.BY STAVROS ANGELIDES
BY STAVROS ANGELIDES
How does your business website rank on the professionalism scale?
Fact 1: People don’t all have the same taste, and people don’t all see things from the same angle.
Fact 2: Being professional is not about taste or an individual way of looking at things. It adds value and it brings results.
IS IT JUST ABOUT DESIGN?
No, it isn’t. It’s also about your clients and potential clients, and what they want. They won’t judge you purely on your website’s design and they won’t be impressed by animation and music if they can’t quickly and easily find the information they’re looking for. They want to get as much detail as possible about your products or services without having to read through pages of text to try to find the answers to their questions. There are other smart ways too!
Getting involved as a business right from the start, in the planning stage and architecture design of your website, helps in balancing out both design and navigation. The result will be a properly structured website which will work well for your business.
In my 14 years in the industry, I have seen businesses that get involved and spend time during the planning stage of their website development, to build successful sites that add value to their business. They avoid risks during development, the website is developed earlier than estimated, and they don’t have to pay extra on the way for changes they haven’t anticipated in the early stages. Above all… they are in control!
Do be careful though. Getting involved doesn't mean starting to draw the lines or coming up with ideas that web design professionals should be generating; they should know what you need, and will come up with ideas in design concepts before building the site for you.
Unfortunately many businesses don't give adequate consideration to their website and simply just assign the project to the IT department – who, to be frank, are not the most appropriate people to oversee the development of your website. They may have the best technical knowledge in the company, but it’s unlikely they know more than anyone else about its management and its clients.
CONTENT IS KING
You’ve heard this before, but have you followed the rule? Many companies look at the develoment of their website purely from the design aspect and when it comes to content they’re stuck. Questions arise: "Do we need to use the same content we have in our brochures?", "How much content should we add?", "Isn't this the web designer's responsibility?" Content preparation takes considerable time and is the number one reason for delays in launching a site.
Your website’s content is not the responsibility of the web designer, nor yours as a company manager, and definitely not that of your PA or secretary. The web environment is different and a special approach is needed to prepare the content. The reason is search engines. If you write your content in a search engine-friendly way, while maintaining the fact and the spirit of what you want to say, it will help you rank well in related keywords within your industry.
The professional approach is to hire a specialist web copywriter to help in this area. You can do this directly, or through the web developer who will know of the appropriate person.
QUICK TEMPLATE OR UNIQUE DESIGN?
Many web development companies work as production factories, missing important steps in the development process in order to produce more websites in less time. They care more about themselves than about you, their client, and don’t always have your ROI in mind.
They build websites based on templates or based on work done for previous clients. Sometimes they use content management systems that are ready-made and on which they base the design of your site – resulting in non-user-friendly maintenance for you once the site is live.
Information architecture, conceptualisation, target market analysis, client analysis and requirements are not part of their work, and that is why sometimes their prices are cheaper. Selecting such a web design company will of course give you an online presence, but in the longer term it will do nothing to add value to your online brand.
If I haven't helped you scale your business website from 1 to 10 in terms of professionalism, I’m sure many readers will identify with the issues raised here and may well have encountered them during their website’s development. If you’re starting the process now, then you know what to look out for!
Stavros Angelides is the Managing Director of SAE-Business Ltd – a professional web development company.
www.sae-business.com
