Tips on Building A Website
 by: Rob Bolton


Building a new website or re-desigin an existing website is a complicated endeavor. Often, we see the trees instead of the forest. By this, I mean we focus on individual aspects of a website, without regard to its whole. Here are some tips to keep you on track while building a website.

First, write down the goals of your website and how you plan on measuring them. This will keep you focused during the process. If you feel you are getting off track, ask yourself how your current tasks are supporting the goals. If they aren’t, stop and refocus. Having goals you can measure is important. If one of your goals is to increase the number of people coming to your site, how will you measure it? By measuring your goals, you will have a higher chance of delivering a website that accomplishes those goals.

Second, it doesn’t matter what you, your marketing department or the CEO think about the site. This can be a hard point to swallow, and an even harder point to get across to people in your organization. But, if you have ever spent 4 hours trying to come up with a color scheme, simply because certain people don’t like a particular color, you will understand. You need to find out what your visitors want in the site. What will make them happy, not what pleases everyone in your company. If you make a decision based on customer feedback and it meets disapproval, ask “Do you want a site that pleases our customers and or a site that pleases you?”.

Lastly, do competitive analysis to determine features your site needs. But look farther than your immediate competitors. Review large and established companies, like Amazon, Ebay and others for inspiration. Obviously, you don’t have the same resources as they do, but you can take inspiration from what they are doing and translate that into something important and relevant for your site.

About The Author
Rob Bolton works for 60AT6 (http://www.60at6.com) and is an active member in the barter network BizXchange (http://www.bizx.com/barter-network-system.html).