Planning your website
The planning of your website is probably the most critical thing you can do to save time and money. It is during this phase that your ideas will come together and probably change a few times. If you are already working with a webdesigner working through these steps will save you money by not wasting time during consultations.
Our hourly consulting rate is $50 per hour.
Naming your site or purchasing another domain name to drive traffic
It is not as easy as it sounds. First, I recommend you stick with a .com name. Second, Check to see if your desired name is available. You can check here. . Try different variations, for instance if you are a dog groomer and www.doggroomer.com is taken how about doggromming.com. Third, you do not need to name your site the same as the business name, I know that this just sounds wrong but if your company name is taken and every other choice is as well then maybe think outside the box. Again, if you are a dog groomer and your name is bubblesdoggrooming how about going with one of the ideas above. Current research shows that urls are part of the complex search engine algorithms so consider purchasing more than one domain name for the same website.
Purpose
What are your sites goals? These are not the companies goals. For instance, using the dog groomer again. The goal of the website maybe to book appointments. Clients could log in pick an open time and schedule an appointment. Maybe they want to use PPC advertising and have custom landing pages for different ad campaigns. If you are redesigning a website your goal my be to increase conversions by 20%. You get the idea - simply list all the goals for your new site.
Branding
Gather all your current marketing materials, print ads, promotional materials, menus, and images that you regularly use. If this is a redesign print pages of your website so you can mark up. I was redesigning a site for a client using a very wordy existing site as a resource. When I was about 90% finished the client pointed out a page that was buried so deep I didn't even know it was there. Having all your textual pages in front of you is essential.
Research
What are the current trends is design, SEO and coding? Find keywords that you should be using in your website. Google has a keyword generator tool. LINK HERE If you don't have a clue this is possibly where a professional can help. A great looking site can be lost on the internet without good and even great SEO theories in place. However, if you are brave and want to forge on here is some reading for you.
Look of site
Think about the what the feel for your site will be. This often depends on the goal and industry you are in. For instance, the dog groomer, Bubbles, we talked about would probably want a clean site, probably in white, bright blue and grey. Where as a musician may want darker colors with lots of images. Through the magic of CSS you don't have to decide on the exact shade but you should have a general idea. Current trends are moving away from flashy graphics and busy sites with a lot of unnecessary graphics. This is when pure SEO collides with Graphic Designers. At smfDesignConsultants we understand this struggle and keep a balance between design look and design effectiveness.
Assess your needs and wants
What features would you like to have in your site. Possibly a built in blog, database, shopping cart, photo gallery, videos, surveys, etc. Depending on your budget you may not be able to have everything you want but we can show you how to incorporate many advanced applications for very little to no cost.
Hosting Company and Platform
First of all I want to say forget about the "free" hosting services. As we get deeper into building your site we will use all kinds of free applications and shareware. Hosting is not one of them. You need to make sure that the host you select uses the correct platform for your use. We are not a hosting and domain name company. However, we can recommend a service that offers flexability for advanced programmers and novices alike. All Web hosting and domain registration is provided through trusted 3rd party partners.
