20 Steps to a Successful Website

We've compiled a list of twenty items that will help you organize your web development project and help things move along quicker. Our company has launched more than 300 websites and these tips have been compiled throughout our own trials and tribulations, good and bad! Learn from us and you will be one step closer to making your internet goals come true.

1. Find a reputable web design firm
Do your homework here and you will save yourself many headaches down the road. Talk to someone about your project and make sure they understand it and want to dedicate time to make your goals happen. How are the communication skills with your representative?
2. Find an available domain name
If you have a "Home Run" domain name then great! If not, we suggest speaking with a representative before choosing a domain. Domains that are very close to keywords are much more powerful than a random domain that you think might be cool. We have powerful keywords research tools that help identify domains that will work for your business or concept.
3. Register the domain name
Make sure you own your domain. It shouldn't cost you more than $10.00 to do this. We recommend using a reputable and large registrar such as GoDaddy.com.
4. Setup web hosting account
We offer web hosting for both shared and dedicated servers. Our staff can take care of everything needed to get your site up and running such as email accounts, setting up the domain name so your site will come up when it is entered into a browser. Unless you have done this before, we recommend leaving this part of the process to your web firm because ultimately they will be the ones making constant changes to the hosting account.
5. Modify nameservers so your domain points to the appropriate web hosting account
Your web firm can do this for you. If you're doing this yourself you'll want to log into domain name account and modify the nameservers for the domain name. Your registrar can help you with this too.
6. Setup email accounts
Again, your web designer can do this for you. Send them a list of email accounts you need and they will set them up for your domain.
7. Setup a temporary homepage
A simple logo page with a coming soon or a splash page detailing the most pertinent information about your site is a common practice that will get you going quick.
8. Design logo for your business or concept
Work with your web design firm for this. Generally, we will get a concept overview from the project manager and some design ideas that you have in mind. From there, we can provide samples of potential logo concepts. These can then be tweaked further to get a logo everyone is happy with. Do not ignore the importance of a good logo. It is the foundation of your entire business.
9. Design homepage layout
Work with the web design firm to get the look and feel you want for your business. Make sure that the design is built with SEO in mind. Make the navigation bars easy to see and use so that your visitors do not get confused.
10. Design inner page layout
Once the homepage is designed, we can begin to connect the inner content pages to the navigation of the home page. It is best to incorporate a â€œflat architecture" design so that search engines can find all of your inner pages with one link.
11. Design a concept overview in Photoshop so that the client has an idea of how the site will look before it is converted to HTML.
12. Develop any back-end databases or items that require programming
13. Keyword research for effective search engine optimization
Identify the most commonly typed in words that relate to your business. What are people typing in on Google? We have tools that help streamline this process and quantify the daily and monthly volumes for a particular keyword or keyword string.
14. Write content using keyword phrases and gather images for inner pages
This is the biggest part of the process and often times the slowest part. The writing of the content seems like the easy part but it is often where projects begin to stall. Once the design and architecture of the web site is complete, we need to get optimized content in place and organize it in a readable manner. We have copywriters that can dramatically reduce the amount of work that you will have to do if you are not comfortable writing your own content. Your web designer can also pull together some stock photography that is available for purchase on sites like istockphoto.com.
15. Combine content with programming and design
16. Test you site for errors, typos or other issues
We can't stress this one enough. You think you found all the errors, but look again. You will be happy you did. Errors look unprofessional so it'll be worth the time to do this.
17. Soft launch for friends and family to test
Get your friends and family to start working for you!
18. Hard launch to general public
Your site is live...now begin your online marketing campaigns to drive traffic.
19. Continue to add content to your site as often as possible
Once your site is live, you will need to start updating it with fresh content as often as possible. Google thrives on fresh content and ranks sites that update content regularly much higher. We have design platforms that help you update your content easily and often alleviating some of the work. This is an on-going process and will help drive traffic to your site in the long run.
20. Search engine submission and link building
Incoming links to your site help build your Google PageRank and ultimately decide how good your page ranks for a particular keyword. We have monthly link building programs available that will help ensure that your site is always growing!

By following these 20 steps, you can be sure that your website project will go off with fewer problems. Give us a call if you have any questions or would like us to help you.