Developing a new website can be a difficult under taking. There are a lot of decision to make and lots of stuff to coordinate. The trick is starting the whole process from the proper angle.

The biggest mistake I see people make is that they have a personal attachment to the way a website looks. This is a big mistake. You have to keep in mind that the website is not for you. It’s for your customers. They are the ones that buy your products. If the website design you like isn’t something that your potential customer’s like you’re screwed. A website should be looked at in a similar light as an ad. Might sound kinda crazy but that in essence is what your website is. It’s out there to attract people, build your brand and drive sales not stroke your ego.

Ads are developed on the basis of who your core customers are. Demographics, income, marital status, etc, etc. The better you know your core audience the better you can speak to them. You should do the same with your website. If you’re redesigning a website you should look at your analytics data to help you make key decisions on the basic site and variations to test. Let the way your customers used your old site tell you where you need to improve the new one. Too often I see websites that are designed and coded without the input of an SEO or a marketer. SEO and marketing are one of the most important elements of a website. If you ignore them from the beginning chances are you’ll get results that are much lower than you expect or are possible. Websites should be designed properly from the beginning with an eye toward long term SEO and marketing because that is what it’s meant to do. SEO and marketability are not, nor should they ever be an after thought.

Once you have gathered that data and really looked it yourself, or had someone look it over. You then need to coordinate and make the people involved (designer, programmer/coder, marketer and SEO) work together. Because this is a business website that must produce sales the marketer/SEO should have final say as to what or how something is designed based on their experience and data to back it up. All coding needs to be SEO friendly. If the coder says something can’t be done in an SEO friendly way then you need to find a new coder because they don’t have the necessary experience to get the best results from your website. Of course all the design elements and other decisions need to approved by you. If anyone in the group has a suggestion or something that they feel should be incorporated they need to be able to explain to you why it should be there. If they can’t chances are it’s a personal like. As you can see communication is key.

So here are the main things to keep in mind when developing a new website

1. Dont get personally attached to the website. Remember this is a marketing and sales vehicle much like an ad. Look at it much the same way.
2. Design it with marketing and SEO in mind from the beginning. After the initail design and launch of the website that’s the vast majority of its job so design it in from the start.
3. Base all decisions on your core customers. They are the ones your website is for not you. If you make them happy they’ll buy your products
4. Back up all decisions made with data. That way you have a solid reason as to why you should do something and a good starting point to improve from.
5. Be prepared to run tests to find what produces the best results. Come up with variations that you want to test before it launches. That way you can let your customers tell you how to improve your website from the beginning.
6. And last but not least ALWAYS keep your customers wants and needs in mind after all they are the one that make your business grow.

By far the most common question I get asked is “what is SEO?”. In this article I’ll explain it in a way that anybody can understand the basic idea of what SEO really is.


First SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It basically means designing a website, through the words and links that are on it and pointing to it, in such a way that the machines looking at everything can easily tell exactly what your website is about. To take it one step further it’s about doing the same thing for each of the pages within your website as well.


Within SEO there are a few sub-categories the first is on-site or on-page SEO which is about designing your site properly so it’s easy for the machines the search engines use to tell what each page on your site is about. Each page should be very specific and only about one topic. You do that so there is little to no chance of confusing the machines and having them categorize your page the wrong way. As an example you don’t want your hairless guinea pig page to show up when someone searches for hamsters.

This can happen if you write about hamsters on that page even if you only reference them and it makes sense to you. Remember machines don’t think they just do as they are programmed and infer nothing.


The next sub-category of SEO is off page optimization
. This refers to other websites that link (point) to you and the way they do it. The search engines look at the site(s) that link to you (what they’re about basically) who owns them and the way they link to you. There are a few other things as well but I’ll get into those in a later article. This is a way for them to see what everybody else on the internet thinks about your site – if people like your site they will tend to link to it and with that link tell others what they think your site is about through the words that you have to click on the go to your website. (links are the blue underlined words and/or pictures you click on to be taken to a different page or website).


The third major category of SEO is SEM or search engine marketing. This is mainly about getting the people that visit your site to do what you want them to. If you sell stuff it’s about getting them to buy from you. If you write a newsletter it’s about getting them to subscribe to your newsletter and things like that. Most traffic to a website comes from the various search engines so that is why it’s called search engine marketing instead of just plain old marketing. Someone that understands SEM help you design your website so that people can look around very easily and are very comfortable. So comfortable in fact that they trust you enough to take whatever step you want them to.


With that information you should have a good basic understanding of what SEO is all about and how it can help your website and business.