What do I need for my website?
When you build a website, there are a lot of requirements that you might not be aware of. It’s a fair amount of work that takes some careful planning and while you can definitely DIY it, whether you build it yourself or hire a designer, it’s going to take you a lot longer than you think. Below I go over the things you need to consider when you want a website that’s going to be effective and help grow your business.
(TL:DR) -Make your site appealing, easy to use/navigate, clearly laid out and well structured, informative and helpful, and accessible.
Table of Contents
Website goals
Branding
Messaging
Copy
Images
Website Platform
Design
SEO
Accessibility
1 - What are your website goals?
This is the first thing you need to think about when you’re looking at getting a website up. What do you want to do with it?
Do you want to have an e-commerce site and sell physical or digital items?
Do you want to have an informational site for education purposes?
Are you looking to share information on your services and book clients?
Do you want to have an extensive blog and showcase your recipes or writing?
Do you want to have a gallery for your art or photography?
There’s a ton of reasons to have a website, whatever your business is, and you need to sort out that first. Because that is going to determine everything else that you need, to support that goal. Otherwise you might as well toss a bunch of random ingredients in a bowl and expect a pavlova to appear. It’s about as effective.
2 - Your brand is the heart of your business
And I don’t mean just the look of it. It’s more than colours, fonts and logos. It’s how people think about your business. How they relate to it.
Take Chapman’s Ice Cream. Canadians love this brand of ice cream. It’s not for their logo, their marketing, there’s no roll-up-the-rim cups from a company that’s now heavily foreign owned (yeah Timmy-hos ain’t quite been Canadian for a while). It’s for delicious ice cream but also for a quintessentially Canadian character.
When their factory burned down, they kept their staff paid as they set up a temporary facility within 7 weeks and started to rebuild. They’ve donated millions to their community.
When anti-vaxxers tried to get a boycott going during the pandemic because the company cared about their staff and came out with firm vaccine policies, including a raise for everyone willing to vaccinate, the public showered them with support. And during the economic turmoil of US tariffs, they promised to freeze prices, with yet more vocal consumer support.
Chapman’s is known as an amazing company and people care about this business. They have an enormous brand loyalty that you can’t buy.
So what do you want your business to be known for?
3 - And how do you want to communicate that?
Messaging - this is how you tell people who you are, what you stand for, what your company is all about. It’s what you say as much as how you say it.
Look at Old Spice. They’ve been around for a while and might have been what your grandpa used. I certainly remember it twenty years ago, it was far from hip and the epitome of safe and boring. But they’ve become known for cheeky, hilarious marketing through viral ads that have won over a whole new generation of consumers. Their marketing campaigns were brilliant and fresh in the mid-aughts.
Or the aforementioned Tim Horton’s. Even though they’re no longer a completely Canadian company (a Brazilian investment company owns a 32% stake in the holding company that owns the brand), they still market themselves as a made in Canada company, leaning heavily on Canadian nostalgia.
It’s still very effective messaging and plenty of Canadians will think of them first if asked to name a well known Canadian company. Which is pretty good, given their coffee isn’t that great (according to friends who still patronize them) and their doughnuts are just defrosted in the stores, and far from fresh.
Communication - How you talk about your company, your products and services, what you do and how you do it, is how you communicate those oh so important brand values.
And that brings us back to the visual part of your brand. Once you’ve sorted what your brand stands for and what you want to communicate, you need to figure out the how. We’ll get imagery in a bit. But looking back at brand fundamentals, colour, font and logo, this is part of a first impression of your brand.
You can do a deep dive into colour psychology, there’s colour seasons etc. But the main thing to keep in mind there is colour simply has associations.
Brand Fundamentals
Colour - Banks and lawyers use navy blue for instance as it’s long been associated with propriety, trust, tradition etc. A bright green like spring leaves has us thinking of fresh growth, nature. Bubblegum pink, bright orange and lemon yellow shouts fun or tropical. Red gives energy and heat. This isn’t deep stuff, it’s our quick associations and that’s important for a first impression.
Fonts - These can also make an impact. A big, bold poster font that brings to mind circus or movie posters calls up that association. A delicate cursive is popular for feminine brands. Hand-drawn fonts for makers or kids brands, retro advertising fonts for a 50’s themed dress shop, a bubble type font for an ice cream shop…you get the picture.
Take a look at a bit of info on typography, so you can take into account the line weight/thickness of the letters, serif/sans serif, legibility at small/large sizes etc. so you can make an informed choice on the best fonts. You also need to limit how many, one for headings, one for body copy and maybe a third, keep it simple.
Logo - And speaking of simple, your logo should be that as well. It can be as basic as just a word mark, which is your business name in a nice display font. It can be a visual logo that’s related to what you do, but it doesn’t have to be an ice cream cone for an ice cream shop. It can be related to what you want your brand associated with, like plant based for a nature related brand. It can be a monogram, a landmark, or simply something that has meaning for you.
Just don’t get a chatbot or Canva to give you something generic, as not only is that boring, but you can’t copyright it either.
4 - So on to copy, or all the words on your website.
What copy is:
Now you’ve decided what you stand for, how you want to communicate it and what you want your customers to associate you with, you need to speak more directly to them. The copy on your website needs to be informative, clear, concise and make it easy for customers to say yes to buying from you or working with your brand.
Your copy is a chance to show why you’re the best fit, not be unethical and take away choice through fear, like FOMO, artificial scarcity or preying on a moment of weakness.
What copy is not:
What it’s not is a chance to manipulate or railroad customers into doing business with you. You’ll find plenty of sales gurus touting buyer psychology, winning tactics, and outright manipulation of people’s feelings and thoughts, in an effort to convince customers that they have to choose you. That’s outright BS.
It’s also not something to hand off to a chatbot. Claude, ChaptGPT etc. are prediction engines, they guess what the next letter or word should be based on the words and voices stolen from countless other writers and people online. They can’t come up with anything new, they can’t speak in your voice no matter how much someone shilling their latest guide or course promises. They only regurgitate boring, generic and average words.
Why copy is important:
You need to put your heart and voice into words that actually come from you, so you can stand out from the sea of bland the bots are proliferating. And likely your competitors have already given you the advantage there, as they probably didn’t put in that effort. ‘Cause it’s hard, it’s time consuming and it’s bloody work. But if you put the work in, you’ll really get the benefit back.
How to have great copy:
If you really feel you just can’t manage the writing, even with some copywriting templates to help, or you simply just don’t have the time, then hire a copywriter. They excel at not just words but at the right words that will resonate with your customers, brilliantly.
There’s a range of options from having them audit what you write, having them write a few pages to write your whole site, and a range of budgets. Yeah, it can be a bit of cash, but it’s money well spent to really communicate the heart of what you do, who you are and why you’re the best fit for your customers.
They will ask you questions that get to the heart of what you do, who you do it for; research your customers and industry; and write the words to actually do sound like something you’d say that concisely communicate what your customer needs to read to choose you as the best fit option, the must work with, the perfect solution to their problem.
Why copy matters:
Your copy is important to get right. It’s the headings and the rest of the text on the page. It’s the descriptions and names of your product and services. It’s your about page and your story. It’s your contact form and resources. The words and phrases matter and come before the rest of the design. It’s how you build trust with your potential customers and show how you’re a good fit for them.
5 - Your imagery is the supporting act
That’s why copy comes first. The images, icons, illustrations, infographics…they all need to support the copy on your website. They are going to be attention catching, they’ll make or break a first impression, and they can determine if someone bothers to read the copy. But they aren’t what will speak to someone in depth about whether or not you’re a good fit for them. That’s the copy’s job.
What imagery does:
They support that copy. Illustrating a concept, showing an actual product - the classic a photo is worth a thousand words, showing you, your premises, your work. That’s imagery’s job. Not just making things look pretty, but visual communication that backs up the words on your website and visually builds trust, illuminates and communicates.
Why good imagery is important:
Let’s face it, people have short attention spans and often can’t be bothered to read what’s in front of them, so making your website visually appealing can make the difference whether they’ll pay a bit more attention and stay on your site long enough to look around.
If you’re selling products, you need images of the products themselves, close ups, products in use or worn for scale and appeal.
They need to be real photos, not genAI generated imagery or you lose all trust from your customers. They need the true thing. AI editing isn’t good enough either, as it makes things up and makes things look unreal. Your phone or computer come with basic photo editing tools or there are things like Adobe Express which are simple to use.
How to get good imagery:
It’s not that expensive to use purchase stock photos, and you can easily take your own photos of your product and use non AI tools to edit them. Simple colour correction, good lighting (natural light is great or it’s easy to make a simple softbox) and basic cropping make all the difference.
AI generated photos aren’t copyrightable so that’s another reason to skip them.
Photos of you matter:
Your services website especially (though all websites do) needs photos of you. The real you. So-called “AI photoshoots” are not a good option. AI edited images always give an unreal effect and people will react negatively to them. That’s going to really impact the trust people need to build to work with a service provider.
A simple brand shoot doesn’t have to be costly and even snapshots can work well. You don’t even have to have an office or anything. Photos in your living room, outdoors, a cool location, even a window with some natural light to stand beside will do. Faking it with unreal photos won’t.
Though maybe skip the laptop and coffee cup shots.
6 - Now you’re ready for hosting
You’ve got your branding, messaging, copy and imagery. Now it’s time to get down to building your website.
You can purchase website templates and do it yourself. You can also hire a web designer (ahem!), and work with them in a do-it-with-you format or hand it off completely.
Should you build your website yourself?
Which you choose really depends on how comfortable you are with learning how to actually build a website or whether you have to time to spend learning and doing. It might be more cost effective to hand it off if you’ve been in business for a while, but when you’re first starting out, there’s no shame in do-it-yourself.
Whether you DIY it or get a designer, you’ll need to have an idea of what website platform you want to use. Even if you’re hiring a designer, unless you’d like them to do all of your later updates, you’ll want to have your website built on a platform that’s easy to use and keep your site up to date.
What platform should you choose?
Personally, I’ve used a number of different ones and I’ve settled on Squarespace, mostly because it’s so easy to update for my clients after I build it for them. And it has everything built in without needing to add bits on like blogs or e-commerce options. There’s even a membership and course option.
Wordpress is popular but it takes a lot more time and effort to design in and you’ve got to keep on top of security and plug-in/widget updates, as they can have security holes if not up to date, and conflicting plug-ins can break your site ‘til they get fixed. I don’t recommend it but it’s widely used.
Other platforms like Framer, Wix etc. have varying degrees of ease of use and some may be problematic for other reasons like who the owner is (yeah politics shows up everywhere). Other platforms like Canva say they can be used for websites but they don’t allow you to control important stuff like SEO and accessibility things so aren’t actually good options. You need to use a platform built for the purpose.
7 - And on to the actual design
Designing a website isn’t as simple as just popping up your copy and some images on a page. There’s some thought and strategy behind it. If you hire a designer, they’ll take care of this for you, but if you’re doing it yourself, you need to take this into consideration.
You need a plan:
First you need to figure out what pages you need on your site. Besides the home page, an about page and a contact page, you need either your products, services or whatever else you’re selling or showing.This could be just one page, but if you’ve got several categories of products and services, it helps to have a main page and sub pages for each category.
If pages are too long, they can get overwhelming. You may have resource pages, a full fledged e-commerce shop, a membership or courses, a blog, case studies or portfolio etc. All of these need to be mapped out.
It can help to use something, even just a Google doc, to plan out where on the page you’ll put the text and images, to make sure you’ve got what you actually need before you start any building.
Gather your content:
You also need to look at your branding and messaging and gather your fonts, colours, imagery and plan out what you want the overall feel to be. If it’s a fun and youthful look, that’s going to lend itself to a somewhat busier and more colourful site that has more leeway for an expressive layout.
Whereas an accountant will have a more trusted professional vibe and this gets set by using certain colours, possibly a more calm and structured layout (unless your brand it fun and free, not common for accountants but hey, whatever works for you), that helps people feel more confident they’re getting a pro that knows their stuff.
Map out your navigation:
Regardless of mood you’re looking to invoke, you need a logical and expected layout, as people shouldn’t have to guess where to find info. It should be clear and easy to find. You need to make it easy for people to understand what you do and make it easy for them to buy or book time. Keep your menu simple and use drop downs to contain categories of pages so they don’t get lost trying to navigate your site.
Make a list of call to action phrases:
You need lots of calls to action on every page (that’s the buttons and links where you direct them to take an action). Whether that’s buying your stuff, booking an appointment, signing up for a class, you need to pop one in pretty much every other section on a page. And make it clear and direct. It has to be more than click here if it’s a link, buy now really only belongs on a button under a product.
Think about layout:
You need to leave lots of white space. Let your page designs breathe. It makes a huge difference on how easy to use a website is, if it’s cleanly laid out with space for the eyes to rest, compared to being busy and confusing.
Is this all sounding like way to much work? There’s a reason we still have designers for hire.
Want to get someone else to do it?
So how do you find a designer? That website platform I mentioned is still important here, as designers will typically specialize in one or two. Sure there’s some that use quite a few, but I’ve picked one (for now) to really get in deep and master all it’s ins and outs. So you can do a search for designers using that platform.
You can also tailor that search to your industry, demographic or specialty, as some designers will have a focus. I’ll work with anyone that’s a good fit, but I’ve chosen to focus on my fellow GenX women as I feel this is a very under-served demographic, and one I know well.
Then it’s a matter of contacting them and basically finding out whether they seem like a good fit and if you’ll enjoy working with them. Keep in mind many are booking months in advance and if you’re also going to be working with other providers like copywriters, brand designers, etc., you’ll need to coordinate all those schedules. Some designers can help you by having trusted service providers they recommend.
8 - Getting found online
It’s definitely not enough to build a website and expect people will just find you.
What is SEO?
SEO is search engine optimization, and is the art of getting found online. This involves making sure your content is structured in a way search engines can easily parse it, having keywords they look for, such as the kinds of phrases people actually type into a search engine, as they look for something online.
It’s also making sure that you have good content that answer’s people’s questions, makes it clear what you do and is presented in a way that is trustworthy. Search engines look at all these factors and more. Optimizing your site can be an involved process but even just the basics makes a huge difference. And now that people are using chatbots to search, having a clear and informative site that they can recommend is important for that kind of search as well.
SEO is the long game:
You can hire someone to help with SEO, but watch out for grifters promising the moon for rather large sums. It’s is an ongoing process but you don’t need to pay someone hundreds or thousands a month to get found. You can do a lot of it yourself or your designer will do the basics. And any designer worth their salt will have a few SEO pros who can help later if you still need some more optimizing. If you hire a copywriter (to write or audit your copy), make sure it’s one that has an SEO focus.
There are lots of articles and videos that will claim doing X will get you found. It really comes down to making sure you are sharing what people are looking for and in a way that makes that easy to understand. That’s the heart of it.
9 - And that brings us to a really under considered part of building a website
Making it accessible. If you think about it like what we do for physical accessiblity - wheelchair ramps, braille on buttons in the elevator or bank machine, crosswalks with audible signals - there’s an online equivalent.
Many don’t realize it, but about a quarter of people have some form of disability. When it comes to online information, that might be:
Vision issues - not just no sight, but dyslexia, colour blindness, being unable to read small print.
Animations - flashing or moving bits can be distracting to someone with ADHD or worse yet, trigger a vestibular or epileptic disorder.
Cognitive impairment - this can mean it can be hard to figure out what a site is about or use it if it’s full of distracting background elements that obscure the text or you’ve decided to ignore conventional navigation or you’ve got walls of text.
And if people are using keyboards to navigate or a screen reader, the information on a site needs to be structured so they can do so without difficulty.
If inclusivity seems a little hard to wrap your head around (and there’s a lot to it, it’s not always intuitive), it’s also a legal requirement. And unfortunately, there are predatory law firms that actually look for websites that have accessibility issues so they can make an easy buck egregiously suing website owners who don’t realize their sites have problems.
For many reasons, making sure your site complies with accessibility standards is important.
The basics:
That means making sure your text is at least 16 points as a baseline.
Making sure your colours of text and background have high enough contrast and don’t use colour combos that fail for someone with one of the several types of colour blindness.
Keep your text left aligned except for short excerpts or headings, and limit line length and use bullet points, for readability.
Use descriptive alt text that isn’t stuffed full of keywords (that’s the hidden text that goes with images) for anything that isn’t just a decorative element, so photos, important icons, graphs etc.
Limit the use of animations or auto-playing elements, and make sure they don’t run for those who don’t want them.
There are articles about how to do this, online tools to help you check your site and particularly if the demographic you’re serving is likely to encounter issues online, accessibility professionals that can analyze your site and make suggestions to improve it.
Your designer, if you’re using one, should also be paying particular attention to this and that’s one thing to quiz them on when you’re hiring one. If they don’t know anything about accessibility and how the platform they use takes care of it, find someone else.
So to sum it all up you need:
To know what your brand stands for
Who your customers are and how to communicate to them
A website platform that’s easy to maintain
Great imagery that captures attention
Clear, informative copy that connects to your customer the answers to the question your customer is searching for
Well laid out offers or products
A website that’s easy for your customers to use
If you want to hand your website design off and have it done for you, check out the options on my custom web design services page.