Critical Development Steps

Understand your market.
For your website to achieve results, you must understand your audiences. Ideally, you will understand their age group, gender, education, income level, and any other aspect of their lives that makes your product or service ideal for them.

Agencies build customer personas that enable them to reach market segments. Small to medium size businesses often skip this step and consequently their results are not effective. This topic itself warrants a full article, so I will not go into detail here. Developing an effective website will only happen with clearly defined goals.

Check your competition
Online competition is often massive, so we need to identify gaps in the market. A prudent business will conduct market research to identify where competitors rank using multiple search phrases relating to their product or service.

Think as a customer with a meagre understanding of your product or service.

1. What words would they use when searching?
2. What phrases would they use?
3. What problem are they trying to solve?

This process enables us to identify weakness in the current market that we can take advantage of. Tools exist to make this job faster, with better tools showing how often terms are searched for. Keywords and search phrases are not the only factors that help a website rank well, high value educational content, and other factors play a huge role in the overall performance of websites.

Understand your point of difference?
Unless you are selling a unique product, or service, then your point of difference is possibly difficult to define yet for marketing to be effective you must explore your point of difference.  An advantage over your competition could be as simple as a ‘longer product guarantee’, a ‘better service provided’, a product or service that solves a problem no other product can resolve.

A point of difference does not need to be complex, it can be as simple as answering enquiries in 10 minutes or less. Many businesses fail at the most basic requirements for customer satisfaction even though they meet expectations on price, product choice, and other common benchmarks. 

Understand your websites’ purpose.
Understanding your website’s purpose is critical to building great websites. Purpose should relate to your target audience, and sell your unique business proposition. Customers do not buy facts or features, they buy products and services to solve problems.

Let’s look at Some Examples

A Service Example
A customer with a burst water pipe has different needs to a customer with a blocked sink. Both need the services of a plumber, but ones more urgent than the other. Neither customer will care what plumbing fittings you use, yet both will want fast, reliable service.

A ’24/7′ manned phone and a no callout fee, might be the difference that gets the job.

A Physical Product Example
A unique product might be a tool that 4×4 drivers need when bogged down. The tool could be faster, stronger, lighter, and use less space when stored.  It might cost more, but is superior to the competition. The sales points could be, 30-second setup time, easy to carry, and minimal storage room.

It solves the customer’s issue of getting stuck by being small, light, fast to set up yet effective. A sale could come as the result of a customer watching a 10-second product animation, via your website.

A Non-Tangible Product Example
Many commercial customers have a problem quoting jobs accurately, with this adversely affecting the profit line. You have a product that aggregates quotes with a detailed time and material analysis, enabling future quotes to be generated quickly with greater accuracy.

Sales come due to substantial time and monetary savings a business makes using your product. The point of difference could be a 50% saving in time and materials over current systems.

For a website to be effective, it must quickly and effectively capture the attention of the audience. It matters not whether you are selling a product or a service. If you have not effectively captured attention within a few seconds, they have already moved on.

Epic content, drives the conversion process, it’s the shortest path to success.

Bruce Furlong

Content Creation
Now we understand our customer profiles, our point of difference, and our website’s purpose, the next step is to gather all marketing material and map out logical paths for our customers.

Great content should be unique, engaging and to the point. Content that has been plagiarised will rarely help your website rank. Search engines compare and check content between multiple sites, and educational, professionally written content, always performs better than poorly written copy.

Keyword stuffing is the process of repeating keywords throughout content to trick search engines into artificially ranking site content higher than a competitor, and while this might have worked ten years ago, it is no longer a good strategy.

Good website articles and content should be written to engage and educate the intended audience. Great content not only relates to site visitors, but it should offer up valuable insights and tips to your audience.

Visual Presentation
High quality imagery is a must for any serious marketing endeavour. Images should relate directly to site content and the path you desire your customers to take. If you do not have first-rate images then you need to either, take some, hire a photographer, or join an image library.

Sales Funnels
Well though out and planned sales funnels are a must if you want conversions and ROI (Return on Investment), for your business. Regardless of whether you are looking for new leads, or to generate sales, the process remains the same. I sales funnels contains four stages made up of: Awareness, Interest, Decision and finally Action.

Every part of the funnel process is necessary and must be considered when writing content for your website. Let us look at each step along with some examples:

Awareness – Clients become aware of your site either through organic search (Google etc), social media, paid advertising, word of mouth, or another medium.

Interest – Now a potential clients found your site you had better capture their interest, content that shows you are the expert in the field. Chances are the customer is doing research and during this phase valuable educational content that helps potential customers make informed decisions works best.

Note: Many sites fail at this, especially ecommerce sites where the product pictures are often too small, too few, and product descriptions are too brief. On top of these mistakes often pricing is not mentioned, and a site visitor leaves to check out other stores where they can find the details they want.

The chances of making a sale are considerably higher if product pictures are high quality with enough of them to show how great a product really is, in perfect detail, and the product description is detailed and informative.

Add to this customer product reviews and you have the recipe for making more sales at your fingertips.

Decision – A customer at this stage in the sales funnel is ready to buy but may still be considering a few different options including yours. This is the time to use the ‘Ace up your sleeve’ to try and prompt the customer into acting. It could be a call to action in the way of a discount that expires if not used now, or free shipping, or some other offer you can use to tempt the customer to act.

If you are selling a service your call to action might be, ‘contact us now for a free quote’, or ‘contact us now for 20% off your first session’, it is not important what the offer is so long as it holds value to the customer and entices them to act now.

Action – The customer acts and now its your turn to act. Express gratitude for the sale, reach out for feedback, make yourself available. Ideally the customer will become regular and as you build trust, they will recommend your service or product.

Action can happen at any point in a sales funnel it all depends on the customer, and when they are ready to commit. If they have already been doing research it might be that they were ready to buy when they enter your site resulting in a sale right away. However, for many customers they often looking for more information and doing comparisons before they commit to buying. Rakuten marketing did a study that shows that the average shopper makes 9.5 visits to a brand before making a purchase compared to 2011 when those same shoppers visited a mare website 2.5 times before making a purchase. 

If you are going to try to retain some of those potential customers, then you are going to have to work harder than you did back in 2011. If a sites visitor comes to your site during the average first 8 visits, then the statistics show that the chance of them making a purchase are slim as they still are looking for more information before making the purchase.

Site Visitor Retention
If you are going to have a chance at enticing these customers back to your site to make a purchase, you are going to need a customer centric loyalty program or drawcard. Let look at a few different types of customer loyalty programs.

Email Marketing – Exceptional email marketing campaigns begin with understanding your customers needs. Once you know your customer needs you can match your product or service to satisfying those needs. One of the best ways to do this is to offer potential customers something of value to them. Being an expert in your field will help with this as you could offer a weekly email for customers that join your program with tips that will save your customers time and money.  This email should be specific to your field and offer real value to your subscribers.

Point Based Rewards – To encourage customer to join and follow your business you can offer a points-based rewards system. An incentive to join could be extra points for joining and participation. Points can normally be redeemed when purchasing from the store. Points can be rewarded for purchases, sharing and participation.

Paid Loyalty – Paid loyalty programs are where a customer pays to become a member. Becoming a member allows customers to unlock otherwise unavailable services or discounts.

Value Loyalty – Customer build rewards by using products or services with your company and are rewarded with points for each action. Rewards points can be gifted to fund a charity of the customer’s choice. This works well where a business wants to help in the community with the environment or socially as the customer and the business share similar end goals.

Tiered Rewards – Tiered rewards work by grouping customers into pre-set groups that have increasing levels of rewards (monetary and support) as members move up through the different tiers.  

Loyalty programs often consist of more than one type of reward for the end user and are tailored to the needs of the customer and business. These systems work well as they rewards brand loyalty by giving a customer a sense of belonging by acknowledging and rewarding them for each brand interaction.

Brand Awareness
Any serious marking campaign or planning should consider brand awareness, colours, logos, font and the general look and feel should be across every platform that being utilised. We want customers to immediately recognise our brand from a quick glimpse at any of our marketing material. Good branding is what helps distinguish us from our competition. Colour, fonts, and Logo’s should distinguish your brand and its services or products by amalgamating company ethos and design together so they independently, or collectively, represent the company by bringing immediate brand recognition.

Domain Names
If a website is the building on your property a domain name would be the letterbox containing the street number. A domain name should be brand relevant and ideally you should also purchase any common misspellings as they can all point to the primary domain name. Domain names can be country relevant, www.domainnames.co.nz,  www.domainnames.co.uk, and www.domainnames.com with a .com domain name being the most common one. 

Impaired Users
When we think of impaired users, we often conjure up pictures of people with dark glasses and seeing eye dogs, however we might be surprised to learn that approximately 10% of site visitors have some type of visual impairment. Of the male population 8% is color blind with color blindness also affecting .5% of the female population.

Imagine if 10% of the population were disabled and could not use stairs. Next imagine for a moment that shops, carparks, etc, did not build ramps for the use of mobility devices for these users. This is a great parallel that shows how visually impaired users are disadvantaged, when they visit websites absent of accessibility standards. 

Text size, font choices, background colors and patterns, image tags and a host of other important factors should all be taken into account during the planning and design stages of your website.

Design, UX and UI
UI and UX require some explanation as they are abbreviations for user experience ‘UX’ and user interface ‘UI’. User interface revolves around the design process making sure that every aspect of a design is not only pleasing to the eye but conveys the site message without clutter or distraction. Every element in a design should complement the content in a meaningful way. Excellent user interface design goes one step further by integrating visual elements such as buttons and icons into the design in an intuitive way.

User Experience is about how a user feels internally after interacting with a website or intranet. Is an end user left feeling lost, or was the experience positive with the UI leading the client to a logical defined conclusion?

Great design looks to please and engage your target audience, great designs not concerned with being relevant to everybody as it understands not everybody has the pain points the sites designed to solve. Good designs user-centric with a focus on taking users on a valuable journey, with a desired outcome.

If design begins without its precursors being considered, then the resulting design will never be as effective as it could be.

OOTB or Bespoke Design
Out of the Box (OOTB) solutions are great for customers who have budget limitations yet need a lot of functionality such as: social media integration, ecommerce integration, payment gateways, forums, customer relations management ‘CRM’, content management systems ‘CMS’ or any other common functionality.

These days there are a variety of robust tried solutions that are either free or cost very affordable. Most content management solutions support modules that can be added to enable desired functionality. Modules often have free basic versions where extra functionality can be added for a minor yearly subscription fee.

OOTB, CMS and CRM solutions allow a person with infinitesimal knowledge of web design to make basic changes to fonts, colors, and graphical elements contained in website templates. Pages and articles give you almost unlimited control over layout and presentation of information and data.

A disadvantage of OOTB solutions is that because they serve many different roles, the code, page load times and ability to optimise, can be hampered due to the complexity required to fill every role a client might require.

 
Bespoke website solutions do not suffer as OOTB solutions do because the code that drives a website is written to achieve a defined purpose and nothing more. If extra functionality is desired later, codes then written to enable new functionality that performs as intended.

This approach also means design is fully separate to code enabling a design that fits with a client’s brand, intended audience and message to be easily implemented without constraints.

An added advantage is that because no extra elements get loaded each time a webserver requests a page, load times are dramatically shortened resulting in less cpu cycles, and less server bandwidth being required.  If your using dedicated server space this can result in savings over time. Clients certainly will appreciate sites that load quickly, are relevant and deliver on promises.

Bespoke design costs more, so having a solid project plan is a must before venturing down this path.

Navigation & Data Taxonomy
The best UI/UX models contain intuitive data taxonomy coupled with instinctive navigation. Data taxonomy is the classification of data into categories and sub-categories, and this is extremely important as it forms part of your overall project plan.  

Poor data classification will severely affect end user experience and is extremely costly to fix once a website is out of production and has been launched.

Sitemap & Wireframe
A sitemap and creation of wireframes are valuable steps to make. Sitemaps help you understand and plan your sites data taxonomy in a logical meaningful way. Wireframes aid further in the development and refinement by allowing you to visually map how and where data should be displayed. This process will not only allow you to visualise layout but it will also enable the planning of website templates.

Responsive Design
In 2020 it is not enough to create websites that displays on desktops alone. With mobile devices making up a significant segment of the marketplace it is critical that any website renders accurately on a variety of devices. Device types, screen resolutions, and the operating systems different devices run on all play a role during the planning and development stage of any project.

If your sites not responsive, then you are going to immediately rank lower than your competition that does implement responsive design into their strategies. Its imperative these days as search engines place emphasis on this approach.

SSL / HTTPS / TLS
SSL certificates show that a website is using a secure protocol to communicate between the webserver and customers browser. (SSL) certificatesare an area that is scrutinised by search engines. Customers and search engines want data to be secure and emphasis is put on security when connected to a webserver. Secure protocols stop hackers intercepting the transmission of sensitive data such as credit card numbers and personal information.

SSL certificates are a must if you want your website taken seriously by search engines and potential customers. HTTPS websites show as a trusted sites by search engines by containing an HTTPS precursor before the domain name, and a padlock icon beside the domain name. Both identifiers show customers the connection to your site is secure and can be trusted, Google also gives priority to websites that have an SSL certificate.

Note: If you are not using an SSL certificate then browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and others will show a warning that the websites not secure.  This is alarming to potential customers and in many cases the customer must opt-out of the warnings to access an insecure site costing you site visitors and sales. 
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is an older protocol that was used up until 1999 when TLS became the protocol of choice due to enhanced security.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the latest and most secure protocol available for website security. Often though TLS is referred to as SSL because of confusion regarding the protocol used by SSL certificates.  

Hosting Services
In order to test and make your site live, you are going to need a webhosting service. There are several hosting options available including, Windows, Apache, Dedicated, Shared, VPS, Cloud, and various other options. Each type of hosting is unique and suited to specific requirements such as cost, traffic, bandwidth, programming language, database needs and a host of other needs.

UAT Testing
User acceptance testing (UAT) is the process of testing a website before marketing begins and it is made public. This is a valuable step as it will find website vulnerabilities, mistakes, broken links, and a host of other issues that you do not want in the final production version.  Larger websites and intranets often go though multiple test steps during production as milestones are met. A small simpler website would typically go through at least one set of user acceptance testing and can be simple or elaborate depending on the intended audience.

Many websites go into production with little or no UAT process and its not hard these days to find such site as they often suffer from broken links, broken code, grammatical errors, poor load times and a host of other annoying issues. Any website that needs to be taken seriously, should go though, at least one set of UAT testing.

Follow Up
An ideal website will have a system for following up with clientele that make it though the websites sale or contact funnels. Ideally you want to engage with all your potential customers so you can meet expectations and be sure that your websites are constantly being tweaked, as required, to take full advantage of the current marketplace.

By engaging with potential customers and clients you will build repour and brand awareness, ensuring your brands at the forefront of a customer’s mind when they require your product or services.

Tracking and Analytics
No website would be complete without the ability to track users’ habits while on your website. Ideally you will want to know where customers are entering your site, where they leave, how long they stay on the site, what pages work well and what pages do not, where they come from and what type of devices they use, whether they make contact or buy products, and any other type of dataset that is useful to your business. 

The ability to gather customer data is one of the most powerful advantages of an online business as opposed to an offline business. A correctly configured, data driven website, gives you power to tailor your products and services directly to your intended audience. The tools that are available for data capture, and data analysis in 2021 are easily capable of meeting the needs of almost every kind of conceivable business you could image.

Marketing and SEO