There are a number of essential ingredients required to make an awesome new website. Here is our definitive checklist to help get you started. Whatever your new site is designed to do, make sure your project plan includes all of these factors.
A great domain name
A domain name is the ‘address’ people use to find your website, and typically matches your company name, or that of your products and services. Everyone knows that the BBC website can be found at www.bbc.co.uk – and ideally you want something just as memorable for your own website.
Unfortunately, many addresses are already taken, so you will need to be a little creative. Use this tool to see if your preferred website address is still available. Otherwise you can take advantage of one of the all-new global top level domain named (gTLD) that offer all kinds of new address options, like mypractice.doctor or mybusiness.architect – have a look at gTLD availability here.
Take as long as you need to choose a good website address – after all, you could be stuck with it forever once your site goes live.
Reliable web hosting
With the website address sorted, you then need to choose where your website will be accessed from. It is possible to set up the necessary infrastructure from your office, but the administrative overheads and increased security risks are not cost effective.
Instead you should choose a webhosting service that can take over the day to day running of the technology in the background. The two major considerations when choosing a host are:
- Reliability – how often does the service experience outages that would prevent people from accessing your website?
- Speed – web users are notoriously impatient and will not wait more than a second or two for each page to load.
Take all the time you need to choose a reliable web host to make sure your new website runs smoothly from the outset.
A well-designed new website
A site that displays well on both desktop PCs and smartphones is now essential to the overall success of your online business. People now access more online content from their smartphone than they do their laptops.
In recognition of this preference, Google makes it easier for people to find these mobile-optimised websites when they carry out a search. So if your site has not been designed with mobile in mind, it will be harder for customers to find.
Design also plays a crucial part in keeping people on your site. Web users can decide if a site is appealing in just 10 milliseconds – and if they don’t like yours, they will leave. If unsure of your skills, seek expert web design assistance before taking your site live.
Building a new website is quite complicated. Rather than take a risk and compromise on any of these elements, Broadband Cloud Solutions recommends that all of our clients carefully consider each stage of establishing their online presence. To learn more about our complete end-to-end website service, please get in touch.
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