Today there are over a billion websites online. Naturally some of them are wildly popular while others are barely known. Some are better designed than others, some serve a wider audience, some are updated often and are more accurate than the rest. You get the idea: there are consistent factors behind how popular a website becomes.
But popularity and success are not necessarily the same thing. A small online store selling crochet supplies may not get millions of visitors, and it may still have a loyal customer base that not only shops there but comes back daily for tips, news and project ideas. Because it drives so much engagement, a site like that can be considered more successful than a far bigger one with no returning visitors. A site with millions of visitors, on the other hand, is probably more successful than either.
So if you want to build a website, how do you make it a success? How do you attract the kind of visitors you want, and how do you get them to convert the way you want them to? It is a complicated procedure, and the exact steps you have to take will vary with your subject and your audience.
The process can still be summed up in five general “mega steps” that hold for any website. Whatever kind of site you are building, there are basic rules for starting it off on the right foot. In this piece we will go through those rules under 5 headings.
Some of the basic criteria we at Türk SEM ask of our partner agencies will come up here too.
1. Set Your Website’s Goals
Understanding exactly what you want your website to achieve is vitally important. Is your aim to sell products? Do you want visitors to sign up for your newsletter, or do you want to turn them into long term customers for your company? Or maybe you want all of it. That is fine, you just need to hold that goal in mind from the start so you can structure the site around it.
If you build a website without knowing what its real purpose should be, it will probably end up disorganized and confusing for your visitors. You will not come close to the results a well structured, goal focused website can reach. And without knowing how success is defined, you cannot evaluate how your site is doing or identify what needs improving.
2. Make a Plan Before You Build
Planning is everything, especially when you are building a project that a potentially large audience will see. Write down a list of the pages you think your site will need and what will be on them. Along the way you may discover pages that can be merged, or pages that should be split.
There are two important points to this planning:
- Arranging your pages so that visitors can find their way around easily
- Working out which pages you will actually need.
Building a website calls for a plain, understandable design that anybody can use comfortably. Which pages you need and how many of them will change completely with the site you are building. If you want a single page introduction or a personal page such as a biography, your job is easy. For that you can get free help even from Canva, the tool you normally use for editing photos. With Canva’s website builder you pick one of countless templates and customize it. Your site is ready the same day.
Say you want to build a multi page site instead. Once you have your list of pages, if you need help visualizing the structure, draw something that shows how the pages connect to each other. Then work through the “paths” a hypothetical visitor would have to follow to view any given page, keeping in mind the number of clicks it takes to get there. Ideally a visitor should find what they came for in three clicks or fewer, and the best case is three pages of browsing.
Example Canva site: we published a bridal wear site on My Canva to test it. (Marie is a brand operating within Türk SEM and a registered trademark of Türk SEM.) We may try Canva Pro soon and look through the lesser known website builder features together.
If you can never construct a situation where a visitor would reach a particular page, reconsider whether you need that page at all. Depending on what it is, merging it with another page or removing it entirely may be the better call.
3. Create an Excellent User Experience
User experience (UX) describes everything about how your website makes a visitor feel. Does it load fast, does it look great on mobile, does it present information clearly? Or is it painful to use because of slow load times, confusing navigation, visual clutter or other problems? UX will make a large difference to how long customers stay on your site and how easily you can convert them.
A friend of mine at a web business with annual revenue over 100 million knows nothing about web design or SEO. But he has always known how to work with the right people. When he describes his own expertise he says he is a UX specialist. SEO expertise plus UX expertise is an important pairing for success. We touched on how much UX matters in our piece on what SEO expertise is.
When somebody visits a website they want to find what they came for as fast as possible. Load times and how your site navigates will decide that. A fast loading website with carefully arranged pages and links works to deliver a far better user experience. If you run an online store, your shopping cart, product pages and checkout process have to be fast and work well too.
People online hold very high standards. At the smallest annoyance they are likely to leave your page and find another product, even when yours is better. Build a website people enjoy visiting.
4. Add Valuable Website Content
Every website needs content. A misguided (and out of date) article written to trick search engines is obviously not going to do you any good. For content to really stand out, what is on your pages has to add value to your sector, not just get the search terms in the right places. Value, meaning the value given to the reader, plays a huge part in how popular your site becomes and in what it can rank for. People know valuable things when they see them.
On informativeness, a website with informative content will comfortably leave behind a site holding “content for the sake of content”. When you start writing, never treat it as an exercise in filling a page. Ask yourself instead what kind of value you can add for that reader right now:
- Instructions
- Reviews
- Product comparisons
- Experiences,
- And anything else that can teach your visitors something and therefore add value.
Writing a blog post? Research the subjects your visitors will want to know more about and explain them.
Writing a page that lists the products in a category? Write an informative introduction to the category and add details that help customers decide which product to pick.
Writing the most important page on your site, the homepage? Explain your sector rather than assuming every visitor already understands what you do. You can show some of your visitors that you can solve a problem they did not know they had.
5. Get a Working Knowledge of SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) calls for a set of skills that runs from the technical to the nearly artistic. On the technical side you have things like link structure, 301 redirects, meta tags and XML sitemaps. On the artistic side, the valuable content we just covered is central to SEO.
Valuable content helps your SEO directly, because it gives visitors trustworthy information they want to share with other people, which gets them linking to your site, which signals to Google that a page is popular and should sit higher in the results. There are of course many more technical tasks to get through so that your site does not get lost several pages deep in search. The good news is that you do not always need deep technical understanding to set SEO up properly. It comes down to your ability to follow instructions: getting your URLs, page titles and meta tags to meet a certain standard can be enough for a short start.
If you are on WordPress as your CMS, raising your WordPress PageSpeed score will be worth a lot to your SEO work.
Making these changes without technical knowledge can of course be hard, and this is where your site builder software can genuinely help. Website builders usually give you easy ways to change titles and tags, and they also take some of the harder work off your hands. They are not all equal on built in SEO tools, though. WordPress is one of the platforms with the richest built in features and the friendliest SEO.
Conclusion
Website builders who follow the criteria set out in this piece can reach success while adding their own style to it.
You can build your own site using all of these guidelines and more through our web design solutions.
These five steps are of course a summary of processes far too long to fit in one blog post. How to build a website is a deep subject. SEO is a specialization we go through in depth in our SEO course. What this piece gives you is something valuable in itself: it tells you exactly where to start.
Update: in November 2024 we mentioned our Türk SEM web design services to improve the piece. We also added Canva Website Builder, the free tool Canva offers.
