3 Things You Need to Start Building a Successful Website
1. Niche Idea
One of the things that divides the successful websites from the less successful ones is a niche idea. Niche websites get more traffic and will do better with search engines than broad topics.
What is a niche? Basically, a niche is a subset of a larger market. As defined by Merriam-Webster, a niche is a "specialized" market.
Typically, your brand or business is niche enough, but if you're starting a blog, this is where you'll want to spend more time. Keep asking yourself "then what" to dig deeper into your topic.
Having a good niche website will help you make more money with your website.
Our advice for finding your niche website idea is:
1. Start with your passion
2. Narrow it down to categories
3. Keep asking "so what"
4. Think about the questions you would google for your "deep category" and that is usually a good place to start.
2. Domain Name and Hosting
This is the most technical part of starting a website. Basically you need a place your your website to "live".
There are a lot of hosting and also domain services out there, and a lot of them are surprisingly cheap for basic features. Depending on your skill level, it might be worth it to pick a web hosting service that does everything all in one, such as WIX.
Other popular web hosting services are bluehost and hostgator both these services are pretty straight forward and also allow you to purchase your domain name directly from them. Bluehost is one of the easiest and most compatible hosting services if you want to build your website using wordpress.
The second "technical" part is picking and buying your domain name. As mentioned above, the easiest way to do this is to us a service such as wix or one of the others mentioned because you can do it all at once. If you want to purchase your domain name separately, there are plenty of places to do it. The most popular and easiest to navigate is godaddy.com.
3. Design
Now on to our favorite part! We can talk forever on the design portion of the website but that's what other blog posts are for.
To keep this short, we'll just touch on the high levels of design:
Color
Again, we have full blog posts on color, but at a high level, you want your color palette to be pleasing to the eye.
Another big consideration with the color palette is that it makes sense with your business and branding. Try to stick with the same color palette across your website and all your marketing materials as well.
If you need help coming up with a color palette, coolers.io can help!
Layout
The layout can be the trickiest part of website design. Thankfully, many of the website building tools have layouts that are free to use. Feel free to play around with a few to see what you like.
Keep in mind a few things when picking a design:
whitespace
navigation
If you need help with any part of your design, reach out to us! We can help!
UX (Interactivity and Experience)
If you're new to design, UI/UX might be somewhat of a foreign concept. However it is very important to consider the different elements that will go into your website and how users will interact with them. This might could be anything from an interactive navigation bar, to a carousel of products
At the end of the day, you want your customer to be engaged on your website, as well as eliminate frustrations that come from using your site. We've all been on websites whose responsiveness is so bad, you click the back button and leave all together. Don't let that be the experience on your website.
Wherever you are in your website building process, let us help! We specialize in design but can help you with any part along the way. Feel free to contact us with any questions! Are you ready to get started?