Web design and development, particularly for large brands, can be a long, iterative process spanning many weeks and months.
Once the project begins, it becomes an intense period of design, development, feedback and reiteration and as you get into the details of the project, it’s important not to loose sight of the most important aspects of the web development process:
At each phase of the project, each mode of design or development needs to tie back to these questions—in particular, questions focused on conversion. Of some concern is the fact that 91% of businesses don’t take conversion into consideration when designing their new website, which makes it difficult to tie the goal of your website back to your business objectives.
Beyond the strategic nature of the web design or development project, it’s important to have a plan for the logistical elements of the website.
Below is a guide on the key five questions you should know before beginning the project. While you may not know all of the answers internally, you can utilise web development consultants to help with your web strategy and planning.
For UK brands, working with a London-based web strategy consultant can bring a number of benefits to the cost-effectiveness, strategy, marketing and maintenance of your future website. When you approach a consultancy, it’s because you need help in defining what the end-goal is, how it relates to your business objectives and how your website can support that. It’s more than simply having a web presence, for many large brands and B2B organisations, your website can be a conduit for doing business. A web strategy consultant will help you define where your website fits into your broader business and revenue goals.
The design of your website needs to be reflective of your brand, your strategic goals, and the actions you want your users to take. If you’re a restaurant or a booking agent, your web design will need to centre around a booking system. If you’re a retailer or online service provider, you will need to centre your design around a payment gateway. If your company offers environmentally-focused services or products, you’ll want to maintain a consistent colour palette and branding in line with those themes. A lot of this comes from the strategic phase of the project, and having a web development consultancy that can manage a project from strategy to design and beyond is important.
It wasn’t so long ago that the market for scalable, user-friendly content management systems (CMS) was limited to a small number of platforms. Today, that number has grown exponentially. In their 2017 Best Content Management System rankings, the editorial team at Business.com provided a comprehensive list of the top website CMS for brands and named WordPress as the best overall CMS. Further analysis on the top CMS for brands were featured in Marketing Tech News.
While the team at Moove have worked on almost all open-source CMS, we agree that WordPress offers the best value for large brands and offer our services as WordPress development experts, developing websites for some of the UK’s largest brands. You can read more here on why we think WordPress is the best CMS for your website.
To extract the full value of your website, it must not exist outside of your day-to-day business platforms. On the contrary, integrating website behaviour into wider business platforms is an underutilised area of optimisation and business growth.
WordPress allows for a high level of customisation when it comes to business platform integration, and Moove are experienced with WordPress integrations and custom plugin development. Whether it’s integrating WordPress with Salesforce CRM, payment gateways or calendar and booking management systems, enabling these integrations means the business generated by your website is easily included in wider business and marketing reporting.
You will need to plan out how your day-to-day business platforms will be integrated into your website. If you are conducting a redesign of an existing website, you also need to ensure the redesign project does not negatively impact your ongoing SEO or PPC efforts.
After all of the strategic and design discussions, the coding and implementation and reviews—your website is finally live and delighting your customers and delivering leads or revenue to your business.
It would be awful to get to this point without considering how the website will be maintained. What happens if a server goes down? If you are capturing payment or personally identifying information and sending the data in an encrypted way, when does the SSL certificate need to be renewed? How will new campaign pages be deployed and managed?
Getting support with your WordPress site isn’t just about having someone to manage the backend, but is also a proactive step to ensure your web development meets specific campaign dates and goals.
Developing responses to these questions will go a long to ensure your web development project is aligned to your fundamental business and marketing objectives.
Are you looking for a London-based WordPress web development agency? Please get in touch to discuss how we can Moove your web development project forward. Contact us today.
