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

It’s an exciting step for your business, commissioning a new website, but to get the best result, there’s a good degree of preparation that needs to happen before you send out that brief. We’ve been building websites for over ten years and have pulled together our pearls of wisdom to help you.

Ensure that you are clear on the purpose of the website for your business

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.

Define your content strategy

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?

Be clear early on whether you need any transactional processes

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.

Consider your long-term brand when looking at the design for your website

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.

Can your new website help to solve a current business challenge?

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!

Need help? If you need a new website or have a business challenge that is holding you back, we could help you solve it through technology.

We are Olamalu, Drupal experts and experienced web developers. We’re a friendly and down to earth team based in West Oxfordshire, who work together to achieve brilliant outcomes. We’ve been building websites and designing tailormade tech solutions for a huge range of different challenges for over 10 years. We work alongside clients and really get under the skin of the business, understanding not just what is needed now, but also how to plan ahead and consider the business needs in the future. If you want to get in touch with us, visit our website www.olamalu.com

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