How to Create a Great Business Website Design

The Secret to Successful Business Website Design

Behind every great website is a strong mix of analysis, strategy and planning. When executed together, they can result in a successful business website design that delivers above and beyond your expectations. Below is a phased strategy for revamping or creating a site from scratch. Whether you have an internal creative department or are working with an external agency, by following the guidelines below in a systematic process, you will be guaranteed to get the results you are looking for.

Branding
A great business website starts with a strong branding and marketing analysis. First, define your target audience. Be sure to break them into subcategories for positioning purposes. Then, define your primary and secondary products/services. Organize in order of importance – revenue, priority, profitability, etc.

Survey
Then, survey your audience to make sure your perception is accurate. There are several ways to do this: 1. Create a one-on-one survey to discuss branding and site usage issues, 2. Interview key clients, a random sampling of users of primary and secondary services, and all business units, 3. Create a web survey to discuss branding and site usage issues, or 4. Conduct a web-based survey of existing clients and service professionals (referral sources). Once you have the results, compile them into a report with recommendations for website structure.

Analysis & Strategy
Pull and analyze your current web traffic report. Track the most popular pages based on web traffic and confirm the match with the most popular pages based on your surveys. Refine results and create final recommendation for website structure. Use results to create new sitemap with primary, secondary, and tertiary navigation for primary audience as well as secondary target audiences. Create additional highlight areas and segment the site by 3 primary user groups or business units – to control their interaction and cater to their specific needs. Review your newly proposed sitemap with each business unit to finalize hierarchy of products/services and ensure website goals are aligned internally and externally.

Creative
Review branding analysis and survey results to inspire and set the tone for brand personality development and art direction. Request content from each business unit for their subsection of the site and ensure all content is finalized prior to programming. Discuss wish list of added features with your creative team such as: search, breadcrumbs, portal capabilities, database management systems, custom data collection pages, etc. to ensure that Phase I and Phase II requirements are factored into final design solution.

Design home page comps that address the needs of both the site and brand challenges of the company/organization, begin to create graphics standard guide for implementation. Go through this process as many times as needed until end result addresses primary brand and user requirements.

Design interior page comps for each of the primary navigation system categories, add to graphics standard guide. Design interior page comps for each of the secondary navigation system categories, add to graphics standard guide. Design 3 primary user group sections and extend brand based on existing graphics standard guide and add to graphics standard guide.

Programming
Finalize all content during design process. To keep costs low, remember, only submit final content and design that has been approved by all necessary parties to programmer. This will minimize revision time and additional expense to ensure your project goes live on time. Submit key master design files and all finalized content to the Programmer, be sure to program and host a beta (testing) site for internal client review not accessible by the public.

SEO
Be sure to work with your creative team to develop a series of keywords based on branding analysis, site traffic, competitor analysis and target audience surveys. Integrate SEO copy into copywriting and programming throughout site. Setup a Google-friendly sitemap to guarantee that all of your pages will be found when your new site goes live.

Review & Transition
Execute corporate internal review of site by heads of business units only and make changes until approved by all department heads to go live. Take your down old site and upload the new site after 5pm on a Friday to ensure that all propagation issues are resolved over the weekend and do not impact day-to-day business activities.

Maintenance
Setup a content management system (off-the-shelf or custom) to enable each business unit or department to control content and be responsible for site updates to their section of the site. Develop an internal site maintenance strategy and require each business unit or department to submit content update reports to webmaster for review on a monthly basis. Remember, your internal webmaster will be responsible for monitoring content updates and fine-tuning any glitches or potential html issues. Continue to monitor your web traffic reports via your web analytics to ensure that the most heavily trafficked areas of your site are promoted via a subsection of the home page of your site and your acquisition, conversion and retention strategies are producing the best results for you.