How to create a company website; 10 very useful tips
The first stop on the road of any project on the Internet is usually create a company website, but in the last 4 years there have been great changes both in terms of its design and its total orientation to the mobile devices. Another aspect that is very important is that the web totally moves away from the corporatist style and gets closer to social plane and to the user or customer experiences.
If you are going to build your house, always do it using the best materials
If you are thinking create your business website I recommend that you take into account the following tips:
1.- Online vs offline styles manual
A mandatory step if you want to create a professional brand design is to create the style manual, which includes your brand logo. This style manual is also known as a company's corporate manual and tries to create the visual image of the company in all its facets, whether online or offline.
14 years ago when I started my first work experience in an advertising agency, I remember that the style manual of a company had a strong and marked face-to-face component and was oriented to offline advertising. At present, the opposite is true, the style manual acquires a greater importance for online applications than offline ones.
2.- Web design
There are many trends in web design that we can use this 2014, so I will try to summarize the ones that I consider most important to review:
A. Minimalist design.
I have been passionate about minimalist design for more than 15 years, and after so many years it is still fashionable which makes it a safe bet to create a company website.
B. Large size and quality images.
A few years ago, images almost went unnoticed on a website, but now visual marketing has acquired great importance in the web design of a company, on the one hand motivated by the increase in screen resolutions and on the other hand by the reduced cost of these images.
Another option that we can use is to go to free image banks, since many of them are very professional and we can find good infographics for our business website.
C. Larger and more creative fonts
The current trend is to use a larger font size than the one that has been used and making a more creative bet with regard to the choice of font that we will use on the web.
D. The pages with vertical scroll
Gone are those pages that had to show all the information at a glance and without having to move the vertical scroll or those that had a complicated navigation due to a large number of subsections, which instead of adding value, were more of a labyrinth that affected in making it difficult for the user to navigate.
Now pages with a large vertical scroll are in fashion and where in one page we have all the most important aspects of our company.
E. Webs more vivid and with striking colors.
The current websites of a company are much more vivid and with more attractive colors. One technique that continues to gain popularity is Parallax Scrolling, which is a layered animation technique that comes from video games, but has now landed with great force on the web.
3.- Responsive
Is a fundamental aspect to create the website of a company, since we need to provide it with a design adapted to mobile devices or also called Responsive.
Depending on the mobile device and its placement, whether vertical or horizontal, the company's website may be displayed in 1, 2 or 3 columns.
4.- The audiovisual capsules
Short-term audiovisual capsules gain presence when creating a company's website, even having a large space and visibility on the website's own home page.
The objective is to create a video of between one and two minutes in length where we can tell what we do through our clients or a funny and original story. It is essential that the story is made by a professional scriptwriter because it is the key to achieving a good impact with the video.
The corporate video is only used for certain in-person activities of the company such as fairs and congresses.
5.- The corporate website is totally dead
If you are thinking of using a corporate format when creating a company's website, I recommend that you give up the idea because it is a format that does not interest users and that frankly will provide you with very bad results.
Web 1.0 is totally outdated and obsolete
6.- StoryTelling & Experience
Corporatism has given way to a website where they tell us through interesting and original stories what a company does.
In the same way, the product ceases to be the center of the company's website and the testimonies and experiences of real clients become so.
The center of the new company website is people
7.- Company Web 2.0
Create the website of a company under the prism 2.0 It does not mean inserting the buttons of social networks, far from it, since it means a great change from the traditional web, where we include different spaces where we can interact with our users in real time; social networks, blog, chat, etc.
In this way, the company's website gets closer to people, leaving behind the enormous distances of the past and applies customer service immediately and much more efficiently, but this also means that the company can make mistakes if it does not have the enough preparation for this new scenario.
8.- Social Networks as a customer service window
More and more companies are using the social media as a customer service tool, although there are other companies that are somewhat reluctant for fear of screwing up and creating a negative reputation for their own brand.
This reminds me of a good article where it explains some examples of "gaffes" managing social networks, written by Mabel cajal, and that I recommend that you read.
But we should not be afraid that some companies "screw up" since providing good customer service through social networks can be very effective and allows us to build trust and a very positive reputation for our brand.
9.- Participation of all employees
The work and management of the company's website is no longer just the work of a single person, but it is recommended that there is a very active participation of each and every one of the employees, in this way all of them can contribute by generating contents of their different specialties that can be made available to the person in charge of the blog and social networks.
The best communication of a company is the sum of all its employees
10.- Where do I start to create a company website?
A very common mistake that many companies make when creating their website is to skip the first step on this list, an aspect that, after the event, will almost certainly bring us more than one headache and that will clearly affect quality.
1.- Briefing. We define the requirements, needs and important characteristics of the new website.
2.- Choice of domain. We have to choose the domain of our company and we can choose one of these 4 options:
- Personal brand. It is one of the simplest and most used today, if we want to bet on our personal brand.
Example: lastname.com
- Branding. In this case we choose a domain with the name of my company.
Example elcorteingles.es
- Using keywords. The only and main objective is the positioning although for that reason we choose a company domain that has nothing to do with the brand name.
Example lawyerenvalencia.com
- A Mix. With the mix we seek to choose one or more words of our brand and add the most important keyword for our business.
Example brand + keyword.com
Some tips for choosing a domain for your company:
- Choose a domain for your company that is .com, net, org and .es.
- The extension must not exceed 20 characters, a maximum of 15 to 20 characters.
- Avoid the use of special characters such as hyphens or underscores, which make it difficult to understand the domain.
3.- Choice of hosting
The choice of hosting when we are going to create a company's website is very important because it affects its availability, its speed and its maintenance.
But how to choose a good hosting?
To choose a good hosting, take into account the following aspects:
1.- Experience and professionalism with the tool or CMS that you are going to use to create your company's website. There are hosting companies that are experts in WordPress, so this will be a plus when choosing this hosting for my website.
2.- Hosting features. It is not only about the hosting meeting the needs of my project, but also seeing other characteristics that can be very positive, such as the inclusion of a free CDN, which allows to considerably improve the speed of my company's website.
3.- Price. The price is always important for our pocket but we do not choose only and exclusively under this criterion because we will almost certainly be wrong.
4.- Support. This is the Achilles heel of the vast majority of hosting companies, but it is essential that the hosting worries about solving our incidents as quickly as possible.
I personally like 2 hosting, for their professionalism and because they are a good guarantee for my project, and because their quality / price ratio is very good, these hosting are Webempresa and HostgatorFor the record, I earn absolutely nothing from these companies for making this recommendation, I recommend them simply because my experience with them has been very positive.
4.- How to choose the most suitable tool?
A difficult and very important step is to choose the CMS or tool that we will use to create a company website.
Depending on the needs you have, I propose two Open Source tools:
- WordPress. This tool will be useful for the 95% of projects that consist of creating a business website, it is very easy to use and manage and we can achieve a good position in a few months of work.
- Drupal. We will use this tool or CMS for more complex and demanding projects when creating a website. It is also important that we know that the management and administration of the tool is more complex if we compare it with WordPress.
Always choose the simplest solution that meets the requirements to create a website.
5.- Theme Vs Custom Design
I always recommend making a personalized design for each company website but we must always start with a professional wordpress theme, and then customize it to the design of your company website.
If your choice of tool is WordPress, it is important that you take advantage of the full potential that the best wordpress plugins have.
6.- How to find good professionals
Many times when we are looking for a company or professional, we do not know how to identify whether it is a good one or not, but try to avoid being "hoaxed" and pay attention to the following considerations:
- Beware of the professional who is an expert in everything.
- Do not confuse presumption with confidence or assurance.
- They promise us unrealistic and unreliable goals.
- Lack of transparency.
- Experience of the professionals who will carry out my project.
- Talk to some of their clients.
- You do not know what you need and you have a greater risk of being sold smoke.
7.- Very common mistakes that we must avoid
When you think about how to create a company website, many doubts and concerns always come to mind, since you want to always take steps in the right direction and dedicate every euro we spend on something that is strictly necessary. For this reason I have included in the article 9 errors that you should always avoid when creating a website.
- Thinking that design is an expendable part.
- Oversizing the necessary infrastructure or applications.
- Not dedicating the necessary human resources.
- Not having a suitable company or professionals for the project.
- Not having the necessary financial resources.
- Eliminate any of the stages of the web creation process as it is considered unnecessary.
- Not knowing the great potential of videos and dismissing their inclusion.
- Thinking that later you don't have to spend time on the project once it has been created.
- To think that we will receive a lot of income and clients within a few weeks of the creation of the web.
Creating a company website will never be an easy and simple task but at least I hope that some of these tips will help you to make the right decisions in each of your projects.
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