One day, your lightbulb moment hits, and you have the perfect idea for a new business that is sure to succeed. With this new entrepreneurial energy, you decide you need to set up a website immediately. 

Slow down! Yes, a website is essential for growing a business, but before you start signing up for services, choosing templates, and going too deep, there are a few steps you can take to make this process more efficient and more effective in the long term. 

These 4 pre-website building steps can help you save time and money on your website creation journey, and help you create a website that engages your users, performs well in search results, and helps your brilliant business continue to grow! 

Step 1: Identifying Your Website Type

Although this step may seem obvious and easy, it's an important foundation to your website building process. What kind of website do you need? And what will it's main purpose be?

Types of website include e-commerce, portfolio, blog, informational, databases, and more. It's important to identify early what type of website you need for your business in order to choose how you build the website. 

Understanding the purpose of your website will help define the content and structure. Is the website meant to sell products? Collect leads? Spread information or brand recognition? It's likely that your website will serve a combination of purposes, but it's important to define the main purpose before building.

Step 2: Understanding Your Audience, Analyzing Your Competitors, and Crafting Your Unique Value Proposition

Before investing time and money into a business, it's important to understand where your business fits into the market, and how it can support the target audience better or differently than competitors.

This research is crucial for your business success, and will also help you develop your brand, messaging, website structure, and much more.

Target Audience

Your target audience is the group of people who would be interesting in purchasing your products or services. It's important to know your audience inside and out! The better you know your audience, the better you can serve their needs, craft engaging messaging, and support their buying journey.

Your website might be, for many visitors, the first time they are introduced to your business, so it's important that you show that you understand their needs, wants, and expectations. 

Researching your audience can include: 

  • Demographics including where they live, age, and educational background
  • Ethics and morals
  • Hobbies and interests 
  • Fears, insecurities, daily challenges 
  • Aspirations and goals

We've created a comprehensive audience persona worksheet to help you clearly define who you are speaking to in order to better craft your website messaging and understand what kind of website you need to build to support this audience.

Competitor Analysis

An important step in your business development is analyzing your competition. Competitor analysis can help you better understand your audience frustrations, desires, and expectations, and help in the development of your messaging and brand. 

Study how your competitors speak about their business, and check out reviews from their customers to understand what they like and dislike.

What Sets You Apart?

So now that you know your audience and competitors inside and out, it should hopefully have become clear where you fit into the market, and what makes you different (and ideally better!) than you competition. 

Your UVP (Unique Value Proposition) is a concise statement of what sets you apart. Your UVP should quickly and easily communicate your business's value to your users. Your UVP will be an important part of your website's messaging, so it's crucial to take some time to develop a strong statement.

We've created a UVP statement builder to help you develop a clear statement of what sets your business apart!

Step 3: Finding Inspiration and Starting to Develop Your Brand

Your website, brand, and business are creative endeavours! A strong brand can help build a relationship and trust between your business and your audience, so it's important to take some time to develop your branding.

Create a Vision Board

The first step in developing your brand is finding inspiration and putting everything together in a vision board. Think about your audience, your value proposition, and the overall feeling you want your brand to evoke. You can explore images, design concepts, colours, animations, quotes, fonts, whatever you feel like fits your business voice. 

Here are few places you can go for inspiration: 

Have a general understanding of the ✨vibes✨ you want for your brand and website will help you save time when working with a designer or searching for templates.

Consider Your Industry

There are certain design and brand expectations that accompany different industries. Although it's important to stand out with a strong brand, maintaining some level of industry standard expectation may be an important to building trust from potential customers. 

For example, if you want to start a workplace consulting business, it's important that your brand and website express a level of professionalism. Keep this in mind when working on your brand.

While you're conducting your competitor research, make sure to take note of the branding and design used on their websites. This will help you understand industry standards, and help you determine what you like and dislike.

Creating a Brand Kit

A brand kit is a collection of guidelines and visual assets for your business including a logo, colour palette, font combinations, and examples of how these elements are used across various media and channels. Your brand kit ensures that your marketing materials like your website and social media platforms all have a cohesive and recognizable feel.

Investing time in creating a brand kit (either by hiring a branding designer or doing it yourself) can save you time, money, and help you develop a stronger relationship with your users down the road. Having an established brand kit before building your website or working with a web designer can make the process much more efficient. 

If your brand is a crucial part of your business, it is probably worth it to hire a branding professional to help the development. If you brand is less important to your business needs, there are many tools that can help you create logos, font combinations, and colour palettes to help you get started including: 

Check out our Top 50 Font Combinations for tons of recommendations on free Google fonts. 

Step 4: Custom Development, Working with a Designer, or Choosing No-Code Tools and Templates

There are many avenues to take to create a website, and the right avenue for you and your business depends on your resources and needs. 

Some of the ways to build and design a website include designing the website using a design software and custom coding the website, using a pre-built template and inputting your content, or using a no-code, drag-and-drop website editor to design your site without any code at all.

Many business owners invest in working with a designer on branding specialist for their brand, a web designer, and a developer to bring their website to life. Other business owners decide to take on some of the work themselves by using a no-code tool or templates to make the process way less technically challenging. 

Here are a few things to think about when choosing how you want to build you website.

Consider Your Resources and Constraints

Creating a website can take a lot of time, money, and skill. It's important to consider these constraints when deciding how you want to go about building your site. 

First, it's important to know your budget. Hiring a web designer and/or web developer can be very expensive, depending on your needs. Having a set budget can help you determine your minimum requirements. Number of pages, complexities of the design, and technical requirements can all impact the price of the website. Using a no-code tool or template is much cheaper, however that can come with limitations (to be discussed below). 

Next, think about your timeline. Do you need a website right away? Using a template or no-code tool is significantly faster than working with a designer/developer, but you might not get the results you want.

Lastly, consider your skill level. Creating a high-performing website with a beautiful design and killer content can be a tall order! Although it's easier than ever to create websites with platforms like Pagecloud, it's still important to reflect on your skill level when it comes to design, writing, and overall level of comfortability using online tools. 

Technical Needs

If your business relies on a website with highly specialized features or unique integrations such as large databases, community forums, customer accounts, and more, you are likely going to require custom development. No-code tools or templates are less likely to be able to support complex features. 

If your website requires more limited functionality, using a no-code tool is a great option! No-code platforms are also (usually) built to ensure your website is fast and secure, making on-going technical management easier.

Creative and Brand Requirements

Similarly to technical needs, if your business relies on your unique and highly recognizable branding, investing in custom design/development is likely the way to go. Going custom can ensure you have the flexibility to bring your brand to life. 

Using a template or no-code tool can sometimes restrict your creative flexibility. These days, it's not uncommon to find similar looking websites that use the same template. However, as no-code platforms get more powerful, your design flexibility will continue to increase. 

On-Going Management

One of the biggest considerations when choosing how you are going to build your website is the on-going management that continues after you launch. Using your website effectively means continue to create and update content to serve your user's needs. 

If you opted to have your website custom coded or designed on a complex platform, it might be more difficult to make even small changes like editing text or swapping out images. This means you may become reliant on outsourcing which can be costly and time consuming. However, if your business is continuing to grow, and your site requires new custom features as you scale, a developer can continue to work on the website, and you won't be restricted by the features of website builder. 

Managing a website created on a visual website builder like Pagecloud is much easier. You can easily add new pages, update content, start a blog, a more. Having full control over your website is important to many hands-on business owners. 

Next Steps

Once you've considered these 4 steps, you should be well set up to start your website building journey! You have have an understanding of your website's purpose, target audience and messaging, and technical and creative requirements. 

If you're interested in trying a no-code website builder, sign up for a totally free account with Pagecloud. 

If you think you need help with the design and creation of your website, check out our Crafted by Pagecloud services. 



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Web Design

Website Builder