Ten Step Process to developing your website effectively.
1. Discovery
You may be involved in the first stage of discovery now. Finding out what kind of website will best meet your needs. Recently I attended a business workshop and the speaker asked the audience if they thought every business needed a website. Almost everyone held up their hand. The speaker however countered with, "No, every business needs a good website."
In other words, a website that meets their particular business needs effectively.
Web 2.0 and the W3C, and new rules for enticing search engines have played a major role in changing the way websites work for your business.
Practically everything changes too quickly for most business owners to keep track of in addition to running their actual businesses. That is where we come in. Astor Media Group specializes in individual service to our clients who continually refer us.
We fill a niche between those companies offering low end template sites with little individual personal appeal and the large corporate site. If your needs are best served by a small firm, people you can talk with all along the way, creative and technical people who will take an interest in your business, then you are in the right place!
2. Content Planning:
Study your current business image. You may want to continue along these lines and begin your website with design elements that match. Or if your business needs a facelift, this may be the time to let us do some new creative work for your corporate image profile and incorporate these into your new website and your current business.
3. Content Gathering/Creation
Gather whatever marketing or promotional material, your business goals, description, demographics, everything that will give the copywriters and designers a place to start.
We can create entirely new images and photography, copy and logos and graphic design in-house.
Once we have an understanding of your business and what you hope your website will accomplish, as well as an asset file of words, images and photographs. We begin putting together a design for you to choose from.
4. Design
It helps to have a basic idea of what you would like before the design phase begins. The actual implementation of a design is a time consuming process and changing it once you have approved the basic design can add unnecessary delay.
5. Site Testing
Once the design and all the copy are in we test the site on a temporary site so you can see it and suggest changes.
6. Launch
The site goes live, for all to see. It takes a bit of time for the search engine spiders to recognize your site. It always needs a bit of tweaking right after going live, which we take care of immediately.
7. Adjust & Fine tune
Try it out on your market, find out how people react, adjust and fine tune.
8. Market
We implement the marketing of your site as discussed.
Include your website in your marketing.
9. Maintain
We implement a maintenance plan according to what you have discussed with us. We offer very basic services to more elaborate. If you feel you would like to update yourself, we will set this up from the beginning so that you can make changes as needed.
10. Renew
It is a good idea to plan regular renewal. Just as you would not neglect to change your display windows, you should plan to have seasonal or other timely changes based on your business model.
Even more static corporate style businesses should look at ways to keep things fresh looking and interest repeat visits.
Plan for a year or five in advance and think about a total site renewal at least every five years to keep your customers motivated. Times change rapidly and just doing this will also have a good effect on the rest of your business image.