A few tips to get off to a good start in creating your website.
Creating a website often generates a lot of enthusiasm, but it can also lead to haste. Because we immediately want to see visual elements, we sometimes jump into designing pages without thinking too much.
But creating or redesigning a website is much more than a design exercise: be careful not to skip any stages!
Many companies waste a lot of time and money by embarking on this adventure with little knowledge, ending up with a site that ultimately fails to fulfill its initial mission: to provide visibility for the company, attract new customers and convey an image that is true to its values.
At Coteries, thanks to our collaborative approach, you remain involved at every stage in the creation of your website.
This way, you focus on your expertise and bring all the knowledge of your company, your customers and your industry to the table. And you share your perspective and strategy with us, so that we can fully understand your business and the challenges it faces.
Our web design, UX, development, copywriting and marketing experts will work with you to translate all this into an attractive and effective web presence.
This sharing of knowledge and responsibilities is key to producing a high-quality website that responds perfectly to the realities of your market.
So, are you ready to discover the journey we take with each and every one of our customers?
Design your website in 7 steps
1. Clarifying requirements and scoping
As with any project, before anything else it's important to clarify what you want to do, how you want to do it and why you want to do it.
So every website should start with a brief! This stage is vital to ensure that you're heading in the right direction and that your site is relevant.
This document, which acts as a common thread, is essential for establishing mutual understanding between all those involved and avoiding misunderstandings and unpleasant surprises.
Writing the brief allows you to raise crucial questions about a range of aspects, including :
- the identity of your company and that of your customers
- the objectives and challenges of your website
- your competitors
- your design inspirations
- your content
- your technical requirements (hosting, domain name, specific functionalities)
- your requirements for analyzing and optimizing traffic to your site
- your time and budget constraints
- the person responsible for your project
At Coteries, we've created our own brief template to help our customers provide all the information they need to make their website a success.
Once these elements are perfectly clear to everyone involved, it's time to get down to the scoping and planning!
To ensure efficient project management, we've developed our own web assistant, enabling you to manage the schedule, everyone's tasks, deadlines and tickets, for example.
Over the years, we have experimented with various solutions and methodologies to improve the management of our projects and collaboration with our customers.
For website design, we draw inspiration from the Scrum method, which involves planning short two-week intervals or sprints for each stage of the website creation process.
Each sprint has specific objectives, deliverables and tasks for the stakeholders. In this way, no stage is neglected, dispersion is avoided and concentration is optimized on precise points of the project for better results.
2. Defining personas
Who are you designing your website for? For your business, of course, but also and above all for your future visitors, who are potential or existing customers. But who exactly are they? What are they trying to do or find out by visiting your site?
To answer all these questions, it is very useful to create personas, i.e. fictional characters or typical profiles that are supposed to correspond to your target audience(s). To do this, you need to list as much information about them as possible:
- What is their age?
- Geographical area?
- What is their job title? Are they employed or self-employed? What do they do on a daily basis?
- What channels, media and platforms do they use to obtain information?
- What is their objective, ideally achievable via your service?
- What content would they like to find to meet this objective?
- Which pages would they use to enter your site?
- What actions are they looking to take on your site?
By drawing up a portrait of your users, you ensure that they are at the heart of your website. You are also helping to ensure that the structure of your pages and messages meets all their needs in terms of content and actions to be taken.
That's what a high-quality website is all about!
3. Structuring the website
The structuring of the site is closely linked to the personas. It is at this stage that we elaborate the sitemap, which gives an overview of the entire user journey.
This ensures that all the messages are consistent and relevant, and that the entire user journey is fluid and meets all the needs of the personas.
After the overview, each page is then divided into its constituent sections.
The principle is simple: one section = one message. We then consider how to structure these sections: a text and an image? 3 columns? Icons?
The idea is to be able to link the pages together as much as possible, to position the content so that the personas achieve their objectives and not forget anything. All this helps to prepare the next stage: the mock-ups.
Although modern tools have simplified the technical aspects of website creation, the design challenges remain complex and multi-dimensional.
Visitors have ever-higher expectations in terms of ease of use, speed and accessibility.
So it's crucial to adopt a user-centered approach and put your personal preferences to the side.
Your site should be designed for your customers, not for you!
4. Creation of the website mock-ups
Once your sitemap has been finalized, it's time to move on to creating the mock-up.
Based on the sitemap, we will create the pages of your site using predefined components in the corresponding sections.
We then take the existing content or propose new content. After that, the elements need to be arranged so that the content is consistent with your messages.
Then comes the long-awaited part: the design!
The layout possibilities are endless. However, it is important to pay particular attention to good web design principles to avoid falling into certain pitfalls.
By trying to stand out or innovate without having the necessary web design knowledge, you run the risk of making your site difficult to navigate. Or even worse, your content could become unreadable, or you could end up with responsiveness problems (adapting the content of your site to different screen sizes).
In other words, there's no need to reinvent the wheel here! We take what works in web browsing and adapt it to your brand image. In doing so, we emphasise authenticity and style. That's the real value that will set you apart!
You should also bear in mind that design trends evolve rapidly. By opting for a clean, simple style that follows good web design practice, you can avoid having to update your site too regularly.
5. Developing & Testing
At this stage, you already have a good overview of your site, but that doesn't mean it's finished.
Although tools such as Webflow or Wordpress now allow you to create a website without in-depth programming skills, it is generally necessary to call on the services of a web expert to integrate it into a CMS (see our article Webflow vs Wordpress). And you may also need a developer for certain specific functions on your site.
For example, you may need to add animations or advanced automation, integrate applications (such as ERP) via APIs, complex forms or interactive maps.
Once the development stage is complete, it's time to make sure that everything is working perfectly before going live. This is the time for a series of functional tests:
- Does the site work on all browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc.)?
- Does the site display correctly on all devices (computers, tablets, mobiles)?
- Do all the links work?
- Do the forms send the data correctly and display the right confirmation or error messages?
You can also carry out tests with real users to gather feedback on the user experience and usability of your site.
At Coteries, we try to be as efficient as possible during the development phase so that we can test live and gather qualitative feedback. That's when we realize that some things are right, others not so much, which we would never have been able to identify from the mock-ups alone!
6. Launching and indexing the website
That's it! Your new website is perfectly structured to meet the needs of your future customers. Its design reflects your brand identity and sets you apart from your competitors. Its content is informative, relevant and interesting, and all its functionalities do their job perfectly.
Everything looks ready to go live, but aren't we forgetting something? SEO settings, of course! This is an essential step to increase your chances of getting a good ranking in the search engine results.
To build a solid SEO foundation and improve your site's visibility right from the start, here are the main adjustments we aim to make:
- Add a unique and descriptive title tag (50-60 characters) and meta description (150-160 characters) for each page, containing relevant keywords.
- Check that your URLs are clean, short and contain keywords.
- Check that each page has a unique H1 tag, including the main keyword, as well as H2, H3 tags etc. to ensure that the content is structured in a logical hierarchy.
- Optimize your images for the web (webp format).
- Create a solid internal link structure to help users and search engines navigate the site.
- Generate and submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console to help search engines index your site more efficiently.
- Configure the robots.txt file to indicate which parts of your site search engines can and cannot crawl.
In addition to SEO, we make sure that visitor tracking is in place in relation to the tools you have chosen, and that all this is part of an up-to-date privacy management system, in particular with Axeptio for cookie management.
Once the site is ready and these steps have been completed, we can go live! We'll work with you or your service provider to manage your domain name for the launch date agreed in advance.
Once the site is online, we do another check and make sure that the basic SEO is well integrated.
7. Maintenance and monitoring
It's time to pop the champagne - your website is online! But the adventure doesn't end there. Most of the work has been done, but don't let your brand new site fall by the wayside.
Just like opening a shop or restaurant, you're going to have to attract customers, maintain it, restock it, display current offers, promote it and deliver your services. Your website will also require some maintenance.
Depending on the CMS you have chosen, you will need to update it regularly to avoid any security problems. Webflow makes this considerably easier, as there's no need to update your theme or manage obsolete plugins, as is the case with Wordpress for instance.
The entire design of your new site follows good web design practice, and you'll also benefit from a multitude of daily backups that are very easy to restore.
As well as technical maintenance, keeping your site up to date also involves updating its content (adding articles, news, new features, etc.).
Furthermore, a large part of the monitoring is devoted to increasing and analyzing traffic and conversions.
A series of tools and actions can help you do this. To attract visitors to your site, you can run online advertising campaigns (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads), publish organic content on social networks, write articles on your blog to improve your natural referencing or send out newsletters.
If you don't know how to go about it or where to start, don't hesitate to seek the help of digital marketing specialists, who can help you define a strategy and support you in all of your marketing activities.
You should also regularly analyse the results of your campaigns using tools such as Google Analytics, Fathom or Plausible Analytics, to check that the actions you are taking are serving your objective of increasing traffic and generating leads.
Coteries, your trusted partner for designing your website
You now have an idea of the methodology and process we use to design high-quality websites for our clients. You can also check out some of our work by visiting our portfolio.
If you're looking for a trusted partner to create or redesign your website, don't hesitate to get in touch for a quote or come and meet our team at our offices in the EPFL Innovation Park!
