A successful website is built on a few fundamental elements. Make sure to never to lose sight of the following 'rules':
- Objective: decide what it is you wish to achieve with your website. Do you want to inform, sell, entertain, assist etc.?
- Target: make sure to have a clear picture of who you want to reach: clients, prospects, members, friends etc. What are the characteristics of your audience? Try to put yourself in their place: are they familiar with your product or service? What do they want to find on your website? What do they want to know about you? Will they understand the text and terminology you use? Will they understand your images?
- Style: what impression do you want to leave? Also the style you use will communicate a message. Do you want it to be traditional, classic, modern, technological, medical? You are the experts of your product and target, together we will pick the right colours and elements.
- Structure: try to organise your content, for example by dividing it into groups. Some typical groups could be homepage (overview), products & services (detail), contacts (facts) etc. Structuring in advance will make it much easier to write your text and select your images and put them in the right place!
- Content: KISS: Keep It Short and Simple! Include all essential information; do not leave anything out, but do not put too much in. This goes for both the structure of the website as for the text and images. Nobody reads long texts and nobody cares about meaningless images.
- Homepage: your visitors will most likely enter through your homepage and it is statistically proven that within 10 seconds they will decide whether to leave or to read more! So you have a one-shot chance: your homepage should load quickly, look inviting and the entrance text should be short but clear. We will help you to nail down the right message!
Your domain name is the 'address' of your website, and most commonly will look like this
www.yourwebsite.com
A domain name is unique and universal; it can be reached from any computer and from all over the world. Therefore it is possible that the domain name you wish to choose has already been taken by another website owner. No panic though! Usually a small adjustment is all it takes, i.e.:
www.yourwebsite.net
www.yourwebsite.co.uk
www.your-website.com
www.yoursite.net
The registration of your domain name is included in our packages. If the domain name you want has already been taken, we will suggest some good alternatives.
Choose a short and easy-to-remember domain name, even better if it says something about your business or activity. If you expect to have international visitors on your website, make sure to choose a name that can easily be read and written by foreigners.
To compose your domain name you can use all characters from the alphabet, numbers from 0 to 9 and hyphens if used within the text. Not permitted are uppercase and symbols (&, ?, +, etc.).
We advise to use between 5 and 20 characters (without counting 'www.' and the extension (.com))
How to decide which extension to use
You probably know that there are various extensions. Some of these indicate the country of origin of the website (i.e. .it for Italy, .de for Germany), while others are more generic and indicate for example a category (.com for commercial activities and .org for organisations)
Make sure to remember where your public is: if you are a local UK company, maybe choosing .co.uk is the best option, while if you also want to reach visitors abroad .com would be the best pick.
For some domain names, local government rules require some extra paperwork. We will do this together with you.
Most domain names are accepted and online immediately (.com) while some require a couple of days (.it)
SEO - Search Engine Optimisation
The majority of your visitors will probably use a search engine such as Google to find your website or service. One of the ways these search engines find your page is through the scanning of keywords that are embedded in the content. That is why it is a good idea, while writing your texts, to include as many specific words as possible related to your business or service.
We will advise you where we can, to reach the best results and we will also register your website on the main Search Engines. All included in our packages!