Building Your First Website, Things to Consider

If you are putting together a website for the first time, you may not really know what you should be thinking about. It is important to make sure that you get things right though as otherwise you might be wasting your time. There are lots of things to consider and below are a few to start you off.

Is the Site Easy to Use?

It is really important to make sure that anyone visiting your site can easily find what they are looking for. You want to make sure that it is put together in a way where they can navigate it easily and find their way to anywhere from any page. This usually just means that you need easy menus or navigation bars on every page. If you use a website builder then it should be set up so that everything will be easy anyway, but it can be a good idea to have a look at some sample sites that have been made using the web builder that you have in mind and you will be able to see for yourself.

Is it Optimised for Search Engines?

It is really important to make sure that when your site is finished and published that people will be able to find it. It could be that you have a way to direct people to your site and will be happy with that. However, it might be the case that you will need to rely on search engines to drive traffic to your website. If this is the case, then you will want SEO in place to guide them. This is something that some web builders will provide you will or will be flexible with and some will not. It is important to think about this and to compare them in order to ensure it is doing what you need. It is worth remembering that even if you have a fantastic looking website and are selling the best product, unless people know about it and can find it, you will not get any sales.

Does it Contain Enough Information?

It is worth thinking hard about the content of your website. Although visitors may like lots of pictures and videos to watch, it is worth bearing in mind that search engines like text. This means that it might be useful to also include text explanations and blog articles as well. Make sure that information is relevant and useful though. Although including keywords can be very useful, it is much better if the text seems natural. Search engines will look out for this these days and if they feel something is just keyword heavy, they will penalise the site. Therefore, have a lot of content written in a natural way and it should impress.

Is it Fast to Load?

It is really important to find out how fast the site will be to load. This is because if it takes too long, you will find that people will get bored and will just go elsewhere. If your site is picture or video-heavy, this could have a significant impact on the speed that it takes to load. There will also be differences between hosting platforms and if you use a web builder then it can be worth comparing their speeds. You may find that they will load even slower on mobile devices and lots of people browse the web on them these days so it important to make sure that they are not too slow.

Does it Work on Mobile Devices?

There will be some sites that do not even work that well on a mobile device. This will not be very good for anyone that is hoping to have a customer base that uses mobile devices as well as desktop computers. It is therefore well worth making sure that your website is optimised for mobile devices. For some web builders, you may have to change different features to work either on a desktop or mobile device. However, many will automatically adapt to the device they are being viewed on, which can be a lot easier.

Cost

Of course, the cost will always be an important factor. It can be easy to actually forget about all of the things that you need to pay for though and so it can be a good idea to give it careful thought. You will need to pay for your domain name and your hosting. You may need to pay extra for ecommerce and if you do have a store you may need to pay transaction fees. If you use a web builder the hosting will be included and you may have a free domain for a year, you may or may not have to pay additional transaction fees for online stores.