7 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Building a Website

March 16, 2017

|In Web Design, Web Development, Design, SEO Services, Education, Social Media, Marketing

Want to build a new website?

Exciting right!? Whether you’re planning to hire a web designer or interested in starting a do-it-yourself (DIY) website project, having a smart approach and knowing where to start can save you time and money. We want to help you with this important and exciting process, and have written a few important things to keep in mind to help make your first steps easy and stress-free. Many people can get overwhelmed by the many different options, new terms, and sometimes complicated features they hear about when speaking with web designers. But if you ask yourself a few simple questions you can easily prepare yourself with a strong foundation of the right information to help make your next steps and discussions with any web designers much more productive and efficient.

In this post we’ve created a list of helpful questions to ask yourself that will help tremendously if you take a little time to answer them before contacting web designers about creating a new website or even if you want to build it yourself:

1. How will your company benefit from a new website or redesign?

Do you want to increase revenue and online sales?
Do you want to bring more traffic to your site?
Do you want to integrate any new features into your website?
Do you just want your website to be modern and mobile-friendly?

2. Who are your primary audience and target visitors?

Do you have a younger or older audience?
Will most of your visitors already know your brand when they arrive, or visit after only seeing an advertisement without knowing much about your brand?
Are your visitors interested in learning something or taking a specific action?
What action do you want first time visitors to take?
What kinds of actions do you want returning visitors or existing customers to take?
Do you prefer visitors to call you, book something, buy something, sign up for something, or just submit their email address?

3. What content do you need, and what content do you already have?

How much information needs to be on your website?
Do you know what pages you want to have, the names of the pages, and text they will contain?
Do you have photos already, or do you mind using stock photos on your website?
Do you have any graphical elements to add, and have they already been designed?
Do you already have a logo designed?
Do you need any custom graphics or icons to communicate your message?

4. Do you have your domain, hosting, or company email already?

Have you thought of or purchased a domain for your website yet?
Have you decided what hosting company to go with and what type of hosting you’ll need?
Do you have a company email setup with your domain name in it?

5. Have you researched what your competition is doing?

What kind of website are they using?
How does their content compare to what you want on your site?
What ‘calls to action’ (CTA) do they use?
What products or services do they emphasize most?
What is the structure and sitemap of their website?
What special features or functionality does their website use?

6. How will you market your website & drive visitors to it?

Will you continually update your content to provide new valuable content for visitors?
Will you use social media activity and networks to drive people to your site?
Will you use online, print, radio, or TV advertising to drive traffic?
Do you want to pay for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to rank well in Google?
Do you need traffic right away or are you happy to have traffic grow slowly as you add more content to your website or social media streams?

7. How Do You Measure Success and Optimize For It?

Are you considering site traffic monitoring systems?
Do you want to track ROI for conversions per advertisement?
Will you try to track total sales, or be able to identify sales from different channels?
Will you use outside sales and marketing subcontractors, or your own in-house team?

For measuring advertising performance and optimizing to improve it, you may want to consider strategies such as A/B testing, SEO, Content Generation, Ad Conversion Tracking, asking leads how they heard about you, using and comparing multiple channels to drive traffic from social media and online content distribution networks, in addition to traditional print, radio, & TV placement.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Be sure to keep these tips in mind when you’re considering building your next website. You will be much more prepared if you take a few minutes to consider each question, learn what the terms mean if any are new to you, and don’t be afraid to ask more questions. If you have get stuck on any of these questions, or feel want to have someone double check your answers, feel free to reach out to a professional at anytime!