Our 7 commandments for creating your website

Website Design Objectives

Your Website: Essential for Your (Digital) Marketing

Your website is now the number one prospecting tool for any business! Provided you've put sufficient effort into your copywriting, design, SEO, and technical elements of your website, it can easily help you present your business, showcase your offering, communicate, and generate sales.

A website means:

• Gaining recognition: Through your values and differentiation, you'll be recognized and increase your sales

• Building credibility: A website showcases your professionalism and expertise

• Increasing visibility: Having a website means being present on search engines, and there's nothing better for capturing attention and trust from internet users

You need to showcase your products/services, present who you are, what you do, who you work with, talk about your news, and your areas of expertise to demonstrate your expertise!

Additionally, this tool will allow you to analyze statistical returns from your visits. You can learn more about your targets, their journeys, and work on your offering and site based on this collected information.

Most importantly, if we take a different angle, not having a website means leaving the door open for your competitors to capture your potential customers instead!

Redesign vs Website Creation: Understanding the Difference

Of course, when we talk about website creation, we can't help but think about redesigns too. Since once you've created your website, you'll inevitably face this step sooner or later.

That's why it's important to take time to understand the similarities and differences. When you create your website, you'll have nothing; you won't know what will work and what needs improvement, at least not before launching and analyzing your live site.

You'll need to build everything from A to Z (content, design, user journey, etc.). Obviously, for a redesign, the work required will be much less since you'll already have a foundation to build on and you can target elements to optimize to boost your site based on collected data and your objectives.

Nevertheless, analyzing your data to have a clear direction will take time and patience. Certain tasks will need to be completed (like redirect planning based on page updates, redesigning visuals, rethinking logical blocks, or revising your content strategy to continue feeding your blog, etc.).

Despite these distinctions, you'll likely need the same marketing skills and tools to redesign your site as for its creation.

Prerequisites Before Website Development

Reserve a Domain Name

Your domain name is the first impression you'll give internet users. It should reflect your image and be unique—it's your online identity. You also need to think about the domain extension. You'll need to choose the most appropriate:

• Generic: Those commonly found (.com or .org for example)

• Geographic: Which allow targeting users in a specific area (.us, .uk, .ca)

• Customized: Which provide more information about the site (.shop, .blog)

You can then create your site name (checking its availability and with a custom domain for your business).

Choose Your Web Hosting

You'll also need to choose your web host to allow all internet users to access your site and ensure it stays online.

There are different types of hosts to choose from based on your needs:

• Shared hosting: Hosting multiple sites on one server. This can cause decreased speed and capacity since they must share space and resources.

• Dedicated hosting: The most secure and high-performing type of hosting where your site is the only one hosted on a dedicated server, giving you total control over your space and features.

• VPS hosting or "Virtual Private Server": VPS hosting provides exclusive storage space to guarantee good performance without requiring a dedicated server. It's a hybrid solution.

• Cloud hosting: Cloud hosting offers users a virtual hosting solution distributed across multiple interconnected servers, with real-time adjustable performance for more flexibility.

Before choosing your host, you need to evaluate your objectives to choose the one that best fits your needs: Important storage capacity? Managing future heavy traffic? A particular location? Security level? Unbeatable quality/price ratio? Your choice!

Our 7 Steps to Create a Website

Step 1: Define Your Website Development Objectives

To create a high-performing website, you need to know where you want to go—what are your website objectives: Convert quickly? Present your offering? Get more leads? Boost visibility? Sell products? etc.

You can use the SMART method to establish your objectives. This is an essential step that will set the direction for your site development. It's particularly important because your website objectives will be multiple and measurable.

Step 2: Work on Your Target Audience to Adapt Your Website to Their Needs

You also need to know precisely who you're addressing (needs, expectations, behaviors), how you want users to interact with your professional website, and how you can differentiate yourself from competitors.

For this, rely on buyer personas to work on your target audience. But you especially need to think about the user journey—the different steps they'll take on your website:

• Discovery of your site and offering

• Evaluation of your solution based on needs

• Decision whether the user wants to work with you or not

• Retention by continuing to nurture your post-purchase customer

Put yourself in their shoes and structure your site and content to provide solutions to their needs.

Step 3: Build Your Website Architecture

Now we move to pure website construction with the site architecture! It primarily serves to offer a good user experience on your site, because if navigation is complicated, visitors will leave. This "blueprint" that organizes your pages will help you define your site levels.

This is the value of working on your user journey upfront. Especially since user experience matters a lot for gaining points with Google, so it's better not to skimp on efforts!

To build effective architecture, you first need to find keywords that match your business and activity (while looking at volume and difficulty to know which ones to target). You can then use them to create your website menu and classify your pages (homepage...).

Next, you can create your architecture blueprint, on software or paper—obviously on computer your work can be more easily shared. Balsamiq or Miro are perfectly suitable tools for creating your architecture.

But especially think about internal linking! Your architecture should allow linking pages together, to nurture them, push them, and make them visible to users.

You'll then have an overview of your site and can establish logical blocks page by page (content that will constitute your pages) and start thinking about what they'll contain. The next step is creating wireframes to begin having the main graphic and design components of your site.

Step 4: Define Your Website Identity

Your professional website's visual identity corresponds to all graphic elements that will identify your business (logo, colors, typography, pictograms, illustrations, layout, etc.).

It should convey your company's values, vision, and mission. You need to think coherence, simplicity, readability, meaning, and originality.

• Coherence: For an identity to work, it must show who you are and what you do, across all your communication materials

• Simplicity: To avoid losing visitors with information scattered everywhere in a flash of color and pile of visuals

• Readability: On a website, what isn't readable isn't read or remembered. Simple, yet we still see many indecipherable websites

• Meaning: Graphic elements aren't chosen simply for their aesthetic aspect, but also for their psychological impact and the meaning they inspire

• Originality: Your site's identity should help you stand out and be memorable

Step 5: Determine Your Website's Editorial Line

Establishing a precise editorial line allows you to write your site content coherently with your identity, without going in all directions blindly.

This will also help you credibilize your content, retain visitors, and boost conversion if the editorial line is well thought out. Additionally, establishing an editorial line helps you create powerful text content!

You need to be clear about what you want to achieve based on your website pages (Inform? Convert? Promote?), who you want to reach, and what content you want to push.

Also think about your lexical field, the tone you want to use, and key terms you want to integrate (to work on your natural SEO).

Step 6: Consider Your Site's Technical Elements

Based on the website you decide to create (online store, showcase site, etc.) and your objectives, certain specific features will need to be added (example: chat, contact form, Google map, special access, multilingual, online booking ability, appointment scheduling, pop-up, etc.).

All these features require technical skills and particular expertise to avoid breaking your website.

Step 7: Conduct Pre-Launch Audit

When your website creation nears completion, anticipate its launch. While this step may seem simple, it shouldn't be taken lightly. You'll have various key points to verify, such as:

• Text proofreading (checking errors, optimizing SEO with right keywords and titles on your pages)

• Alt tag verification (text describing your images if they don't load, appreciated by Google robots)

• Title tag writing (your web page titles, should be 50-70 characters plus your page keywords)

• Meta description writing (small text describing your web page content, should be 150-160 characters)

• Internal linking verification (internal and external links present on your website)

You should also create a redirect plan if you already have an existing website to switch old URLs to new ones, avoiding errors and limiting SEO traffic loss. Other technical elements need consideration, including: cookie setup, HTTPS, image formatting, etc. That's why it's important to get proper support during and after your website launch.

If you want to know everything about site audits, don't hesitate to check our complete SEO audit article.

After Your Website Launch

Set Up Your Analytics and Tracking Tools

Your site is live, you're exhausted but happy with the result! However, the adventure doesn't stop there since post-launch is as important as creation: it must evolve, improve, and be optimized continuously to be effective.

How? Through data! Data collection will boost your thinking and guide your actions. Different tools exist for this, notably: Google Analytics and Search Console. 100% free, they'll help you observe your site's evolution and point out elements to work on or correct.

You can also use Microsoft Clarity (integrable with Google Analytics). It helps you study and understand how users interact with your website via heatmaps, showing where users click or how far they scroll down a page.

For those wanting an additional tool to analyze friction points on a website, there's Hotjar! You can observe user behavior and improve your funnel via this feedback.

Finally, if you're looking for a tool that respects user privacy while having access to your website audience, choose Matomo! It lets you collect and analyze numerous visit-related data while protecting it.

Continuously Optimize Your Site's SEO

Your website will need regular maintenance to guarantee long-term effectiveness. Especially since the web constantly evolves, so if you want your SEO to remain high-performing, you need appropriate maintenance.

To make this task easier, some providers offer SEO monitoring. That's notably the case at Sales Odyssey! So it's better not to make the wrong agency choice from the start.

Use Social Media to Get Known

You must select the platform(s) (be careful not to multiply channels) that suit you and fit your strategy. Between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, you have choices!

You need to capitalize on social networks where your target audience is to share your content regularly and generate new prospects, or at minimum boost your company's and website's visibility.

Keep Your Content Updated Regularly

For all these best practices to work, you must create engaging content that's regularly updated. Search engines love active sites that don't hesitate to improve and add content.

There's obviously the "blog" category that lets you write articles, which you can then optimize and repurpose into new content. But you can also create web stories or share videos from your YouTube channel directly via your website.

Website Creation: Costs and Benefits

What Happens After Creating Your Website?

Finally, your website is launched! You "only" need to follow its evolution and maintain it daily. Obviously, a website inevitably generates costs: hosting, domain name, maintenance, SEO optimization, etc.

All these actions impact your ROI, because remember, your website's goal is to attract new customers. For example, by working on your website's SEO, you'll be more featured by Google, your traffic will increase, and you'll have more chances to convert.

To properly analyze your website ROI, you should look at:

• Number of leads generated

• Your conversion rate

• Then determine the average value invested per customer

Multiply the number of leads generated by your conversion rate, then by the average value invested per customer: you get your projected revenue. For final ROI, subtract your investment costs then divide your result by website costs.

How Much Does Website Creation Cost?

Paid packages vary from one website to another. First, depending on the type of website you want, pricing won't be the same; a showcase site requires much less investment than an e-commerce site (with online store) for example.

Similarly, based on graphic element complexity, pricing varies:

• For a website without motion design or complex animations, target a lower price range

• For a website with animations and specific design elements, target a higher price range

Different services that can be added to your website creation can also vary prices, for example:

• If you want your provider to write your pages

• If you have significant content volume to produce

• Based on number of pages to implement

• Etc.

The CMS (content creation and management platform) used and requested features will also affect proposed pricing. The more customized your site, the higher the price.

To help clarify, we've gathered and studied 2022 market data via quotes from freelancers, small and large agencies.

Here's a pricing table showing average costs based on deliverables: