Our Targeted Approach for a Successful Website
We create and design digital experiences that excite both users and organizations. We focus particularly on translating our client’s online ambitions into functional, pleasant, intuitive, and user-centered experiences. We believe in a structured approach. According to our vision, avoiding subjective discussions about taste is crucial when choosing an online strategic partner. Every decision must be well-founded and yield tangible results. Therefore, our design phase comes after a thorough inventory/discovery phase.
In this phase, we map out both the organization’s objectives and potential goals of the visitors. This allows us to understand where they logically converge. To gain deep insights and make thoughtful choices, we rely on existing data and research. We use existing studies whenever possible, but if there are gaps, we fill them in.
Preparing Yourself: Where to Begin?
Imagine: you’re an entrepreneur in a rapidly growing company, and it’s clear your website needs a refresh. Where should you start the development process?
Before seeking a partner to execute the project, it’s good to organize what you think is important. Don’t forget to ask for input from people in your organization. Each department has different goals and therefore different desires for the company website.
Who is your target audience? Define the buying personas.
Determining buying personas is a critical step in the web development process. These personas are detailed representations of your ideal customers and form the cornerstone of a successful digital strategy.
By defining buying personas, you can better understand who will visit your website, what motivates them, what problems they want to solve, and what information they’re seeking. This insight enables you to determine focused content and features that engage visitors and increase their involvement.
Specify your website’s goals and inventory your requirements.
What purpose or purposes does your website serve? Is it purely informational, or will services and/or products be sold in an e-commerce section? Do you want the website to be interactive, a showcase website, or simply the online business card of your company?
Are you starting from scratch, or can you reuse parts of your current website?
If you already have a corporate website, consider that developing any website takes time and effort. Often, careful thought has already been given, and something has been gained from that. Map out what works and what doesn’t on your current website. Can you reuse or optimize anything?
Research the competition and the market’s desires.
It might seem so obvious that you might forget it but take a good look at what your competition is doing—what works and what doesn’t for them. What can you do smarter and more efficiently than your competition?
Also, consider what visually appeals to you and why. Does this align with your brand identity, or do you want to modify the brand identity? Remember that while a visually appealing website is nice to look at, visitors benefit more from a well-functioning website with intuitive navigation, allowing them to quickly find what they’re looking for.
Align your digital strategy with your long-term ambitions.
If you’re planning to use your website as an e-commerce platform and want to compete with your peers by focusing heavily on SEO, this needs to be considered in all development aspects. Unfortunately, this is often overlooked.
Can you easily create landing pages for external ad campaigns, track everything effectively, want a chat function on the website, or an extensive FAQ so customers can easily find the information they need without contacting your support department?
Once you’ve done the groundwork, look for a partner.
There are many parties involved in web development. Each agency has a different approach and expertise, depending on their vision, target market, and, of course, the knowledge and experience of their employees.
Cloudsuppliers’ Vision
Cloudsuppliers follows a specific vision when developing websites. Throughout each phase of development, the customer and their preferences are central. We discuss every aspect and take on an advisory role, drawing on our knowledge of the hosting market, among other things.
Cloudsuppliers aims to utilize standard techniques as much as possible, supplemented with customizations when necessary. The main principle is that the customer should be able to manage and maintain the website on a daily basis themselves. This includes formatting and adding pages, updating the CMS (components), adding a blog post, etc.
In practice, we often encounter projects developed by other agencies where daily management can only be handled by an (expensive) developer. Whether this situation is intentional or unintentional on the part of the developer, we’ll leave that aside.
Cloudsuppliers believes that the customer should never be tied to a development partner if self-management is required or if they’re not satisfied with the partner.
Once you’ve chosen a partner, what’s next?
After an extensive intake and gathering of all requirements, we create a requirement document. This document captures all desires and necessities.
Based on this document, a functional wireframe design of the website is created, including the necessary navigation (pages), layout, and structure.
Once everything is approved, the initial design is created based on this wireframe design and the brand identity. Once the design is fully approved, actual development can commence. The website is now built.
First, 3 to 4 basic pages are produced for desktop, tablet, and mobile. After completing the basic design, an input round can be scheduled for discussions within your organization involving influencers, stakeholders, and implementers to ensure everything is on the right track.
Once everything is approved, all required pages are formatted, and functionality is added.
Following this, everything is thoroughly reviewed and tested, and the site is presented to the customer. After the customer’s approval, the website can go live, becoming part of the established digital strategy!
Note: Cloudsuppliers heavily relies on WordPress. Unless specific needs or requirements call for a different approach, we don’t use other Content Management Systems. WordPress is familiar to us, allowing us to create well-functioning marketing or sales funnels and integrate them with popular Marketing Automation systems. Depending on factors such as goals and budget, we may use existing WordPress themes and enhance them with customizations for specific functionality, or we may provide entirely custom solutions. The main consideration is always that a daily administrator with minimal WordPress knowledge should be able to update and manage the site.
Want to know more? Contact us today!
