What to remember when creating a website, whether you create it yourself or use a company?
Table of Contents
Platform
Most websites change more or less over time, so you need to find out if the platform allows changes to the site, both minor (changing opening hours) and major (adding an e-commerce feature to an existing blog, changing graphics a little or a lot, etc.). It is also important to know how such changes will range in price, so that you don’t get caught in the net of a cheap site, but then pay for a small modification. What we would definitely not recommend are small platforms with a small number of companies that build sites on them, if anything happens you will be left with an unusable site that no one will be able to maintain and you will have no choice but to look for a new supplier and repeatedly pay for a new site.
We build websites on WordPress (60.4% market share), it is the most widely used CMS in the world, it is OpenSource has a huge fan base from so called “clickers” to professional coders and programmers. WordPress is very flexible thanks to the possibility of plugins. And what a plugin can’t do we will 🙂 As long as you or your contractor stick to the basic rules of WordPress web development, it’s not that big of a deal to have someone else take over the site management if needed.
The choice of platform, although it may seem secondary or less important to you, don’t take it lightly. It is a very important thing. Just like complex graphics or text.
Other options that are under Open Source license are Joomla (5.2%), Prestashop (e-shops) (5.2%), Drupal (3.4%), Shopify (2.7%), WIX (1.9%).
UX and UI
You have about 3 seconds to attract a customer and the appearance of the site is the first thing the visitor sees, the appearance consists of two main directions, namely UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface). UX is all about the structure and layout of the page and on all devices = responsiveness, it’s all about getting the visitor to navigate the site quickly and find what they most likely came for. UI is about the pleasantness of the site environment, appropriate colors, nice photos, sufficient contrast and response to user action. So, for example, when a user adds a product to the cart it should be clear to him that the button really performed the expected function.
WPDisto has its own web designer who solves these problems. So there is no need to come up with a ready-made design, you can consult everything with us. If you want to start on your own, it’s not a bad idea to familiarize yourself with terms like “use case diagram, wireframe or wire model, color palette, visual hierarchy and figma program”.
As a company we are also involved in colour psychology. We feel that whoever understands the perception of colour in different target groups wins these days. Remember that the website may not be as much to your liking as it is to your target audience.
We also favour testing and it has happened more than once that we have uploaded a graphic, tested it and then changed or modified it after visible results. The advantage of our solution is that the graphics can be changed very easily and at a reasonable price.
Supplier and his services
The supplier itself is very important. It’s not just about the price for which you get the website put together, but also about how the result will look and whether he is willing to make changes. The contractor should have a portfolio displayed on the site (or send it on request) and available reviews outside of their own site. The web presence of the chosen contractor is also important, check out the website and read the blog if appropriate. Before signing a contract, it is advisable to find out what your options are if the cooperation ends, especially whether all the data is yours and can be downloaded at any time if it is stored on the supplier’s server, for example. Simply remain the owner of your data!
Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is an important step in web development. It helps us understand the market we are in and find out how our competitors work and what they offer to their customers. Identify your competitors, find out their strengths and weaknesses, analyse their websites, monitor their online activities and stay alert, because competitor analysis is a regular process that can help you adapt your strategies further.
Don’t forget that you don’t have competition only in the Czech Republic. Get inspired and look for the same companies abroad. Trust those who invest a lot of money in marketing.
Analysis of foreign competition
The moment you find out that you will be expanding abroad, we recommend not only to research the competition in that country, but also to find out what the customs are in that country. For example, just because you find one website beautifully red in the Czech Republic doesn’t mean that the same use of red and the same use of colour will work in another country.
Learning the culture of each country is not always easy.
Also, when expanding abroad, don’t forget about the technical side of the website. Will the site be multilang or will you make a different brand with different graphics in each country. There are a lot of possibilities. But the bottom line is that you must always analyze the environment and not only the competition, but especially the mindset of the people.
The culture of each country can be very different.
Hosting
Hosting is an important element in the creation of a website, as it allows you to put your website on the internet and thus make it accessible to visitors. Hosting provides a server where the site’s files are stored and ensures that the site is accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
One of the important aspects of hosting is speed and reliability. The loading speed of a website is crucial to the user experience and reliability means that the website will be available to visitors without any downtime. According to your requirements, you then need to pay attention to the size of the database, usable disk space for the website itself, PHP memory_limit, aliases, subdomains and much more. For smaller projects, there is usually no need to deal with these things and it is not a problem to buy a better package or change the hosting in case of insufficient parameters.
Technical support is also very important. If you have problems with your website, it is important to have quality technical support to help you solve problems as quickly as possible. You can host your WPDistro website on our server, this way you will get technical support not only for the hosting but also for the website together.
For clients targeting the foreign market, we place some sites behind Cloudflare’s security service. But we don’t do this for everyone. Any more security obviously reduces the convenience of e.g. site editing and quick interventions.
Copywriting
Copywriting is an important part of web development, the text on a website is a key element for communicating with visitors and gaining their trust, but also for SEO. Copywriting involves writing texts for the website itself, the texts are clear, understandable and persuasive to people and also need to contain appropriate keywords, meta descriptions and headlines that will make your website searchable in search engines.
For us, however, copywriting is especially important to make it catch the eye at first. Simple and concise texts that catch the eye. And should that simplicity go hand in hand with functionality, then on the other hand quality and well-ranked articles that have a telling value for the reader are good for SEO.
However, don’t think that text alone will get you on the first page of Google. SEO itself is a discipline that must be given time.
Copywriting also involves writing copy for ad campaigns, emails or social media that must be engaging to motivate visitors to take action. It’s not a bad idea to hire a professional copywriter for some of the copy.
Copywriting is one part of the big bubble called marketing, which your business can’t do without. Which doesn’t mean you can’t do it yourself. Some owners know best how to figure out what to put on the site and how.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is a large group of topics, some of which you can influence on your own, while others will probably require the help of a professional.
- site map – detail below
- image optimization or lazyload
- site crawling – internal linking and backlinks help robots find the crawled site
- HTTPS – a protocol that allows secure communication over a computer network
- duplication of content
- site speed
- responsiveness of the site – display on mobile devices
- enabling/disabling indexing of specific URLs
- redirects – a long redirect string will not only deter a robot, but also a visitor
- status codes – you probably know the 404 code, there are many more and they have different meanings for crawlers
- URL format – see below
Sitemap
A sitemap is a structured list of all the pages on your website. It should be available at a public URL. The sitemap is generated in XML format, but it can also be processed in such a way that it is clear for site visitors.
It is an important element in web development because it allows visitors to easily find the information they are looking for and, most importantly, it allows search engines to more easily index the pages of your website, which is why we can include sitemaps in technical SEO.
URLs and their format
URLs and their shape are important in web design because they affect how easy it is for visitors to get to your site and how well your site displays in search engines. URLs should be short, simple and easy to understand so that they are easy to remember and write down. URLs like site.cz/?p=15268 are not suitable for a robot or a visitor, so use them only in the backend!
One important aspect of URLs is the keywords of the content they lead to. These should be included to increase the chances of your site appearing in search engines when those words are searched for. URLs should be easy for visitors to read and provide them with information about what is on that page.
The URL system allows a slash to create a hierarchy of pages, which also helps search engines to understand the structure of the site more easily and thus better index individual pages.
text SEO
One of the most important aspects of SEO texts is the use of keywords. These words should be used in titles, meta descriptions, headings and text to increase the chances of your site appearing in search engines when these words are searched for.
Another important aspect of SEO text is the quality of the text from a human perspective. The text should be engaging, easy to understand and contain useful information for visitors. The text should also be natural and not overly optimized for search engines, as this can negatively affect the quality of the text for visitors. Prioritize clarity over search engine optimization.