Your website can be your company’s showcase or your online sales or customer acquisition platform. Whatever your objectives, your targets and your market, it deserves a personalized web study based on the analysis of different criteria in order to maximize the potential of conversions and the achievement of your objectives via your website. Different strategic steps are essential to optimize the investment of a website creation project.
If you wish to undertake the creation of your website, it is recommended that you seek professional advice before you start so as not to miss out on certain important aspects of your site. The technical foundations, the user experience and the quality of the contents of the site must be in the center of your reflexion to be able to dissociate you vis-a-vis your competitors and to bring a real added value to the communication and the visibility of your company.
The creation of a website is a multi-faceted project
The search engines propose numerous recommendations in natural referencing and it is essential to respect them in order to be visible on the web and to attract organic traffic. It is necessary to be even more vigilant since these technical constraints are regularly updated. It is therefore necessary to always be on the lookout in order to anticipate new algorithms and to adapt to changes and evolutions.
Another technical element, the creation of a website must be imagined with a well thought out tree structure in order to offer the best experience to your users so that they want to stay there and come back. If the website is ergonomic and pleasant to consult, users will feel confident and your website will be able to satisfy its visitors since it will be considered as reliable and serious.
A website must meet the mobile challenges with a perfect responsive design. Mobile traffic often accounts for more than half of all website visits. It is therefore essential to optimize the navigation on mobile during your website creation project.
For all these reasons, creating your website is a complex project. By entrusting this responsibility to a webmarketing agency, it will offer you a web universe specific to your brand image and you will be accompanied in all your steps on the web. The agency will propose a solid webmarketing strategy and a well thought-out user experience, notably with an SEO optimization approach and value-added content proposals.
Website creation: the importance of the specifications
The creation of your website must first be subject to the establishment of the most qualitative specifications possible. It allows to clearly list all the needs related to the implementation of the project. It is fundamental to establish a relationship of trust between your company and your provider and will allow to frame precisely your expectations by informing the essential information of the design of your website. The more clear, assessable, and exhaustive the specifications are, the more your provider will be able to accomplish the website that will meet all your expectations.
The specifications are your guarantee of security since they are an official signed document. It is the commitment of your provider to implement all your requests and respect the important criteria. It therefore protects both parties by establishing a sound professional environment, and by estimating the time needed to complete the project at the fairest rate.
During the meeting with your service provider, the latter will write the specifications following your vision and objectives for the project. The document will list all the technical constraints and the essential needs of your website.
Analyze the different features that could add value to your website
All the components of your website are to be included in your specifications. These components provide the different functionalities that will allow your website to be unique and efficient in the eyes of your users. The features allow you to customize your website to best reflect your company and its image and to meet your business needs. Some features are essential to optimize the user experience, and others are essential to have more visibility while respecting the expectations of search engines. That’s why a webmarketing agency will adapt your requests with customized functionalities, and will bring you precious recommendations to guarantee the visibility of your website. This feature analysis considers, among others, these different non-exhaustive examples:
- The functionalities of the backoffice and the CMS (Content Management System) will allow your team to easily manage the website: It must be functional and efficient.
- The header (logo, menu, tree structure…) and the footer (internal links, contact, schedules, access map, newsletter registration field…) are essential and deserve a precise organization.
- The form and design of the product sheets must reflect the quality of your know-how.
- The integration of an online payment module must be secure for e-commerce stores.
- Your website can host customer feedback with the possibility to publish a review.
- Content can be translated into different languages if your audience is multilingual.
- Live Chat can be integrated to quickly respond to user inquiries. Your social networks can be highlighted on your website.
- You can also invite users to share your content
The tools are custom-made according to your request. They can evolve with your business.
How to choose the right CMS (or content management system) when creating your website?
By CMS we mean Content Management System, these are tools that facilitate the creation of a website with prefabricated bases for editing and modifying the content of your site. Choosing the right CMS allows you to considerably reduce costs and development time. It is necessary to consider all the objectives and constraints of your website to choose the ideal CMS to manage your website in the medium and long term.
In view of the multitude of solutions available to you, it is essential to ask yourself the right questions to choose your CMS. This one will condition many aspects of your future site. It is therefore important that you choose a CMS that you understand and that is easily manageable.
WordPress is one of the most used CMS on the market. It allows you to add articles, pages, text, images and videos with ease. It is effective for the management of showcase sites, dynamic sites and even e-commerce sites. Fast, ergonomic, and very easy to install, WordPress drastically reduces the costs of a site. There are also many alternatives to WordPress on the market and it is important to make a personalized study to identify the solution best suited to your needs.
Website creation: the importance of taking into account the best practices of natural referencing (SEO) from the start
SEO is the set of methods and strategies used in order to reference its website on the search engine results pages. The goal is to attract more Internet users to your site, and thus maximize your potential chance of achieving your objectives of notoriety, incoming contacts or sales. It is an essential web marketing expertise to be visible on the web and it is therefore important to undertake the right SEO strategy since the creation of your website.
To have SEO optimized pages from the start, you need to work on the content with a preliminary keyword analysis. These will serve as the loot for your content strategy. It is then necessary to carefully integrate these keywords and their semantic fields into the content of your pages, avoiding over-optimization. Ideally, optimized pages offer a 100% unique content of about 500 words. To reinforce this approach, the creation of a blog section is an effective feature to communicate regularly with your audience on topics related to your business by intelligently adding new keywords more interesting for your business.
The tags also deserve careful attention for SEO optimization from the creation of your website. Thus, the URL, page title, and meta description allow search engines to gather essential information about your page so that they can rank it properly. Make sure your website has unique metadata with the right keywords.
Images are usually overlooked in SEO. However, they strengthen your natural referencing on search results and also allow you to be referenced on image searches. Images have different tags, including title and alt text. If you give words to your embedded images, they can be read by search engine robots. Choose images compressed to less than 500 Kb so as not to slow down the speed of your site.
Finally, when creating your website, the integration of internal and external links can boost your SEO. For external links on the one hand, you need strategic partnerships with other websites. This will directly improve traffic. For internal links on the other hand, internal linking allows you to increase the traffic of your lesser known pages. This practice is very beneficial in your SEO approach since the creation of your website.
Think about accessibility for people with disabilities
There are different components of the development and interaction of your website to make it accessible to people with disabilities (visual, hearing, physical, speech, cognitive, language disabilities…). The content of a web page (text, images, sounds, markup) defines the structure of this page and it is possible to equip your pages with assistive technologies (screen readers, alternative keyboards, switches…) to make your website accessible to people with disabilities. This adaptation strategy is based on four principles:
- The integration of information perceptible with different senses.
- Interactions that can be used by all. Users with disabilities must be able to use the interface.
- The information as well as the operation of the user interface must be easily understandable.
- Assistive technologies must be able to be interpreted reliably.
Inclusion is good for everyone. You are sending out a positive image with human values and this will greatly benefit people with disabilities who are looking for information about your company, or want to become your customers.
Choose well your web agency for the creation of your website
In order to guarantee the good implementation of these various advices, it is recommended to call upon a professional web agency: its experts in webmarketing will bring you the expertise you need to succeed in the creation of your website. They will guide you in your design and optimization process.
To make the right choice of agency, you can consult their references. Existing clients can give you direct feedback on their satisfaction with the agency’s service. You can also consult the sites already created to see concretely the quality of their work.
It is recommended to inquire about the availability of the agency to know what are the response times, the treatment of urgent situations, etc. It is also important to know the size of the team, and the seniority of the provider to know if the resources will be solid and sufficient to carry out your project and to ensure a good durability of your website. It is also important to know the size of the team, and the seniority of the provider to know if the resources will be solid and sufficient to carry out your project and ensure a good durability of your website in time.
Finally, it is normal to be interested in the rates of the agency’s services to evaluate if the quality-price ratio is in adequacy with your expectations and your budget. If all these points match your expectations, you just have to trust your instinct and follow the “good feelings” that will allow you to identify the agency to which you want to entrust the creation of your website.