5 Things to Think about Before Launching a Website
In e-business, just like in many other spheres, the success of an enterprise is determined at the stage of planning: no matter how hard you work later on, if you’ve made some blunders in the very beginning all your efforts may go down the drain.
Here are 5 things you should take into consideration before you launch your website. They don’t guarantee good results, but make them much more likely.
1. Domain name
In ideal, it should repeat the name of your business – which is a yet another reason to have a brainstorming session and think up a really catchy, . Of course, as far as it is appropriate – people may find a funnily named funeral parlor to be in bad taste.
However, before you register your business under this name, check if it has already been taken – if the name is less original than you thought, you may have to think of something else.
2. Hosting
Many beginners deal with the choice of hosting as an afterthought – which is a mistake. Performance, stability and overall speed of your site heavily depends on which web host you choose. This means that you should carefully study all available information about the hosts you are interested in and, preferably, ask their representatives additional questions: what kind of hardware they are using, whether they provide round-the-clock customer support, in what ways you can contact them and so on. To choose a good, respectable and stable host at the outset is much easier than to relocate your site further on.
3. Usability
Your website should not simply look pretty – it should work as intended. Think who your potential and desired audience are, what their interests are, what they expect from your site, what they will like and what will annoy them. Make sure your site is easy to navigate, that you are not sidetracked by your own ingenious design decisions – make it inconvenient.
If you are not sure about something, the rule of the thumb is to avoid excessive complexity. Clean and simple is an all-time favorite of most people.
4. Content
Whether you are going to start a blog or a static site, one thing is certain – in order to succeed you have to provide it with first-rate content. Times when it was enough to stuff a website with keywords to get into the top ten have long passed – modern search engine algorithms do their best to sift out sites that contain poor or plagiarized content. What is so special about your site, why people should prefer it to competitors? Make sure the content reflects your business’s unique features.
5. Search Engine Optimization
The reverse is true as well – those who say that ranking is all about content now are as far from truth as webmasters who stuff their websites up to the eyeballs with keywords. SEO is far from being dead, and you should learn a thing or two about its current trends before starting out as a webmaster.
Starting a website isn’t hard – in fact, everybody can do it today. Starting a website that will be successful is a quite different story. But with some thought, effort and planning you’re likely to be on the right way.
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