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Before you start any new website project, it's important to give some time to challenging your own idea to make sure that it is worth the investment that will be required to realize it online. If it holds up to the scrutiny of the following questions, you may be ready to get started.Get in touch!
There are two budgets that need to be considered and allocated in advance of beginning any web project. The first is the cost of the initial phase, which should cover the planning, prototyping, design and development leading up to the first launch of the site. If you've already set aside a specific amount to work with, it's helpful to let your web partner know this up front. Vaguely representing your budget in order to try to control negotiation won't work well for either party. Agood web partner will consider your budget and tell you exactly what can and cannot be done with it, even if that means you end up spending less than you planned toGet in touch!.
The second budget is the yearly amount you'll likely spend maintaining your website, which might include specific costs like support and hosting fees, as well as any functional upgrades or design changes you make moving forward. Often, this amount is commensurate with the initial project cost; the more complex and costly a website, the more complex and costly it is to support and maintain.Get in touch!
Why are you building this website? What do you hope to achieve with it? If you are unclear about the purpose and expected outcome of your project, then you will have a difficult time answering any further questions. Start by considering your business. If, for example, you offer services to other businesses, your immediate goal is to capture the attention of prospects that don't know about you yet, speak directly to their need--clearly identifying the pain points and your solutions--and compel them to contact you. In other words, your website is primarily an informational resource and lead-generation tool. On the other hand, if you offer a product, you may need to provide functionality like product demos and support forums in addition to actually selling it through your website. In either case, you must have specific goals for your website. Simply being online is not enough.Get in touch!
If you've worked out the purpose and goals for your website, the next step is to identify the types of people you hope will use it. We call these types "personas." As an aspect of planning, identifying personas is one of the most helpful exercises for shaping your content strategy. In their most simple form, your personas will probably be either decision makers--those to make the final decision to buy--or influencers--those whose research will enable decisions to be made. For business to business marketing sites, it will be very important to enable both types of persona, particularly because what is of value to influencers--substantive content--is just as valuable for search engine optimization as well.Get in touch!
Though most successful companies have experience creating and executing robust lead nurturing processes for print marketing campaigns, it hasn't been until recently that they have had to apply the same principles to web marketing. It's one thing to identify the most basic goal--sales. It's another thing to understand how users operate online and to nurture them from browsers to customers. Clear and easy-to-respond-to calls to action are critical to actually capturing leads online. In some cases, they might be as simple as 'Buy Now!' But most often, they are actually going to be engaging users to enter into relationship with you, perhaps by signing up to receive more information, registering for an event or requesting a meeting with you. No matter what the level of engagement, you should try to ask for as little information from the user as possible while giving them as much as you are able. For example, if you are offering a newsletter subscription, go ahead an ask for the user's email address, but much more than that will be pushing it, making it much more likely for someone to pass up your offer. Put simply, don't ask for more information than you need.Get in touch!
Often, your website is just one piece of a complicated operation. Rather than attempting to consolidate all the functional elements of a business into one web application, it's probably more realistic to properly integrate a website within an existing process that may include many players. This means finding ways to integrate the website's functionality with already working systems. Before you start any work, it's very important that you identify all the necessary systems already in use and determine what level of integration with them is possible. There may be limitations based upon time, budget or the capabilities of the other systems.Get in touch!
Before you build anything, someone will surely want assurance that their money will be well spent. Measuring the return on an investment requires data, so you'll want to make sure that your website is built to facilitate measurement. This could mean generating unique reports, passing information to and from other measurement tools, or integrating with CRM's. Assuming you've created clear calls to action, your site should begin generating rich user session data that will help you understand how it is being used, from the beginning of a lead cycle all the way until a goal has been completed. If you don't collect and measure the data, you'll never know what is working and what isn't.Get in touch!
Once it's built, maintaining a website is a major ongoing effort. Yet many companies assume that it can be just folded in to the already long list of responsibilities of someone in their marketing department. Perhaps this is realistic for some, but not many. The amount of work required to maintain a website should correlate to the level of expectation for its value as a business tool. In other words, if you expect your entire business to run through your website, then you should expect to devote significant resources to it as long as it's live. This might mean partial time spent by several people, or full time by one or more--it depends upon the size of your business and the complexity of your site. But the key point is to plan for this in advance. Realistically, maintaining a website today involves regularly creating and adding content to the site, tracking and nurturing leads, evaluating site performance with various measurement tools, planning for and managing ongoing upgrades, and all kinds of engagement activity necessary to generate valuable traffic to it. For some sites, one person can do all these things; for others, it will require a team.Get in touch!
A typical web project takes 3-6 months from planning to launch, though various phases of the project will require different levels of client attention. During the planning, prototyping and design phases, we tend to schedule as many as 2-3 calls per week with our clients to coordinate and review progress. However, less input is needed from our clients during the actual development phase, so it tends to be a "quieter" time in which they can create and prepare content to be entered once the site is built. In any case, the website development process, from start to finish, is a significant effort which requires the full attention of everyone involved. Think of it like an intensive, boot camp like training experience that prepares you for the ongoing task of maintaining your website. If you don't have time to devote to this process, you either need to make time or find someone at your company who does.Get in touch!
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