Marketing should never be an afterthought when creating a business website. After all, your goals are always going to be geared towards sales and profitability. An expertly coded website is useless if its aesthetics make it difficult to market.
Before you even start coding your website, you should do a domain search to settle on your website’s name. You should also outline what you are trying to achieve with your website and make some of the marketing decisions that will get you there. Fortunately, a website builder like Wix will help you get there, providing a number of marketing tools.
Let’s explore why you need to take advantage of this and how you can go about it.
When you have the skills to code a website, the instinct is to start immediately. The attitude many coders take is that they can fix any problems that arise along the way. Why not dive right in?
However, the reality is that if you are building a website that you want to be able to market effectively, decisions you make while coding could hamper your entire business plan. Without a good marketing strategy in place before you start, you will not know which formatting choices will get in your way, which sections are necessary and which will simply clutter the page, and what kind of functionality you need.
If you still don’t think it matters, at least consider the following 3 marketing decisions before you start coding your website.
Your website’s name
Technically, you could leave this until the website is done. Technically you could do a simple [control-F] at the end. But you shouldn’t.
The name of your website is always going to impact how you market it. If you decide to use a color in the name because it sounds great and works in a URL, you’re going to need to incorporate that color in the style. If you name your website a market rather than a hub, you might choose to build an ecommerce marketplace instead of using affiliate links as you may have planned.
Your website’s name should reflect what your website is meant to provide. It should also be snappy and easy to remember. You need to do a thorough domain search to ensure the URL is not taken. Included in this search, you should try to find similar domains that might be mistaken for yours, so that visitors don’t confuse you with a more established website.
Your website’s primary goal
Many people start building their websites without a complete idea of what they are doing it for. Maybe they have a vague intention to share their thoughts about certain topics and make some money off affiliate links. They end up building a website that has no audience. Or they build a website that functions perfectly as a blog, but decide they actually want to create a reviews site.
You can save a lot of wasted time by coming to a decision on your website’s primary goal before you start coding. You will be better positioned to build it with all the necessary functions and pages. Instead of taking time to think every time you need to make a decision on a component, you will know exactly what will better achieve your purpose.
This is also made easier by looking through various themes provided by website builders. While you may well choose to make your own, these themes provide well-thought-out versions of what already works for millions of sites.
Your color palette
Coders don’t always have the most developed aesthetic senses. For this reason, you may think that color palette is something you can settle on once you’re done coding the website. After all, it will be easier to see what suits it at that point.
However, a color palette will determine how you create different components that need to interact with each other. Without knowing what color palette you want to use, you may end up stuck with a choice between color palettes you hate. The colors you love may just not go well together on the web page you’ve created.
Again, this is a decision that will be made easier by a site like Wix and the premade website themes. There is endless data on which colors work best for various websites, and these themes have been created accordingly. Drawing inspiration from them at least is a good idea for anyone without an eye for color.
Marketing is not something that comes naturally to a lot of coders. However, it will have an impact on how you build your website. Do not leave the above matters for later. Decide on them before you get started and you’ll save yourself hours of unnecessary coding.