What Is Web Strategy And How To Create One?

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19 Feb, 2024

web-strategy

Every business should invest in designing a solid website strategy. Since a monotonous, static web design communicates in only one direction without segmentation, it will not exhibit your website well. There are many organizations with no websites or horrible websites, and then there are other websites that can make hundreds of million-dollar turnover. 

Thus, you can see that a website is like an anchor to digital marketing efforts, and if you think that website development is as easy as selecting colors, fonts and layout? but instead, there’s substantially more to it. 

An appropriate site strategy will help you grow website traffic and fulfill website goals. At the same time, developing a website strategy isn’t just about effort. You need to focus on details and give more time to creating an all-inclusive website strategy, making it easier for you to develop and launch your website. 

A website strategy plan includes defining a target audience, setting goals, developing a brand strategy, conducting keyword research, and using SEO to optimize web content when building a website. 

Are you planning to develop a website for your company? Then you’ve so many things to learn. Our strategic website design services experts have compiled this comprehensive guide where you will learn about what is web strategy, how you can create website strategy plans using simple steps, and much more.

Eager to know how to get started? Let’s start without further ado…..and try to understand what is a strategy and then what is a website strategy…

Understanding Strategy - 

A strategy can be defined as a plan of action developed to accomplish an overall objective. In other words, how will you meet the target or something incredible? A business strategy usually consists of the following apprehensions:

  • A summary of where you’re now
  • Defining objectives - where do you wish to go
  • KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure your success
  • Suggested approach - how do you plan to achieve your goals

Now that we’ve broadly described what is strategy in general, let’s now try to understand website strategy -

Understanding Website Strategy

There are reasons behind designing and developing websites. according to the business perspective, websites usually exist to generate more sales or quality leads. The idea behind developing a non-profit or political website could be to spread knowledge or create awareness. Therefore, irrespective of the particular reason, all the websites should have an objective and desired result that explains the reason why they exist. 

Thus, a website strategy is how you are planning to approach your website to accomplish your desired outcome or goal.  

Let’s move on to the importance of having a website design strategy

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Importance of having Website Design Strategy

Not many web design services design and develop websites without a website design strategy. Doing so means not thinking about what is the best approach to dealing with the website or attaining the desired results. Having said that, the web design strategy usually lacks clear aim and diligence.  

According to people, web design strategy is usually impromptu. Partners normally talk about the content, look, and feel of the website, its navigation, and communicating with customers. However, these are just critical discussions, and they might not result in successful strategies. For example, assume that you’re planning a trip to a neighboring country will you get in the car and start driving without thinking about what is the best way to get there?

You’ll certainly spend a lot of time figuring out where you would like to go, what things will be needed for your trip, and what is the best way to reach your destination. Specifically, you’ll design a strategy for accomplishing your goal, i.e., reaching your destination.

Back to websites, you might not know what you’re trying to achieve without a clear web design strategy. So overall, it is important to know that there’s some reason why the website exists but without a strong plan, it’ll be difficult to get there. 

It is called “the gap.” in the following image, you can see the difference between an average website and one that carries our tasks 100% accurately by knowing how to close the gap. Because of this, website design strategy is crucial. 

The Gap

What Exactly Does a Website Design Strategy Consist Of?

If you remember, the majority of the business-related strategies consist of, at the minimum, the following components:

  • A summary of the current situation – i.e. Where we are now?
  • Defined objectives – i.e., Where do we want to go?
  • Key performance indicators – i.e., How will we measure success?
  • Recommended approach – i.e., What we will do to get there?

A few of the standard components consist of

  • Current Situation
  • Goals & Objectives
    • Business Goals 
    • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
  • Discovery
    • Analyzing Target Audience
    • Competitor analysis
  • Approach
    • Content strategy
    • Information Architecture
    • User Flows
    • Page Strategy
    • Messaging
    • Visual Language
    • CTA Strategy
    • Technical Needs
    • Web Traffic Strategy
  • Logistics
    • Timing
    • Budget

Let’s discuss these Steps to develop web design strategy-

Steps To Develop Web Design Strategy

Using a little dedication, you can develop a web strategy that will help you to build the best website for your business. On the other hand, a content strategy will guide you to understand how to utilize content to optimise your website. Meanwhile, here’s how you can define strategy for web applications.

1. Decide Your Business Goal

The first and foremost step in creating a website strategy is to determine your long-term and short-term goals for your website and the strategies you will follow to achieve those goals.

Try to figure out the main purpose of designing or redesigning the website. Is it to overhaul the website identity to attract the audience or to reduce the bounce rate?

Take a few minutes to think and understand where your business can be successful, where are the errors and bugs and what will be the use of these marketing tools and SEO strategies, and techniques for startups. 

You can consider asking other questions like:

  • Do you want to increase the lead?
  • Do you want your website to be reliable?
  • Do you want to demonstrate your skills and achievements?

Whether you are looking for e-commerce development, an informative website, or a service provider website, you need to align the goals for the website to express your innovative and developmental talent while designing your website to improve your user experience.

2. Key Performance Indicators or KPI

Remember to have a KPI for every goal since it’ll let you measure your success and evaluate if you’ve achieved every goal. 

If your aim is to boost leads, your KPI would be leads generated from your website every month. Thus you’ll be able to track leads generated every month and check if its 25% above the standard in 12 months. 

Key performance indicators could be quantitative, or qualitative. Now if your aim is to enhance the anticipated brand value, then your KPI can be based upon user feedback. 

3. Discovery

A web design strategy could not be developed in a vacuum, its important to understand every influencing factor in order to find out the most effective or strong plan of action. It can be achieved by doing research or by consulting professional web design services. 

So start researching your target audience as well as competitors.

4. User Research

Users evaluate how promising your site is and your site will be successful when the users decide to visit your site, fill out form, place a call or purchase a product. So, if you fail to understand their thinking, needs or motivations, you will find it challenging to keep them on your website for a long time.

It is recommended that you create user personas or user models that try to understand and record the objectives, motivations, tasks and journey your target audience undergoes when interacting with your brand.

5. Competitor / Industry Analysis

Majority of the customers visit several websites in order to finish a task. Thus, you must be aware of how to do competitor analysis in SEO because you’re required to make best decisions based on this analysis, to find out what competitor websites do well or poorly.

For instance, do you need to consider adopting any conventions for your website? Do you need to avoid any aspects that don’t seem to work well for you? Remember to analyse competitors, directly or indirectly and analyse websites in the similar sector and record what you find on the way.

6. Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience will play a vital role in the design and functioning of the website. Many statistics will help you influence the website, like age, gender, profession, and interest. For example, an eCommerce website will need a different style than a business journal website.

Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience will not only impact your website appearance but will also help you to figure out small details and features like font size, font style, and much more.

7. Content Strategy

One of the most crucial aspect of website success is its content! Every website’s purpose requires relevant and supportive content as well as visitors to visit the website in order to utilize the content. You can make use of different content creation tools to do the needful.

Therefore, your content strategy should propose:

  • What content is needed to support your website’s objectives and visitors
  • The need of every piece of content, i.e., its length, required assets, structure, etc.
  • Source of the content i.e., new content, migrated content, rewritten content, etc.

8. Messaging

All websites need messaging, so define at least 1 to 5 message/s which you want to use for targeting audience. These messages could be functional or promotional content. A functional message will be a clear sentence explaining your website’s uses and for whom is intended to. Whereas, a marketing-oriented message can be a competition differentiator or a value proposition. 

9. Information Architecture

IA, i.e., information architecture is the company, structure, labeling of content on the website. The aim of IA is -

To make it easy for the users to find out information and finish the task.

Professional web designing services will help you in developing your information architecture.

10. User Flows

User flows depicts normal paths customers / users take when browsing the website. Users are notified using user models and will find out how frame pages and browsing to assists visitors in achieving their tasks. 

11. Depict Your Brand Story

Each brand has its own voice and a story to depict; therefore, find out your brand story and work out how you wish to present it. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, try to find an honest narrative, but it should also be simple. 

12. Analyse Your Content

Before launching your website, find out what type of web content you wish to provide. You might have a simple story regarding your brand, but do you also have any videos, online customer reviews or blogs which you can share? 

Content is vital if your goal is to increase traffic to your website and also increase conversions. If you wish to utilise content previously written but not published, then you should add more relevant keywords to your content for SEO. 

13. Visual Language

For most of the visitors your website is a visual first impression and since all the visuals convey something, its important to understand what do you want to convey and what is the best way to do so. Take help of an experience website designing services in order to make informed decision regarding visual language.

It might consists of:

  • Word exercises
  • Mood boards
  • Brand guidelines, etc. 

14. Call to Action Strategy

A CTA is where a visitor is being explicitly asked to take the desired action. For example CTAs related to crucial actions such as purchasing, subscribing to email notifications or filling in a contact form. 

Since these elements are closely related to the site goals, how to go about them will particularly affect the success. 

15. Design Your Website

Once you figure out the fundamentals, start planning your website. You’ll need to make a number of decisions when developing your website, like deciding between static and dynamic websites, responsive or adaptive web design, or strategic web design and determining the budget for your project. 

At the planning stage, it's beneficial to work with website design services to begin replicating a rough draft for the website. It's not mandatory to keep the website design as it is from beginning to end, but having a preliminary design in hand could be a huge help. This also helps you to define strategy for web applications, your clients and your requirements. 

16. Develop Your Website

The next level to developing a website strategy includes actually building your website. It's challenging to check your website's performance or add new content unless and until you launch your website. Therefore, hire professional web design services like JanBask Digital Design or make use of a website builder to begin. 

Remember that you’ll be required to purchase a domain name along with website hosting to get your website online. 

17. Keyword Research

Use keyword research tools before you start to write or plan any web content to identify the relevant keywords for your website, which will help your website rank on SERPs. 

Add high-volume keywords in your content so as to increase your search engine ranking for that specific keyword/(s). Also, keep in mind that these keywords might change once in a while, so it's an intelligent decision to identify their rankings often periodically. 

Checklist for Keyword Selection

18. Plan and write website content

At this stage, you know which keywords to use. Therefore, your next web strategy should be planning and writing web content. When planning out web content, you should add your keyword once or twice every 100 words. 

And if you develop a website strategy that includes adding keywords more than that, you might end up being penalized for stuffing the keywords. If you wish to keep your web content fresh, combine it with various types of content for your visitors. 

Uploading blogs can also be an effective way to engage with your visitors and share fundamental information. Another way is to publish long-form blog posts written after in-depth research, which will help to add more value to visitors. 

19. Monitor your results over time

If you don’t use analytics somehow, your site might not perform well. It doesn’t require an entirely data-driven company. However, you’ll need to monitor a few things, such as monthly site visitors, monthly unique visitors, bounce rate, geographic location of visitors, and much more. 

It's essential to understand how your website is performing, in spite of the fact that your website has been online for recent years. 

20. Traffic Strategy

Any unvisited website is an unsuccessful website! So, irrespective of how much website traffic you expect to drive, it's important to plan how you hope to attract the right visitors to your website before anything else. 

Same as the technical needs, this aspect of designing a website strategy is usually addressed as an independent document or initiative. Learn how to set up Google Analytics goals by clicking here. 

21. Adjust accordingly

In the end, you might not be able to define a strategy for web applications, in the beginning. But the good thing is that you can make minor adjustments to your site depending on analytics and whatever you learned from using your website.

It may be that you wish to move your website to concentrate more on blog posts, or you might wish to develop an ecommerce website, or you might want to switch your keywords for something more relevant to rank higher on SERPs. Whatever the reason, there’s no regret in returning and making the relevant changes in your web strategy. You can consult web designing services regarding the same. 

Thus, it's crucial to design a strong website strategy!

Benefits of a Website Strategy

The benefits of a website strategy are numerous and significantly impact the business's success in this competitive world. Some of the benefits are: 

  1. Enhances business credibility
  2. It offers cost-effective operations.
  3. Builds long-lasting customer relationships 
  4. It ensures 24/7 website accessibility.

FAQs

1. How do you create a web strategy?

A website strategy is basically a workflow that helps you take from where you’re to where you wish to be. It's beyond an essential to-do list and more of a continuous procedure that facilitates changes and advancements according to technological improvements.

Apart from technical aspects, there are implications of customer behavior, like- how the changes around the world are impacting the way we shop, browse, or dwell online. So the best website strategy will consider all of that and much more.

2. How do you define web strategy?

Website strategy is an essential step for developing any outstanding web project, which makes sure that your website’s design, content, and techniques are structured to empower excellent business profits by managing numerous essential elements. 

3. Why is website strategy important?

Website designing and developing means creating plans and putting them into place- that is why website strategy is very important. It's possible to develop a website without making a web strategy, but a website strategy will help you drive more traffic and accomplish the goals you’ve set for your site.  

4. Who is involved when developing a web strategy?

We believe in “thoughtful collaboration.” and we’ve come to know that it is only half of the equation therefore, it's essential to involve our clients in our website strategy process equally. Every project includes a budget for a strategic working session with our customers. 

5. How do you measure the success of a web strategy?

We can measure the success of our strategy by involving key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with the business goals.

Conclusion

You are now equipped with essential factors for designing the website strategy. Let’s take a look at all those aspects:

  • Decide your Business Goal
  • Know your audience
  • Depict Your Brand Story
  • Analyze Your Content
  • Design Your Website
  • Develop Your Website
  • Keyword Research
  • Plan and Write Website Content
  • Monitor Your Results Over Time
  • Adjust Accordingly

Remember that you should keep an eye on your competitors and make the best of them. Follow these points, and you will be able to turn a dull website into a brilliant website

So, what are you waiting for? Go and design your website now!! For more information about creating a website strategy, contact website design services at JanBask Digital Designs

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Jorge Hall

Many times I try to read your articles as I find them highly fascinating, and again this article on website strategy is very helpful.

B

Beckham Allen

I am going to try these website strategies for my new blog post and hopefully get the desired results.

C

Cayden Young

Really clear and valuable article on website strategy. Thanks.

J

Jaden Hernandez

I use translation plugins. Are they good?

B

Brian Taylor

Many times I try to read your articles as I find them highly fascinating, and again this article on website strategy is very helpful.

L

Louis Anderson

I am going to try these website strategies for my new blog post and hopefully get the desired results.

C

Caden Thomas

Really clear and valuable article on website strategy. Thanks.

M

Maximiliano Jackson

I use translation plugins. Are they good? Does your web designing services help me in creating web strategies?


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