Effective Business Website Development Process

Step 1: Personas

Thoroughly understanding your target market groups (visitors) and developing a persona for each segment is key to building a successful website or landing page. By researching what they want, how they think and talk, how they prefer to communicate, how they like to buy things, their typical buying cycle and other elements of their personality we can determine which direction to take the site.

Once we have answers to these questions, the personas practically tell you what to do in the development and layout of a website.

Step 2: Wireframing

With completed Personas in hand we can now begin to develop a wireframe for our site. A wireframe is a foundational, graphic representation of your future website. Looking much like a corporate organizational chart, this blueprint gives us our first look at our potential scent trails and conversion funnels through which our future visitors will be taken.

The wireframe allows us to group content together, or develop the proper internal links for related content page groups, based on information already developed in our personas.

Step 3: Content Development

Content Development and Storyboarding are both developed somewhat simultaneously. Our completed wireframe is the basic blueprint upon which the content, scent trails, and conversion funnels will be built.

Content Development is done using the personas created for the site as our guideline(s). Since we now know through our persona research what type of stimulus each persona grouping prefers we can begin to develop our scent trails and funnels with those traits in mind. While the different persona types may all be after the same end-result on your website they all have very different methods in which they look for and process information to get to the same finish line. Content development is all about developing the right content for each of those personas, giving them visual clues to head them in the right direction so that they “see” what you want them to see in the way they’re used to “seeing” it. We’re attempting to tell them our story in the language they use to interface with the rest of the world.

The default definition for “content” has traditionally meant text. Content can take many forms, however, including static photos, drawings, 3-D image, videos, podcasts, and social media links. Any way can be used to communicate and draw the attention of a specific persona-type to a bit of content that says to the visitor, “Here I am, your next step; click me!”.

Step 3.5: Storyboarding

As scent trails and conversion funnels are developed they are hung on the wireframe blueprint. Links between pages are mapped, content is positioned on individual pages, and the substance of the website begins to take shape.

Along the path to completion the developing storyboard is presented to the client for feedback and approval. As the assembly and creation of content wanes, the work of placement, links, scent trail and conversion funnel placement increases.

Once content has reached a probable state of final positioning we can begin to put a face on the website. The “look and feel” of the site is already in place once content placement if finished. All that remains is a pleasing face on the underlying structure that is your website.

Once that final element of the storyboard has been added and the client has signed off on content, its’ placement, the logic behind the scent trails and conversion funnels, and other structural elements, what we have is a completely finished website still in storyboard format. We have yet to add that singular component that brings the site to life; programming!

Step 4: Programming

Finally we arrive at the point in the birthing of a website where we add the code that will bring it to life. Note that the code is added at the end of the design process, and our programmer is not being tasked with creating the look and feel of the site on any level. We’re going to let the website programmer do what he does best—write programming code! When he finishes his work the website will look exactly as it did at the time the final storyboard proof was approved except that it will now be a functional, live, website.

Step 5: Testing/Tracking

Website testing is called A/B Testing or Multivariable Testing. A/B Testing attempts to determine which of two web-page samples produces better results. Multivariable Testing can test one or more elements of a page in an unlimited number of page layout variations to determine the best content elements and/or design draws the best response from actual site visitors.

Tracking, or web analytics, is the process of determining what happened on a website during a given period of time. Half science, half art, the process of gathering data is done in a number of different ways, the lion’s share of it being gathered by a primary analytics software package. Additional information may be gathered from other sources and combined with the analytics software output, to be analyzed by a practitioner for the obvious and the inferred (this is where the “art” comes into play) actions of the site visitors.

Both testing and tracking are on-going events much like any other key function of a business will undergo. Operations will test new ways of doing things and measure the results to find new and better ways of achieving higher results. Accounting then tracks the overall effort and verifies the results.

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Phillip Crum is the Chief Idea Officer of MarketingMeasure located at 2414 Arbuckle Court Dallas, TX 75229, and is committed to the idea of helping small business owners do a better job of finding their next customer or client. He and his two sons,Tyler and Preston, also own a Sir Speedy Printing franchise and employ those additional capabilities in the overall marketing services menu of offerings. Phillip can be reached at 214-213-7445, or pcrum@MarketingMeasure.com.