simple 6 Step Guide to a Successful Website

What follows is six steps for creating and running a successful website. There are billions of websites out there, created for different purposes. The following guide is a method for making yours stand out from the crowd. Each website is different however, so these are not hard and fast rules. What you should hopefully be able to do with the list however is relate each step to your website is some way.

1. Plan
With all projects it is a good idea to plan what you’re going to do. Outline the website’s goals - what do you want to achieve with your site. It might be sales, traffic, member registrations or many other things. Then think about how you’re going to achieve these goals, what pages and features your website needs. Sometimes I like to rank this list against how important each one for meeting the goals. You don’t need to spend too long planning, but having a list of features ranked by importance, and an outline of all the pages on your site, can be very handy when it comes to thinking about how to lay out your pages and navigation.

2. Good, User Friendly Design
Having a good looking site is an important factor to me. Something that looks good and is sensible for the target audience, and is considered with user friendliness in mind. I’m not necessarily talking about having lots of fancy graphics - that might not be appropriate. A good start is to look at similar websites to yours (or websites in your niche) and see if there are any similar attributes in the design (colours, layout, images and type of images etc). If there are some similarities there may be a reason for it. A visitor to a website can quickly determine whether a site looks good to them or not, and a website can fall down if it gives the wrong impression.

3. Clean, SEO Friendly Code
When coding your pages, keeping the code clean will help both in loading times and maintenance down the line. Doing some basic SEO will also save headaches later on. Things such as considering what your header tags are on each page, adding titles to links, adding alt tags to images and including keywords in URLs and file names. SEO is a whole beast of its own so I won’t go into lots of detail here.

4. Quality, Relevant Content
Depending on what your site’s purpose is this step will change accordingly, or might not even be relevant. The content of your website is just as important (or even more important in some cases) than the look and feel. People are coming to your website for a reason, and you want to offer them what they’re looking for. Whether it be articles, news, reviews, products or anything else - if it’s not what they’re looking for they will leave. You want to offer the best possible content you can.

5. Regularly Update
Tied in with the last step, you want to keep updating your site regularly. If its articles, publish them regularly. Release new products regularly. Review things regularly. Whatever your site is about, if you can, update it regularly. People like to see that the information they are reading is recent, and that websites they visit are still active. This will make people come back to your site, and more likely to tell others about it. The best way to keep your site updated is to use a content management system.

6. Review
At the end of the process you should have a great looking website that’s churning out quality content regularly. It’s a good idea to review how things are going after a while - is your site achieving the goals you set in step 1? Do you have any new goals now the site is running? From this you can return to step one and plan for the next stage - either adding new features or refining what you already have.

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