Many website owners know what a website should be. However, not all of them are completely aware of just how beneficial it is to have a highly functional and intentional website. For some, a good looking website built with one of the small website builders like zenfolio is one huge ticket to landing on Google’s top ten search results. Unfortunately, website magic entails a lot more than just aesthetics to be able to increase its conversion rate. Below is a smart guide on how you can design, develop and manage your website to make it capable of giving you the results you wanted.
Identify your objectives
When your objectives are well laid out and clearly communicated to your team, it will become easier for everyone to work together towards making these objectives achievable. It is also important that you have these objectives already written and carefully stipulated before forwarding this information to a web design company that you choose to work on your site. What is it that you want your website to achieve? Do you want it to provide excellent customer support? Do you need it as a means to sell your products and services? Does it need to help you promote better relationships between your investors and your business? These objectives have to be well documented for everyone in your team to see.
Determine how your objectives will be measured
After setting your objectives, you also need to identify those factors that help determine the success of your website. Make sure that these factors are measurable. For example, your objective should state that your website must result in a 30 percent increase in conversion rate after four months from the time it was launched. This kind of objective, allows you to easily measure just how successful are the changes that were done to your website.
Plan how the project will be completed
This is when you need to plan how many people should be in your team. During the project planning phase, you will also identify what tasks will be assigned to each department or team. For example, your marketing team will focus on gathering images or photographs to showcase your products and services while the web designer is assigned to developing page layouts. Your finance team will take care of payment gateway accounts and other stuff involved in e-commerce transactions. If you think you need to outsource some contractors, make sure you clearly specify the tasks that will be completed by them. This plan must also include enough budget and a realistic deadline.
Monitor each team’s progress
Project completion requires regular monitoring of the changes that are currently taking place while everything is still in progress. The schedule, scope, and costs must be revisited every now and then to see if changes have to be done. With regular monitoring, the stakeholders can also immediately take corrective actions and prevent the entire project from missing its objectives. Any problems that arise in one team which could possibly delay the completion of the website can be dealt with right away and prevent it from affecting the other teams as well.
This guide gives you a few of the many best practices that should be implemented when designing, developing and managing a website. Adherence to the abovementioned tips will help increase the chances of having a successful website.