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Looking to Build a New Website in 2019? Start Here.

By Snap Agency October 5, 2018

Congratulations! If you’re looking to build a website in 2019, it means you are ready to take your business to the next level. Soon, you will be joining countless other services/ideas/brands in the race to win over the online populace. Although we all know a good website is key to maintaining a successful business in the technological age of today, research shows that having a beautiful website isn’t enough anymore.

The main goal of your website design process should be to create an attractive, targeted platform that will attrach both organic searches, and engage well with SEO and SEM efforts. Through experience and best practice research, we’ve learned how to make and optimize websites so that you can make the most of your web design ROI.

To take your web build 2019 to the next level, check out the below tips.

Be Willing to Invest in Your Web Design

Behind every stellar website is an even better team of creatives. Although many know that building a website can be terribly complicated in itself, designing a great website is a process that is also challenging and requires a full team of account managers, project managers, developers, strategists, and designers. By bringing in experts in every area of web design, you can be confident in your end result and sure that you are avoiding beginner mistakes. Since you want every aspect of your web build to be excellent, we recommend working with a full-service digital agency for your website building needs. A good web build process  should include:

  • Discovery
  • Requirement-gathering
  • Research/solution gathering
  • Documentation
  • Design
  • Development
  • launch

If you consider yourself to be an expert coder, and want to give web design a try, you should! However, if you are serious about the quality of your website, and not an experienced designer, involving professionals in the web build process is the way to go.

Write Your Own Content

A post on Dan Schwabel’s personal branding blog, by Roger Parker, outlines the benefits of creating original content for your website versus sharing curated, outside posts. He argues that overlapping content and duplication, plus limited personalization options, actually weaken branding by being too generic. Plus, if you spend time on your website, encouraging and sharing others’ content, you may actually be helping your competition win clicks and increased traffic.

By writing your own awesome content, you are giving your site infinite potential for conversion, higher traffic, and with hope, an overall higher ROI. Plus, no one knows your audience/searchers better than you do. By writing your own content, you can cater your tone and message to perfectly fit your brand. Not only does this look super sleek, but it ensures that you can stand behind everything you post.

Buy Your Domain Name

By registering your own domain name, you are officially staking a claim on your little corner of the web world. Personal domains allow for more personalization; on your domain, you can install blogging software, push your own landing pages, add your portfolio, better control your searches, and much more. More than anything, though, securing your own domain ensures that your services and ideas are tied to your own voice. When you control the content under your own domain, you have a unique opportunity to tell your searchers who you are and what you do – unfiltered by outside influences and voices.

Another amazing perk of owning your own domain are the SEO and SEM benefits. If you/your business is known by name, and you own your own domain, it is guaranteed that your domain/website will float to the top of the search. By beating your competition on search, your domain and website will only increase your 2019 ROI.

Ensure That Your Site Is User-Friendly

Can you remember the last time you went anywhere without your cell phone? Most of us (ourselves included) can’t. For this reason – and more we’ll explore below – a vital part of your 2019 web design must be conscious towards all users, an increasingly large number of whom are mobile users.

We’re not here to tell you that every aspect of your website must be mobile friendly, but, it must be responsive. Forbes explains this difference by reminding us that a mobile-friendly website is designed to look good on a cell phone screen, where a responsive website is designed to adapt to whatever screen it is opened on.  

By using your resources to build a website that looks the same no matter how it is viewed, you are broadening your user pool from either just desktop searchers or mobile searches, to encompass all searchers. Talk about an ROI increase just from using smart web design.

So Where Do You Go from Here?

Your website is an extension of your business. Whether your consumers stumble across your website or are led to it, your website should give them a feel for who you are and what you offer.  If you have an existing site and don’t want to build a website from scratch, consider updateing your existing site. Or, if you have already decided the time has come to approach a fresh web build in 2019, reach out to the experts at Snap to start the process.