Thursday, March 3, 2011

How to Design a Successful Website For Free!

Designing a Successful Website

A website is essential if you want to tap the highly potential internet for promoting your business. Whether you create free websites yourself of hire a professional website design consultant, it is important to get the right website design if you want it to be successful. Here are some important factors you should consider to create a successful website.

Goal and Purpose of Your website

First thing you should ask yourself is – Why do you want a website? Is it for advertising, providing information to customers, or for e commerce? Whatever the purpose is, a business website should be designed considering what you have to offer to the customers – information about your products, services or the industry, to provide your services through the internet or to sell your products online.

Understanding Your Customers

Before deciding your website design and what goes in it, you need to be clear about who it caters to. You might already know who your customers are if you’ve been in the business for long. Otherwise, you should identify the potential market for your products and design your website to suit their needs. You should -

  • Use a language and terminology they can easily understand
  • Make sure that the website is simple to use
  • The technology used in creating your website should be compatible with devices such as desktops, laptops, mobiles, etc
  • Create a purchase or order process that is easy to follow

In case you are creating an ecommerce site, make sure that users find your site reliable and secure to place orders or make online purchases.

What do You Want Customers to Do

A business website is successful only if it helps you achieve your goal. Once the customers are on your site, you may want them to

  • Make an online purchase or place an order
  • Share their personal and contact details
  • Contact you through phone or email
  • Create an account with you or subscribe to your newsletter
  • Ask for a quote or consultation
  • Download something
  • Donate for a cause
  • Share or bookmark your page

Depending on what you want the customers to do, you should design and organize your website so that they can access the most important pages and perform the desired action easily.

Planning Your Free Web Design

Once you are clear about your website’s purpose and what you want to achieve through it, you should work on the following aspects of your website.

  • Classification of Website – You need to figure out the different webpages that would be a part of your website, including the primary pages like Home, About Us, Contact Us, Products, and FAQs. Besides that, you can have secondary navigation links for event calendars, blogs, case studies etc.
  • Navigation and Usability – Your website should be easy to browse and use for all kinds of customers.
  • Content – Content should be relevant to your company’s theme and have the appropriate language, tone and keywords
  • Appearance - The overall appeal of your website should be attractive and striking enough to hold the visitor and turn them to customers.

A paid or free web design would be most efficient when it is original, appealing and tells the customers exactly what to do.

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