To create a successful website, you have to carefully plan each phase of its development. And you have to bring together the right resources and information. Here are some guidelines to help you draft the plans for developing your website.  

  

Define your objectives for your web site

What do you expect to achieve from your website? Is it simply raising awareness for your brand with a brochure site? Or is it for selling your products and services with an ecommerce website? Or is it going to be a Social networking platform? It's essential that you concentrate on the objectives of your website, as it will create the foundation for your overall online strategy. Get the help of a consultant or observe websites in the same business as you are in. By observing other websites you can identify what are the basics, what are the must haves and what are the gaps left by others. You can take the best elements and improve them to create a unique website rich with advanced features.

Define your visitors

No matter how great your website looks or how advanced the features it contains, a website is nothing without visitors. It is similar to having a glamorous store with all the hottest items for sale, but located in middle of the desert, where no customers can reach. If you want to be successful, you have to reach your customers and make them visit your website. If they can't find your website, you are not going to make any sales. You have to clearly define your target audience and take time to study them, which goes a long way in helping you come up with the right web design and marketing strategy.

Build good content

Do not hesitate to invest in building unique and good content for your website. You can always hire a good writer to create the content for your web pages. Never do the mistake of coping and pasting content from other websites. That's very unprofessional and your visitors won't take you seriously. Besides search engines will penalize you for having duplicate content. Carefully design the structure of your website, and the flow of your content. Expose your content with easy navigation so that the visitors will find what they want effortlessly.

Ensure smooth functionality

Depending on your objectives, your website needs to have specific functionalities. It could be ecommerce-shopping cart functionality, contact forms, forums, blogs or membership program.  Advance functionality may require an experienced developer, special software and hardware. It should be one of your main areas to focus as this is very important for you overall web design and it affects your budget as well.  

Monitor and measure the Success

Another area that often goes unnoticed is measuring your success. Just setting goals is not enough, you have to monitor whether you are reaching them or not. If you are deviating from the set goals, you have to take corrective measures. Be it lead generation or selling your products and services online, by having a well-defined monitoring system you can make sure you are on the right track. Take your time to identify a list of variables that should be monitored. This may include simple numbers, ratio and most critical statistics. And you may have to add more items to this list as your website progresses, depending on the growth and direction of your business and the relevant industry as a whole.

Remember, if you spend more time on planning and collecting information, your chances of creating a successful website are high.