Whether developing an ecommerce website from the scratch or redesigning a current website that is not functioning as well as it should, businesses may face the necessity of making essential decisions concerning the site’s design and development.
This article covers 10 vital points in building a website where the owner has to make the right decision to avoid repetitive mistakes and work slowdowns. We do not intend to cover the peculiarities of HTML writing, but want to give you the mindset and basic approach to website development and design.

01  Determine the Key Purpose of Your Website
To build an effective website it is crucially important to determine its purpose not on the assumption of designers or developers or budget prerequisites, but on the business’s or organization's needs and perspectives.

Among basic website purposes there may be:

Building a brand – placing some information about your company, products and services online and encouraging people to contact you
Selling your goods and services online – establishing an e-shop to conduct local. National and international sales
Saving money through online orders processing, electronic product catalogs and online customers support.

So your decision here is to clarify and focus on your website objectives and needs.

02  Decide Whether to Outsource Website Development and Design or Do It Yourself
Website design and development require a number of various skills, such as HTML knowledge, graphic design experience, CGI and database programming and many others. Done right, web design is quite complex, that’s why the best way to get a good realization of your purposes and needs is to turn to a professional web design company.

Moreover, if the purpose of your site is quite specific and requires embedding some extra services (e.g. selling software) it is quite reasonable to turn to professionals that combine design services with software development and integration. This step will save your money not only for development, but also for implementation and support services.

Another way here is to build your site using site-building wizards or templates, but the problem is that in the end you may get a very common, typical site that will not be able to transfer the individuality of your business.

Another approach here is to outsource your site development only in part and have a professional web design company to set up the layout of your site, its basic structure, design the website templates, navigation system, CGI and JavaScript programming, and perhaps do usability testing and do the rest of the job yourself.

Thus, you should decide whether to outsource all, part of your website building or not.

03  Determine the logical structure of your site.
To avoid mixing your site pages into one huge confusing mass of content you should organize your site into sections, subsections and directories, one for each section. The precise structure of your site depends on your business features but basically it should contain “About Company”, “Products” or “Services”, “Contact” and other sections.
The home page of your site needs your special attention. To give visitors of your site exact notion of what you do, state it clearly right from the start and provide links to other pages of your site to let them know more.

So you aim on this stage is to split your site content into webpages and logically group them into directories and subdirectories.

04  Develop a Site Navigation System
Now you have a layout of your site and the next step is to make a good navigation system for it. Do not make you visitors speculate a lot on their next steps while browsing your site make the navigation of it clear. Think about distinct left-side menus, tabs near the top of webpages, search functions and clear bottom links to provide your site guests with effective tools for investigating your site.

If you are outsourcing your site development, pay special attention to your design company recommendations as their experience will not only increase the usability of your site, but will help to make it search engines friendly.

Your decision here is to increase your site users’ friendliness by making your site navigation distinct and clear.

05  Give Your Site Visual Attractiveness
The pages of your site are reflecting the features of your business and you owe it to yourself to make your site look professional and intelligent, just as your company is. It is quite difficult to do on your own, and the best way here is to turn to a professional designer who will make basic color scheme and assembling of your site, select some pictures and site graphics tools.

Please remember that your site’s design has a dramatic influence on people’s perception of your company business style and may determine their further actions.

Thus, your decision here is to make your site appealing and professionally looking.

06  Make Your Site Friendly for Search Engines.
Having a web site is the first step for promoting your business on the web; the next is to make it visible for your potential clients and partners. And here search engines play the most important role in driving qualified prospects to your site. Search engine friendliness depends on many factors but let us mention basic ones.

Optimizing your site pages. This means selection of keywords relevant to your site content, embedding them into webpages titles, tags and headers;
Filling your pages with highly relevant content. You should select 1-3 keywords for each page of your site and include them into the text with proper density to make search engines be sure that the page is focused to a user request.
Building proper navigation system. Hyperlinks inside your site guide search engine robots through your site and let them index all of its pages. That is why it is important to avoid navigation tools that may shadow the pages from search engines robots. These are HTML frames, Java scripts, flash and dynamically generated pages.

Now your decision is to make search engines friendliness major point in your site development.

07  Communicate with Your Customers through Your Site
Your site can be much more that a showcase for your company, it can be a real communication vehicle between you and your customers. You may build an informative contact page but the best way is to use “Contact Us” online form as you will be able to receive more contact information about your customers () than when asking them to send a letter with their request.
Another way here is to establish a life chat system to give your site visitors direct access to your employees or give a list of your managers contacts to save both your time and time of your clients and partners.

The design decision here is to incorporate multiple ways to let your customer to contact you easily and effectively.

08  Make Your Site Generate Sales.
The first thing you need is get visitors at your site and the second is to convince them that they have come to the right place to buy the product or service they were looking for.

There are several ways to make your site bring you profits and choosing of one or another depends on your site’s purpose.
If you are selling services that cannot be sold at once, you will need pages explaining clearly what you do and how you do it. This will help you generate qualified leads.
If you are selling goods or products online, you will need quality e-commerce capabilities embedded into your site functionality, and reliable order processing tools to make shopping fast and safe.

So your decision here is to choose quality ways that will increase sales through your website.

09  Try Your Site’s Usability and Make Corrections.
When your site is almost ready, there is one more step to be taken. Nearly all newly created sites contain glitches that you may not notice. To eliminate them initially, you have to perform some testing. If your site is being developed by professionals, be sure that these actions will be performed by a qualified test team, but anyway you can check their job. Invite a friend who is novice to Internet and ask him to browse through your site. Note what confuses him, where he is stuck and listen to all questions.
This information will help you to see the changes that need to be made in your site navigation, content, etc.

The decision here is to test your site properly before deploying.

10  Maintain Your Site for a Long Time.
Site maintenance includes content management, adding new pages when necessary, information updates, etc. Usually maintaining a site requires only basic HTML or other special technical knowledge, that is why it is preferable to perform these actions in-house rather than outsource them.
Actually there are two ways of solving the problem of keeping your site up-to-date. You can make an employee of your organization to learn how to manage all these processes or you can use a special content management system that does not require HTML or other additional knowledge.

So your decision here is to think carefully about your site maintenance and plan it thoroughly for the future.

We do not intend to cover all aspects of complicated though exiting web site development process, but we hope that these first 10 steps will help you ask the right questions and avoid typical mistakes.