When choosing a company to develop your website, there are some important things to consider before approaching a firm to take on that challenge.Your website is an extension of your business that should provide users with a convenient method for consuming relevant information about your products and services. Choosing a web development firm capable of hitting all of your goals can be a difficult task, especially when there are so many to choose from. Here are some traits that your web development company should possess before you settle on them as a service provider.
Search Engine Optimization Solutions
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a key component to ensuring that your website remains relevant in search engine results. Your website may have a fantastic design or an awe-inspiring color palette but without a good SEO strategy it will never see the traffic that your website deserves! Content creation and link-building are the two most important parts to increasing your site’s traffic. So ensuring that your web developer has a formidable SEO strategy is crucial to the long-term success of your website.
Adequate Research
Doing sufficient research is a necessary step to building a successful website. How is your developer ever going to accomplish this without first completing some in-depth analysis of your company’s offerings? Not only should your developer have an intimate understanding of the products or services that your company provides but they should also have a firm understanding of your industry. Understanding your industry, the market trends within it, and how the competition operates is invaluable information while brainstorming strategies for setting yourself apart in a saturated market.
Building a Blueprint Destined for Success
So far we’ve established that the main purpose of your website should be converting visitors into paying customers. Once your developer has done the research it’s time to build a site blueprint that maximizes that conversion rate. How is that accomplished, you ask? Well that would be the Fantastic Four: Attract, Engage, Convert, and Nurture.
Measuring Success
Effective SEO strategy can drive new traffic to your website, but how do you measure the success of that strategy? Generating new traffic and converting some of those visitors into paying customers should be the main purpose of your website. A good web developer should provide case studies or analytical data that demonstrate the success of their digital marketing strategy. Without certifying that your developer has produced verified results for past clients, how can you be confident you’re not wasting your budget on a mediocre solution?
Impeccable Design
So you have a usable site blueprint that will function properly and adequately convey your company’s offerings. Next on the agenda is a killer design that engages your audience and will keep them coming back time and time again. But there’s a lot more to creating a beautiful web design than having a nice aesthetic. A good web developer will adhere to some standardized design principles and let those principles influence the design of your site. Verifying that your web developer is adhering to good design principles is easy; simply visit some of the websites they’ve developed in the past! Exceptional sites will be fun, easy to use, and will guide you through the experience.
Back End Management and Site Maintenance
The best kind of developer will provide options for maintaining your site after it’s been built. Dealing with computer code and managing a site can be a nightmare for someone who’s unfamiliar with the process. Often, outsourcing this work to your web developer is ideal. After all, they’re already familiar with the site structure and your company goals so utilizing the developer to provide back end support can take a load off your shoulders.
Content, Social Media and Link Building
In the second paragraph, we established that the two most important elements to SEO and ensuring your site remains relevant are content creation and link building. Consider it a bonus if your developer also provides these services because tending to these things yourself can be unnecessarily tedious. By constantly creating content and spreading links across the web that direct back to your site, you are informing search engines that your site is relevant and frequently updated, which will help you attract more visitors and increase the potential of turning them into new, paying customers.
Whether you’re building your very first company website or refreshing an outdated version, a web developer that will satisfy all of your goals can be difficult to come by. Use this page as a guide and take it upon yourself to do a little research before you settle on a mediocre solution.
…and as a client, you need to be prepared to pay for it.