Building your website is the online equivalent of moving into and setting up the brick and mortar storefront for your business. You want to be sure your website does a great job of representing your brand and all you have to offer. It needs to be easily found by customers and your store layout needs to be easily navigable.

But so much of the online world is unknown to many and can be intimidating because much of the conversations you’ll be having with your designer or developer will involve terminology you aren’t familiar with. The website design list below includes 6 important considerations you need to make when building or redesigning your website.

6 Things to Consider before Building a Website

1. Decide your goals for your website Before any website creation and design work begins, decide what you’ll be using your website for. Will you be sharing photos of your work or projects? Do you need an e-commerce component to your website? Will you be blogging for your business? Will you need a custom form created for your customers to place an order or make a reservation? Do you need to include an email newsletter opt-in form?
2. Can your current website accommodate your goals and vision? If you want to update or change your existing website, it might be necessary to transfer your website to a different platform or CMS (content management system). For example, not every website is easy to update, can accommodate a blog or can be optimized for search engines. So it’s important to be aware that a change like this might be necessary to take your website to the next level.
3. Think of your design from the viewpoint of your customers This can be difficult to do; however, it’s vital to understand that what you might personally prefer or what layout makes sense to you, may not be the best for your average website visitor. Colors, fonts, locations of standard website elements, and functional menus are just a few items. I know that, personally, I will click off a site if I can’t easily locate social media icons, contact information, hours of operation and a services or products list.
4. Be prepared to write copy Typically, anyone you hire to either design or develop your website will handle only the “tech” part of building a site. That means all those brand new website pages being created for you need words and photos to go on them. If you are starting from scratch with your website or reworking an existing one, you’ll be counted on to name how many pages you want and to write all the text for those pages.
5. Domain and hosting are also required You’ll need to purchase your URL as well as set up hosting for your website before your designer or developer can get to work. It is possible to have your domain through one company and your hosting through another, or you can often buy your domain through the same company you’re going to pay for hosting.
6. Mobile-responsiveness A significant amount of website activity now happens on smart phones. You can have a mobile site created for you, or help to make your website mobile-friendly through the use of a plugin like WPTouch or a mobile responsive theme (both apply to WordPress sites).

Website builds and updates aren’t something you do everyday. Some dedicated planning and strategy needs to go into it to be sure your new website is as effective as possible in growing your business both online and off.

What challenges did you face with a website redesign?