Creating a website, whether for personal or business use, isn’t always as easy as it might seem.
True, there are plenty of site-building companies out there who claim to help you construct your site in just a few steps. But to have a successful WordPress site, there’s more required.
It’s important to start from the ground up, which means pre-build planning.
Any agency or freelancer worth their salt won’t leap straight into the design or execution of your site. Before those steps come the step of constructing the basis of your presence online. A good consultant will have an eye on the long game, knowing that your site needs to be built on a good foundation. So if your potential agency doesn’t advise you from square one, it might be time to rethink your choice.
Once that initial plan has been put into place, then and only then is it time to move on to the actual construction of the site. This means a thoroughly professional look to the entire production, which is often very difficult to pull off without prior experience.
A competent agency who knows their business will create a hand-tailored, professional design that highlights and adds to your brand.
Again, there are so many variables in this process that it can be very difficult to make it happen without having a great deal of experience under your belt. Agencies with years of web design experience will have learned what works and what doesn’t. If you hire an amateur, however, it’s much more likely that they will end up sinking your WordPress site through poor choices in images, written content, color palette, or typography. WP is well known for providing themes that work well for professional sites of all kinds. But it still requires an educated eye to execute correctly.
An important part of the planning phase is the creation of an overall content scheme. It’s vital to the success of any site to know the purpose it will be created for, which means knowing what content will be included. Good content can help to elevate a website, whereas bad content can sink even a well-designed site.
Well-written content is designed to draw in new customers as well as ensure that your existing customers don’t get frustrated by a website that doesn’t communicate as well as it should. A good agency should definitely have optimal content as a top priority for your site, including judicious — and generous — usage of graphics and videos.
Optimal content will communicate clearly, outline benefits to the audience, and motivate the reader to action. If any one of these are missing, it can result in frustration for your reader and, ultimately, failure for your site.
But it’s difficult to check all three of those boxes at the same time. So, to play it safe, it is absolutely recommended that you work with an agency who provides copywriting services. A professional copywriter will work along with you in order to ascertain your goals, both short and long term, and craft compelling copy. Keeping in mind that motivation to action is a key ingredient in well-written copy, it’s vital to construct a narrative within your copy that allows the reader to see the benefits of following through, whether that follow-through is signing up for your services, following links to your social media, or purchasing through your eCommerce site.
Along with these targets for well-written copy comes the consideration of search engine optimization, or SEO. WordPress is celebrated for its main structure and for plug-ins that are built in to help you optimize your SEO. The high rate of SEO means that your site will rank higher in Google searches for those particular phrases.
But SEO isn’t just a matter of plugging in noted keywords without regard to whether they fit, or whether the content makes sense.
SEO is really only effective when it is combined with helpful, educational, or entertaining content that people want to read — your content has to draw people in. If the copy is poorly written or riddled with errors, and your readers hit the back button almost as soon as they land on your page, Google will also keep track of that, and it will scuttle your search rankings.
So content has to be clearly written, easily understood, and professionally edited in order to really benefit fully from SEO keywords.
Not only that, but keywords can vary depending on local areas. So if you want your local customers to be able to find you, say via a Google search for Yelp reviews, this is another aspect that demands attention.
Again, all of this can be overwhelming, trying to make sure all the boxes are ticked. And again, competent and professional optimization services should be offered by any good agency.
Hundreds of other factors impact your rankings on Google, apart from the actual content of the copy. A professional agency will also ensure that your website loads quickly, which is something that Google looks at when organizing rankings. The images included on the site should be optimized, and WordPress managed hosting will almost certainly be recommended, especially when dealing with local rankings and keywords.
Whew! All of that has been covered with your new agency. Your website is constructed, shiny and new. You’re done, right?
Well, no, not exactly. Websites are years-long projects, in a sense. They require constant updating in order to keep up with Google search rankings, as well as updating simply to continue to be relevant to existing customers and to draw in new ones. WordPress itself is not a static software — it continually loads updates to themes and plug-ins.
So your site can’t afford to be static, either. It needs regular maintenance in order to be the best version of itself that it can be.
A good agency comes in handy here, too, keeping up scheduled maintenance and making sure that your website runs smoothly and efficiently.
Finally, with all of the above taken care of, your website will begin to do its job: generating attention, business, or revenue, depending on the type of site that you have created. It’s definitely recommended that at least a portion of that revenue be re-invested in the site, in order to keep it top of the line, and even to potentially upgrade over time.
A progressive improvement of your site, allowing it to grow and breathe along with your growing brand, is far more cost-efficient than starting from scratch and investing in an entirely new website design every few years.
To break it down in an easily-digested handy-dandy bullet point list, let’s look through all of this one more time.
Here are the benefits to you, the website originator, in hiring a professional agency to handle the creation of the best WordPress website:
- The agency will strategize a plan for the site
- Your site will be guaranteed to work correctly and present a professional appearance
- The agency will provide a professional copywriter to help craft written content
- Attention will also be given to other types of content, such as images and videos
- SEO specialists will optimize your site for the best possible performance on Google search rankings
- Regular website maintenance will be handled for you
- Your website will be able to grow along with you and your brand, while you still have the time to focus on other aspects of your business
If all of the above sounds appealing to you — and if you’re a busy business owner, how could it not? — then it’s time to check with Jones & Jones Advertising. We provide top performance, professional attention, and continued investment in you and your company.