30 things to consider before developing website [updated]
A website involves a ton of work. Even a world-famous website like Amazon needed things to consider even before developing it. The most common but critical question is, where should you start?
Truthfully, developing a website is a complex and time-consuming process. But it is not a headache if you have a proper guideline.
Due to the improvement of modern technologies, developing a website became much easier. Still, it is not a day’s work. There are more things to consider than you already know.
Whew! We are just getting started. Here are 30 precise things you need to consider before you step into developing a website.
Sit tight and grab your coffee as this is going to take a while but you will benefit a lot.
30 things to consider before developing website
- 1. Purpose
- 2. Audience
- 3. Domain & Hosting
- 4. Managed Hosting
- 5. Site Builder
- 6. Budget
- 7. Study
- 8. CMS
- 9. Design
- 10. Profit Strategy
- 11. Technology
- 12. Branding
- 13. Color Scheme
- 14. Sitemap
- 15. Content
- 16. Typography
- 17. Mobile Responsive
- 18. Features
- 19. Cross-browser support
- 20. CTA
- 21. Structure & Navigation
- 22. SEO
- 23. Speed
- 24. Clean Code
- 25. Security
- 26. Social Media
- 27. Generate Leads
- 28. Keep Copyright content
- 29. Bug testing
- 30. Analytics & Maintenance
- Conclusion
1. Purpose
A website must serve a solid purpose. The first thing you should do is to set your mind at what should be the purpose of your website.
Of course, some websites have multiple targets. But the truth is, those websites can’t achieve any good ending. So, you need to focus on one thing.
To simplify your options, you can categorize your choices by:
- eCommerce perspective: Buy/sell purpose, product promotion, revenue/profit management.
- Lead generation: Entertain crowd to generate potential leads.
- Portfolio: Build credentials to boost your own profile.
2. Audience
To climb the ladder of success, you must reach your targeted audience quickly and efficiently. The very best website doesn’t need to target any specific group of people. But a new website needs to rise by solely focusing on a specific audience.
You need to identify what makes your audience to reach you. Ask yourself:
- Is there anything causing trouble or uneasiness you can identify in the market?
- Are people looking for a solution?
- Can you provide unique solutions?
Based on the answers to these three questions, you can analyze who will be your target audience.
3. Domain & Hosting
One of the key things to consider before developing a website is to choose the right hosting and a good domain name.
Take a look at Google or Yahoo. These domain names are small and easy to memorize. These names don’t have must characters in them yet represents the whole company effectively.
This is an example of how you should pick your domain name that reflects the purpose of your website.
For the hosting, it solely depends on your website type, what it does, and how much it does. Simple and small site needs around 3$-15$/year for the hosting fee. The more a site grows, the more the cost increases.
Again, the hosting cost for a blog site and an eCommerce site is totally different in amount.
4. Managed Hosting
A self-hosted website needs a few people constantly working behind it. You need developers to properly manage and maintain your website.
Although, there are certain pros and cons here. With a self-managed system, you can expand your website as much as you want, customize it as you need, and access it with you being the admin.
But, you need to invest a lot behind the site structure, developers, and additional equipment. Again, the risk of site security totally falls upon you.
On the other hand, you can choose a managed hosting by a secured provider and manage your website without any manpower. Then again, you can only expand your site to a certain extent.
Depending on the type of your website, both options may be helpful. In the end, the type of your website will decide this fact.
5. Site Builder
Building your website needs a good amount of effort behind it. But considering budget and manpower, you can approach it in two ways:
- Expert developers and designers
- Online Website builder
For the first option, all things are in your hand and you get the most control. You will need to move your asset and manpower to forge the structure of your website.
If you lack a proper workforce or you want a site to test the waters, you can use an online website builder. Although it will limit the growth of your website in the future, it is a good choice for beginners.
Platforms like Wix, Shopify, Strikingly, Squarespace, offer site builder features at a minimum cost.
6. Budget
Budget is one of the most important things to consider before developing a website. With a proper budget utilization, you can build great websites with minimal cost.
First of all, you need to categorize the cost of your website. For example:
- Fixed Cost
- Domain & Hosting
- Strategical cost
- Maintenance
- Marketing
- Variable Cost
- Theme
- Plugin
- Design
- Features & Functions
Second, you need to divide your budget into two portions, one for keeping the site alive and the other for extra features.
The fixed cost isn’t much if you use shared/self-maintenance and Self-marketing. The variable cost totally depends on your choice.
For example, you can buy Element Pack Pro plugin to design and add features to your website. It has all the necessary tools for designing both eCommerce and blog websites. Have a look!
7. Study
The proper way to start anything is to study. Developing a website properly involves a long chain of work. Before you take each step, you need to educate yourself properly. As people say, Knowledge is power.
Before you do any technical work, you need to study properly. For example:
- Target
- Competitor
- Tools
- Unique niches
- Cost vs demand statistics
Following these simple ideas, you can determine if your chosen niche is good enough for market competition. Studying your competitors will always give you extra insight into dos and don’ts.
8. CMS
CMS aka Content Management System is one of the main elements of a website. It empowers the structure of the website, makes it easy for you to manage it, and boosts user experience. Without it, websites don’t function well.
As for a CMS, you can choose from:
- WordPress
- Joomla
- Magento
- Drupal
- WooCommerce
- Wix
- Shopify
There are more than 20 popular CMS you can choose from. However, around 1/3rd of users worldwide use WordPress CMS.
Why? Here’s why.
9. Design
One of the most crucial things to consider before developing a website is design. With a clean, appealing website design, your website will rank high in google and other search engines.
People invest a lot into web-design because it matters most to attract the audience.
Your website needs to be built cleanly, with a minimal amount of textures, lots of white areas, and highlights. Most of the visitors avoid an unnecessary amount of details on the screen.
- Use proper spacing and maintain a decent content gap
- Use quality graphics including images, banners, and backgrounds. Keep using content related visuals and avoid visual stuffing
- Highlight important things with brighter color/contrast
A good web design will increase your branding value tremendously. So, you need to hire experts to do proper site design.
Learn more about WordPress
10. Profit Strategy
If you are planning to earn profits through your website, you have to come up with a monetization strategy. Your website will fall under one of this three category:
- Subscription type
- People subscribe to your website and gain access to the content until the subscription expires
- Membership type
- People buy membership token and get the service or item
- Item selling type
- Directly sell actual/digital items despite being the owner or not.
11. Technology
One of the major things to consider before developing a website is technology.
Depending on the structure of your website, you need to know about the software and hardware behind it. You need to have the basic knowledge behind the code structure, and how it works.
Websites much often face errors. You can not fully depend on a third party for all the maintenance of your website. In case of emergencies, you have to fix your own stuff.
Again, you need to properly budget the necessary equipment for your website. It doesn’t need to be fancy but enough to work things out.
12. Branding
A Brand bears the identity of a company to the audience. People don’t always judge products to buy, they follow certain brands and buy without thinking.
It is proven that a successful brand creates a long term positive attraction for the company. So, you need to think big.
To ensure the future value of your website, you need to make it a brand. From colors to graphics, pictures, texts, logos, features- everything must follow a certain pattern. This will promote your site as a brand in the future.
13. Color Scheme
Color is one of the vital and super-essential things to consider before developing a website.
As color reflects the characteristics of any particular thing, it creates brand identity. It directly interacts with the user’s psychology.
That is why it is super important to use a color scheme on your website properly.
You can take examples of popular websites and see how they properly added colors on their pages. Here are some tips you could use:
- Pick colors that represent your brand
- Not too light, not too dark, pick a main color for branding
- Keep high contrast on focus areas and low on blank spaces
- Use a unique pattern that covers most of the site
Other than that, you can follow one of Neil Patel’s blog about the color scheme, 12 Essential Tips to Picking a Website Color Scheme.
14. Sitemap
As a part of the website development, you have to properly plan out a sitemap for your website.
You must choose pages you want to include in your website even before constructing them. Keep in mind that, pages related to the service you are offering boost user experience. Therefore, you can make a web sketch of all pages that will be residing on your website.
You can do these as well:
- Take a pen and paper and write down the page contents for each page
- Create a flow chart and layout your whole plan
- Illustrate demo pages to get the right color scheme
15. Content
Once you have selected a niche for your website, it is time to gather information.
A good website should have a stable blog/content part. While you are providing intel to your visitors/customers, blogs play a good role in ranking your website.
There are times when people look for quality content instead of business. This is a chance to promote your brand through texts.
Make sure:
- Your website has good product details
- Tutorial and informative blogs
- SEO friendly blog strategy maintained
16. Typography
Typography is another important thing to consider before developing a website. There is a common practice among professional web developers. And that is, “Balance between two fonts throughout the whole site.”
Typography is something that will affect the readers. Bad combinations often fall into a bad user experience. So, what you need to do is:
- Use a balanced portion of serif and sans-serif font in the headings
- Use sans-serif for the details
- Add bold text for highlights
- Don’t put more than 84 characters in each line
Following these tips will greatly increase your site’s user experience. Of course, not all sites are equally made. So, you can improvise by experimenting with it.
17. Mobile Responsive
The fun fact is, around 60% of the global internet users access the internet with mobile devices. That makes a mobile responsive website gain more traffic than a website that doesn’t support a mobile interface.
That being said, you need to develop your website considering mobile responsive behavior. Don’t even try to develop a website with no mobile device support.
18. Features
As you are planning to develop a website to gain traffic, you need to go all out about the features of your website. You need to consider a few things:
- Responsive and easy to navigate
- Refreshes feed every day
- Focus on your main content from the beginning
- Has decent loading speed
- Has an optimized CMS
- Flow charts and guidelines
- Social media integrated
19. Cross-browser support
One of the key things to consider before developing a website is cross-browser support.
The majority of internet users tend to use 2-3 different browsers to navigate the internet. If your website ranks A+ in chrome but falls to C in Firefox then you are probably in the red zone.
Building a cross-browser supported website will increase user experience and has a good amount of contribution to increasing traffic. Once a user gets to access it through multiple browsers, that particular user gets attached to the site 90% of the time.
So, it is a good practice to secure more audience.
20. CTA
A website looks and acts like a proper website once it has a proper call to action. It is a statement that motivates the crowd to get attached to your website.
It is a good practice to keep at least one CTA on every page of your website. For example, you may add a CTA below your blog post saying, “Don’t miss the next article”, or “10 tips of success”. Thus, it will motivate the visitors to sign up.
Again, when placing a CTA on your site, you need to cite clear instructions with it so people won’t get confused about why they need to sign up.
Learn to make outstanding CTA now!
21. Structure & Navigation
Statistics show that the majority of people stick to websites that offer an easy navigation system.
Your goal is to lead people through your site step by step, explaining things bit by bit. To do that, you need to maintain a ladder structure on your website. Arrange content in a way that each portion of the page leads the user slowly towards the final decision.
You can try a few things:
- Keep general topics on your homepage and try to cover most of the question-answer regarding your purpose
- Put your brand slogan on the header part and slowly drag people into conversations
- Showcase primary products from the beginning and divide them into sections. Keep minimum but necessary details
- Use labels to help people identify the section and its content
- Don’t repeat sentences, it’s a bad practice
- Use a standard navigation system throughout the whole website
22. SEO
One of the most important things to consider before developing a website is SEO. It is a common trait of a successful website that it’s properly SEO optimized.
SEO directly affects your website’s rank. Search engines crawl through websites and index them. If they find a website difficult to crawl or have no clear intention of its content, it places the site in lower ranks.
So, to climb high on the internet site rankings, you need to optimize your website properly for search engines. You can do a few things:
- Create a neat and clean site structure
- Use quality content for blogs
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- Keep sentences short and on topic
- Use more text links instead of buttons
23. Speed
Statistics show that a good website loads within 2-3 seconds once opened. Typically, about 40% of the visitors tend to bounce back from a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
That’s why proper site speed needs to be maintained if you want to keep people engaged. Here are things you can plan do to increase site speed:
- Choose a theme with the least amount of features
- Use a minimum amount of plugins for features and services
- Choose a better CDN
- Select a good caching plugin
- Use file compression methods for images and videos
24. Clean Code
Clean code is what you need to consider before developing a website. Any website having fresh code in the back-end tends to show improved performance than websites that don’t have it.
A website optimized with code tends to rank high. Because the search engine deploys spider bots to crawl your site, neat and accurate code let them index the site faster.
As you can see, spending a few bucks to improve site code structure will boost several aspects of your website.
25. Security
As a part of website development, a website needs to have a standard of site security.
Nowadays, we are getting a lot of spam attacks on websites globally. Each day, the total number of websites is increasing rapidly. So, a lot of potential sites are in danger of getting hacked.
That’s why you must invest a part of your site’s budget into security. You can secure your site in two ways:
- Internal Site security
- Strong back-end firewall
- Security plugins
- External security
- Cybersecurity software
- VPN
- Hardware isolation
26. Social Media
Social media is one of the key things you need to consider before developing a website. In this digital era, the most accessible platform is the social media platform.
That’s why you need to use this platform for your own benefit. Before you move on with your site development, create groups, channels, pages, and promote your brand. It will help you secure a good amount of offshore traffic.
You can try branding with:
- YouTube
27. Generate Leads
Now comes the best part, capture and generate leads.
Just creating a website is meaningless unless you already have a good amount of leads in hand. People hook up for quality content or free giveaways. So, there are always more than one ways to fetch people.
Just as you have guessed, you have to invest time and little assets to provide people what they want. Give promotional items, free courses, free audiobooks, or quality blogs by having people subscribe to your mail list.
This way, you can secure your primary audience, which will generate future leads for you.
28. Keep Copyright content
Most people won’t say this, but copyright is a very important thing you need to consider before developing a website.
If you are planning to expand your website in the right direction, then you need to use your own content from the start. Although there are free resources available online, they have security issues.
So, the best approach would be to develop content yourself (image, video), buy from a trusted site, or get certified free items. If you avoid using other’s content, your website’s rank won’t be affected.
29. Bug testing
Don’t just launch your website and hope people point out bugs and errors for you. It is not a good thing to do.
Test your website within your own server again and again to reach perfection. You can give access to your friends and family to review your page. By constantly putting the site on the test, you will be able to tell if it’s ready or not.
The last thing you want is to spend money on a site that is full of loopholes. So, patch your website properly.
30. Analytics & Maintenance
Once you have made it to this point and successfully launched your site, it’s time you see how people are behaving on it.
By this point, you just have to take care of the site maintenance and take a good look at analytics. You can use Google Analytics to analyze your page. You can find out:
- How many people visiting
- How much time spent by a visitor
- Which part is getting maximum clicks
- Bounce off rate
By analyzing these data, you can grow your business effectively.
Conclusion
We try our best to provide you with pieces of information that helps you overcome your boundary. If you find this blog useful, don’t hesitate to comment down below.
Thanks for staying up. Hope you learned something today.
