and feel: Determine how the site will look, how imagery will be used, how menus work, and how the site will behave in response to user actions. We will provide iterations of wireframes until we arrive at a look that you approve, coupled with decisions about the back-end design of the site (below), as one affects the other.
  • Back-end design: We recommend that the backend for all but the simplest websites use a content management system (CMS). To be successful, the final site must provide a fast and effective experience for users, be readable on modern devices and screen sizes, and be easy to maintain.
  • Implementation and testing: We will implement the site on a development server to complete testing, then when it is completed, will work with your own web team to install the site on your own servers.
  • Handover: Final testing is performed to ensure the move was a success, then we will work with your internal team to prepare them for ongoing maintenance.