Planning a new website?

Excellent, you’ve come to the right place! The planning of your website is one of the most important tasks in web development, and can eliminate the chances of errors further down the line.

First of all, we would ask you this. Why do you want a website? The majority of our clients book appointments with us if:

• They don’t have a website and are in completely unchartered territory
  
• They have a basic website which is in need of a major update
  
• They have a functional well designed website but are getting poor results from it.

You may fall into one of these camps, or you may not. Either way you have to be sure of what you want your new site to achieve, and how you want it to do that. Take your time, brainstorm with your marketing/sales decision makers. Or, call PlannedSites, because we would be happy to offer you free consultation over the phone at this stage.

Building your own website

OK, I know what I want from the website and what I want it to look like. Why don’t I just make one myself?

You absolutely can. There are a number of template websites available which allow you to create a website, often for free. It’s a very easy process and you’ll probably find that you can get a pretty aesthetically pleasing site up and running within a couple of days.

However, a template website will struggle to generate traffic to it, because you won't have the technical ability to optimise it and therefore the search engines won't show them at the top of the listings. When considering ‘what you want your site to achieve’, one of your main goals may be to generate business through it. If that is the case then amateur websites aren’t the way to go, and that’s a fact. Contemplate your chances of being able to single-handedly build your own house without any experience. It would look bad, be poorly constructed and certainly wouldn’t attract visitors!

Web design

I think that it’s also important to understand the difference between web designers and web builders or web technicians. A web designer can get you so far. They will take your brief and due to the fact that they are graphically gifted they will make a stunning website, which to some extent will really showcase your products and services. If you are in the graphic design/ art or exhibition sector then this may be exactly what you are looking for. Incorporating some flash elements and a few other features will really make for an impressive looking site.

But working under the assumption that you still wish to generate traffic to your website, and essentially want to make money from it, a web designer may not have all of the capabilities necessary to fulfil your expectations. For a website to compete in today’s market, it needs to be optimised to feature on the search engines (primarily Google), and should have a variety of resources and features which are so impressive, that other websites will want to link to it.

Web design agencies

OK, you’ve convinced me to use a web design agency to help me build my site, now what?

We are biased, but using a professional agency is the wisest decision that you can make when it comes to building a new site. A web design/seo agency can offer you all of the tools that your website will need to fire you up the Google rankings and start the enquiries rolling in.

Once you have discovered the main reason that you want a website and got some ideas together as to what you want to achieve from the site, contact your chosen agency.

You will need to establish what you want the site to look like (colours, format etc.) who you want to target and the associated budgets. You will have to spend some time drawing up the content and images that you want on the website, then hand this over to the agency.

The agency can then work on the websites technicalities, ensuring that keywords are put in the right places and that content is used wisely. They may suggest you offer documents to download which will attract visitors, or offer a blog on your site to become interactive with your clients.

However, after building the site, it may be the case that they will then charge you a lump sum, and any future changes that you wish to make will become a low priority.

Talk to an expert

At PlannedSites we are a team of experts that offer marketing, web and seo consultation all under one brand. We have a team of experts that work with clients for the duration of their website life. We charge a low monthly fee so that reciprocal commitment is made for years to come.

We will design, build and advertise your site and then manage it, changing anything that you aren’t happy with as we go along.

We can offer any web related feature, but also any type of marketing, which includes any online (e.g. PPC) or offline (e.g. Direct mail) campaigns.