How to Plan Your Website

how-to-plan-a-websiteWhether you're going the DIY route or employing a professional the key to any successful website is planning!

Proceeding on a website design and development project without a well-thought-out foundation will either lead to failure, at worst, or, at best, a project that is frustrating, drawn-out and a negative experience for all involved.

You need to enter the website design process realising just that: it's a process. There's a beginning, a middle and an end. With the research, thought and strategy that goes before any selection of fonts, colours or templates, the beginning part should be the longest. This foundational piece of work will guide you through the entire website design and development process, help you stay clear on your goal through the wobbly parts and, ultimately, will give your users an enjoyable and engaging experience once you're live.

Your website is a crucial part of your Digital Marketing Ecosystem; there needs to be an alignment between your brand promise and what your website delivers. For example, I recently came across the website of a high-end business coach who was making 6- and 7-figure (no exaggeration) income promises and their website was a dog's breakfast: it was poorly-designed, links didn't work, elements looked shoddy and it had a very DIY air about it. Do you think I felt confident about investing in their services? (I didn't, BTW).

If you are making premium promises you need to have a premium website. Otherwise, you will be turning customers off in a major way.

Think about expectations of brand experiences: when you interact with a brand there is a tacit promise being made. For example, if I am going out to buy a Mercedes, the anticipation and the expectation is a lot higher than if I am going to Uncle Roy's Dodgy Car Yard. There needs to be an alignment and cohesion through every element of your brand and how you deliver your brand experience to your customers.

When you're spending hours investing in social media posts and people land on your website or landing page and it doesn't deliver on that promise, we, as humans, instinctively are put off and it creates mistrust. And you might never see that potential customer again.

Bear in mind your website's role in your overall marketing strategy and how your website will support your wider marketing efforts. Marketing's role is to break down the friction in the sales process and your website can play a major part in that by creating know/like/trust, addressing fears and barriers and educating your potential clients on what you do, why you do it and how.

Let's start with some basic questions: why do you need a website? What is the purpose of your website? What are you trying to achieve through your website?

Is your site designed as info only, with an invitation to engage your services? Is your website designed to make a direct purchase? Is it to engage potential clients in your marketing funnel? You need to have some specific goals for your website so that you can measure its success and gauge your return on investment.

Once you have set some goals, work out what metrics you will have in place to measure your site's success? Do you want to increase enquiries? Increase sales? Decrease tyre kickers and time wasters? Offer product support to reduce phone calls? There are many reasons to build a website but you need to be clear on the number one reason for your website before you undertake the development process or brief a designer to do it for you.

The three crucial things you need to be clear on before you start thinking about the "fun stuff" i.e. fonts, colours and imagery are:

  1. Who is your website aimed at? i.e. who is your Dream Client?
  2. How do you want them to feel when they visit your website?
  3. What action do you want them to take when they visit your website?

  1. Who is your Dream Client

I take a human-centric approach to all of my projects. We are all humans, selling to other humans so we need to think of our Dream Client as humans first. Take the time to get to know your Dream Client as well as taking the time to examine why you want to work with these particular people. [If you haven't downloaded the My Dream Client Workbook yet, here’s the link.]

  1. How do you want your Dream Client to feel?

Feelings are often an overlooked element of web design but a crucial one. What questions, fears and aspirations does your Dream Client have when they land on your site? What is the ultimate outcome they want to achieve? What are their fears around that goal? What information can you give your Dream Client so that they feel like they have come to the right place to find the solution to achieve their desired outcome? What information can you give your Dream Client to allay their fears? To make them feel that you understand them and so they feel nurtured?

  1. What action do you want your Dream Client to take?

A basic part of website design is including a simple Call to Action (CTA). One CTA per page, often several times. What specific action do you want your Dream Client to take? To download a workbook? To get in touch with your sales team? To request a quote? To join your mailing list? To book a call with you? One call to action per page and be absolutely clear about it!

Now we’re clear on the basics, have a think about how you’re going to structure your content. What pages will you need? Each page needs to have a clear headline, a sub-heading, some body copy, imagery, and a call to action. Each element makes up part of the story you’re telling on that page and driving your Dream Client to answer that Call to Action.

To help you with this process I’ve put together a Website Planner that will help you plan your website for your Dream Client. Click here to download it now.

Migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org with surprising results

codeispoetry-rgbWow! I must say, I’m impressed.

I’d put off migrating my blog from WordPress.com to my self-hosted site as I was concerned traffic would drop as a result of not being directly connected to the WordPress community.

The time had come, so I migrated on Friday. I published one post yesterday (Tuesday) and have already eclipsed the best-ever traffic day I had on WordPress.com.

So there you go, you think you’re taking a risk and it turns out to be a much better option for your business!

It’s taken a long time and a lot of (wo)man hours but it’s done and I’m happy with the result. It still needs tweaking but I’d rather have it out there than not.

So what steps did I take to migrate my blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org?

  1. I found a decent, local host that allows a one-click WordPress install. One-click is a lot easier than trying to set up a testing site on your desktop (take it from me, I tried and failed at the mySQL database privilegesstage).
  2. I set up a “testing” sub-domain via cPanel and installed WordPress there, the equivalent of a sandbox environment where I could “play” with my new site.
  3. I built my (responsive) site. There were a few hiccups along the way, including being hacked and having to start from scratch! But here it is, using WordPress as a CMS. I know a lot more now than I ever thought I would about the mysterious workings of WordPress. Happily I know code and was able to customise the visual to my liking.
  4. I exported my old blog from WordPress.com to my WordPress.org (self-hosted) site following the instructions here. I was tempted to purchase a “guided” transfer but the transfer staff “weren’t there that day” according to the message. Was I up for the challenge? Why yes, yes I was and it was easier than I had
  5. I purchased a re-direct from WordPress.com for USD$13 for 12 months. Invaluable, in my mind, as anyone who has bookmarked your blog will still be able to find you.
  6. I installed “Velvet Blues Update URLs” plug in which updates all your internal links to point to the posts within your new site.
  7. I migrated my testing site to my main domain and, like magic, the JMC website had a major transformation from the old, image-based, non-SEOed one I whipped up one evening and was meant to be temporary, to a slicker, more visual site which is a breeze to update.

 

Things to remember:

 

I’ll update this post if I remember any other key points in my “journey”.

Is there any helpful advice you can provide to the bloggers about to go out on there own? Please add it below.

Copywriting, in a nutshell

One of the questions I am most frequently asked is "what does a copywriter do?".

To those in the marketing world this may sound like a silly question - I write copy, duh - but I think we often get so caught up in our industry that we forget what it's like to be on the outside looking in.

A common question is whether I work on trademarks and patents, as there is an understandable confusion with copyright as intellectual property (the English language so often presents us with these quandaries); moreover I have received comments including: "there wouldn't be much call for that any more with digital printing" as there is a perception that copywriting has something to do with typesetting (if you know the origin of this misconception please do let me know).

So, what does a copywriter do? In a nutshell: every word you see (or hear) in every form of marketing material is written by a copywriter. This covers every form of advertising, collateral (printed materials), billboards, websites and, in my case, annual reports.

Not only putting words into wonderfully compelling copy, copywriters are known for their punctilious natures when it comes to spelling, their perniciousness with grammar and their predilection to thesauruses (or is that thesaurii?).

So when you see a pithy billboard tagline or a call to action to compels you to act, think of me and my fellow copywriters, slaving away at our keyboards, racking our brains for the combination of words that will achieve balance between compelling copy and a compulsion to buy.

But basically, when it comes down to the aforementioned nutshell: we sell stuff with words.