Ellie
When you immerse yourself in the actual website creation, you’ll realize there are a lot of stages: planning, building, and maintenance. As a business owner, you must oversee each process, so you are assured your website is getting only the best and quality services.
Let us help you go through this process so in case you’ll be hands-on with your website development, you know what you’ll go through. And even if you are delegating the task to experts, having this knowledge gives you an idea of what your partner team will do to launch and keep your site beautiful and functional. Let’s find out!
There are three stages in building a website: research and planning, the actual design and development, and the maintenance stages. Although we are most familiar with design and development, the two other steps are also important. Let us check what you and your team should do at each stage.
The research stage involves in-depth communication between you and your hired website design and development team to introduce your brand, mission, and vision to them. When your team understands your brand, they can reflect it on your site.
Then, audience and competitor research also occur. You and your team go into a deep dive into the persona and demographics of your target audience. You check their age, gender, jobs, and internet use patterns. Meanwhile, you cannot forget to look at how your competitors have built their sites. By looking at them, you’ll get an idea of what you can do or how else you can make your site better to make it stand out.
Search engine optimization (SEO) research also happens in this stage to ensure your site will include keywords that help website’s ranking and appear on the search engine results pages.
After research, you already have data you can work on. The data ensures that you are not taking steps blindly but are always guided by the insights you get from numbers and facts. Your brand serves as the main guide to the design that will follow.
You will also consider the details you got from audience and competitor research. Some of the questions you and your team need to answer in this stage are:
During the research, you’ll have tons of keywords. You and your team need to strategize and determine which keywords to include on the site.
These questions and details will help you determine your action plans.
Once you have laid out your plans, the work begins. In this stage, you take a supervising role as your web designer and web developer get the job done and show their expertise. The website builder ensures the layout, images, navigation, theme, site loadings speed, and access are all excellent. They should mirror your brand and create a blissful journey for site visitors.
The visits should be worth it and fulfill their role of creating brand awareness, sales, customer retention, and loyalty. With the help of a content team, your site will also include optimized texts and copies. After everything’s done—your website will be ready for launch! And your website maintenance plan begins.
Seeing the fruit of your and your team’s ideas and hard work brings joy. Your website is finally launched and can finally fulfill its role of introducing your brand and products to the world.
But the work does not end here. You and the website maintenance and support services are still bound for website upkeep. And what should website maintenance include? Here are the ways your partner experts can help you after the website launch, during routine maintenance.
The website you built today is relevant to your audience and competitors, but everything on the internet is fast-changing. Good thing you don’t have to worry about achieving an updated web design when partnered with a web design and development company.
If there are tweaks you need to make to ensure your website remains relevant, they can do it for you. The layout, theme, and images posted can be replaced or leveled up. And if there are any updates on website design elements, your website development and design team will surely know about it. The great thing about the partnership is you have a very well-updated team with the latest on the field. They get constant training, and their skills and tools are always updated.
Your website will grow each day as you add more content to boost your ranking on search engine results and update your listing with new products or your latest discounts and offers. These changes may slow down the site loading speed.
When you see an alarming trend in visitor site abandonment, loading speed might be the culprit. Know that it is the responsibility of your partner website maintenance agency to do a site check and ensure your impeccable site loading speed is maintained. Many include this service in their website maintenance fees.
You’ve already planned and executed smooth navigation, but as you continue adding products and content, your site menus and categories will also grow. Make sure to keep the mother-daughter categories organized to avoid confusion from website visitors.
It would be best to maintain a search button to make it easier for clients to search for the products they are looking for. Always optimize the results page from a search term to lead customers to the page or product they want to purchase. The smoother the customer journey, the faster you can make sales.
Before you even launch your website, the web development team will test how it looks on a computer and using a mobile phone. Normally, the looks will have technical issues affecting the website’s functionality during the first tries, but what matters is that the support from the experts does not end after the launch.
Small business owners like you should do regular accessibility checks. If you notice any issues with accessibility or difference in looks in different mediums, contact your maintenance service provider so that they can assist you.
Another area of your website that should always be maintained and kept fresh is keywords. Make regular search engine optimization checks to see how your SEO strategies are working and your website’s overall performance. Stick to the strategies that give you the ranking you aim for and make amends for the keywords that are lagging.
As you do so, check out competitor keywords and make fresh keyword research to ensure your website SEO is up to date. Optimize frontend and backend keywords after.
Many eCommerce businesses’ websites have a better chance of ranking when product listings are always updated. Hence, it has been a practice of many business owners to make tweaks or upload new products and offers regularly. You can implement this in your own site too.
Meanwhile, keep your blog entries relevant and timely. Have the courage and drive to think out of the box and create unique content, so your site stands out. Feel free to go for fun quizzes, launch surveys, and try out more interactive content types. These two are easier to fulfill when teamed with an agent with account managers and content creators. Not all agencies offer a content management system, so it is best to check the monthly website maintenance checklist if this maintenance service is included.
There are a lot of threats your website faces without the proper protection, like attacks that will disable your site, Malware that targets confidential data in your site, being blocklisted, and original content replaced by malicious ones.
Avoid these situations by acquiring an SSL/TLS certificate, fortifying your site with a web application firewall, and consistently updating your content management systems. Your team should check these defenses regularly to ensure your security is always solid. With the assurance, the professional maintenance services cost you invest is surely worth it.
Building and maintaining a website can be difficult, but with the help of website hosting and maintenance services, it can be easier. Building a website goes through many stages: research, planning, website design and development, and then finally, small business website maintenance.
Updating visual design, ensuring impeccable site speed, going for smooth navigation, assuring accessibility, updating SEO keywords, keeping content fresh, and establishing impenetrable security are all ways to maintain a website. If you are looking for an agency you can partner with, Mesmeric could be just what you are looking for. We provide professional website maintenance services to help small business websites remain updated and running smoothly. We explain our website maintenance package offers in detail, so contact us now! Let’s bring your dream business website to life!
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