It is easy to create a website with all the tools and help/guides from Youtube these days. Most trainees from Equinet Academy have created their own website after they attended our WordPress website creation course. 

The most important part of a website creation project usually happens before and after building the website. 
In the article, you will learn some of the best practices that professional web design companies do when a business hires them to create a website for their business.

Do up a plan before you start developing your website

Set Goals and Objectives for your website 

A website will never benefit your business if it serves no purpose. Every website is like an employee for your business and like every employee, you need to set a job scope and KPI for this employee. 

Setting out your objective and goals that you want to achieve for your website can make your website stronger and you will see more return on investment on your website. 
Here are some best examples of website goals and objectives for your inspiration.

Website Objective Goals Example

• Boost Brand Awareness and Generate Sales by 20% each month
• Improve customer satisfaction by 50%
• Increase productivity by 10% each month.

Think of your target audience 

If you think everybody can be your website’s target audience, your website may lose its focus and you end up losing a huge amount of money in ads and marketing.

“ $37 billion is wasted in ad spend every year from ads that fail to engage the target audience”

– White paper in Advertising from Marketing Evolution  

Target audience can be segmented into categories, intent, age groups, roles,demographics, and many more. 

Think about :

• Age/ Gender
  • Age and Gender can help you to know what design you should use and what is the tone you should use in your content.
• Interest
  • This helps you to know where you can reach out to them
• Who they trust
  • Helps to write content that links to the person/organization they trust
• Are they usually the decision maker? 
  • Helps to decide how much you want to present on your website.

Understand your competitors profile

List out the competitors you know and learn how they reach out to their target audience. It helps you to list out the potential keywords you can use on your website and how you can sound on your content used on your website. 

Understanding the profile of your competitors helps to find gaps between you and your competitors. 

The essentials you need for your website 

As for every website (even if you are not using wordpress), you will need these 3 essentials to start your website. They are:

1. Domain
2. Hosting
3. Web Application Framework (e.g. CMS)

Purchase a domain name 

A domain name is the address to your website. You can buy domain names from different providers. 

Here’s a guide on the type of domain names you  can purchase. 

Public	Government	Country	Special
.com / .info / .org	.edu / .gov.sg	.com.sg / .sg	.design / .solutions
Can be registered by anyone.No need to register a business	Can only be registered through the Government bodies	Need to register a businessRequire CORPPass/ SINGPASS	Can be registered by anyone.No need to register a business
SGD 15 – 20/yr	NA	SGD 60 – 120/yr	SGD 1- 5000/yr

Get a hosting for your website

A hosting is like the house of your website. You will need one to house your website. For security reasons, you may want to consider reputable hosting like Siteground or Namecheap.

	Siteground Startup Plan	Namecheap WP Turbo
Storage	10 GB	50 GB
Visitors/Month	10k	200k
Free CDN	Yes	Yes
Free SSL	Yes	Yes
Location of Server	USA, United Kingdom, Netherlands. Europe, Australia, Singapore	USA,United Kingdom and Europe
Price (per year est. in SGD)	SGD 250/Year	SGD 150/Year

Setting up your WordPress

Once you have got your hosting and domain, you can start setting up your WordPress. 

Installing your WordPress on your server is simple with one click installation on your server, you can get you WordPress installed in a few minutes.

After you have installed your WordPress, you can start installing Divi Theme and the recommended plugins to get started. 

Read up here on how to install theme on WordPress Website. 

To know how to install plugins on your wordpress, read up more here. 

Planning for your website

Before you jump straight to working on your website,look back at the objective of your website that you have done previously and work on the plan for your website. 

Here’s what you need to consider:

• What are the keywords that you are going to use for each page on your website?
• Who is ranking on search engines with your keywords?
• What are the pages that will appear on your website?
• What colors do you want to use on your website?
• What kind of fonts will you be using on your website?
• What kind of graphics, photos will you use on your website?

Create your visitor personas

Personas are fictional characters that you create which helps you to understand your user’s needs, experiences, behavior and goals. 

Personas helps you to be sure that the website that you have created can be useful to your target audience. 

There are 4 types of personas:

1. Goal Directed personas
2. Role – Based Personas
3. Engaging Personas
4. Fictional Personas

Read up more about Personas in Interaction Design website.

Create Wireframe for your pages

A wireframe is the skeleton of your web pages. It helps you to have an overview of your page and allows you to run through with your personas that you have created and observe if it achieves their needs, experiences, behavior and goals. 

You can simply draw your wireframes on a piece of paper first and refer back to your personas and see if it works for them. 

If you have a team, you can use collaboration tools like Adobe XD to create your wireframes.

Get to work  

Now that you have everything set up and planned, you can start working on your website.

With your wireframe, it is easiest to create your page using the Divi theme. 

While you are working on your website, take note a few pointers:

• Make sure you only use one h1 Tag – Read Guide 
• Make sure all you images have alt text
• Make sure you have internal links and external links
• Make sure you content have the keywords
• Make sure that external links opens in a new window
• Make sure that all your font types, color and sizes are consistent
• Insert your meta title and description for all pages

Prelaunch 

Before you launch your website, run a check on all the pages of your website. Make sure everything looks and works correctly.

You can look into your website using multiple devices or make use of the Google Chrome Simulator to have a view of your website.  

Here’s how you can use the Google Chrome Simulator

Divide the Pre-launch test to 4 checking criteria:

1. User Experience
2. Functionality
3. Search Engine Optimization
4. Site Security

Post your website and make it live! 

Finally, it’s time to launch your website! A few more actions and you can start marketing the website

• Integrate your website with Google Analytics
• Integrate your website with Google Search Console
• Submit your website’s Sitemap
• Harden your wordpress website
• Optimize your WordPress website 
• Protect the forms from spam

Once you are done, you are now ready with your next step on your digital marketing. 

We know it’s a lot of steps to launch your website but trust us that the more checks you do for your website, the easier it will be to manage it in future! Fret not, we have prepared a checklist for you, you can download it here. 

You should consider building your website with a trusted web design company. At Lemonade, we have stringent checks and inspections protocol put in place. This has helped us to build professional and beautiful websites for all of our clients! 

Contact us at 3158 3831 or email to [email protected] for a free consultation today!