How you set up and design your business website will be one of the most significant business decisions you’ll make in the lifetime of your business (which will likely be pretty short if you do a bad job of this), and you need to be really careful and research all aspects involved. Mistakes in the site’s development and subsequent management can be really costly – not only driving away customers/clients but also tying you down with a low-quality website for years to come – migrating and changing a business website is quite detrimental. These are the reasons why you should be getting the website right on the first try, and this article tells you what to look for and measure to ensure your efforts are going smoothly:
The Technologies Used
The technologies you use to build your website will have a major impact on the performance, usability, longevity, and the maintenance of your website – If you were to use an old and deprecated client-side web framework, no matter how much time you spend developing and designing the landing pages, you’ll find that your website will start functioning poorly in a year or two, get harder to maintain and even stop getting displayed correctly on the latest browsers. That’s why you need to make sure the technology stack you use is up to the task:
- Large frameworks with vibrant communities: how well the code is written and how robust is the framework aren’t the only things that matter when choosing a development stack. Not matter whether you are an advanced coder with tens of years of experience or you have no coding knowledge and your business doesn’t even rely on the Internet, if you are going to own a business website, you’ll face challenges. Platforms with a lot of users like WordPress offer a ton of support for free (not to mention a vibrant commercial ecosystem that provides necessary services such as the HTML to WordPress service) – if you ever face a problem, you can probably go online and get a comprehensive diagnosis of the issue in a few minutes. This is especially important for small to medium-sized businesses that don’t have the luxury of paying for support.
- Up-to-date and maintained: the standards governing the Internet are changing relatively quickly, how browsers render websites and run code changes, what features are expected and necessary from a website changes also. Nowadays, everyone expects business websites to support mobile phones and dynamic rescaling on the fly, but this was a rarity just a decade ago. This is why it is important to choose a popular and well-maintained framework with a high likelihood of being stable and updated for years to come.
User Experience and Potential Clients’ Opinions
UX is extremely vital for a business website – you need to make sure the people who visit the website get a sense of authority, trustworthiness, and professionalism from it. This is why UX has become a well-established field in web development, and it is now standard practice to invite and ask potential customers about their opinion of webpages you’re developing.
- User experience: user experience involves a lot of consideration: this ranges from ensuring the website loads quickly, responds fluidly to user interactions, etc. But it also concerns the number of payment options on your website, how easy it is to send feedback, how intuitive is the UI. You need to consider every small detail and ensure the website visitor gets the best possible experience.
- Testing: it is hard to learn how people view your website. You sometimes might roll out something you think is immensely popular which might end up as a flop. That’s why it is important to ensure clients and customers actually like what you’re doing with your website. You can do this through multiple ways, but the two easiest ways are either A/B testing your website and empirically measuring how visitors behave when interacting with different versions of the same webpage or inviting multiple people to your office and letting them test out both versions of the website.
