Planning Your Website
Ask yourself these questions:
- Why do I want a website?
- What do you think a website will do for me?
- How much am I willing and able to invest?
Most people expect a website to attract new customers, bring in more sales, and open up more opportunities for their business or organization. A website alone will not and cannot do that. You need a plan.
A lot of businesses have wasted their time and money building a website, only to abandon it. Then it sits for years without being updated or visited, or it has outdated information.
A website is like owning a house. It will need ongoing maintenance and someone ensuring it’s always ready for guests. It will have ongoing costs and will need repairs at times, so be sure that you’re willing and able to make the commitment.
Now, ask yourself…
- What will people do on my website?
- Why will they want to visit my website?
- How will people find out about my website?
- Who will maintain my website?
- What value will I provide to my visitors?
Should I Build a Website?
Websites have become a necessity to almost everyone. Companies, businesses, individuals, even young adults have created personal websites with their respective purposes, be it for profit, or for entertainment.
What one must consider, however, before creating a website, are the factors in which must be put to thought before doing so, such as the cost, maintenance, use, web host and so forth. There’s a lot involved!
The cost of owning, building, and maintaining a website can vary greatly from being totally free to costing tens of thousands of dollars. The key is knowing what you need, putting together a good plan, and finding the right resources, tools, and people to help you.
Good Planning Gets Results
For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs.
With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace.
The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks.
For example, you might have a "food" section, an "accommodation" section and an "entertainment" section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.
If you are starting a blog, when you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page.
You can also earn from programs like Google's Adsense and Bing if people surf to those pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.
Who Is Your Audience?
Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important task because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. As a result, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more.
What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts, but a well-educated university graduate will find that site interesting.
Take your audience's emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.
When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site's general theme.
Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.