Creating a new website has never been easier with free and simple online website design software and online content management platforms like WordPress. You can create a home business website with just a few clicks in 5 minutes. However, if your goal is to create a website that attracts customers and customers, you cannot expect success by simply building a website. Planning a website is just as important as creating a website.
Follow our simple PLAN to ensure you don’t miss any important steps in building your website. An acronym used to create websites that help you achieve your home business goals.
Table of Contents
Abbreviation for PLAN
Use a PLAN to understand what your website needs. acronym:
Preparation – Identify your target audience, the right website tone and goals.
Scenic – Think about how you want your website to function. More specifically, what features does the site require?
Aesthetics – The look and feel of your website is as important as possible. Think about the colors and images you want on your site and how your site compares to the competition.
Voyage – It’s important to plan how you’re going to drive potential customers through your website. Thinking about the pages you need and how to place them can help ensure a good visitor experience early on.
How to use the PLAN website
Preparation: Before you go online to buy a domain name and web hosting to build your site, you need a plan. Create a business plan that will help you take your next steps.
- Decide who your target market is. Think about who your top sellers are, and what’s the best way to communicate with them.
- Set goals for your website. Your goals include what your website wants to do for you, and if you want to generate leads, sell a product, or run it as an online brochure.
- Gather the information you need on your site to achieve your goals.
- Organize your information based on your target market and think of it as the best way to present this information to your customers. In some cases, the sound is more formal or business-like, while other presentations may be more casual or whimsical.
Scenic: Knowing the “horizon” of your website is determining which website features are essential and desirable to achieve your website’s goals. In order to do that, you will need to refer back to the goals of your website in a previous step. For example, to sell products, you need credit card processing and shopping cart functionality.
Features to consider include:
- Lead Magnet for Building Email Lists
- E-commerce settings including shopping cart and payment processing
- photo or video gallery
- blog
- Maps and directions if you have customers in our headquarters
- Information including contact page or business hours
- Social Media Links and Share Buttons
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- portfolio
- Member testimonials page
You need to consider not only the front-end features, but also the back-end features such as:
- Integrated marketing systems such as search engine optimization (SEO)
- Security measures such as SSL certificates to help visitors feel secure
- Caching to make web pages load faster
Not all features listed above are required. Again, you should consider your market and site goals when deciding what you need.
Aesthetics: Design aesthetics or site appearance is an important part of the website creation process. Fortunately, most web hosts provide templates, and content management platforms have themes to make this part easy.
How to determine the look of your site:
- Go back to whoever you decide to be your mayor. Think about their demographics. You will reach out to business owners differently than your parents or survivors. It is important to match the tone of the site and the market. For example, if you’re looking to do business in a conservative business-to-business (B2B) marketplace, don’t go for the offbeat music industry template.
- Make your site easy to read. In general, white fonts on a black background are harder to read than black on white. Also consider the font style. Use a default font that all browsers can deliver to their readers.
- As the old adage progresses, a picture will show thousands of words, so use an image. Research shows that readers are attracted to visual content. However, you should choose high-quality graphics that enhance your content and message, and don’t have too many images. You can take a picture of yourself or use free and cheap stock photo options on the internet. If you don’t have great photo editing software, you can use one of the free and inexpensive online graphic editing options like Canva.
- As with print newspapers, the content above the fold is the most popular. You want the best information, information that visitors find when they visit your site, front, center and center of the screen. There are so many other websites that visitors can visit if they can’t find what they’re looking for on your website. You should keep this in mind for each website page. Make sure your visitors don’t scroll down to get the information they want.
- Use responsive design. Responsive design allows you to transform web pages into a format that can be viewed on connected smartphones and mobile devices such as pads.
If you’re well versed in how to visually create a website’s vibe, visit a competitor’s website and see how it works. You will get an idea of what you need to do and what you can do better.
serious
You do not want to copy or plagiarize. You just want to understand the colors, fonts, and themes used to set the mood for your visitors.
Navigation: Website navigation is how website pages and links are organized. If you want to design a site that will make it easy for visitors to use and find what they are looking for, you need to decide on the navigation structure before you build it. To check site navigation
- Use paper to build your site. At the top is the homepage or the top page of the site. This is the page your domain URL (www.yourbusiness.com) will guide you through.
- Just below the homepage, list the pages you need, such as “About” and “Contact”. If you have checkout or shopping cart, that function will also go to this level.
- List the main categories of your site at the same level as “About” and “Contact” just below the home page. For example, if you have a culinary store, your primary categories might be “Utensils”, “Pots and Pans”, “Kitchen Tools”, and “Cooks”.
- List the subcategories under the main category. Using the cookware example again, under “Utensils” you could have “Knife”, “Serving Utensils” or other items in that category. “Kitchen Tools” may include equipment such as “Crockpots”, “Spiralizers”, and “Mixers”.
Once you know all the pages you need, decide how to easily find them. Most sites have a top and/or side menu that appears on every page. Top menus tend to have more limited space than side menus, so you usually only want links to the main page (Home, About, Contact) and top category pages. But again, we want to make it easy for people to find what they are looking for.
One option is to create a drop down list from the top menu. Returning to the cooking store example, when the user points to the main category of “Kitchen Supplies” in the top menu, a drop-down list of “Knife” and “Serving Supplies” subcategories appears. You can do this via a side menu by clicking on the main category and then using a nesting effect that opens a list of subcategories below it.
Include a search bar on your website for those who are patient who don’t want to poke around to find what they’re looking for, or for visitors who have trouble finding what they’re looking for.
put together
After completing the PLAN, you are ready to move on to the building phase. First, buy a domain name and web hosting, then choose a theme that suits your tone and give it all the features you want to include.
After building your site, make sure all pages and graphics load correctly. Test your form to make sure it works. Preview and use the site on your phone (smartphones and tablets) as well as other browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari) to make sure everything appears and works.