Building Successful Websites

Website Design, Architecture & Content

The first stage of designing and building a new website is to decide its overall purpose. Is it a corporate website, designed simply to provide information about your company, or perhaps an ecommerce website selling your products online?

Domain name & hosting

Choose a suitable domain name that either reflects your brand/company or relates to your main business activity or product. Think about the ‘brandable’ nature of the domain name - can you buy international suffixes if you expand the business overseas? Or combine the brand/company with your main product/activity to make a unique domain name.

Keep it as short as possible - the average length of a domain name is 11 characters.

Find a web hosting company that fits the purpose. If you simply plan on having a corporate website with marketing pages, a simple business website hosting package is all you need. If you are planning an ecommerce website or one with a high level of functionality then a dedicated server may be suitable.

IT Platform

Pick your operating system, development language and database (if you are planning a database-driven website). Most websites can be developed simply in HTML, however if you plan anything more complicated perhaps you should consider a database-driven website. This is particularly useful if you are selling many products that could change over time. A database makes it quicker and easier to update your product information.

The choice is normally between Microsoft Windows (i.e. IIS / .Net or ASP / MS SQL Server) and Linux (Apache / PHP / MySQL). We would normally recommend the Linux platform for its robustness, reliability and speed.

Website design

Every website is different; however some elements of the design should always remain the same. All websites should be built to the W3C standard of HTML. Page sizes should be kept as small of as possible to help search engines and page loading time. The architecture and design should make it easy to read, navigate and use for both humans and search engine robots.

Website content

Whatever your purpose, the content on your website will be key to getting the right type of traffic, keeping users on your website and also getting the user to return in the future. Think about what you offer the user on your website. Why will users come back to your website? Do you have content that changes? Do you have interactive content that users will want to use again and again? Perhaps you update information regularly, informing users of the latest news, articles, products or services.

Can you offer users a newsletter or a way to contribute content of their own. User-generated content is still a big part of the Internet - just look at the success of Youtube. Social networking can also be used on your website. Can you offer a Facebook application or link up a Twitter account for your company?

Building Traffic

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation

It is important to design your website with SEO in mind. Basic things that you can do include making simple directory structures with meaningful names and page urls, linking between pages and sections in a coherent way and using the standard HTML tag structure on each page (i.e. H1, H2, H3 etc...).

Do not repeat content and always write meaningful meta tags such as page title, keywords and descriptions that are relevant to the content on the page.

You must build a XML sitemap for the search engines and remember to submit it to Google and Microsoft's Bing. Inbound links are one of most important elements of SEO. Search engines love links to websites because they show the importance of your website.

Submit your website to relevant online directories and ask related online businesses to link to your website.

Promoting and marketing

I have already mentioned social networking, but social bookmarking, forums and blogs are a good way to get your website noticed. Make sure it is easy to bookmark your website pages either to the user’s browser or preferred social bookmarking website.

For example, the AddThis widget is a quick way to offer social bookmarking options on your website.

Use traditional methods of promotion such as offline advertising but also consider online marketing such as PPC (pay per click) through the search engines, affiliate marketing, online press releases and website partnerships.