As an entrepreneur, you can’t escape it: you have to have an online presence in order to reach (potential) customers. And so you must have your own website. But, do you make that website yourself? Or would it be better to have your website built by professional web developers? And how do you know what to look for? We help you choose by listing 5 points of attention when creating a new website.
1. Webdesign
Webdesign or graphic design is the design of a website. It determines how a website looks and what atmosphere it radiates to your customers. A crucial point to consider when designing the online identity of your company and thus creating a new website tailored to your business.
Because this involves an additional cost, ready-made templates are sometimes used to build a website. Although this simplifies the design process, a website built using templates is also less flexible and small adjustments to the website structure, for example, will immediately have major consequences. Technical knowledge is often required to structure and display this correctly again.
2. Content management system (CSM)
The choice of the content management system has a major influence on the rest of your website development. An important advantage of a CMS is that you can easily manage pages, text and images yourself.
Dazzle uses Drupal as CMS for websites where customization is required. For rather simple websites, we then choose WordPress CMS. It all depends on the type of website a client needs. So it’s very important to consider the choice of CMS as one of the points of attention when thinking about a new website.
Drupal has many other important advantages in addition to the user-friendliness of most content management systems:
- An extensive range of basic functionalities.
- On top of that, there are thousands of additional modules that developers can fall back on.
- The content and design can be completely split from each other.
- In the case of multiple users, the different roles can be easily assigned.
- Drupal has a powerful engine that makes 5 to 500 pages work optimally.
An important disadvantage, however, is that a great deal of technical knowledge is required to implement Drupal correctly. That Drupal is a very popular and well-functioning system can be seen from the websites that have been built on the Drupal platform, such as The Economist, Tesla, Harvard…
If you want more information about different CMS platforms, you can read the comparison between WordPress and Drupal.
3. Hosting and support
Of course, the story does not end after your new website has been created. Web hosting means that you have a certain web space on a server on which a website can be placed. This is primarily for hosting a domain name, but also for additional services such as e-mail, a web editor, a MySQL database, etc. Hosting is best done on a fast and powerful server so that your website keeps running smoothly. It is therefore an essential component, which is best handled by a reliable partner.
4. Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Whether you make your website yourself or have it made, you always have one goal in mind: to be found by your (potential) customers. It is therefore important that your website is optimised to rank high in the results of Google and other search engines. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization in jargon, we call it.
Being found depends on certain technical aspects of your website, for example whether your website is mobile responsive. Most CMS systems, including Drupal, are geared towards this and are therefore technically already very SEO-friendly.
Yet there is a lot more to SEO than just the technical construction of your website. For example, it is also crucial to optimise your content for your website visitors through good copywriting. For all these non-technical matters, it can therefore also be useful to be assisted by an SEO specialist.
5. To measure is to know
The great advantage of marketing online is that you can monitor the results very well. Which ads generate more leads? On which pages of my website do people drop out? Where are people having difficulties completing a purchase?
The possibilities of analysing marketing actions and the consequences for your website and sales are enormous. These insights make it possible to adjust your marketing efforts and your website to get the maximum return.
Tools such as Google Analytics are specifically designed for this purpose. However, as is often the case, in order to get the most out of such analytical tools, a thorough expertise is required . Here too, the advice of an expert can make a big difference.
5 points of interest: the conclusion
It is clear that a website is not just set up and then continue to function correctly until the end of time. Making a website goes far beyond simply adding text and images that you consider to be of added value. In each of the above-mentioned focal points, you can see that far-reaching and specific knowledge is required to guarantee a good end result.
That is why it is best to let professionals create your website. They can easily see the difference between what is really important for the user-friendliness of your customers and what can therefore have a big impact on the performance of your website. This way, the eventual return on investment in terms of user-friendliness, visibility, contact or sales is much higher.
