Top Tips For Launching A New Website

Your website is going to be one of the most powerful tools your business can have when it comes to marketing. If it isn’t formative and easy to navigate, you risk your customers losing interest and going to one of your competitors. Launching a website and managing it can be quite a daunting job, especially if you have little or no experience. Because of this, many business owners don’t bother with one or have one that is ineffective, and they do not understand the impact that this can have on their business. Don’t worry though, because here, we cover some of the things that will help to make launching and running an effective website a lot more straightforward.

Carefully select your team.

Before you do anything, you need to choose whether you are going to do it all yourself, whether you will use an in-house web team or whether you will outsource to a third party. All of these options have their pros and cons, and most of it comes down to your budget and how much control you want over your website. Creating a site that looks good, but most importantly works with little downtime is a demanding and skilled job, so many decide to leave it to a professional. However, if you do want to have a go at it yourself, start off with a simple website, such as a WordPress based one.

If you decide to outsource the development of your website and IT services, which, if you have the budget, is recommended as it gives you more time to focus on growing your site, then there are a few questions that you need to ask.

Can you add/edit content easily on your own, or will you need to wait for them to do it?

Do you receive any technical support from the developer?

What measures do they have in place to protect against hacking, data breaches, and other cybercriminal threats?

Develop the content.

Before you spend ages building a website, you need to make sure that you have plenty of content prepared and ready to go on there. Many commercial sites now have a blog section, where they can share information, thoughts and relevant content linked to the industry, or give their clients and customers a ‘behind the scenes’ look at the business. One thing that you should be aiming for is not only to be selling your product or service to your audience but to be an industry expert. If you are using your website purely for sales, people will only come to your site when they are looking to purchase something. If you have a blog attached to it, people will be checking in regularly, so you need to be updating it regularly with fresh and exciting content. Google now consider interaction when ranking websites, so having material which encourages interaction and discussion with your customers will only help push your content higher up the search engine.

Develop an understanding of SEO.

Search engine optimization is essential when it comes to your website. Without it, your website won’t be visible or rank highly in Google searches, which is what brings in traffic for many sites. It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. Essentially, it is thinking carefully about the words that people might use to when they are searching for your site. These are called keywords. They need to be used carefully within your content, as well as being applied to images and titles. There are professional SEO companies out there, but there are also lots of website plugins and software available to help you out with this.

This is a contributed post.