5 Steps to a Successful Website Launch

Every company, organization, or professional needs a strong online presence to attract an audience, build recognition, and succeed at selling online, providing information, or attracting members. From the first thoughts of website design to the ongoing website maintenance process, these five steps will help you have a strong website launch that leads to ever-growing levels of success in reaching your unique goals.

1 – Know Your Brand Message

Website design does not start with layouts and color schemes. It begins by identifying what message you want the site to convey to visitors. An e-commerce site may focus on instilling trust and pushing for sales. A team website may drum up support and convince people to join in. Every factor that goes into the creation of a successful site launch depends on understanding what you want the results to look like.

Brand messages combine on-site actions, such as purchasing a product or filling out an email newsletter form, with emotion. Make visitors comfortable, instill trust in your brand, and create a strong association between the brand identity and value.

2 – Know Your Marketing Plan

Understand your most effective marketing methods and make sure the website facilitates their use. Search engine optimization (SEO) infiltrates every aspect of building a quality site and creating content, as well as being an incredibly powerful way to get organic traffic. Brand recognition campaigns get a boost with unique color schemes, typography, and logo design that marries the website to any display advertising down the road. The online world offers many types of marketing, and offline advertising comes into play too. Launching a website without a plan to grow an audience is frequently a waste of time.

3 – Know Your Sales Funnel

Sales funnel attract attention and push site visitors through a carefully-constructed process toward a purchase, signup, or another goal. While charity groups, sports teams, and churches are not trying to sell, they still make use of a funnel to convert people. Map out the path and make sure the website leads people who land on it toward the end goal. What feature is the mouth of your funnel? Maybe it’s a content-rich blog or a landing page with obvious signup forms.

4 – Know Your Maintenance Needs

A big part of succeeding for the long term with a site launch is understanding what it takes to keep things running. Is troubleshooting problems something you can handle yourself or do you need a professional team on your side to help? How much time will everything take away from other business or organization growth tasks? The answers to these questions contribute to overall website cost as well.

5 – Know Your Budget

For businesses that sell products or services, the expectation is to make back the cost of the website with the money you bring in. For non-commerce site owners, there is no promise of recompense in most cases. No matter why you need a website, ignoring a reasonable budget is a bad mistake to make.

Professional-quality website design costs money. However, the amount can change considerably depending on the style, size, and design options included. Also, do not forget to factor in ongoing maintenance needs, content creation, or updating when you create a budget for your online presence.

A successful website launch requires all five of these things in conjunction if you want to reach the biggest targeted audience and convince them to take action. A great option for site building that makes these simpler is the WordPress content management system (CMS). This most popular CMS in the world not only provides professional-level structure and content sharing capabilities, but it is also highly intuitive when it comes to website maintenance and less expensive than other options. WordPress is trusted by so many site owners because it works.

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