A well-crafted website is behind every modern business that nails the digital aspect well. Whether you want to establish your brand or expand your business, a well-formed website is critical to creating a lasting user experience. However, the truth is that most businesses still stumble when building a website that relates to their business needs. So, how does this happen? What is the reason behind this? It might lack a clear understanding of what is required from the beginning.
Think of website development as similar to planning a trip. You must know where you are heading, what it will take, how many days a particular trip will be, and more. A website is no different. A well-thought plan is mandated to shape your vision into a working reality.
However, launching a website is not as easy as hitting the “publish” button. A successful website launch requires a lot of effort, from creating a plan to making it live. Website development services can help you formulate a distinctive strategy for your project’s needs. This includes everything from defining your goals to incorporating all the essential features that can serve as a standing pillar in the success of your website.
How to Launch a New Website?
No, you are not alone. Most businesses experience the same sense of confusion before launching a website: confusion about buying a domain or hosting first, which CMS to choose, pre-built or custom themes usage, and many other aspects. All these can confuse anyone, but creating and following a perfect roadmap is essential to formulating a competitive web presence. Here are the steps that can help you launch a successful website:
1. Formulate Proper Planning
Proper planning plays an essential role in the successful launch of a website. You must clearly understand the goals and requirements while preparing a working plan for your project. When constructing your home, would you put up the roof before providing any support in the form of walls? Not possible! Similarly, in website development, laying a strong foundation becomes crucial. Here are the things you can consider while formulating your plan:
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Defining the Purpose
Start by describing the purpose of your website, whether you want to create a blog-based website or an eCommerce store. What are the goals of your website? What will your website offer that others do not?
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Setting the Target Audience
The first thing you need to know is, How? Well, this is not rocket science that requires particular expertise. Whether you are a business owner with a specific audience group or a startup making the first appearance, you must know your business type.
For instance, you are a startup with a straightforward focus on providing website development services. The users you will target will be looking for these types of services. You only require in-depth research of similar websites, their users, and other important aspects that can help you create a sustainable presence.
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Selecting the Apt CMS
When formulating a working strategy, the next important step is selecting the right content management system (CMS) to maximize your business’s presence.
The market is filled with various options, and choosing the right option becomes difficult. For CMS development, various names like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and others have raised their flags. Now, which way to go? This depends on the requirements and the type of business you are in.
For instance, you are a local business owner who runs a brick-and-mortar shop and wants to expand online to reach and attract more customers. CMSs like Shopify, Magento, or PrestaShop can greatly help you develop one because these platforms are built explicitly for eCommerce website development. You can utilize one of them based on your project’s preferences. Work with the experts to harness your selected platform’s full potential.
2. Secure Your Identity Online
After formulating the plan for your business, the next step is to secure your online presence. This directly relates to buying a domain name that matches your business name. Various platforms can help you complete your quest to find the right online name for your business. Moreover, it is good to reserve book a domain name if you find it because the evolving competition does not require any introduction. So, it’s better to be on time than late.
3. Focus on Sitemap Creation
If you ever visit a library and find there’s no difference between educational and fictional books, it might be clear that you will face difficulty in finding the right book to read. This is an example of following a poor hierarchy, which is why most readers take an exit, and those who don’t are confused about their book choice. Similarly, website formulation also requires a proper structure to follow. Remember to keep this structure as simple as possible because complexity always leaves a negative impression. However, you can utilize your creativity or get assistance from a Technology partner. The structure of a normal website could go around like this:
- Homepage
- About Us
- Services or Products
- Blogs
- Contact Us
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
While building sitemaps, insist on following the “one page, one time/task” rule, stating that each page on your site has one purpose, whether it’s the landing page or the homepage.
4. Design and Develop your site
The next step is to design the individual web pages on your site. You can choose from the two approaches, whether to start from scratch or use a pre-made template or theme. The custom website design and development process requires in-depth expertise in the subject. Working with a company can help. Creating a custom design can offer you a distinctive web presence, which can help you stay ahead of the competition. However, formulation can take longer because of the choice of framework for front-end development (whether Angularjs, Reactjs, Vuejs, etc. can help), web development techniques, back-end development, database integration, and more.
On the other hand, if you utilize a pre-made theme for this purpose, it can provide you with generic functionality, but the way you want is not possible. Unlike custom development, these are not specifically built for one individual. However, compared to custom themes, it does not take that much time to invest.
5. Build a Content Strategy
Content is the backbone of a successful website. The stronger and more quality-oriented it is, the more powerful a business’s presence will be. To do so, blindly following everything or a trend is not right because instead of driving traffic, it can lead to a negative impression. How?
Consider that you are a service-based business focused on web development services. You have repeatedly posted content on the latest trends in mobile development to capture the majority of the audience’s interest. However, you lag when offering services, which can damage your web presence. This is where content strategy matters a lot to attract the right audience to your business.
6. Optimize Pages for SEO
What is the point of creating a website and building a content strategy if your pages are not optimized for SEO? If this is the case, then you are going to lose potential users who can either buy or opt for the services you provide. It is better to optimize every page for SEO before the launching of your website. You can work with experts to lay the technical foundation of your site stronger than others. Technicality matters, and in SEO, it plays a major role. For instance, your website’s structure, proper arrangement of navigation, consistency across all the pages, and so on.
Apart from the technical aspect, you can optimize your pages for SEO by conducting keyword research, creating meta titles and descriptions, using the correct placement of heading tags, and using various other strategies. This will help you attain higher ranks on the search engine. Also, stay updated with the latest updates of search engine platforms, never to downfall your rankings.
7. Ensure Responsiveness
Search engines like Google prefer to rank a website that seamlessly adapts to different screen sizes. While developing one for your business, ensuring the responsiveness of a website is a must. If you are using a pre-built theme, most of the chance is that a particular theme is responsive, and if not, it can be customized to meet the set benchmark. You can hire responsive web developers to create a screen-adaptive website theme.
8. Integrate Analytics
Be sure to check out the analytics integration on your website. It can help you track in the future which aspect is working as intended and which is not. Later, you can obtain information regarding which element users don’t like on your website and which is their favorable one. Also, it can help you in making data-driven decisions that can improve conversions.
9. Test Your Site
Before hitting publish, checking whether your site is working optimally is essential. This stage requires a quality assessment of each aspect of a website to ensure it is working fine. You can perform certain tests, such as usability, functionality, compatibility, performance, and many more, to find the OK report. These help identify the bugs and formulate a strategy to fix these errors.
10. Launch Your New Website
Now, it’s the time to launch your site and get it live. Launching a website cannot help you attain a promising position in this competition-oriented market. You must promote your website through various ways, like social media, email marketing (blogs or services), and advertising. This can help you achieve what you are aiming for. Moreover, maintain your website because as the traffic increases, it can slow down. To never face this, you must work with a website development company that can support your site effectively. Experts will perform all the necessary things, from taking a regular backup of your site to finding and solving bugs.
Conclusion
So, that’s the website launch checklist you need to follow. It includes all the pointers essential for a website’s successful launch. Follow all of them carefully. From creating a working plan to launching your site, every point holds an important role. However, some points can be added further depending on your business type.
The current market hosts a cut-throat competition, and to stand still by maintaining a strong presence, you need to stay updated and avoid stagnancy issues. You can make it yourself or hire web developers to perform this process effectively. The experts will understand your business requirements and formulate a working plan to help you create a sustainable web presence.
