Designing a web site that get results can take time to complete and the best results are gained when you are fully involved and prepared in the process.
Making your company an attractive and popular is more than just placing a picture of a product or a description of a service on a web page and publishing it to the web. There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed to ensure success.
Primary market research
Strategic marketing provides the structure that helps assemble the information through which the company understands its customers. This is the information needed in order to sell successfully. Hence before beginning any development work, it is important to have a clear picture on who the customer is and why they are likely to buy. In describing the target customer, such factors as gender, age and socio-economic group are essentials while further information such as technical capability and language level can also be useful.
Including this information in your design briefly puts the web site designer in a much better position to produce a site that the end user will feel useful and comfortable with.
Objective of the website
Determine the objective of the website; is it to provide information, to produce direct sales? or just a brochure-ware site showing the company and its capabilities. Is it intended to generate enquiries from new customers? or to keep existing customers informed.
Objectives will include the detailed information on any existing brand identity and the image the company wants to portray to the world at large. Remember your web site is the salesperson to your potential customers.
Promoting the website
Promotion of the website is essential if potential customers are to find your web site. Although it is not obvious to the viewer, the purpose of this information is to provide the search engine with the data they need to place the site in the correct category in the database, which in turn helps the search engine respond to search terms entered by users.
To achieve successful ranking in search engines the title and meta-data must reflect the content of the page it belongs to. Keywords and phrases need to be researched thoroughly, what exactly are your customers likely to enter as search terms into search engines.
Update your website
Analyze your site as often as possible to make sure that it is presenting the image, content, accuracy that your customers and prospects expect. The costs associated with this effort are different from those of other marketing media, but the significance should not be under estimated. Updating your web site continually helps your readers come back time after another to find out what are new things you've posted recently.
In summary the major part of the web site is carrying out your research into your customers and understand them and then conveying all required details properly to your web site designer so that they can build a web site, which your customers will find useful and will purchase from. After all the web site is for your customers!