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Preparing for your web design project

Preparing for your web design project

Preparing for your web design project

Apart from the direct development cost based on time spent building your website, application or app. The cost to develop your digital product will almost definitely be in correlation with how much time you have spent researching your product or service. One way to save on development cost, is to first research the presentation of your service or product on the internet. This process will take you through a discovery phase and help you decide on key features and functionalities your digital product will need for success. And if your product or service is something completely new. You can still discover how similar products or services classed in the same category are performing, by looking at the potential competition and their websites. Compare pay-per-click search results and organic search results. The top organic search results, which also appear top in the pay-per-click result sections are the ones to first research. Go through each website of interest and ask yourself questions based on:
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Content

  • What makes them stand out?
  • What is their style of communication?
  • Who is their market reach?
  • Would you buy the service from them?
  • What are the options for communication?
Writing engaging content that is copywrited can seem daunting, even if you know all there is to say about your industry. We can help you overcome this hurdle, or if you simply don't have the time.
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Usability

  • How does the site navigate?
  • Is it just as easy to navigate in responsive mode?
  • What elements change or are hidden in responsive mode?
  • How easy was it to navigate to get relevant content?
  • Through each step of your journey on the site, do you know where you are?
We build responsive websites that work on all devices and through rigorous testing take the time to ensure key information is always visible, or reformated in a way that works.
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Aesthetics

  • Does the site look good?
  • Is the site visually appealing?
  • What key elements are appealing to you?
  • What elements are perhaps unnecessary?
  • What would you change? Why?
We build visually appealing websites and yet choose to lean on the simplicity of things by encouraging minimal distraction from the content.
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Visibility

  • What is the social media impact of your competition?
  • How are they using social media in your industry?
  • Is there a strong focus to reach out using other mediums? Example email marketing.
What is your competition doing to make themselves visible internally from the website and externally using other communication mediums? Its always hard to tell which medium works or which combination of mediums work together looking from the outside. But its good practice to research and get ideas for experimentation from seemingly working concepts. We can simplify the process of finding out which pages convert by integrating A/B testing using Internal Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.
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Interactions

You have researched the competition and interacted with their websites.

  • How easy was it for you to navigate their site and interact with the content?
  • Was it easy to find what you were looking for?
  • Which of your competitors would you give your money? Why?
  • Which ones would you not give your money? Why?

Taking the time to go through these steps meticulously will help to give you solid ideas of what works and what you think you can change or add to make things work for you. Often any competition performing well in search results and generating leads have had pitfalls they have learned from in the past and its better to learn from other peoples mistakes than to make the same yourself.