Web.Search.Social: The Marketing Magazine For Smart Businesses
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Choosing a web developer isn’t easy, whether you’re just starting out and need a website to begin marketing your business online, or you’ve been through the ringer before and the thought of muddling through again, even in the name of a much-needed redesign, is enough to make you wish the internet had never been invented.
Hooooold on a second… weren’t there supposed to be five steps to planning? How did “building” make it into the planning steps when it should come after? Ha! Bet you know that building could be part of planning, too. Of course, this is building in a different way than you might expect.
The planning process is a little like that old song where the shin bone’s connected to the knee bone… and the knee bone’s connected to… um, something or other. Fortunately you don’t need to remember your anatomy but you will be building a connection with your wireframe, which you just built to connect with your sitemap.
Once you know what pages will be on the site, the next step is to figure out what’s going to be on those pages. This is where the wireframe comes in, sometimes referred to as “information architecture”. It’s still a paper-and-pencil exercise, but it’s far more detailed and it builds on the previous two steps.
Building a sitemap is a good old fashioned paper-and-pencil exercise. Ok, maybe a good old-fashioned keyboard-and-mouse exercise. Whatever your tools, it is a drawing phase. You will need to sit down with your developer and decide exactly what your site structure is from a high-level perspective.
It’s common – and unfortunate – practice to start building a website based on a conference call and a couple of notes about colors, pages and content. With so many DIY web tools that make the process sound as simple as a drag here and a drop there, many businesses fail to recognize the power of planning.
Its so obvious yet at the same time so elusive. You’ve spent so much time planning your site down to the last minute detail and now you’ve got a lovely site, with terrific information, so tastefully cutting edge and easy to use… except… what, exactly, is a person supposed to do with it?
So far all of the mistakes in this series have concerned some aspect of your website that can annoy or deter customers. This next mistake is more likely to ensure that your site never makes it onto their radar. It has to do with META data, the sometimes invisible information that can have a huge impact on the success of your site.
One way or another all of the rookie mistakes we’ve covered in this series can cost you business without adding any value to your website. But perhaps one of the most common mistakes, because there are so many ways to make it, is the misuse of technology.
Today we’ve got another mistake to help you avoid, and it’s one simple concept that comes in many eye-rolling variations: the page background. It might be polka dots. Smiley faces. Books. Ballerina bears or a bad mess of colors and textures. If the goal of your website is to turn visitors into customers then this lesson is simple.
