Business
Website Design, Creation & Development
We offer business
website design for small, medium and large enterprise businesses.
However, Web design is one among numerous Web services we offer.
Not only can we design a superb business website, but we can program
any web applications your business website will need, and we can
create and conduct a traffic-driving e-marketing plan to promote
your new business website design. We'll help your business get online
for the first time or we can create a state of the art, next-generation
web site for you if your business already has a website.
When designing
a website, the number one question to be asking is, “How can
I design our website’s appearance and usability to optimally
achieve our business’s goals?” Beware of design for
design’s sake. In fact, when carrying out any action involving
your business’s website, from designing to coding, to maintaining
and marketing, the issue of optimally achieving your business goals
and facilitating the user’s experience should be front and
center at all times.
The most important
facet of business website design is the user. The design of a website
or Web service should be driven by the user’s needs. One cannot
practice business website design without being affected by the expectations
of future users. A business’s website exists to communicate
and help the user, the existing and potential. Following this rule
will help make sales. Therefore, the user needs to be central to
the creation of a site. To ignore this principle would be like a
retail store planner ignoring the fact that customers will soon
be navigating through the store and insisting on creating a confusing
floor plan that resembled a tortuous maze of racks, trapping even
the most experienced person in a labyrinth of aisles of goods who
will never see the light of day again.
To successfully
accomplish the goals of helping, communicating and selling to the
user, a website must have an appropriate appearance and be easy
and intuitive to use. Web design involves first and foremost the
look and feel. This is made up of color schemes, font styles and
sizes, graphics, page layouts, and how all these elements come together
to form the site’s overall website appearance.
Also, drive
more traffic to your Web site by utilizing Oak Web Works' search
engine optimization services. Our SEO
services include one-to-one meetings to determine your most
important keywords, analyzation of competition placement and your
existing placements, search engine optimized page development for
specific keywords and specific search engines, submissions, monitoring
and reporting to you.
Business Website Marketing
Here
are a few of the things we can do to drive traffic to your site,
increase brand awareness and create more sales for you:
- Strategic
link development
- Internet
exploration to discover where to place your link
- Search
engine optimization
- Article
writing help and submission
- Newsgroup
and forum "buzz" building
- Newsletter
development
- Email
marketing
- Banner
creation and placement
- Flash
movie development
- Forum
creation
- Site traffic
analysis and reporting using WebTrends
- Site traffic
analysis system setup for your company
Our Approach and Methodology for designing
and developing an effective business website
Website
Manifestation - 7 Steps to a Successful Website
If
you are in business for yourself, an executive with decision making
power, or the head of your company, you are probably bombarded with
advice, opinions and information about how to build or re-vamp your
website and how to use it to your advantage in business.
To
be as successful as possible in your e-business, you’ll need
to plan ahead and you’ll need to properly fuse the disciplines
of design, technology and marketing. From conception to reality,
the process of manifesting a website draws upon a multidisciplinary
approach.
The
more time and effort you put into planning and building your website,
or revamping an existing one, the more successful you’ll be.
Your new site will have more potential in accomplishing your business
goals, your business will look more credible to all the people visiting
your site, and you’ll increase your bottom line.
The
following is a guide for building a new website. It shows how a
corporate webmaster or Web department creates a world-class website,
and it is the same step by step process that every organization,
no matter how small, should follow.
Step
1 – Discovery:
The first phase involves determining the scope of the project,
the timeline and scheduling parameters, everyone’s expectations,
and your current human and technical resources.
Step
2 - Business Website Concept and Planning:
The next step is to determine site requirements, business goals,
types of functionality, site features, and a timeline and due
date. You’ll need to determine who your site audience is,
the demographics and psychographics of your visitors.
In
this phase the architecture or organization of the information
that will be included on the site needs to be planned as well.
The most important part of this step is determining your goals
for the site. You need to ask yourself and any other stake holders
exactly what the new site ought to yield when completed. What
do you expect the site to do? What do you want to get out of it?
What messages do you want to convey to all the people who will
eventually view it? What are the priorities of the site in terms
of your business and making money? What types of people will be
using the site and what will they want to accomplish while there?
Step
3 - Business Website Design Specifications:
This is when the look & feel and a visual design specification
are created. Here you’ll determine the fonts, colors and
size and layouts, always trying to keep consistency paramount.
You’ll want to write specifications for the images you’ll
be using on the site as well. It’s also the time to decide
upon and design the technical infrastructure and architecture
of the site, server, environment and platform. You’ll determine
what programming languages and databases will be used, if any,
and any other technical features your site will need.
One
of the secondary benefits of following Step 3 is that you’ll
have a document to refer back to later on when adding to the site.
If you hire a new Web person of company, you can give them this
design specification document for them to follow whenever they
work on your site
Step
4 – Business Website Production:
Before this phase begins, everyone who is involved in this project,
including people who give the final ‘ok’, need to
know that there will be a technical and look and feel design freeze
at this point. If any changes are needed during this point, then
those changes will be done in the next redesign.
The
production phase can be broken down into three areas and will
include:
Step
4a - The website design production:
The artistic look and feel design production, usability designing,
the navigation production, and image and button creation. The
homepage of the site and the inner page template both need the
new design applied to them. The homepage design may use the same
template the rest of the site uses, or it may be unique. If it
differs from the rest of the site, then make sure its look and
feel is very similar to the look and feel of the inner page template(s).
Also, if it differs, consider applying this entire step-by-step
guide to the homepage as well, treating it as a separate, but
related entity.
Step
4b - The website technical production:
This entails the html coding, any other coding to contribute to
the functionality and the configuration of the server’s
environment. The technical aspects could also include any server
side coding in a major programming language, database design and
development, and site security measures.
Step
4c - The website marketing production:
This area includes creating the homepage and pre-determined inner
pages to be search engine and index friendly. It also includes
the copy writing for every page. Any mechanisms for interacting
with the visitors will be produced here. For example, forms on
your site that asks users to give information are ways for a user
to interact with your site. Although the look & feel of the
form falls under ‘design’, and the actual mechanisms
that make the form work falls under ‘technology’,
the purpose of the forms will be very marketing-centric. What
you ask, how you store the data, and how you retrieve it and use
it later are all marketing issues that should be addressed in
this step.
Step
5 – Site Testing:
The produced site now must be loaded onto a staging area that
is exactly like the production environment, or made accessible
to testers only. During this phase, various people will test all
aspects of site, including functionality, spelling and grammar,
hyperlinks, and all other elements. This is often called the Quality
Assurance phase.
Step
6 – Publishing:
This phase is the push of the new site from staging to production.
Here the site is made live and is now on the World Wide Web.
Step
7 - Business Website E-marketing and Maintenance:
Unless the site is marketed, it won’t matter how well-designed
or technically robust it is, no one will ever visit or use it.
Therefore, the final and ongoing phase entails implementing e-marketing
techniques, keeping the site’s content fresh, and making
continual adjustments based on site specific and customer research.
Whether
you decide to tackle building a new website yourself, or you choose
to hire someone else to do it, the steps outlined above ought to
be followed. If you decide to do it yourself, you’ll need
to read up on graphic design and usability, Web technologies and
e-marketing.
If
you hire an outside company to build a site for you, ask them how
they plan to accomplish it. Ask them if they have a set method for
building a new site or re-vamping an old one. If they have a good
system, it ought to look a lot like the steps above. They ought
to be proficient in all aspects of website development and be able
to communicate to you everything they are doing and why. Remember,
the better your site is initially and the better you manage your
new site going forward, the better your business will be.
Article
by Jason O'Connor
© 2004
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