Best Practices and First Steps for Developing a New Website

You’re at that stage. You know you need a new website, or a least a major refresh, but you just don’t know where to start. We’ve seen some large organisations get stuck there for years. We also see the opposite. Someone thinks a new site might be needed, charges headlong into developing it and before you know it you’ve got a new site up but it doesn’t do what you want, takes no benefit from the SEO you’ve established over  the years and you’re not sure how you’re going to maintain it in the future.

If your website needs an update soon, and if it’s more than two or three years old it probably will, then this checklist should help you get started, and make sure you cover off all the critical stages so your new site performs and ranks well from the day you launch it.

1. Check Your Marketing Plan

Have you got a Marketing Plan? How about a Business Plan?  Make sure you know what your business goals are for the next year or so. Who you are trying to talk to in terms of audiences? What you are aiming to say?  Is your brand identity up to date? Do you want to keep your logo, font and colourways or change those too?  Have you got an agreed tone of voice and style guide?

Have a look around you too.  What are competitors and similar businesses up to? Is there anything you can learn from their websites? What would you like to emulate or avoid from their online presence?  Don’t make mistakes that others have already made.

What else is in your marketing plan? Events? Trade Shows? PR and Press? Your website needs to work alongside all your offline and online marketing.  At least knowing what that will look like over the next year will give you more chance of building a site that can both support the rest of your marketing, and be driven by it

2. Know Your Online Customers

Your new site is for your customers.  Do you know who they are are? How will they use it?  What will they want and expect in terms of functionality?

If you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console working on your site, and a Facebook Pixel installed, you can already find out a lot about who is using your site and how through examining the data.  If you need to know more, you could use heat mapping, surveys and other research tools to really dig in.

When we do this for clients, we nearly always find surprises.  Sometimes the people using your site are not who you think they are. More often than not, they are not using it in the way you intended.  Knowing this upfront gives you a much greater chance of building a new site that will be intuitive to use, have all the functionality your customers need an increase your conversion rate, the amount of business you do through the site.

If you have an e-commerce site, you can also look through the customer and sales data.  How do your online customers compare to your offline customers? Who places an order on the site and who calls you up?  Can you get more of the people who call to order online if you make the new site easier to use?

If you’re investing a lot in your new site, you’ll want to make sure whoever builds it for you includes a full User Experience (UX) and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) review in as part of the research process.  If it’s a smaller scale project, you could conduct a lot of this research yourself using data you already have.

4. Set Website Goals

You have your Marketing Plan sorted, so you have some Marketing Objectives.  How is the website going to support those?  How are you going to judge its success one year on?

Knowing whether your new site is primarily about bringing in more leads, generating sales, encouraging downloads, supporting customer service, widening your reach to new markets or taking the pressure off the sales team will mean you can set some clear KPIs and know whether or not your grand plan is working, a few months down the line.

5. Review Your Resources

Before you get started, be honest about what you can put into the project.  Obviously you’ll need to have some idea of budget. At this stage it’s important to consider not only the cost of the build but also the ongoing hosting and maintenance.  A website is a bit like a car, you can’t just accept it new and expect it to thrive.  Someone needs to keep putting fuel in and getting it serviced, so do budget something for ongoing support.

You’ll also need to review what resources you have in terms of people and skills.  Have you got someone in-house that can write well optimised copy?  take great photos? make some videos?  project manage the build? or even do the build themselves?  If so, do they have time alongside their day job to actually do that?  If not, do you have the budget to outsource?

Honesty is the best policy at this stage, with yourself and if outsourcing, with your agency. Being realistic about budgets and about the level of time and expertise your own team can add to the build will help avoid disappointments and difficulties later. We work at both ends of the spectrum.  On one large site build, a member of the client’s team gave up pretty much a year of her life to writing copy and supporting the content development for the new site.  On other sites, we research and write the whole thing, source images and video and just keep the client updated occasionally along the way.  Cost obviously differ for the two services!

 6. Search Engine Optimisation

Site launches and migrations can be a tricky time for your SEO. Your new site may well be a great opportunity to improve your SEO.  New sites tend to perform better speed-wise and have neater code that search engines prefer.  It is also your chance to make sure you get all the set up and meta tagging right, from how images are uploaded to ensuring appropriate titles and descriptions are set for every page.  If your new site performs better on mobile than your old one, that will also be hugely in your favour.

Where SEO can go wrong is where the rebuild involves a change in URL, either the main domain name or even just a reshuffle of the navigation, or if you go for the big clear out and get rid of a lot of old pages.  If you don’t make sure all that content is redirected somewhere appropriate (not just the home page!) you are risking poor SEO as a result of broken links and 404 pages.

Your new site is also a chance to take another look at your keyword research. Have the terms used to search for your products or services changed since you last looked?  If so do you need to update any of your content or add new sections to reflect that?

If you are outsourcing the build, it’s really important to be clear about who is responsible for the SEO.  Will the agency automatically optimise and tag images as they upload them?  Will they add all the meta content and mark up data?  Will they set up your Google Analytics, Tag Manager and other tracking? Do they understand SEO at all? If you ask those questions and they look back blankly, you might want to think again.

7. Content Audit

You’re getting closer, so it is time to look at what content you actually have.  What do you have that you would like to continue to use in terms of written content? video? images? graphics?  If you sketch out a rough map of what you would like your new website to look like, do you have the content to fulfil that desire?  If not do you have the time and budget to get that content together?

We’ve been asked a few times now to produce a “highly visual” website, only to find out that the client had nothing more than a few low resolution phone photos…  It is possible to build a highly visual site for almost any brand, but you might need a bit more budget to commission the work.

8. Functionality

It is every web developer’s worst nightmare to be told a few days before launch, that “oh by the way, it needs to integrate with our XXX software!”.  Are you sure you know, completely, what your website does and how it interacts with other tools you use?  This might be your EPOS, your CRM, warehouse software.

Perhaps your site needs to feature Social Media feeds, email sign up links or even integrate completely with another site, such as your commerce site.  The earlier in the conversation that these are mapped out and understood, they more likely they are to work seamlessly as you cross over.

What does your current site do for you that you might have forgotten?

9. Migration

However much testing and planning you do, moving from your old site to your new one is always a bit of a stressful time.  There can be a lot of trip hazards at this stage so it’s a really good idea to be thoroughly prepared.  It is also a really good idea to make the move at a quiet time for your business, and not shout too loud about the new site until you are 100% sure everything is working as it should be.

When is a good time to migrate your site?  Have you got all the access you need to the server and domain names to make the changes?  Has ALL the old content been mapped across to the new, and redirects set up for the pages that no longer exist or have changed URL?

If you are changing domain name, the task is even larger.  Have you changed all your other marketing? Have you sorted out your email addresses?

Oh and how long will you keep a back up of the old site?

Ideally migrate your site at a time when not much  business is coming through it. Make sure everyone who might be needed to support the move is available for a few days around this time and save the press releases and launch announcements until it’s been live for a week or so.

10. Write your Brief!

And it won’t be… brief! If you’ve followed the ten steps above and written some stuff down, you’re probably well on the way to having a website brief sketched out.  You’ll want to include everything mentioned here, and probably a bit more.  Don’t be afraid to ask your agency, or any agency in fact, to help you write the brief.

We’ve helped write briefs for sites we were fairly sure we would end up building, and some we knew we’d never take on but did understand the requirements for.  Always happy to help and whoever you do end up working with will be very grateful.

Well done for making it to the end. If you are contemplating a new website, whatever stage you are at, we’d obviously love to talk to you so do get in touch.