The following guide is a method for making yours stand out from the crowd!

1. Plan

Outline your website’s goals – what do you want to achieve with your site? Is it sales? Traffic? Member registrations? Then, think about how you’re going to achieve these goals – what pages and features does your website need? Jot down a quick list of features ranked by importance, and an outline of all the pages you want included on your site.

2. Great, User Friendly Design

It’s important for me to produce a good-looking website. It’s also important for me to allow the target audience to easily navigate their away around the site – that it’s user-friendly. I’m not necessarily talking about having lots of fancy graphics – that might not be appropriate. A good start is to look at other websites (or websites in your niche). Take note of which attributes in the design stand out – colors, layout, images, etc. A visitor to a website can quickly determine whether a site looks good to them or not, and a website can fall flat on its face if it gives the wrong impression.

3. Clean, SEO Friendly Code

When coding your pages, keeping the code clean will help both in loading times and maintenance down the line. Doing some basic SEO will also save headaches later on. Important things to consider are: header tags, adding titles to links, adding alt tags to images and including keywords in URLs and file names.

4. Quality, Relevant Content

The content of your website is just as important (or even more important, in some cases) than the look and feel. People are coming to your website for a reason, and you want to offer them what they’re looking for. Whether it be articles, news, reviews, or products – if it’s not what they’re looking for, they won’t hang out for too long.

5. Regularly Update

Update your site regularly. If you offer articles, publish them regularly. Release new products regularly. Review things regularly. Whatever your site is about, update it regularly. People like to see that the information they are reading is recent, and that websites they visit are still active. This will make people come back to your site, and more likely to tell others about it. The best way to keep your site updated is to use a content management system (CMS).

6. Review

At the end of the process, you should have a great looking website that’s churning out quality content regularly. It’s a good idea to review how things are going after a while – is your site achieving the goals you set in step 1? Do you have any new goals now that the site is running? From here, you can return to step one and plan for the next stage, by either adding new features or refining what you already have.