What do you need to think about before you commission a new website?

A website is a valuable tool, which when used strategically, can make a significant impact on the performance of your business. It’s therefore important from the outset to be clear on what your business objectives are and if/how the website itself can help can you to achieve them. Having a clear purpose from the start is the most important step on your website journey.

Be clear about what your user needs to know about your business through your website. What are your key messages? How do you best communicate them through the website? Do they tie in with your offline communications? What do you want a user to do on your site?

This should come out if you follow points 1 & 2, but determine before you write your brief whether you require your user to be able to undertake transactions such as booking or purchasing on your website. Your web developers can then start planning this early in the build process to allow sufficient time for testing.

Your website is a key communication tool and should feel like your brand. If you are thinking about updating your brand, refreshing colours, fonts etc then do this before you agree a design for your website. It may sound obvious, but it does happen and it costs time and money to change things retrospectively and is frustrating if they could have been done before or in sync with the website build.

This is our favourite top tip and something we get involved in day after day. When you are working through the brief for your new website, consider whether or not you can actually improve your business by using it to solve a challenge. For example, can you automate a manual process such as booking meeting rooms, checking availability for something, ordering catering or booking another type of business service? Could you use your website to join different information sources together such as syncing to a helpline or call centre? Could your website provide some information support to staff through a gated access area? You don’t need to know the technical answer yourselves, but presenting the offline challenges or frustrations you are facing every day in your business to your developers will give them the opportunity to explore technical solutions as a holistic response to your website brief and quite frankly could be a gamechanger for your organisation!