There are many aspects to planning your corporate website and obviously varies from industry to industry. However, the marketing basics are similar whether you have a business-to-business target audience or are consumer/retail focused; and for some companies, they are both.

Fortunately, a seasoned design firm can relieve much of the process fundamentals for you and actually guide you from the project start to the launch of the site with support thereafter. Having over 10 years of online marketing experience, WSD Resource will help minimize your internal requirements and resources.

We have listed several considerations you may want to include in your design ‘team’ discussions. Each line item could be expanded on and not all will be applicable to your project, but having them on your ‘check off’ list will provide an advantage in understanding the design scope, timeline and setting expectations.

Maintaining Your ‘Offline’ Brand

If you have already created marketing materials utilized in your traditional sales efforts such as brochures, logos, colors and images, unless you are looking to change your ‘brand’, we recommend you carry this ‘look and feel’ over to your new online presentation.

Also, if you have one, include your ad agency in this process. They have an understanding of your position in the marketplace and should be part of the design reviews as well.

Your Company Resources

Determining the internal lead for the project is important. This person will be the point contact for all communication regarding content, design mock-up reviews, images, site navigation functionality and IT questions. In some engagements, this is managed by several individuals while with other projects, this might be the responsibility of one person.

Graphic Design Review

To assist our graphic designers with the color scheme and page layout, it is helpful if you have spent some time reviewing your competitor’s websites. Listing the pro’s and con’s of their sites. Be ready to provide several websites that represent the graphical ‘look and feel’ your team finds appealing.

Website Functionality

We approach most of our design projects in developing a website that ‘drives’ the end user to take action. We view your website as a sales tool that although is providing information about your products and services, ultimately we want the visitor to bookmark the site, send you and email, download a white paper, opt-in to your monthly newsletter or call you directly.

So consider the functionality of your new site and how best to make your online presentation part of your sales team.

Site Navigation

Understanding the overall page structure of your website is key to creating a user friendly site that navigates smoothly and intuitively. Mapping out all the pages and how they interlink to each other will help you better manage the visitors experience and your content delivery.

Page Content

The most challenging part of any website design project (for you) is creating the content for each page of the site. Usually, you are able to use much of the content from your current site but you will probably be adding more pages and functionality requiring new copy and images.

Writing engaging content takes patience, time and review to deliver a message that retains your visitor’s interest and attention. Regarding images, we have accounts with both www.istock.com and www.stockxpert.com for high resolution images to enhance your new site’s presentation.

Search Engine Optimization

We incorporate SEO applications into all of our development projects, not all website firms have this competency. We will guide you through the process of what is needed for each page to be best positioned in being recognized and indexed by the search engine crawlers.

Keyword density, alt tags, title tag, meta descriptions, anchor links, image names and other optimization practices are our responsibility. Building your new website is really just three-quarters of the project. Launching a fully optimized website while resubmitting your domain to the SE’s and business directories, will significantly increase your online visibility and keyword rankings.

Content Editing

We develop all of our sites with traditional HTML code and according to W3C standards. This helps the search engines navigate your website for keyword specific content and programming but also allows you to edit the pages.

Meaning you can use HTML content editing tools, like Adobe’s Dreamweaver, to make copy changes without having a programmer do this for you. Using many of today’s HTML editors is as easy as using MS Word.

Obviously, we are glad to make any site changes you need as you add new content, products or services, but we prefer to enable you to maintain your site once it is launched.

Hosting

Once we are ready to move your site from our development servers, you have many options in selecting a hosting company. You can host the site on your own in-house servers, a local hosting company or a well known service provider like Go Daddy, Rackspace or Stormhosts.

Much of this consideration is based your site’s size, functionality and platform. Whether we developed your site in a LAMP or ASP architecture, we will recommend the best hosting solution for you. Additionally, we will migrate your site to the new host environment, including ecommerce requirements, payment gateways, even MySQL and SQL Server database installs.

Support

With all of our projects we provide 100% support. Meaning, for 30 days from the launch of your new site, we are still responsible for the functionality, performance and content changes missed during development.

That said, many of our Client’s contact us 6 months or longer after their site has been launched needing a image swap or some copy change and we are glad to accommodate just requesting recommend us as a referral when the opportunity exists.