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In this online era, having a professional website has come up as a necessity for almost all business ventures and organizations. A good website acts as a great marketing tool, service platform, a communication channel, portfolio of skills and an engine for branding. Only a highly professionalized website can offer these multitasking features. It’s not always like that only expert web development companies can develop engaging sites. There are various website builder tools that can assist a business in building their own effective website.

A step-by-step guide for building an impressive site is as follows:

1. Strategize Your Brand

   The first task that needs to be done is to analyze business requirements and formulate a detailed branding strategy. Don’t start the development process, until you have a solid idea about site’s purpose, its targeted audience, its guiding visual philosophy or service offers. Go through the steps below for making proper analysis report:

   • Identify target market- Find out what type of audience your business will deal with and how will the services you provide affect that group of people.
   • Research about competitors- A business should be completely aware of the competition it will go through after entering the online market. Research to find out the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, so that you can easily get over them.
   • Define the brand’s identity- Select the description for your brand name that can define a business motive in a proper manner.
   • Prepare branding material- After the above reports has been formed, its time to select the materials required in site building such as logo, images, videos, content etc.

2. Approach the Design

   Most of the website builders, come with built-in web design and a developer just needs to select the style that suits an enterprise requirements the most. This design step includes:

   • Choose a template- A design template aims to offer a solid foundation that decides the layout and style of a business website. Choose the theme and style that suits your vision the most.
   • Customize it- Once a template has been selected, it’s time to customize it by adding content and images. After this, the design is refined for colors, shape, font etc.
   • Tweak the look- Enhance the beauty and looks of a site by adding variety of features like parallax scrolling, background videos, dynamic motion and much more.

3. Prioritize Usability

   Its necessary to develop beautiful and user friendly websites to engage more visitors. A complex flow of options and content can force audience to leave a site. Along with stunning looks, build one which is easy to understand and provides better user interface and experience. To create such a nice website, focus on the following aspects:

   • Navigation flow- Aim to develop a clear and appealing site structure, which offers easy navigation using links and menus.
   • Content grouping- A consistent placement of content within a site guides the visitors to find the information they are searching for in the best possible way.
   • Call to Action- These are often the button messages that guides the visitors about the necessary actions needed to be taken, such as register free, send now etc. Its recommended creating attractive CTA’s to enhance user activity.
   • Readability- There is no use of placing content, if its not visible enough to read. Use clear fonts with readable font sizes. Include proper white spaces wherever needed.

4. Prepare for Search Engines

   One of the most beneficial way to engage more visitors and popularity for a business is, getting their site ranked at a good rank in search engine page results. Though it’s a job which can be completed by an SEO expert, one needs to keep SEO strategies in mind before developing a site. Few key elements to be kept in mind are:

   • Keyword research- Google generates page ranking based on keywords and other aspects. The keywords used in a business site should target the services an enterprise provides. Use relevant ones and place them inside the content paragraphs meaningfully.
   • Text- Every type of text whether it’s a blog, about us section, FAQ’s etc should be written keeping SEO purpose in mind. The real trick which needs to be achieved is, finding a perfect way to integrate keywords into text without compromising the content quality.
   • Meta tags- Search engines doesn’t read a website content, instead they focus on meta tags i.e title and description. So, its advised to create rich tags that displays the features of a site and contains relevant keywords.

5. Go Responsive

   Mobile Internet usage stats indicate that Internet users spend more time surfing on mobile devices compared to actual computers. Since mobile search is on a constant rise, its great if you create a site which functions well on both smart phone and laptop devices. A responsive website is guaranteed to have more visitors and better ranking as compared to normal sites.

   Google has recently announced an algorithm that prioritizes mobile-friendly websites on its search result pages. The conclusion that can be drawn out of this is, responsive business sites have a bright future. Most of the website builders, come with built-in editors that can easily enable a mobile version by resizing the layout and design to make it compatible of viewing on smart phones and tablets. While customizing for mobile, pay attention to readability, image resizing, navigation and understandability.

6. Keep Visitors Engaged

   Few businesses develop a site, make it go live and sits back ideally thinking the development process is over now. But, that’s not the true fact. The actual job starts once the website goes live, that is to attract more and more visitors. Attracting and maintaining customers is quite a big challenge which needs to be achieved at every cost. This can be done by enhancing site features and keeping the content unique, relevant and dynamic. Few sections that can help in engaging visitors are:

   • Blog –Blogs are written either daily, weekly or monthly depending upon the need. Writing a blog offers many valuable benefits. It allows a business to communicate any message or ideas in a much personal way. Blogs are also helpful in improving SEO ranks, as they are commonly optimized with keywords.
   • Social Feed –For higher conversions and user engagement, social media advertisements and feeds play a crucial role. Attach social media accounts of a business to the professional website by providing link buttons such as twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. This will encourage visitors to connect to your business profile from other platforms except the website itself.

A professional website is a must have desire of every business, whether small or large. Many times, an enterprise isn’t financially too sound to hire an expensive web agency, in order to develop a business website. These were the detailed ordered steps which can help in building an ultimate professional site with the help of a website builder tool.

Iron Paper is a full service web design company in Toronto, that offers world-class WordPress development and effective SEO solutions to its clients at budget prices.