Building an effective website strategy is a critical step to redesigning or building a business website and must precede all else. Too much focus on the aesthetics of your website can make it easy to overlook the functionality. Before you start building a strategy for your website, understand it is an ongoing process. Content needs to be updated periodically so that it stays fresh and remains relevant. These constantly moving parts might be overwhelming but keep in mind your web development shop is there for support.

A website strategy is a long-term strategic plan that details a company’s online presence with reference to business goals. Because your website is your best marketing tool, a well-thought out marketing strategy serves as a great basis. Understanding your marketing goals will help you identify steps that need to be taken in the web development process. Planning an effective strategy will answer a variety of questions. Below are seven ideas you should include in your website strategy:

Your website should act as your best marketing tool, so why not hire a marketing firm to build and maintain your site? Marketing is a working project, constantly developing, changing, and progressing. Websites are the same way, which is why marketing firms understand the big picture. They envision website development as a process rather than a project.

By following best practices, your website can act as your main marketing mechanism. Start by defining the purpose of your website in terms of marketing goals. Are you looking to gain market share? Support customers? Increase sales? Drive traffic? Your development company will be able to build you a website that works toward achieving your well-defined goals.

Well designed websites for businesses are built with the customer in mind. When you visit a website, you don’t have all the time in the world; you’re looking to find the information you need in a reasonable amount of time. Best-case scenario? The page is formatted so that the most important information is near the top; if you want to scroll and read more, you can. A great website should be functional, visually appealing, and communicate targeted content.

A few of the things that make a website appealing to customers are navigation, images, reviews, blogs, and security. Navigation helps you find information quickly and easily. Images appeal to those with more visual capacities while reviews and blogs provide helpful information. Security features let your visitors know their information is protected.

Drupal is an open source software that is developed and maintained by more than 100,000 individual contributors. This software is a great choice for building a wide variety of websites, including company sites, community portal sites, campaign sites, news publishing, aficionado sites, intranet/corporate websites, resource directories, international sites, educational sites, and personal sites.

The benefits of using Drupal to build the website for your business are extensive. Not only is it open source, it uses standards-compliant methods to improve search engine ranking. Drupal is stable, supported, and here to stay. Key features of the software include:

Your website is the hub for everything your business has to offer, which is why web design best practices are important to follow. It is an all-in-one center for your biography, products, portfolio, and insights (including bragging rights). You know what content is available, where to find it, and where to go if you can’t, but can your customers?  How well your website works is just as important as how it looks.

We find ourselves in an age of digital technology and information. People are no longer popping into stores to see what’s available. Instead, they are searching online. Think of your website as the first impression your company gives. When a customer clicks on your URL, they want to be greeted in a warm, friendly manner. Imagine if you clicked on a webpage and were directed to this:

Website planning can be an overwhelming task; so much is involved. You have to gather information and plan where you want that information to live. The design team comes in before the website is even developed, and all of this precedes testing, delivery, and maintenance on the site once it’s launched.

This quick guide will walk you through the necessary aspects of a development strategy, including timelines involved in the overall process.

Here is a broad layout of the main steps for your business:

Content planning for your Lansing business is one of the most critical elements to web development. The purpose of content planning is to tell the organization’s story with the present information, and the information that needs to be created on the website. If you already have a website, the content plan is more about mapping. Mapping involves defining page titles and URLs. Yet, defining what content to present on your website can be a difficult task for a client and their website design firm. In fact, content is often the biggest delay when it comes to launching websites.

Once clients start writing and organizing their content, the website redesign process can quickly evolve into a lengthy endeavor. New content on a website can mean additional features need to be added. Scope creep (often times referred to as requirement creep, function creep, or feature creep), is a project management term that refers to uncontrolled changes or continuous growth in a project’s scope. What can make the journey toward your new or redesigned website easier, is the wireframe process.

You’ve started thinking about a website redesign project plan for your business and wondering, do I really need to redesign my site right now? We just launched it a few years ago. Your website serves many purposes and the optimal time to update may depend on several factors, but a company website’s primary goal is to generate leads.