Building A Website In Australia ?
Don't Do It Before Reading This!
What To Do Before Building A Website In Australia?
Here’s a step-by-step guide on what to do before building a website in Australia as a freelancer, solopreneur, or small or medium-scale organization. This article will help you with deciding what you should focus on, before you hire a web designer/ developer or before you build your own website.
There are so many things that you need to consider before you jump into actually building a website, and we’re not just talking design either. It goes much deeper than that.
You have to think about long-term goals, budget, market strategy, keywords to target, and a bunch of other stuff that you probably haven’t even considered yet. Below are some of the questions you ought to ask yourself before designing a website:
Do You Need A Website?
Are you in the midst of considering whether you need a website and, if so, what that site should accomplish? If a website is on your mind, don’t make any rash decisions. We’ve put together this handy guide to ensure you acquire a stellar understanding of what a quality website would do for you and how it can help you achieve your business objectives.
Businesses have long discovered the importance of having a website.
Your website can improve how you do your marketing, how you interact with your customers, and how people see your company.
However, not all websites are created equal, and creating or redesigning a website without asking yourself the right questions is going to hurt your business more than help it.
What To Consider ?
Building a website for your business is much easier when you plan. But if you don’t it can lead to thousands of dollars wasted and a website that doesn’t hit the mark. There are a few things you can do that will help save you a lot of money, time, and frustration. Below is a list of what to do:
1. Think About The Business You Want To Venture In, Ask Yourself Questions?
There are a couple of things you need to consider before you create your website. A few questions you should ask yourself are: Why Venture into business? What is it exactly that you want to achieve from this venture?
Is it because you want to earn a living for yourself? Or maybe you just want more customers for your business?
Whatever your answers to these questions are, it’s vital that you take your time in deciding what kind of website and business you’ll be running. Knowing this will help the process go a lot smoother than if you were to rush into it without any plan at all.
Other questions you should ask yourself are
What type of business are you going to start? What are the industry challenges you might face and how best will you overcome them? These are important questions that you have to ask yourself before getting started.
Moreover, If you want to become a thriving online business in Australia, then you will need to find the right niche and audience.
It’s important to ask yourself a few questions before you venture into the world of online business.
Answering the following questions is an important part of designing and setting up a successful online business, otherwise known as your “website”.
A domain name is essentially the address for your website. It may also be called your URL (Uniform Resource Locator).
A domain name is an identity for your business online. If you are reading this blog, it means you probably have an interest in building a website to promote your business and/or brand.
A domain name serves as your online identity and a platform for communicating with current and prospective clients. It’s not just an extension of your business – it’s your business brand.
A great domain name will give you the edge on competitors when customers search online and it helps build trust, making your company more professional in the eyes of consumers.
If you don’t have your own domain name yet, here are some options to explore. Choosing a domain name is more than just getting a name that you like, there are other factors to consider.
Domain names can help you with search engine rankings and therefore generate more leads for your website.
Choosing A Domain Name
It’s advisable that when you choose a domain name, you choose one that has keywords in them to help you rank or easily be found by customers.
For instance, if you sell shoes in Perth, it’s advisable by SEO Experts that you include your main service or product in your domain name as it is one of the factors that might help with ranking, let’s say your surname is Guy, it would be wise to have your domain as www.perthshoeguy.com.au
When a person in Perth types Shoe and you have this domain, they will find you first compared to other sites because the word Shoe is part of the URL which helps with SEO ranking.
Choose a relevant domain name that will help potential clients find your site easily. However, be careful not to make the URL too long as some people may not bother googling very long URLs.
2. What Is Web Hosting?
Website hosting is basically the place where your website lives on the internet. It might be stored on servers in Australia, or it could live overseas, depending on you and what you want your website to do.
Typically when choosing a server, people look at space, price, speed, downtime, customer service and location of the servers.
Website hosting is what allows your website to be seen on the internet. Without it, your site will not appear in the search engine results or be accessible to anyone with a browser.
There are two types of website hosting: shared and dedicated.
With dedicated servers, you have a private space reserved specifically for your use. With shared hosting, however, you share the same server space with other users who are also hosted on the site.
Shared hosting vs. Dedicated hosting is a subject of a long debate in the webmaster’s world, mainly because most of the sites are still aiming for low traffic numbers, for which shared hosting is sufficient.
3. Planning Your Website
So you’ve decided what business you’re going to start. You have your website set up on a domain you purchased and hosting for your website. Most people ask themselves this question, should I build my website myself?
Or take the easy route and use an off-the-shelf solution. It’s difficult to estimate how long this is going to take because planning your website involves two tasks.
The first task is to determine how your website will look and function in terms of site architecture and design.
The second task is to determine what features the site must have (usually a combination of the “must-haves” and “should haves”).
How do you make sure that your potential customers find it? Although your business is online, the success of your website depends on having the most relevant information a customer could possibly want and the proper channels in place to contact a company. This is where planning comes in.
Businesses that don’t have a professional, well-developed website are the ones that get left behind. If you think you can do everything yourself, you’re just going to waste valuable time, energy, and resources.
It’ll be significantly more expensive in the long run to develop your own website. Even worse, it could harm your business if your design isn’t up to par. Hiring an expert to build your site is a great investment in your company and will end up saving money in the long haul.
Keyword Planning
It’s vital when building a brand new site or redesigning an old site to think about keywords. After all, if you aren’t targeting the right keywords, it’s unlikely you’re going to reach the target audience and convert them into customers.
It’s also important to think about keyword trends because the longer a keyword stays relevant, the more searches it will get. That can result in more traffic and sales too.
Web design isn’t just about how a website looks, it’s also about making sure you optimise for search engines to index your site and show it in the search results. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an important part of web design.
One step you can take while planning out your user journey and designing your website is to plan out the keywords you will target to make sure they are relevant to your business or website.
Keyword planning is fundamental to developing a good SEO strategy. This is because Keywords are the lifeblood of your SEO efforts. If you don’t know what keywords you need or have targeted the wrong keywords, it will be like building a house without any foundations.
4. Logo Design
A website is an entrepreneur’s most important marketing asset and their logo is the emblem that sets or them apart in the marketplace.
A great logo should be simple, yet distinctive. It creates an image in the minds of consumers and represents your brand personality and attributes. Having a logo designed for your website is important, but not all designers know how to do this.
It’s easy for a website to have an identity crisis if the logo doesn’t match the rest of the website. You need a web designer that can understand the look and feel you want and how to create something that matches what you want to achieve.
Your business logo will be used for many things and will be one of the main ways people begin to associate your business brand with you.
5. Cost Considerations
Creating a website on your own can save you thousands of dollars. However, web designers and developers are skilled individuals who have studied for many years to learn their skills.
Creating a website is a lot of work. Creating a fully functional website will take time, effort and money. The advantage of using professionals is that they have the experience needed to get the job done in a timely manner, meet your deadline and do it the right way the first time without putting you through the guessing game of being insecure about your end product.
For many, the idea of building a website from scratch can be overwhelming. If you’re not considering your own domain name, hosting, and design, but also unique tools to interact with visitors and properly install it on multiple platforms—it can get expensive quickly.
This is why most business owners opt to hire a web designer/developer to get the website they not only need but want!
Let’s take this into account: Hiring someone to build your business a new website will likely be cheaper than designing and creating one on your own. Yes, you may have a clear understanding of what you need in terms of functionality and hence wouldn’t mind doing it yourself, but when you take into account the time and resources needed to create your very first site from scratch: You cannot ignore the time and money it will cost you.
Conclusion
Building a website might appear to be simple, however, it has the potential of becoming a very disruptive process if you don’t have a clear understanding and plan in mind. There are a lot of people who end up getting sites built that they don’t need or niches they would have been better off avoiding.
Hence it is essential to start with a proper initial assessment to get the right direction to go at. So, these were some of the things to consider before building a website in Australia. The question that remains is what will you do now? Well, whatever choice you will make, start with finding yourself a good web host and then try your best to build it, or with the other option, see if you can find a good web designer to start working on your website project. Good luck with your ventures!
