5 Tips to Planning a New Website

Your website represents you 24/7 and needs to convince visitors (and search engines) that: 1) you are an authority in the industry and 2) your business is a worthwhile provider to meet their needs. You build trust by looking professional and sharing accurate and compelling content.

But developing or improving a website for your business can be daunting and overwhelming for even the most digitally-savvy marketers; resulting in delays, increased costs, panic and even (gasp!) paralysis!

Because Affinity Express helps hundreds of small- to medium-sized businesses establish or redesign their websites every year, I decided to get some advice from Patrick Mullen, our vice president of interactive operations and product development.* He has been integral in building our website offering, which our publishing and other clients market to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Here are five tips Patrick shared to help you formulate your website plan and understand the project scope. As he notes, a solid plan defined early makes for a simpler process that will achieve the desired outcomes.

1. Build a complete plan

Identify the key stakeholders. For Affinity Express, this includes sales, marketing, customer service and human resources. Document their goals (e.g., human resources wants an attractive job posting page that communicates company culture but is easy and fast to update without a lot of training). Understand their needs and come to simple and acceptable solutions. Remember that requirements are not necessarily the same as preferences.

An important point to keep in mind that simplicity is the new paradigm for website design because it is the only way we have to make content accessible and readable on the greatest possible number of devices with the best user experiences.

Review all of the stakeholder input and then determine: