Today we try to answer a question many people are curious about: “How should a professional website be built?”
First of all, anyone who wants to build a website should answer two questions: “Why do I need a website?” and “What will I use it for?”. Once goals such as increasing sales or serving existing customers better are thought through, it becomes much clearer what level of design and functionality the site needs.
Even if the owner of the idea isn't a developer, they should research the field and learn at least a little about it. The reason is that they have to explain the project fully to the developer and understand what is and isn't possible in development. They should also study competitors' websites in advance and think about whether the technologies used for their site will be better than the competitors', or at least the same.
At the next stage, choose a name for the website that is catchy, explains its purpose and isn't too long, and a hosting company where the site will live. The name matters because it has to stay in customers' minds, and the hosting matters for the site's loading speed. Both also affect the site's ranking in search engines (Google, Yandex, Bing and others).
The website's design is an even more influential factor than the ones above. The design should not tire new users who know nothing about the system. It also has to display correctly in every browser and on every screen size, and a mobile version has to be built. Websites without a mobile design are pushed down the rankings by big search engines like Google, because they are seen as unusable for visitors.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) may be an unfamiliar term to many people reading this article. Optimising a site for search engines is necessary, even mandatory, if the website is to become known. During SEO, the website has to be presented properly to the search engines I mentioned above. Thanks to SEO, the bots that search engines send to a website can check which search terms the site should appear for, and whether it offers full information to its users. I'd like to continue with something my mentor used to say: “Page 2 of Google is a graveyard, and only people interested in the dead go there.” Funny as it sounds, that's how it is. 90% of users only open the websites shown on Google's first page; almost nobody looks at the second page and beyond. That's why SEO should be done so that the website appears on the first page for the search terms it needs.
Once each of the points above is solved, is the website professional? NO. Building a website and doing SEO right is only the beginning of the work. After that, the site has to be constantly updated with content. “We bring forward the sites that deliver the most up-to-date information to our users,” says Google.
The internet is a hugely competitive place. To stay on your feet there, you have to work harder than your competitors and not lose heart, because in search engines it's bots, not people, that rank sites. It takes some effort, but in the end you will see the results!
My next article will be “How to grow website traffic?”. Stay tuned…
