Nine Key Ingredients For Website Creation, Design, and Development

Yesterday a business Yahoo Group in Los Angeles that I subscribe to got into a heated discussion of what a new website creation, design, and/or development should cost, including SEO, or search engine optimization. I decided to create a basic primer in order to explain why the cost will be $3000 or more for a serious site. Here's what I came up with:

Copy this list and put it in your website file for any future plans you have to create or update your website. If your website designer can't do these things, or has no proof of their ability to do them, you should either use a different designer or assemble a team to do the work.

1. Determine what the website is to be used for. Is it an online brochure? Do you expect people to take action (Call, email, sign up, come in, buy something?) Is it an information resource? Will clients continue to come to the site to "do work" after they become clients.
2. Set goals and objectives with regard to what the website is to achieve. Is it for placement on searches? What will be satisfactory?Is it to generate traffic? How many unique visitors per day? What bounce rate is acceptable? Is it for conversions? How many phone calls per day do you expect?
3. Keyword search. If you were a consumer of your goods or services, how would you search for you? Use keyword generators and evaluation programs to decide on keywords and phrases that are important to you to achieve desired results in #2 above. If you are a local business these key words would include local cities, neighborhoods, villages, and zip codes.
4. What is your message? What are your important brands/models, products, services. How can you create a compelling headline that will establish a need that you can then fill in the body paragraphs of your first page?
5. What is the competition doing? Learn from competition in your area and across the country with a review of best practices on other websites that are in your business.
6. Google loves content. How can you create substantial textual content on your site so that Google sees you as an expert? How does that content get properly arranged on the site in order for Google to pay attention.
7. How will people reach you? Automated email? Online Chat? 800# (not always a good idea?) Send away for white paper? Sign up for newsletter?
8. What graphic impression do you want to make? If you are retail, for instance, the impression you leave on the website should be similar to the experience the customer will get in store.
9. How will you maximize the traffic to the site once built? Use of the keywords in appropriate places is just one piece of that pie. How do you get back links? Where do you list the site?

I may have left something out, here, but these are the basics. This is the underlying effort required for a professional website. That's why $3000 is a reasonable number, and $5000 is not that much. This is not much different than creating the interior design, store front and signage for a retail location. It isn't cheap to do it right. It can be very expensive to do it cheap.

I have just worked with a team to create the closest thing I have seen to a perfect website. You can see it at http://www.UnwindMobileSpa.com

If you would like me to help you do a Great Website, call 310-920-9649.