Purpose of Creating a Website
It is a general feeling for every one of us to have a site or blog on our own. Especially when you are stunned while coming across a wonderful online store, a blog or content site and thinking of having something like it on your own. Whether you already had a site or wanted to create a new website, ask the following questions:
- Are you clear on why you want to start your own site?
- What you want to achieve by starting a website?
The answers to these questions should be firm and followed throughout the entire life cycle of your site. Here is the complete checklist of how to plan for creating a successful website.
Making a Vision
Every site on the web has its own mission which could be like selling items online, or to provide fun to the users or provide information on the topic of interest. It is a clear fact why people can’t succeed with their site is because they don’t possess a clear vision of what they want to create.
It is essential to prepare a simple vision or goal sheet in order to avoid the failure happens to you. Spend considerable time to prepare your goal sheet before start creating a site which ensures 50% of your online success story.
Sample Goal Sheet
Below is an example goal sheet:
I want to start a website for:
- Selling eBooks online
- Selling digital goods online
- Educate people on learning English
- Non-profit providing information to people on immigration services
What are my goals?
- Update the latest products or information on regular interval
- Fund raising for a non-profit organization
- Providing online help for my site
Designing Your Site
Once you decided your goals then the next step starts with building your online presence. Below are the important things you need to consider before you start creating content for your site.
- Site Address
- Choosing Hosting Plan
- Site Design
Choosing Site Address
Your online presence starts with finding a good site address (also called domain name). It is important to ensure the site address is the same as your brand or business. More the people remember your site more your brand will become popular. This is true for even an information site as people will directly enter your site address without searching it for every time in the search engines. Finding the right site address is the most important task for any site owners.
Choosing Appropriate Plan
There are plenty of hosting providers available in the net with variety of plans. Invest time in choosing the one suitable for your need. For example, if your goal is to create an online store then you may need to choose a provider who offers hosting services with complete ecommerce features.
Designing Your Site
The look and feel of your site creates the impression among the user to come back to your site. Choose the theme, layout and menus in appropriate manner so that it will not hurt the user experience. It is a good idea to look at other’s sites having the same objective that of yours. Filter a few good looking sites and write down the features you like and check your goal sheet how to incorporate these features in your plan.
Content Management
Now that you locked your goals and design aspects of your site. The next step is to build content for your site in line with your goals. It’s again a good idea to write down all your thoughts and align it with your goals.
Below is an example content sheet for the goal of creating a site that provides information on website creation:
What are the information to be included in my site?
- Website registration
- Hosting
- Type of websites
- Search Engine Optimization
- Demo on installation procedures
- Contact us for free or paid consulting services
Performance Tracking
Most of the service providers offer their own performance tracking tools for webmasters. In order to monitor the true and complete performance, it is recommended to register for the following services.
Webmaster Tools – This is a free service offered by most of the search engines like Google and Bing to enable you to add and verify your site in order to submit your Sitemap to search engines. This helps the search engines to understand the structure of your site and index the pages to display it in the search results.
Analytics – Google offers an important tool called Google Analytics for measuring your site performance in the web. It provides exhaustive reports on the search terms bringing traffic to your site, conversion rate and social media performance.
Use these tools to understand the performance and improving the promotion methods of your site.
Review Your Goals and Performance
Final step is to take your time in reviewing the performance and goals of your site. Though it is necessary to have rigid goal you can improve the information and layout of your site dynamically to improve the performance. Promotion methods like creating a blog posted periodically about your site news, participating in online forums of same interested communities, social media promotions like Facebook and email newsletter to your users will also help to make your site’s online presence a success.
Leave a Reply
Your email is safe with us.