image credits-dianaxstoyanova
Website Planning Process + Marketing + Lead generation
Are you looking to create a new website for your business or thinking to redesign your old website? Regardless of your needs, the end goal is to design and develop a brand new website that is optimized for conversions. Our ultimate guide will help your business with the Website planning process, Digital marketing and Lead generation. Keep this guide handy to avoid any planning mishaps, budget overshoots, missed deadline, etc.
Here is our 12 step website planning process
Step 1: Identify your goals and define them in as much detail as possible
The first step is to understand what you are planning to achieve from your website. Do you more sales? Do you need to showcase your products better? Do you want to share information and gain traffic? Do you want to get inbound leads? etc.
After you have identified your main goals, start defining them. Write down as to how much and what exactly is your goal. For example, do sales worth $25,000 a year via the website from my 10 products with an online marketing spend of $1,000.
Prepare a website brief based on the details identify and allocate.
Step 2: Assign budgets, financial flow and plan the time frame
It is very important to calculate and allocate your funds properly before getting into building the website.
Once, this is done, assign budgets for the 1st phase of your website, the intermediary one and the final version.
Simultaneously research on the time required for building a website with your requirements. Based on your research and finances, calculate an estimated time frame.
Step 3: Hire a website/digital marketing agency
It is always better to go with the experts in the field. A farmer can take better care of crops than a newbie or aspiring farmer. Hence, request for quotes from at least six to seven agencies based on your budget and pick the one who suits your cost as well as time.
Step 4: Discover/Explore with your agency
Use the website brief you made in Step 1 to explore with the digital agency you hire. Having the brief will help the agency zero in on your requirement without much confusion and discovery. Once, you have sorted the exploration - finalise your creative plan with the design/creative team at the agency.
Step 5: Freeze sitemap and basic architecture
In phase 1, the basic information flow on the website has to be fixed upon. The easiest way to do it would be via Sitemap. From this, your entire website's structure, as well as hierarchy, will be sorted. Ideally, this will help users/visitors intuitively explore your website and gain relevant information.
Step 6: User experience
Post-finalization of the sitemap, the next crucial step is to help create content and designs which are easy to comprehend for the end user.
Step 7: Branding and tone of voice
Based on your sitemap, architecture, user experience designs the next stage would be to finalize your colour scheme, imagery, fonts, graphic styles, etc.
Step 8: Wireframing, UX and Animations
From this stage, the actual website layout is done. Customer journeys are built based on various UX models. Animations and micro-interactions are defined and developed to help ensure the goals defined in Step 1 are met.
Step 9: Navigation and bug fixes
In this stage, the website is nearly ready and your focus should be on testing the website for any navigation and goal completion issues. Any bugs encountered in this process should be logged systematically and resolved.
Step 10: Beta release
Release beta version of your website to professional testers, friends and test sample of users. Log the bugs found and fix them up.
Step 11: Soft launch with SEO
Ensure proper implementation of the seven different meta-tags in your website and get it SEO-friendly.
Step 12: Setup Social channels, marketing ads and start content marketing
Setting up your social media channels, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads is crucial for proper content outreach.
Execute a simple but consistent content generation and marketing plan to get inbound traffic.