Create sites in 2023 professionally

In recent years, we’ve all grown tired of fake news and other online interpretations of the broken telephone game, so most of us have become accustomed to trusting only what is written on the official website. Moreover, it is websites that bring companies from various industries the maximum number of new customers, more than other advertising channels.

A website is your own sales, information, and communication platform. With the right approach to development and promotion, the website will be commercially successful and will deliver the results you initially hoped for.

Website Development Is a Team Effort

Website development in 2023 is a team effort involving a designer, programmer, search engine optimization specialist, marketer, and sometimes an analyst and brand manager.

Project management is responsible for coordination within the team and understanding between the client and developers. One person cannot take on all these roles because it will inevitably lead to either a loss of quality or an extension of the project’s timeline.

Why It’s Better to Order Website Development from an Agency?

When ordering website creation and design from an agency, you don’t take as many risks as when working with a self-employed specialist or freelancer. The agency’s responsibility is documented in a contract, and you can be sure that no one will deliberately delay the website delivery, disappear from communication, ignore requirements, or change the price after everything has been agreed upon and work has begun.

Stages of Website Creation – Client’s and Service Provider’s Responsibilities

To order a website in 2023, you don’t need to understand the nuances of web development or be able to create technical specifications. Project management is responsible for understanding between the client and the contractor’s team at all stages, and after discussing the details, they will handle the work plan and other documents.

In 2023, a lone specialist in creating a complex corporate resource, even if they can manage it, will prolong the process. For businesses, extending the website launch timeline is an inexcusable luxury, as it almost always leads to financial losses and lost profits.

Accordingly, ordering website creation from a digital agency is the best option for a company compared to hiring freelancers for each separate development task. Choosing an agency will save time, money, and nerves (which is crucial).

Let’s explore the stages of developing a commercial website and who is responsible for what.

Prototyping

A prototype is a presentation of the website that clearly shows what it will look like, how it will be used, and how it will function. Usually, the designer is responsible for developing the prototype, using data about the project’s target audience collected by the marketer and analyst.

Copywriting and Content Preparation

Copywriting involves creating marketing content aimed at attracting website visitors to become customers of the company. Like the website design prototype, copywriting is not created from scratch. To make sure texts and other content on the website contribute to sales, the copywriter must be able to present information about the company and its offerings in a way that generates interest and trust from the target audience.

Website Design Creation

Website design development is possible only after the structure is formed, the prototype is approved, and the texts and other content are ready for publication.

The website’s design should not only be attractive but also user-friendly, clear, and familiar to the target audience.

Interesting Statistics

A website user has up to 10 seconds to decide whether to stay on this website or look for information/product elsewhere.

That’s why it’s crucial for the page to convey the following at a glance:

• What this website is
• What it offers
• How to use the offerings

And most importantly, everything listed should be available primarily on the mobile screen.

The mobile-first principle is crucial because for several years, mobile traffic volume has significantly exceeded desktop.

Approximately 40% of users still visit web pages from computers and laptops, which automatically means the predominance of mobile phones as the main tool for viewing web pages.

HTML Markup

Website design is a graphic file, an image that needs to be converted into HTML code, style, and animations. This is the job of a frontend developer. It’s essential that the website is intuitively understandable to the user. What does “intuitively understandable” mean? It means that the placement of buttons, sliders, sections is done in a way that the user has to make as few actions as possible on the website to get the necessary information. This also applies to ordering any products: the simpler the ordering process, the higher the likelihood that the order will be placed, and the customer will return to your website.

CMS Integration

The designed website is still not ready; for full functionality and administration, it needs to be linked to a functional framework, often represented by CMS – content management systems.

The initial version of CMS allows you to launch the website without additional modifications, but only if there are no specific requirements for it. In the case of a corporate resource, the absence of the need for “modification” is extremely rare. Therefore, when developing a website for business, additional plugin installation, external integrations, administrative panel settings, user accounts creation, and more are often required.

Testing

Before the website becomes the company’s representation on the Internet, it undergoes several testing stages. During testing, it’s checked for full compliance with the technical requirements because even one malfunctioning or missing button can lead to the loss of hundreds of potential customers.

Transfer to the Main Hosting

When everything is ready and tested, the website is transferred to the main hosting, linked to a domain, and launched. However, the work on it doesn’t end there. In 2023, a website cannot just be created and put on the Internet; it needs constant work: optimization, attracting traffic through SEO and other promotion tools, promoting it in search engines, maintaining it, collecting analytics, and working with it.

Web Design Trends 2023: How Page Design Impacts Reputation and Sales

The trend is minimalist design, simple and straightforward, built around a specific goal. In simpler terms, each page of the website should provide specific benefits to those who can access it. For example, contacts help to get in touch with the company’s representative, a catalog allows users to familiarize themselves with the assortment, a gallery of works lets them see cases, and reviews help form an understanding based on customer opinions.

At the same time, the design of the website’s pages should be such that it doesn’t hinder reading reviews and browsing photos in the gallery but helps to navigate where to click to move between pages, write to the manager, or place an order.

Website design in the 2020s starts with the mobile version; this trend is called mobile-first. The reason for such attention to the mobile version is that people use the Internet more frequently from their mobiles and pay more attention to pages than from their computers.

When structuring the pages in the mobile version of the website, convenience comes first. For this purpose, a designer who understands the nuances of UI/UX design relies on knowledge of user habits and how and under what conditions they will use the website.

If you want voice assistants to deliver content from your website in response to user queries, you need to adapt each page correctly for this purpose. Moreover, such adaptation allows people with disabilities to use the website and become customers of your company.

Modern icons, fonts, buttons, and forms – all these are the building blocks that make up the overall impression of the website, its relevance, and the seriousness of the company.

As a rule, a website redesign is carried out every 3-4 years to modernize the online representation of the business. In design, it’s essential to strike a balance between uniformity and individuality, making the site both convenient through intuitive control elements and memorable.

What Capabilities Must Be Considered When Developing a Website in 2023

A modern website must be interactive and useful to users.

You need to talk about yourself, share advice, provide feedback, interact with the audience, respond to information occasions, showcase products, talk about services, and do much more that’s possible through your website. And most importantly, all content should be presented in a way that’s convenient for the intended users.
Partly, this is achieved through design, and partly through functional features.

In addition to the illustrative examples mentioned above of what should be on a website in 2023, among useful functional features for a company’s web representation:

• AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages),
• CRM integration,
• calculators for conducting preliminary calculations in a few clicks,
• quizzes,
• data exchange with social networks,
• 1C integration,
• chatbots,
• authorization via Google and Facebook accounts,
• payment processing (acquiring),
• blockchain integration,
• analytics systems,
• AI (Artificial Intelligence).

This does not mean that everything listed must be implemented. A project manager and a marketer are needed precisely to suggest optimal approaches to solving business tasks through the implementation of suitable features on the website.

Preparing a Website for Search Engine Optimization

For effective website promotion in search engines, it needs to be structured correctly well in advance, ensuring content quality, loading speed, program code validity, and hypertext markup. All of this is the job of an SEO specialist, and it’s desirable that they take responsibility for search engine optimization after the project launch:

• building a backlink profile,
• updating content,
• forming and updating the semantic core,
• keyword clustering,
• tracking analytics data.

Preparing for search engine optimization in 2023 starts long before the website launch. A specialist collects data on relevant client-oriented search queries, studies competitors from the top search results, defines requirements for website content, and cleans up the list of keywords from blatantly irrelevant ones.

Ways to Promote a Website

• SEO or Search Engine Optimization – the most effective channel for attracting a target audience to a website. To rank website pages on the top positions of search results for relevant queries, an optimizer works with content, code, moderates external links and mentions, and ensures that the website meets both the expectations of the target audience and the search engine’s perception of the quality of each page.
• SMM or Social Media Marketing – attracting a target audience from social networks. You can attract people to the website through targeted advertising placement or by purchasing advertising links or by building and maintaining a brand community.
• Contextual advertising – paid ads that users see in a separate block of search results in response to queries.
• Reputation management – a general term for processes aimed at creating and maintaining a positive image of a company online. This may include gathering reviews, publications in directories, and on third-party websites.
• Advertising with bloggers and PR works more on brand promotion than specifically on website promotion. However, purchasing posts and articles in the media can also attract loyal users to the website.

The listed methods themselves are complexes of activities to attract people potentially interested in becoming customers of the company. In a well-organized digital marketing strategy, SEO, SMM, PR on the Internet, and advertising complement each other – attracting, retaining, and bringing the target audience back to the website.

How much does it cost to create a website and what factors affect the price?

The cost of developing a website can only be calculated after a complete list of requirements for the result is determined. As we have already established, development is a complex process, so there is no fixed price for any website, just as it is impossible to determine the cost of apartment renovation or tailoring an exclusive dress without understanding the task.

The cost of a website is influenced by:

• Complexity of design;
• Number of pages with unique designs;
• Volume of content;
• The need for programming unique features and integrations with external services;
• The price of CMS licenses and plugins for it.

In the case of ordering a website from a studio, as in any interactions between legal entities, the cost of development should take into account taxes and other administrative expenses.

In Business Site, a commercial proposal with a calculation of the development cost is sent to the client after discussing all the details. Payment for each stage of work on creating a website is based on its own fixed tariff grid:

• Prototyping – for the prototype of each page;
• Copywriting – based on the amount of text in characters;
• Design – for unique pages;
• Layout – per page;
• Programming – per hour of a programmer’s work;
• Content – based on the volume of published content;
• Testing – paid on an hourly basis.

Common Mistakes in Website Creation

Despite the fierce competition for user attention on the Internet, commercial websites often have errors that hinder their marketing effectiveness.

Among the most common mistakes on websites in the 2020s are: outdated design, a complex interface, poor content, non-functioning forms and buttons, and ignoring the principles of search engine optimization.

Outdated design is especially noticeable on pages when the target audience of the company is tech-savvy. People under 55 spend most of their day online, so when they see outdated page layouts, they immediately leave because, from their point of view, the site looks abandoned and not worthy of attention.

How to check the quality of a website? Watch this video:

A complex interface is more off-putting than outdated design. If a user can’t figure out where to click to buy the product they are interested in within a few seconds, consider that you have lost them. Hence, the rule: pages should be unique only to the extent that creativity does not interfere with intuitive navigation and website usage.

Poor content makes the website appear uninformative to users, and the information provided becomes unreliable. In other words, if a person finds the product description insufficient, they will go to Google to search for more information, and they are likely to place an order where there are comprehensive answers to their questions about the offer. That’s why it’s crucial for content to be clear, accessible, relevant, and provide the audience with comprehensive information to move on to the next stage of the sales funnel: making a call, filling out a form, making a purchase, and more.

Non-functioning forms and buttons are a serious issue, and it’s hardly necessary to explain why. Imagine that you’ve invested money in traffic acquisition, but didn’t get any sales because of a malfunctioning order form. People visited, filled out the form, waited for someone to call them to clarify details, but their orders simply didn’t reach the manager. This is not only lost revenue but also a serious blow to the reputation. Therefore, testing the website before launch and regularly checking its functionality is crucial.

Platforms (CMS) for Creating Websites in 2023

Content Management System or CMS is the framework most often used for website development.

It’s not mandatory that a website is built on CMS. It can also be based on frameworks or pure native code, but these options are preferable when you need to implement complex, specific functionality. Corporate websites and online stores have a typical structure, so WordPress, Opencart, Bitrix, and other engines are suitable for them.

Furthermore, ordering website development on a CMS is cheaper than starting from scratch, and it requires significantly less time to launch. This does not affect search engine friendliness and usability.

• WordPress – the most popular CMS in the world for creating websites. WordPress is used to develop media, blogs, company websites, portals, and even simple online stores. The project library contains hundreds of plugins to extend built-in capabilities, and if something unique is needed, finding a specialist to implement it is not difficult.
• OpenCart – an open-source CMS for online stores. OpenCart is often updated, has reliable protection against hacks, supports the installation of add-ons, and integrates with external services – all that’s needed for a virtual storefront in the 2020s.
• Bitrix – a commercial content management system with strong support and enough flexibility to build complex websites. Bitrix’s perfectly organized integration with the CMS and 1C – popular business tools in many Ukrainian and CIS companies – speaks in its favor.

In addition to the ones mentioned, there are less popular CMS and other platforms that can also be used for website development in 2023. At Business Site, we always make a decision about which technology stack to use individually, based on the client’s tasks and needs.