How to deliver a website that works for your business

A structured approach to delivering enterprise level website experiences that have a positive return on investment

Building a web presence is not just a process that get’s you a great looking website and nor is it something you can put up and forget about. Achieving or even nailing the website customer experience takes planning and commitment.

Here are 5 key steps to consider when developing web platform experiences that add value to your business and have a positive impact on your customers.

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Strategy

To be able to deliver real value to the business, you need to be able to clearly articulate your website strategy, what it’s purpose is, what does conversion mean and who are you targeting.

Business objectives need to align with audience objectives, otherwise the result will be high bounce rates and your website quickly dropping down the rankings in search results.

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UX / CX

Customers expect a refined user journey across all their devices when interacting with a business online. Digital channels offer organisations opportunities to create experiences that go beyond those expectations. 

It is the experiences that surprise and delight the customer and add real value that can make a business stand out in a very crowded global marketplace. 

The UX process helps identify your audience in detail, understand their requirements and develop frictionless user journeys that are rewarding.

The UX toolkit includes the development of audience personas, use cases, prototypes and lot’s of testing.

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Development

Most businesses need to see real value from their investment in website infrastructure quickly. Large and complex websites can be in production for many months and if every small requirement is going to be delivered before the site goes live, this can stretch into years.

An Agile approach to development is the fastest way to deliver value back to the business quickly. The Agile methodology requires the business to prioritise the requirements and deliver them in stages (sprints), enabling the identification of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Get a viable site live allows you to start collecting data and ensuring the solution delivers on the strategy.

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Reporting and Optimisation

It seems obvious, launch a website and report on how it’s performing and make incremental changes where required to improve the user experience. But so few businesses do this well. The typical approach is to set up Google Analytics and get an automated report that provides a very simple view of the traffic coming to the site.

A more structured and effective report would close the loop with the strategy and report on how effective the platform is in delivering on it’s objectives, both for the business and for the audience. Setting up events based on use cases can quickly identify where users are getting stuck, allowing you to make incremental improvements and assess the impact of those changes.

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Support

Key to getting long term results from your experience platforms is to ensure the technology it is running on is up to date and performing effectively. The rapid change in hardware and software means you can quickly fall behind in terms of efficient delivery of information over the internet, opening you up to security breaches or a demotion by Google.

Developing a website is relatively straightforward. But by following this structured approach, you will deliver a solution that adds significant value to your business and provides your customers with a seamless and rewarding user experience.

Get in touch if you’d like to chat to our team about how we might be able to support you to deliver digital solutions that work for you and for your audiences.

 

Az Yousaf, Managing Director

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