The 7 Important Factors to Consider When Building a Website

One of the primary goals of getting a website is to drive visibility, generate traffic and make more sales but to achieve these goals, there are some important factors to consider when building a website

These key items are not merely a part of the design elements that are very decisive when it comes to your website’s success, put together, they will decide your overall ROI from the website.

To get to achieve whatever ambitions you have for your website, the following are some of the key things to consider while building the website…

Your overall Goal

One of the most crucial factors to consider when building a website is your overall goal of building the website.

Keep in mind, the overall goal for your website is different from the vague desire to build a web platform or online visibility. It encompasses the functionality you want for the website and in particular, exactly what you want to achieve with the website.

So, before you start planning your website, you want to figure out exactly what you want to build and the key things you want to achieve with the website after it’s all set up.

These are some of the questions I ask my clients each time they approach us for a web design project, what do you want for your website and on your?

These questions are very important to the success of any web design project and you as the potential owner of a new website should be ready to provide answers to them, as you get set to build a website.

Because your answer to these questions will be fundamental to the success of your website. It’ll affect the way the site is set up and the things you’ll be able to achieve with the website.

From your layout to the structuring of the website including usability, up to the content you’ll post, as well as the cost of the website itself.

So, you have to take out time to figure out the end goal you want to achieve with your website. And you must be very clear from the beginning while doing this.

If you’re building a website to showcase your business, communicate that clearly to your developer. If you’re creating the website for any other purpose also, be sure to mention that to your website designer.

Not only will doing this help you to get the right professional advice or set up the right infrastructure, identifying and communicating your goals clearly will make it easier for your developer to set up a structure that will prepare your website to achieve your expected outcomes.

Domain Name

Your domain name is another one of the most key factors to consider when building a website.

The reason for this is not far-fetched. The domain name is the name of your website. It’ll both serve as your URL and your brand name online.

If you’re already a well-established brand, you have to consider getting a domain name that’s similar to your existing brand name before building your website.

Where you’re a new brand that’s just setting out both online and offline, consider choosing a domain name that’s suitable with the brand you want to build, regardless of whether it is a personal or corporate brand.

Another factor you want to consider while choosing a domain name for your website is the availability of the domain name. This is very important especially where you’re already an existing brand.

As an existing brand, there may be instances where your preferred domain name has been taken up by another entity.

If you get into such a situation, consider using an alternative domain name or try to see if its possible to buy the domain name from the other entity if they are willing to sell.

The third thing to consider as regards your preferred domain name while building a website is the geographical location of your target audience, or nature of business.

As a small business targeting a well-defined local audience, to increase visibility, you might want to use a country code top level domain (ccTLD) alternative for your business.

With this in place, instead of using an xyz.com as a domain name, you might opt for something more local like xyz.uk or xyz.co.uk, if you’re based in or targeting an audience in the UK.

While the former domain name is targeted at an international audience, the latter targets a specific audience in the United Kingdom (You can always replace the .uk with your local ccTLD).

Preferred Target Audience

So, who are your target audience and what exactly appeals to them in terms of website aesthetic and usability?

Your target audience is one of the important factor to consider when building a website.

For starters, you might e tempted to ignore your target audience and build whatever kind of platform you have in mind because you feel its literally all about you and your business.

But that’s not right. Your website is primarily about your target audience. And they are also the ones that’ll use the website to reach you directly, patronize your services or consume your content.

For this reason, you have to pay attention to key website functionalities that matters to them and also the usable features they would expect to have.

Outside that, the following are some other key things to keep in mind while building your website especially as it concerns your target audience:

Understand your User Demographics

If your website is targeted at a non-English speaking audience, consider writing in the language of the majority of your audience but at the same time, include a translator for the other part of your audience.

Identify with your Target Audience

If you’re representing a brand that targets a particular gender or cause, keep your website branding and design to reflect the audience.

Build for a Specific Audience Demographic

If you’re an ecommerce website that sells directly to a young and urbane millennial audience for example, your website design, content and imagery must put into account features that this audience can identify with.

Design Aesthetics & Branding

Whether you’re an existing or a new brand, you want to build a website that’s both aesthetically appealing to your audience and in line with the brand you want to represent.

As an already established business, it’s possible you have an existing logo or brand color. Any website designer that knows his onion will want to design your website to reflect this brand.

That’s best practices and it’s also what is expected as part of key industry standards. But there are instances where your brand colors do not bring out the needed design aesthetics for your website.

Where you’re in such situations, you can depart from your brand to some extent. Choose a color that emphasizes the design aesthetic without losing touch with the original brand colors.

Always remember that even if yellow and black are the major brand colors that identify your logo for instance, it doesn’t mean that you have to make these two the only colors that define your website.

Learn more about how to create a brand for your business here.

Website Usability

In the virtual world, your website needs less than 3 seconds to make an impression on a potential user. Within a split second, a user may click away from the website without ever returning to it again.

In a nutshell, usability can decide the number of people that access and spend time on your website. This is why usability is one of the key things to pay attention to while building a website.

Now, website usability refers to how easy it is for your audience to access or use your website for the purpose it is designed for.

It is an important element of web design that spans from the structuring of your website, the user interface, page organization, text to white space ratio, font and website content among other things.

And you have to pay attention to this because they are very crucial to the success of your website.

Here are questions that’ll help you fix usability related issues on your website…

Does my website have a clear navigation?

Beyond the paparazzi of owning a website, your audience have to be able to access and use your website with ease.

Find out, are they finding it easy to carry out whatever they want to do, while they are on the website.

For you to find out the current state of your website usability, you can run some test on the site after it is developed, to understand the functionality and how it works.

Is the website well optimized for performance?

Slow websites can get your visitors clicking away, never to return again. So, while creating your website, there’s every need to get your website speed performance to optimum levels.

For example, you need to test the speed of your website. Does the website load very slowly or is the speed level at optimum levels with that of other websites?

If you’re setting up an ecommerce website, have a walk through the ecommerce process from the moment a user lands on the website to when they make a purchase.

Find out, what are the steps involved and how easy is it to get through each of these steps when someone gets on the website.

Search Engine Compatibility

One of the primary traffic sources for most websites is the search engine. This is most likely going to be the same thing for your website.

So at this point, while building your website; you have to find out if your website is compatible and ready to be indexed by the major search engines.

To do this, after your website is all set up, you need to create a profile for it on the top search engine platforms. And also, ensure that your sitemap is uploaded to your search console profile.

After that, take some steps to find out if your website can easily be found if someone searches for your brand name on Google or any other search engine.

Now, one thing we do for our client while building their websites is that we give them at least the basic search engine optimization that will get their website a decent visibility on the search engine, right from scratch.

If you’re building your website on a content management system, you need to understand that a handful of these CMS, their templates, software and plugins are directly out of the box, search engine optimized.

In spite of this, there are also others whose templates and plugins are not search engine compatible. Some are buggy while a good number of them can cause some incompatibility issues on a website.

You do not want this on your website and as much as possible, you want to clearly mention this to your website designer.

Mobile Compatibility

Is my website easily navigable for mobile users? This is a very important factor to consider when building a website.

Even though your website is all good on desktop and computer screen, it is important it has a good display on mobile devices.

Especially considering that mobile traffic presently accounts for about 60 percent of all web searches and traffic. You don’t want to ignore your mobile audience.

Also, another reason you need to lay emphasis on mobile compatibility when creating your website is because most search engines like Google rely on mobile compatibility as a key factor in ranking of web pages.

Where your website does not pass the mobile compatibility test, you may a have lower search engine ranking for your web pages and this will in turn affect your ability to drive organic traffic to your website.

Conclusion

Building a successful website that delivers on key expected outcomes is very possible but like I mentioned earlier, for this to happen, there are a handful of things to put in place.

While some of these pre-design elements may not be things you generally understand, working with your web designer, you can use this as a checklist to know what to expect from your web designer as far as the functionality of your website is concerned.

Now, one thing you must keep in mind while searching for a web designer is that a lot of web designers can over promise but deliver far below expectations. But, there are a few exceptions.

So, while looking for a team of web developers, be rest assured your web design project is in safe hands, if you reach out to us here.

Now, there you have the important factors to consider when building a website. So, which of these elements of web design matters most to you? Drop your comments below.