How to prepare for a new website
Operational Requirements
The first step is to determine your operational requirements. This is the purpose of your website, what your website must do and how the various function from your website fits into the processes within your business. This can include an online sales platform, CRM integration, Online Marketing or Brand Awareness. The different functions for your website can be developed in stages over e period of time.
Determine the Minimum Viable Product
The MVP or Minimum Viable Product would be the least required functions for your website to go live. It is not recommended to build everyting all at once. Rather start either small or with as little as needed to first increase your online presencse before spending more money on further development. Further development are often influenced by customer feedback that often reults in changes being made to website along the way. Our motto is to build the MVP and to then let the website pay for itself therafter where posible.
Design the Workflow
It is not recommended that you build a website based on what isavailable especially from template sites. Instead, build your website to fit your business model.
The next important aspect of the workflow is your audence. Build your workflow around the customer journey within the shortest time and least resisted path. It you are selling a product, make sure that visitors to your site can get to the product within the fist 7 seconds of visiting your website. People these days order things online and it is extremely frustrating if you cannot find the price or contact details. Make sure tat your customer courney reflects a satisfactory customer experience.
Setting a budget for you a new website
People often start by requesting a quote for the website they dream of having. Often such dreams come at a high price like a dream house and to some, it may come as a shock. Due to the various components that make a website work, it is recommended to set a handsome monthly budget for your website.
The best way to go about your website budget is to set an initial development amount and then to set a monthly retainer budget for support, ongoing development and required services. Also, set a marketing budget based on cost per sale rather than throwing money into thin air. Cost per sale is something you can decide upon which will improve the effectiveness of your adds.
Marketing your website
Unlike conventional marketing, the focus is NOT on what you have to offer but on what your audience wants and what they are searching for. Your audience will search for example on Google and you must give Google a reason to show your content or products to people. This will only happen when you do things by the rules which require high-quality content on an ongoing basis.
Internet marketing is about getting your website content and articles ready for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) which can cost as much as a website when done correctly. It is important to get your SEO done on your website for the Google algorithm to show your content to others.
Marketing includes continuous development and posting of the new website content, interacting on social media discussions etc.
Advertising your website
Proper analysis for advertising is to be able to determine the advertising cost, calculated per sale. In other words, it costs you R15 per sale of a product valued at R100.
There are different advertising models available but the most commonly used is to set a price you are willing to pay for a sale and offer the price as a bid to bloggers, search engines such as Google or social media platforms such as youtube or Facebook. The higher the bid amount the more attractive and lucrative it becomes for advertisers.
Website Maintenance
If you build your own website you should have this area covered. If your website gets built by a developer there are updates that will have to be done on a regular basis. These updates should not be tested and performed on a live production site. Our team normally test these updates on staging sites before updating production sites.
Website maintenance can also include daily support to website members or administrative duties such as managing an e-commerce platform. Such duties can be managed in-house by the site owner or employees. Alternatively, it can be outsourced.
Website maintenance also includes the ongoing changing or updating of content on a website as well as posting new content on a regular basis.
Content must also be shared to various social media networks and although some of this can be automated, it still requires a tremendous effort to reply to comments and requests or to interact in conversation.
In conclusion, you must determine what must be done and how much of it will need to be done. Instead of trying to figure out how much it is going to cost you. Set a budget and a price per hour which you can increase when things start to pay off.
