Your website defines your brand as much, if not more, than your marketing or sales operations. Any business with an undesirable website risks losing all standing among consumers.

Users do not visit a company website to enjoy its style and admire its functionality. They want to do something! Whether they are online to buy, to learn, or to enjoy, the job of your website is to help them achieve that particular goal.

The Core Model argues that websites should be designed from the users’ point of view with an emphasis on the core tasks that users want to do.

The Core Model can create a website that boosts brand potential and drive sales. Here’s the secret to how to design a website in seven steps:

Discover Your Business Goals and User Goals

You must first determine two sets of goals: your business objectives and the various tasks users want to do on your website. Make sure that your goals for your website are both prioritized and measurable. The core model integrates both of these goals sets to create your website.

Plan Your Information Architecture

The next step is designing its structural framework and fundamental organization. This framework, called Information Architecture, determines how users navigate your website. For instance, I.A. would determine what categories should go in the navigation at the top of the web page. It would also determine what links are in the footer.

Create a Content Model

Content modeling focuses on organizing the written, audio, and video content that appears on web pages. Content models represent the connections that exist between the content types. The term “content-type” applies to any component, asset, or unit of information that is valuable within a specific organization, market sector, or industry. In show business, content types might include specific films, television programs, or songs.

Bake SEO into the Website’s Foundation

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) increases online visibility by ensuring that people who use Google or another search engine sees your website near the top of the page when they seek out relevant content online.

Leading search engines like Google give ranking preference to websites that are designed for mobile or responsive layouts that fit whatever device a user chooses. 

SEO also favors websites that group content into content clusters, which feature a single “pillar” page that acts as hubs for other pages with a common overarching content topic. 

The URLs for each page should include one or more relevant keywords. Be sure to keep things simple and avoid the pitfalls that come with over-optimization. In other words, trying to cram too many keywords into your URL will actually hurt your SEO results.

Optimize for Conversions

To drive conversions, you must fine-tune all aspects of your website with a focus on providing exceptional user experience. From offering easy navigation to ensuring speedy clicks, there are plenty of ways to optimize the user experience. 

An evaluation of overall user experience that has recently garnered a significant amount of attention is “dwell time.” This metric of online data analysis measures the total time that a user spends on your website and each of its individual pages before returning to the Google search. Remember that it is far more important to create a great user experience that leads to conversions/sales that it is to keep a user engaged on your website.

Prepare Relevant, Useful Content

People are drawn to websites that provide content that they find both relevant and useful. Look to various authorities, influencers, and thought leaders in your chosen market or field; it might prove helpful to study the best and most effective content that your closest competitors are posting. Alternatively, by surveying your audience base, you can post content that better aligns with its interests and needs. Content comes in the form of audio, video, pictorial, and infographic content, as well as written material.

Schedule Regular Content and Design Updates

Consumers shy away from businesses with websites that are clunky or out of date. Only attach your brand to a functional website that reflects your values. You should also have a website that meets or exceeds all consumer expectations. 

When it comes to increasing the efficiency of an online property, nothing can beat the value of building your website properly from scratch.

Take SEO benefits, for example. It is far more difficult and expensive to add SEO infrastructure to an existing website than it is to plan and integrate SEO into the initial design stages of a brand new website. When SEO is organically baked into your original site, you can avoid the future URL optimization that leads to redirect chains that impair your search engine results.

Small business owners can save a considerable amount of time and money by designing their websites to drive conversations immediately and to allow for ongoing optimization as their chosen market sectors and audiences continue to evolve.

Zimmer Marketing is a full service marketing company Joplin MO providing SEO, Web Site Development, SEM campaigns, OTT, Pre-Roll video services, video production, social media management, and marketing, and the most listened to radio stations in the 4-State area with 300,000 listeners every month.