Starting a new website is an exciting time, but there is a lot of work to do upfront to ensure that your site is a success and that you have everything covered. Long before any designs are implemented or content uploaded, you have some work to do to prepare for the new website. Follow our tips below to make sure you are ready for your new website:
Budget
Like with any project, a good place to start is with your budget. Having this in place before doing anything else is vital as it allows you to keep your aims realistic. There is no good finding a great hosting package, a perfect domain and an awesome web designer just to find out that the combined cost is several thousand above where you want to be.
Instead, take some time to sit down and consider absolutely everything your website will need in year one, and assign a portion of budget to it. Hosting, domain, design, build, software licenses, content creation, SEO, marketing and imagery. It’s a long list, and there is much more that you could add to this, but if you have taken the time to consider it, then you can spend more time looking for the affordable options and not wasting time with pie-in-the-sky ideas.
Plan the website itself
Okay, once you know what you have to spend in each area, you need to come up with a blueprint for what your website will be. What will be the main aims of the website and what should visitors be able to do on it? Is it merely informational or is there some functionality on there that can really engage your audience?Also, begin to think of how your website will look design-wise. If it’s ecommerce, you’re going to need a clear and effective customer journey with calls to actions leading to the design, whereas if it’s inspirational content, you’re going to need to look at having a content and image-led design.Once you know in your mind what your website or blog will do, how it will vaguely look and how much you have to spend on it, you can move on to stage three. If your looking for more information on starting a blog then go here. We always recommend WordPress but there are many alternatives out there.
Build your team
Whether you are a small one-man band or a company with a lot of staff and resource, this step is as important. You need to have an idea of who is doing what on the project, and ensure they are comfortable with their roles. Even if you are just starting a blog or website of your own and have no staff, it may be that you still need to have a website theme to buy, in which case rather than recruiting a designer and a developer, your homework will be based around sourcing the theme, design or template you wish to use.
Create a schedule
There is a famous saying that states how a dream without a deadline is simply a fantasy. In the case of building a website, you need to apply strict deadlines for yourself and your team (if applicable to work to). If working in a large team, ask them to feed in to this schedule with estimates of how long their tasks will take. A friendly word of note, on any web project make sure that you leave enough time for creating content. It is the single more underestimated part of any new website project.
Get going
Once budgets are set, resources and teams are in place, goals are set and a schedule is drawn up, it’d time to put the plan in to action. Like with any project, it will always pay to have regular project meetings if a lot of people are involved, just to make sure things are on track. Even if you’re working on the project alone, every week you should use an hour of your time to take stock of where you are at and make sure you’re still on track.