As a business owner, you know that having a website is essential for establishing your online presence and reaching potential clients. However, creating a website that effectively represents your brand and meets your business goals can be a challenging task.
That’s where a professional web agency comes in – they can bring their expertise to the table and create a website that not only looks great but also performs well too.
Creating that perfect website involves an important collaboration between you and your chosen web agency.
Here are 5 pointers on how to prepare before your agency can get stuck into doing their magic.
1. Why do you want a website?
Before you even start to look for an agency to create your website, be sure to think about why you want a website in the first place.
What are your goals for your website? Do you want to showcase your products or services? Do you want to generate leads or sales? Do you want to establish yourself as an authority in your industry?
By clarifying your goals and expectations for your website, you’ll be better able to communicate them to the agency, and ensure that they create a website that meets your needs.
Having a clear understanding of why you want a website can help you measure its success and make improvements over time.
With social media on the rise, you might even conclude that you don’t need a website after all. The video below is a webinar of our very own Jag Panesar and Danni Johnson talking about where the best place is to place your budgets – in your website or in social media.
2. Who is your target audience?
Once you’ve established that you need a website and why, you need to think about your target audience.
To create a website that effectively communicates your message and resonates with your visitors, you need to have a clear understanding of your target audience.
Who are your ideal customers? What are their needs, wants and pain points? What motivates them to take action?
By understanding your target audience, you can create content, design and add functionality to your website that helps you address their specific needs and interests.
So how do you work out who your target audience is? You can start by creating buyer personas, which are fictional representations of your ideal customers.
You can use surveys, customer feedback, and social media analytics to gather data and insights about your current audience, and use this to refine your audience personas.
Once you have this information, share it with your agency so that they can create a website that resonates and ultimately drives more conversions and sales for your business.
To dive deeper into how you can create buyer personas and identifying your target audience, watch the video of a webinar run by Danni Johnson, below:
3. Research what you do and don’t like
To ensure you get a website that aligns with your vision and goals, it’s important to have a clear idea of what you like and don’t like in terms of web design and functionality.
Start by looking at websites in your industry to get a sense of what’s common and expected. Then, branch out and look at websites in other industries to get inspiration and ideas that you can adapt for your own website.
Pay attention to elements such as layout, colour scheme, typography, imagery, navigation, and user experience.
Watch our webinar below on how you can make sure your website is fully optimised to achieve stronger enquiries.
Additionally, think about websites you’ve visited in the past that you didn’t like or found frustrating to navigate. What is it that you didn’t like? Make a note of this and share it with your agency.
Doing all this will allow you to give your web agency a clearer picture of your expectations and what you’re looking to create.
4. What action do you want people to take?
Your website is a tool for driving conversions, whether that means making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter. To ensure it’s effective in achieving these conversions, it’s important to identify the specific actions you want visitors to take when they visit your website.
Your website is an important sales generation tool so you’ll need to consider how it fits into your overall sales process.
Start by thinking about the business goals you outlined above and how your website can help you achieve them.
Once you have the primary call-to-action, make sure that it’s prominently displayed on your website and that your content and design support that. Make it super easy for your visitors to do this primary action.
5. Consider the content and information you want on your website
It’s important to provide an outline of the information you want to give your website users to your web agency. Think about your unique selling points and make sure the web agency is aware of them.
Your content is what will ultimately engage and inform your visitors.Think about the information you want to include on your website and how that information will be presented.
No one likes a cluttered website with huge walls of text.
Work out what you would like on the primary pages. This can be your homepage, about page, product or services page and contact page. This is great content that your audience would like to know about.
Then look at what you’d like to have on your secondary pages such as a blog, testimonials or case studies. These can all be powerful pages to build trust and authority with your audience.
When looking at the type of content for your website, focus on your audience’s needs. What information will they find valuable and useful? What questions do they have that your website can answer with engaging content?
Hopefully, now that you have a clear idea of these five points you’re well on your way to getting the website that’s right for you, but more importantly, right for your customers.
Want to learn about how we created a result driving website for one of our clients? Read how we helped Pinder Cooling generate £290,000 of enquiries from their new website.
