Starting a new website? What should you pay attention to?

Nice! You want to start a new website. In this article I am going to give you some tips & tricks & tell must do's that are crucial when creating a new website. If customers want to create a new website or order one from us, they often want to start building immediately. This is usually not the right approach because this often ensures that you get a bad structure on your website and if it has to become a large website you can no longer see the wood for the trees.

But then the question is what should you do? Before you start building a new website, it is useful to consider what do I want to achieve with my new website? Is that selling products/ informing people/ instructing people or any of the thousand other reasons why someone can start a website. All these reasons have one thing in common, they need people. After all, you don't make a website so that no one ever visits it.

Functional Design

That is why we always start writing a concise Functional Design before we start a new website. First we discuss with the customer what exactly needs to be achieved with the website and on the basis of this we record a number of things so that we are not faced with any surprises later on. This also ensures that we can make a better estimate so that we or customers are not faced with surprises.

Structure

Here we determine, among other things, the structure of the website. For example, if you create a website for a company that offers services, you expect the services to be listed under a global services page and not under the main page. In addition to giving your site a much more logical layout, it also ensures that you can be found better by Google.

wrong = https://mijnbedrijf.nl/dienst_1

correct = https://mijnbedrijf.nl/diensten/dienst_1

Templates

In larger websites it is often not the case that every page looks different, this is also not useful because it ensures that your website will look much too chaotic and you also ensure that you show that service pages have the same appearance, but with different content this creates the feeling that they are both services. To start making the page again for every page is crazy work and a waste of time. That's why we work with templates so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel for every page.

We therefore often make a mockup of the template with the help of our landing page builder so that we also immediately have the html of the template. With this we can very easily via our drag & drop builder quickly put together a basic template that is also immediately responsive. We can do this together with customers so that no one is faced with surprises.

Functionality

Another big topic that we often use here is functionality. Some functionality only has an impact on a page, for example a booking module for a hairdresser. And other functionality affects all pages, for example a website that must be available in multiple languages. Therefore, depending on what kind of functionality a customer wants, we have to think carefully about how we can implement this in the website.

Building

Once we have a good functional design, we can start building. Based on our design, we can quickly set up the pages, but before we start building there is one more important point I want to show. Below we've grabbed a month and a half sample size for one of our websites of how users visit the site. As you can see just under 3 quarters visit the site on their mobile. Nowadays, websites are more visited via a mobile and tablet instead of a desktop. We see this trend increasingly extending to all industries, of course there are exceptions to some industries, mainly B2B, financial and recruitment have even more traffic via desktop. But we also see an increase in the number of mobile users in these industries.

That is why it is important that we take into account when building that all information / functionality that you want to have on your website can also be viewed or used on a mobile device. That is why when building a website we always have to build mobile first and then work our way up to a desktop. And that we keep a close eye on whether the flow of the website runs smoothly on a mobile phone. If you want the customer to press a certain button, it is not useful if it is at the very bottom and that you can only reach it after scrolling down for fifteen minutes.

Finished! But what now?

Well we have now launched our website completely within budget thanks to our functional design and taking into account mobile first development. Now we have to wait for the first sale/customer, but they will not come automatically. Unfortunately, we still see too often people who think that if they put their website live, the customers will come automatically. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way - it takes time and hard work to get people to your website. If you have taken the above things into account, you have taken a good first step, but we are not there yet. It is important to look at how many visitors my website needs to run monthly. If you know this, you can see if it is useful to run ads or if you should focus more on SEO.

Conversion

To see how many visitors your website needs, you need some data. This can often be obtained from a combination of Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools, which is why it is so important that these are both properly configured because they contain very valuable information.

Suppose you have to bring in 4000 gross to run quite and you make 40 euros gross profit per product sold, then you have to sell 100 products per month to achieve that. Then you see how many visitors you need to make 1 sale. You can calculate your conversion rate based on this. Your conversion rate strongly depends on the product you sell and whether you have regular visitors or not. Bol.com, for example, has a fairly high conversion rate because people who go there already know what they want to buy. Suppose you have a conversion rate of 1.2%, which means that if we want to sell 1 product, we need 83.3 visitors. We had previously calculated that we had to sell 100, so to get there we need 8330 people on our website.

If you then have to pay an amount per person to get them to your website, this can quickly add up. That is why it is so important to ensure that your website is as solid as possible before you start advertising. If you want to read more about how you can organically grow your traffic to your website, read this article about SEO.

I hope you learned in this article that a good preparation when building your website can make a big difference and in the end result in you ending up with a better website. Do you need help with creating a functional design or creating a website. Please contact our team and we will be happy to help you.