Strategies for Creating a New Website

In the first article of website strategy series, we'll give you the information you need to create a successful website.

Whether your creating a blog or business site it's important to have a marketing strategy that you follow to create, maintain and expand your website. If you're just starting our and don't have a website, now's the time to create a marketing plan which will be your road-map that you will follow that will lead to increased exposure, customers and web presence.

New Website Strategy

Whether you're setting up a blog, business site, portfolio, or e-commerce site, there are a few basics you need from the get-go including a custom domain name or URL and a place to put your new site. There are many options available to build a website on like Wix, Weebly, and WordPress but the website host with the potential to a quick start is Webflow.

Building a New Webflow Website

Webflow has a quick, easy, and responsive User Interface (UI) that allows for quick site building.

If you're deciding to build your site yourself, Webflow has tutorial videos that help you learn the ropes but if you want a fast start, this is a great option for people creating their first business website.

Building a New WordPress Website

While WordPress has a steeper learning curve, their are things that Webflow can do, but not as well as WordPress. If you're looking to build a massive website, WordPress may be the best option. Our new project Xclusive Collectibles is a site much like eBay, where vendors can list items to sell in the collectibles marketplace (for cheaper I might add).

Xclusive Collectibles has over a thousand pages, not including internal pages, this simply couldn't be quickly done with WordPress however, as you can see, you have to choose the right platform from the start, or else you'll find yourself with wasted time.

Starting Your New Website

When creating a new site, design is important but usability is very important.

If your site isn't set up correctly from the get go and things are hard to find with no connections to other pages or your navbar or page has dead links, it lowers the user experience of your site. Ensure your website is optimized or your visitors to your site won't stick around long.

Creating a well laid out site takes time, especially if you're just starting out and making your plan as you build. Long load times, impact the user but also also causes your sites' SEO to rank lower.

Having properly compressed images and videos on your site with easy to read text font and colors are easy to read and all relevant content can be viewed easily on mobile devices. Webflow has a very simple solution for mobile optimization which makes it more appealing to build your website with.

As you can see at the top of this image, there are 4 icons which show a PC version of each page your building, tablet view, mobile horizontal view, and mobile vertical view.

You can quickly make changes on your PC version and quickly switch modes to make adjustments through the views, and any changes you make down the line don't effect any of the versions to bigger views (to the left). This is a huge time saver that allows for quick adjustments to make sure your site is optimized for all devices.

Mobile friendly sites are a must have for businesses. Mobile sites continue to drive the most sales growth for businesses though only roughly 60% of the top 100 global retailers have a site that is mobile friendly.

Having a mobile responsive design helps improve the mobile sites user experience on your site, but it optimization also has an impact on your SEO.

New Website Content

There are basic pages that every page typically has. These are the "Core" pages that the majority of websites have. Examples of core pages include:

• Home Page
• About us Page
• Contact Page
• Blog Landing page
• Service/Store Landing page
• Template for your SEO Expansion
• Template for individual blog posts

While not all sites will have all of the above pages, a robust blog or business site will have at least 5 of the above. Home, about, and contact pages are nearly ubiquitous for pages all across the web.

As far as templates, the cool thing about Webflow is that is allows for the creation of collections of data. These collections allow you to set up individual data fields and then create a template that allows for the creation of pages based on that data so you only have to create and design only one template to display that data.

Here's an example of a page template created on Blox, if you read more than one of our blog posts, you'll notice that some of the elements stay the same, no matter what blog you're on, while others are different. This is all possible by using Webflow's collections to create new pages while using one template and linking custom data per new blog post.

Here's an example of our collection for blog posts, each one of these data fields represents data we input that creates unique content for our blog posts.

These collections will allow you to create templates for your blog, service pages, products, portfolio items, or anything else you want to create a custom template for.

Here's an example of our collection for our marketing services pages, each one of these data fields represents data we input that creates unique content for our each service.

Both Webflow & WordPress have the ability to create a single template to house your service paages.

These collections will allow you to create templates for your blog, service pages, products, portfolio items, or anything else you want to create a custom template for.

Additional Considerations for Your Website

When creating a new website, you want to have content with your intended users or customers in mind.

There are questions that will have to be consistently on your mind as you build. What types of pages are you looking to create?

Are you giving your visitors enough information to move to your next blog, in the purchasing process, more information?

Always review your written content so that your users understand your business, products or solutions, and what makes you stand apart from the competition.

If you're looking for assistance building an affordable website, we have built dozens of websites and have ready to work code to make your website quickly and affordably.

You can visit our marketing page for more information or reach us through our contact page.

We recommend before reaching out, you sign up for a free Webflow template to get acclimatized to the User Interface, to save time, and allow us to quickly build your site.

Disclosure

We are members of Bluehost and Webflow affiliate programs.  Clicking on the links links you to our referral program and we may earn a referral fee for clicking on those links above.