5 Steps to a Website That Works For You

This is a bit of a generalisation, but these five areas cover most of what is required to make any website successful:

Step 1: Business Analysis

The very first step is to decide what you need the website for. A website is a tool, and a tool does something. You need to take a good look at your business and decide exactly what you need the website to do. Do you just need a web presence? Do you need to showcase a range of products, or sell those products directly to the public? Perhaps you need to provide easy-to-use tools to your existing customers, to make their lives easier while reducing your costs. In short, you need to define goals for your website.

Step 2: Information Architecture

Now you must decide what information or services you need to have on the website to fulfill those goals, and how that information should be organised. This is not a trivial exercise, and can make the difference between a useful website and a waste of time. You need to be practical, and balance the long list of ‘awesome’ stuff you want on your site with your budget, and what you can practically manage. Remember that the site isn't 'done' when it is launched – that is just the beginning, so grand plans will need to be maintained. On the other hand, this allows you to start small and build a body of content over time.

The way your information is organised is crucial to your site’s success. You need to present and arrange the information in a way that makes sense to someone who does not already understand the concepts, and does not know how your company is internally organised. So many websites contain very useful information hidden away in places the uninitiated user would never think to look. Remember who is going to be using the site.

Step 3: Design

The design of the site is the most obvious of the steps, but also often underestimated. It is important to choose the right colours, fonts and general style to complement the goals of your site, and support your company’s brand identity. More important, though, and the aspect of design that is most often ignored, is the presentation of information. The way each page is laid out, and the way each piece of information is displayed can make the difference between a useful, easy-to-use site, and a mess. A good design needs to focus on what is important on a page and remember who will be using the site, while taking into account the many limitations of designing for the internet.

Step 4: Code

At the core of it all, a web site is a piece of computer software, and needs to be written in code. Well written code will provide a framework and management system which will allow you, the website administrator, to manage the information and services on the site without actually knowing anything about the code that underlies it.

Step 5: Content Creation

Once you have goals for the site and you know what content you need , it is time to actually write or collect the content. Writing or editing content for the internet takes experience, and, in addition to the usual writing skills, the writer (or editor) needs to keep in mind the limitations of the medium. More than any of the other five steps, this is a continuous process. Business analysis, information architecture, design and coding should be revisited periodically, but content creation should happen continuously. The site needs to grow and develop, or it will stagnate and will no longer serve your business goals.

What about SEO?

If your code is up to minimum SEO standards, your information is organised carefully, and your content is well written, the SEO will look after itself. This is, after all, how the search engines are designed to work. There is no magical code we can add to the site to make it appear in position one for any search. Your site's rank with the search engines will grow with every new article you add to the site, and with every time another site links to yours. Other sites will link to your site if your site contains useful information. So all you need to do is organise your site well, and continuously grow your body of content, and the search engines will like you more and more.