There are millions of websites nowadays. If you are thinking of building your website, there are many things you should be aware of. This ranges from having a friendly SEO to attractive designs.
For starters, you should place yourself in the shoes of the customer and make a list of what you would have wanted. You should think about the security issues regarding your website and much more.
To talk about all that in a little more detail, here’s a list of 10 essential things to know before building a website in 2016.
1. Domain name
It’s the initial step of web designing. It’s a name of your website. You have to pay certain fee to register for the right to use that name. However, getting a name doesn’t mean you will get a website. It’s just registering a business name.
The domain name must be short, easy and memorable. In addition, branding strategy should also be applied while choosing a domain. In other words, your domain name should represent your brand. However, you should be careful not to violate any copyrights with your domain name as you don’t want to be on the bad side of the law.
2. Users
When you design your web page, you do so with a specific group of users in your mind. You must appeal to those users’ wants and needs to have a popular website. Otherwise, your website will be just another website in a world of millions of websites.
How can you know what your user’s need is? There are hundreds of analytic tools to answer that question. You can make use of one of those analytic apps to sort that out. These apps will help to get a data in your user, which will ultimately lead to the success in your undertakings.
3. Social media integration
In this age of social media, there is hardly anyone who hasn’t heard about social media. Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and many others have millions of users, which will provide a great platform to market your website.
If you are thinking of building your website, you should make sure that your website has an option to share the contents of your website in social media. Most of the top website builders provide support for this.
There are many analytic tools that cab track the ways and locations from which people are finding your website. This is vital for a successful website.
4. Security
Security is the biggest concern in the 21st century, even more so for the Internet. Technological advancements have led to different malwares, viruses and many malicious applications compromising the website integrity. Add the threat of hackers and you have your hands full.
To be more specific, if you are into e-commerce and require sensitive information such as personal information and credit card numbers of your clients, you need to ensure the security of your website.
These threats should be assessed in the beginning of webpage designing. Webpages must have SSL certificates and security checks must be conducted regularly.
5. SEO
You have a website with phenomenal design, interesting content and fast-loading speed. Great, but what good will it do if it has no viewers or just a few users? Therefore, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important part of webpage development. It will make sure that the targeted user will be able to access it.
Hence, it is crucial to have a clean and SEO friendly code. For this, you can use certain CMS services. While some CMS services require you to have a technical knowledge in coding, some services like WordPress require little technical knowledge.
6. Compatibility
Compatibility is one of the important aspects of a website. A website page must be able to run in any browser from Firefox, Safari to Internet Explorer. Even the older browsers must not be exempt from reaching this webpage. If it doesn’t, we will lose a large number of a customers, which will be very detrimental to the webpage in its infancy.
Moreover, the site should be supported on mobile devices as well. According to one study, 95 percent of mobile users actually use their mobile devices for online searching rather than their computer or laptop. This means a large chunk of your webpage viewers will be mobile users. Hence, webpage must be supported in all types of devices and across all the browsers.
7. Design
How your website looks is an essential thing to consider if you want it to stand out. Since it is the basic element to attract or distract the user, it is one of the important things to keep in mind before building the design.
For instance, if a design of any webpage is eye catching, users will be more likely to spend their time surfing for the content in a page. Good design also affects SEO of a webpage.
8. Hosting
If a site has a very slow loading rate, people are not going to wait unless it is a must. Since there are many webpages to choose from, there is no alternative for good hosting.
In addition to that, poor hosting is bad for the search engine ranking of a webpage. You should test your website and resolve hosting issues prior to the official release of your website.
9. Navigation
If you are thinking of building a website, let’s be clear that there is no substitute for good navigation. If a customer finds it difficult to navigate your page, they are going to lose interest and may never access it twice.
For a good navigable site, you can use dropdown in navigation menu. This will ensure, there is no confusion for a client while viewing your webpage.
10. Cost
After all the considerations, things eventually boil down to the ‘cost’. Building a website requires money. You need to spend money to get a domain name. You will also need money, if you are employing a web designer to design your webpage.
Furthermore, monthly maintenance must be done, which is also costly. Therefore, one should estimate all the associated costs before starting the project.
Featured photo credit: Pixabay via pixabay.com
