Launching a new website can be daunting, especially for small businesses that don’t have the resources to hire a professional web developer. Luckily, there are several things you can do to ensure your site’s success, even if you’re on a tight budget. In this article, I’ll walk you through the entire process of launching your new website in seven easy steps, from choosing your domain name to optimising for mobile devices and more.
Steps for Launching a New Website
Choosing a Domain Name
Choosing a domain name is one of the most important decisions when starting your website. It’s also one of the easiest to mess up if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Let’s go over some tips for choosing a great domain name:
- Choose something easy to remember. Ensure that someone who has never heard of your company can remember the name after hearing about it once or twice, such as “The Best Company Ever” or “Fantastic Products.” Avoid names like “bestcompanyever” or “fantasticproductsinc”. Even though they might be easier for people who work at these companies (because they know how long their names are), it is not likely going to stick in people’s minds long enough for them to become customers later on down the line when they see those domains pop up again somewhere else online!
- Make the domain name short. Try to keep it under 15 characters, or people will have to enter more than one word into their browser’s address bar when they want to visit your site. This is especially important if you’re trying to make your domain name easy to remember. If people have to type more than one word into their browsers’ address bars, they might forget that they even wanted to visit your site in the first place.
Designing Your Website
When you’re designing your website, the first thing you need to do is decide on a clear design style. That means deciding what colours and fonts you want to use throughout your site. It also means deciding whether or not it will be responsive (adjusting its layout for different screen sizes) and whether it will be a responsive web app (an app that runs in a browser).
Once these decisions are made, they must remain consistent across all pages throughout all platforms: desktop computers and mobile phones alike. Suppose users visit one page of your website and see something completely different from what they saw before when visiting another page on that same site. In that case, those users might get confused about where exactly they are within your site’s structure, and this could lead them away from completing whatever goal brought them there in the first place!
Create an Effective Homepage
The homepage is where your visitors will land, so ensuring it’s easy to navigate and read is important. Include a call to action (CTA), such as an email signup form or an invitation for people to download something. This can be a simple text link at the bottom of your page that says “sign up” or “download.”
You should also include a statement of purpose on this page. A short description of what you do and why you do it. This helps visitors understand why their time may be better spent elsewhere if they don’t fit into your target audience, but also gives potential customers something else they can trust about who you are as a business owner when making decisions about whether or not they should buy from you in particular over someone else who might have similar offerings at lower prices or higher quality products/services (or both).
Finally, include links highlighting some key areas where users might want further information about what products/services you offer: FAQs pages, blog posts related specifically towards those topics; even videos explaining how each item works in detail could be helpful here depending upon how complicated its function happens.
Create a User-Friendly Navigation MenuThe navigation menu is the key to your website’s usability. It should be easy for visitors to find the information they need and also make clear where they are on the site.
The first step in creating a user-friendly navigation menu is deciding what will happen. There need to be enough options that people can easily access what they want, but not so many that they get lost or confused (this is where having an experienced designer can help).
If you have multiple tiers of content, such as “About Us” and then “Our Products”, which leads into “Our Services,” consider using dropdown menus instead of submenus within each section of your site’s homepage so that users only see what applies at that point in their journey through it–otherwise they may feel overwhelmed by all of those different options at once.
Incorporate Formal Features into Your Site
- Use a logo. A logo is a graphic representation of your company’s name and identity, so it should be used on every page of your website. Logos can be simple or extravagant, but they should always be recognisable as an element connecting all your web pages.
- Use a tagline. A tagline is another way to express what makes you unique from other companies in your industry. It can summarise why people should choose you over others who offer similar products or services, even if those other businesses have better reputations than yours. Taglines are often shorter than full-blown mission statements (which we’ll talk about next), so they’re great for getting across key points quickly without being too wordy or boringly straightforward, like some mission statements tend towards being at times.
- Use a mission statement if possible; otherwise, just stick with using only one main goal per section instead because having multiple goals feels redundant when combined into one statement, which may end up sounding clunky, duelling two different ideas against each other rather than complementing each other while still maintaining focus on achieving them both simultaneously without losing sight of either goal’s importance over another. However, this may only sometimes work depending on how much space is available within certain contexts, such as small screens where limited space only allows enough room for necessary information.
Optimise for Mobile Devices
It’s no secret that mobile devices are becoming more and more popular. According to research from Statista, the number of smartphone users worldwide will reach 2 billion by 2021–that’s more than half of the world’s population.
Mobile devices have different screen sizes, capabilities, user experience and connectivity speeds compared to desktop computers. For your site or app to be accessible on all these devices, it needs to be responsive (the same code runs across all screens).
The best way to make sure you’ve optimised for mobile devices is by testing your site on real phones/tablets with actual users in mind when designing it so they can give feedback throughout the development process, so there aren’t any surprises after launch day arrives!
Things to Consider When Launching a New Website
There are many things to consider when launching a new website. Here are some:
Your Target Audience
This is the group of people you want to attract, and your site must meet their needs. For example, suppose you’re launching an eCommerce site selling lady’s shoes. In that case, your target audience will probably be women ages 18-30 who live in urban areas with access to Wi-Fi and credit cards–not men over 40 who live in rural areas without internet access or cash.
If your company sells products across multiple industries (for example, medical devices for patients with diabetes), then you should consider how each product fits into these different markets before choosing what type of content will best reach each one.
Business Goals/Objectives
Why are we doing this? What do we hope to accomplish by creating this new website? Are there specific metrics we need to meet (like sales conversions) by the end date? How will we measure those results once they come through? These questions help determine how much time should be spent developing each page within the site, so everyone knows where their efforts will lead them down the road; no point spending hours making sure every paragraph looks perfect if nobody reads past them anyway!
Technical SEO Factors
This is where the rubber meets the road. When it comes to technical SEO, there are three main components: Speed, Structure and Security.
- Speed: It may seem like a no-brainer, but one of the first things people notice when visiting your site is how long it takes to load up all those pretty pictures and words. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load on a mobile device (which accounts for more than 70% of all internet traffic), you’re losing customers before they even start reading what you have to say.
- Structure: A structure refers to how your content is organised. For example, suppose you have a homepage that has a lot of different pages linked to it (such as “About Us” and “Contact Us”). That could be considered a bad structure since it doesn’t allow for easy navigation on the site (another factor Google considers when ranking sites).
- Security: If your site has security flaws, then Google will penalise it because they don’t want their users to get hacked. This includes not using HTTPS (the secure version of HTTP) when collecting sensitive information such as credit card numbers or passwords.
Let’s Launch Your New Website Together!
Overall, indeed launching a new website can be a daunting task. There are many factors to consider and decisions to make when creating your online presence. But don’t worry–we’ve got you covered! At Digital Rescue, we will make sure to guide you every step of the way. From the planning stage until even after launching your website. We make sure to provide all the guidance you need, and together with our trusted Melbourne SEO agency partner, TopRankings, we will not only build you a stunning website, but we will also help you rank higher on SERPs. Book a FREE chemistry call today or contact us at 1300 912 950 for more enquiries.
