Planning a web site? - How to get started on-line
Placing your business on-line can at first seem confusing and overwhelming, particularly if you are not technically minded or computer literate. The good news is it needn't be. Gone are the days when running a business on-line was a daunting and complex endeavour.
At DMC Web Services we act as web partners for our clients on-line, dealing with all technical and computing related aspects of the process.
What we need our customers to provide in building their web sites and web enabled systems is information relating to the real-world part of their business.
We need to know what business you are in, what your products and services are, who your competitors are and importantly what your target market(s) are.
Gathering this, and other information allows us to develop the right solution for your needs - whether it be a bespoke e-commerce solution, an off-the-shelf system or a small/simple web site to test market on-line. Through an informal consultative process of information gathering, discussion, feedback and approval, we will ensure your business on-line is pointing in the right direction.
The solutions we provide to help our clients manage their web-sites are aimed at the non-technical user so working with your web-site has never been easier. Of course, for those organisations requiring a high or specific degree of control of their web-sites parameters and functions, we have solutions too.
However, as with most new ventures, preparation is key, so we have listed some important activities below to help make the ride a little smoother and ensure that you enter into the process with a clear agenda and set of objectives.
Research
Carry out a little web-based research into what you competitors are doing on-line. If your product/service is unique you may have no direct competition, but in our experience those cases are few and far between. If you have no direct competitors on-line there almost certainly be organisations whose sites reflect some of the function, style and marketing approach of your own.
Take a look at these competitor (or near competitor) sites and ask yourself - Why have they chosen to build their site or present their business in this way?
Looking at the sites of successful companies and competitors will save you a lot of time and effort trying to re-invent the wheel and decide on questions like, How should our customers login, or sign-up?, or, What's the best was to display our products and services to our site users?
Most likely your competitors have been down this road when planning their own site. The good news with this approach is that once you have carried out your own research you can discuss it with one of our Project Managers, who will help you to decide the best options for the business to consider. Perhaps more importantly, the results of web competitor research provide good insight in to the most up to date approaches to working on-line with similar goods and services to yours, and when this is allied to our expertise and web development skills - We can often see a way to do it BETTER!
In essence, learning from your competitors successes or mistakes allows you to gain competitive advantage. The importance of good research should not be underestimated, and DMC Web Services are available to help you find the best examples of your businesses activities on-line, and improve on what your competitors are doing on the web, putting your business ahead of the pack.
Build a Specification Document
A little like building a house, or or other structure - poor planning will result in costly strategy revisions, and wasted time and resources.
All well executed projects start with a clear strategies. Your strategy (or for that which relates to the building of your web site, a Web Specification Document) may be subject to change along the way, but nonetheless it serves as a roadmap for us, the site developers, and you the client.
A specification document for a large web-site or web application may be chapters in length running to hundreds of pages or more, but for simple small business sites may only contain a few pages. However extensive or simple you plan your web site to be, the same rules apply.
Your specification document should outline project milestones and may set timescales for completion of each milestone from concept through to testing and placing your site in live operation. Again, for smaller web sites this may contain only a few bullet points and notes and be laid out on a single page.
Here at DMC Web Services we work with companies large and small with varying scope of works to be carried out, however here are some tips for the small to medium sized businesses planning their site(s) who may not have the benefit of an IT Department of Senior Manager looking after their web project specification.
How will the site work? (The Functional Specification)
Illustrate the sites operation and function as you see it, either using plain English, or diagrammatically where suitable. Provide links to show live working examples on other web-sites if you like.
eg.
1. At the home page the user should see X, Y and Z, and have the option to view a gallery of our works. The gallery should scroll vertically with arrow buttons above and below. etc.
2. From the Contact Us page the user should be able to send a form to us specifying their Name, Address, Postcode, Date of Birth etc.
and so on...
How will the site look? (Visual Design Specification)
Similary, you can explain this in your own words, send us graphic design layouts of your own, or simply send us URL links to web sites you would like to emulate or approximate in visual and aesthetic design terms.
What is our budget and timescale?
Do you have an idea of cost for your project? Once you have an idea of what you want to achieve from carrying out some of these preparation activities above, we can discuss your ideas and provide an indicative cost. Try us and see what we think. You may get a pleasant surprise!
If you would like to speak to one of our web development team, feel free to call us for an informal chat on
0845 108 0736
