Map Out Seven-Day Plan to Get Your Website Ready
How to make a website: Making websites is a kind of tricky thing today. They’re a little bit more complicated than they’ve ever been. A lot of times, a website in the past was just thrown up with a bit of content and some creative designs and it was effective because the internet was a lot smaller then.
The essence of this blog post is how to get your website made in seven days or less.
Now, it’s getting more and more complicated by every passing minute and especially, the influence of social media and how conversation around your websites have really evolved things. Social media and the conversation around content is almost or more important than your website itself.
Get Started With Your Website Ideas
Really on day one, it’s about a site map. Creating a map of the content that you want included in your website is the first step to start with. Spend a couple of hours at a white board where you’re sketching out with a marker what you think the website should look like. The different things that will go into your website that you know are important like:
- Website navigation
- The page layouts
- Short & informative videos
You can do this with someone who is an expert in such a thing like a usability expert or an information architect or you can just do it yourself to get started with your ideas.
Day One Plan
On day one of ‘How to make a website’, create the site map and wire framing of your website. Remember that textually organized or visual site map will let your website visitors navigate through your site to get the info they have been looking for. You may do it yourself or you can involve an interactive expert to help you create site map of your website. For wire framing, just focus on:
- Variety of displayed information
- Selected range of available functions
- Comparative value of functions and info
- Standard directions to display information
- Effect of multiple rules on displayed information
This is what you will do on day one to have a great start with your website making plan.
Day Two Plan
Engage with your content writer and your creative designer. These two steps especially writing can be awfully complicated and time consuming if you’re starting from scratch.
A lot of times, a good way to start with a website is by taking some of the materials you already have across your organization like sales presentations or other collateral product brochures and things like that.
You can even just sit down, like I’m doing here, recording your own talk, especially if you’re a subject matter expert. Just talk your products or talk your message and take that information and transcribe it into content. That’s a good way to get started really fast. Day two is all about creative design and content.
Day Three Plan
Now you start engaging the developer. In a lot of cases, the best way to approach website development now is a kind of the 80/20 rule. Go and find a template that is really effective and captures 80% of what you want your website to be. Therefore, you’re only changing 20% of it.
Getting a website up fast is really about not doing development. You want to find a template that works, probably on WordPress because:
- It’s fast
- It’s effective
- It’s the best content management system out there.
Find a template on the third day of your plan on how to make a website in seven days or less.
Day Four Plan
This is when you implement everything nicely.
- You put the website together.
- You put the content in.
- You start doing some testing.
- You start laying it out.
If you’re going on a super-fast agile approach here where you have a website developed in seven days or less, day four is really about pulling it together and putting it together fast.
Websites don’t have to be perfect on the first day you bring them up, but you just have to have content in there. Its important in ‘how to make a website’.
Day Five Plan
On day five, you are going to launch your website. Launching your website on day five is on an aggressive timeline by far, but the whole idea here is to use existing materials and use templates that you already have in place. In this way, you can get it up quickly without doing a lot of work until you actually have something that’s established.
There’re a lot of reasons to get momentum and have a website up quickly, and how to make a website the quickest. And the most effective way is just by using templates and using your existing content.
Day Six Plan
Day six is about promotion and getting some back links. Websites don’t really exist on the internet until the search engines are actually coming to have a look. There’s a term called ‘Spidering’. When a search engine comes and finds your website like Google comes and finds your website. Search engines spider your website.
They come and they understand all the pages. They take a look at the content and they start indexing that content into their search engines so that when a person Googles, how to make a website in seven days or less, the content on your website is found. That’s very important on how to make a website. That’s day six.
Day Seven Plan
Day seven then is what I call wash and repeat. You put this website up extremely fast. Now you go back in on day seven and start filling in some of the holes where maybe you just had some place holder content, where you were a little bit rough in how you put things together.
The whole idea of day seven is going in and cleaning things up and getting into the idea that websites are never finished. They’re just something that you continuously work on and the whole idea of websites nowadays is:
- Get websites up fast
- Use templates
So, go in and understand that websites will be a continuous process that you work on forever. That is the blog post for how to make a website in seven days or less.
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