How to create a professional website?

As everyone knows, the first channel of information for customers today is the web. This is true in all trades, whether to be known by individuals or companies.


But how to create a professional website ?



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This article will answer all your questions and give you the keys to successful digital communication performance.
If your website is not designed to be effective it will not help your business. We will show you our keys to success to set up an effective digital communication and create a professional website .

Why do I need to create a professional website?
The website creation is a means to a commercial approach that aims to promote a company in all its markets in France, Europe and worldwide.

A professional website has the ability to influence how your market and prospects view your business. First impressions count, so your website must meet the following objectives:

establish credibility,
create trust,
engage visitors,
generate leads,
support your customers,
facilitate sales.
Many corporate bosses or marketing executives are just putting online a website with too little thought or strategy on how this website will impact lead generation, customer acquisition , brand awareness of the brand.

Creating a website is useless without a goal and a clear strategy that helps you increase business contacts, sales, everything that helps you grow your business.
Your website is visible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, making it a valuable marketing asset. Better yet, when you have created a professional website, it costs almost nothing.

It is therefore essential to create a website but it is equally essential to create this website with clear objectives.

Here are the top five reasons why you need to make a website:

1. Establish a web presence
For companies that have a physical location, a website allows, at marginal cost, to make known prospects in catchment areas away from their store.

For service companies, establishing an online presence is the most effective way to provide legitimacy while providing your target with a reference point that can be accessed at any time.

For entrepreneurs and start-ups, the website allows to test the viability of the project and can, in many cases, allow to realize a MVP of your product to validate the reaction of your target and thus optimize your marketing .

You are not convinced of the usefulness of a website to establish a presence on the web?

Some companies make the choice to create a Facebook page and only to create a Facebook page. They lose sight of the three limitations inherent in social networks:

a message posted on Facebook has a lifespan limited to a few hours. In this interval, if it is not read, it is lost in the mass of contents published between time and never again nobody will be able to reach it. A web page published today, because it is accessible by search engines, will still be visible in 6 months, 1 year or even more.
a Facebook page is a very standardized communication space that makes it difficult to argue. A professional website creates trust and gives your prospects confidence to take the next step: make a purchase decision. Without an online presence on the internet, your business reduces its chances of giving this much needed business confidence.
Trade precisely. It is still impossible today to use social networks to sell or make appointments. To start in online sales, it is not useful to develop a site e commerce with a website creation software such as Prestashop. A simple form can in many cases be more than enough.
Today, internet business is an essential part of business development. This is also true for a well-constructed TPE website that represents a fabulous opportunity.

2. Provide information
Your company sells a product or provides a service. Your prospects and your customers inevitably ask a lot of questions about your offer or even want a demonstration.

A professional website is a surprisingly effective tool to meet those expectations.

the visualization of your offers, the detailed presentation of their features will reassure your visitors about the quality of your products,
the creation of a blog allows to give a quality information and to answer in a precise way to the questions of your target. Better yet with your blog, Internet users will discover your company because your articles respond to concerns that concern them. Satisfied by the quality of your blog articles, they will naturally seek to know what your company does,
a FAQ will concern your prospects close to the act of purchase to reassure them and deal with any objections,
the presentation of case study will allow a prospect to project by discovering how your customers have appropriate your offers,
the creation of a web page "Who are we" will reassure your visitors about the seriousness of your approach.
There are many examples that show that information is the basis of creating a pro website.

In many cases, obtaining this information facilitates the qualification of serious prospects and brings them closer to the sale. A user visits the product features web page of your company. It is certainly not there by chance, so it's time to suggest contact with you for example with a live chat that triggers after a few seconds.

3. Make your business visible to as many people as possible
There is simply no other form of marketing as effective as a website when it comes to making your business known. A well-built TPE site will be as visible as a site of a large company giving it all its chances.

An entrepreneur can launch his showcase site before even launching his business and take advantage of this channel to create a file of prospects and work a beginning of notoriety. That's exactly what we did at Orson. We created our blog 2 years before launching our website and our commercial offer. From the first day, we have benefited from visits from prospects convinced by the coherence of our commercial approach.
This is also what many startups are doing that offer their products in pre-purchase on the internet.

In many trades ( bed and breakfast , hotels , restaurants, VTC, photographers, ...) information portals or directories are positioned as wholesalers. By means of commissions they present such or such company thus allowing him to make turnover. This situation is of course expensive but especially dangerous because in many cases the companies concerned do not have their own website which makes them totally dependent on the decisions of these portals:

With a well-built hotel website you can fight against such portals as Booking.com or Trip Advisor and master your communication. Better yet, you can regain control over your business strategy and set different rates depending on whether your prospect reserves directly on your hotel website or through a portal,
in the same way a site showcase of photographer will allow this one to present his works without having to pay a commission to Star of service or Companeo for example.
It is the power of web marketing that is based on website creation that is built with the right strategy and the right methodology to take advantage of countless opportunities.



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4. Generate prospects
A website has a huge capacity to help you generate leads for your business.

We have all learned how the sales process works. First communicate to reach his target, then adjust his pitch, set up offers or accelerators, generate leads contacts, communicate with these prospects to convince them, turn them into customers.

Your website is a highly effective operational marketing tool. Whatever your job, your website will allow you to define your commercial indicators:

know the audience of a site : many tools allow you to know your number of visitors, their origin, your Google ranking .
get contacts and know your rate of leads / visits. A form, a newsletter module, a live chat will allow you to capture prospects emails that you can then use
measure your conversion rate prospects into customers.
This complete mastery of your sales process allows you to easily define your recruitment cost and then define your marketing and sales budgets. How to do ? It's very simple: You know you have a conversion rate from visitors to X% leads and prospects to Y% customers. You can according to the investment made to recruit a visitor to define your recruitment cost.

What's great about the internet and digital communication is that it costs nothing or almost everything and therefore allows very small businesses to develop effective web strategies .

Indeed you can at any time test sales pitches by modifying the presentation of a web page, make tests A / B (the A / B testing consists in presenting randomly 2 slightly different pages to measure the one that is the most effective), test arguments, ...

Once you have a good understanding of your recruitment costs, it becomes easy to optimize the use of your marketing budgets.

For example, a portal offers to send you qualified contacts against commissions. Test and compare if this action is more or less profitable. Same for the purchase of keywords or for an action of affiliation, ad on Facebook (Facebook Ads), ...

To measure your visitor traffic and understand how it behaves, your website is connected with Google Analytics, which allows you to keep track of your site 's audience and verify Google' s position.

That's why your website is a great machine to generate leads.

5. Generate sales
Whether you have a DIY store or a merchant, whether you are selling a product or a service, making a professional website is a major commercial lever.

A website operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even while you sleep.

Yet very few companies use their website to trade. In France there are more than 3.5 million websites, of which less than 10% offer online sales .

It is true that a few years ago, commerce was a little complicated. Online payment and logistics are now very easy to integrate into a website. Whether you go through a communication agency (creating your website on WordPress most often) or you do your website independently with a professional website creation software  just connect a module for a few seconds dispose of :

an online payment tool,
an online booking tool (for example for a hotel website ),
a planning management tool (for example for a sports coach site ),

How to create a website: the keys to success
Simplicity of use is more important than design
We all tend when creating or redesigning a website to spend time on color choices. Yet the rules of web design have nothing in common with the rules of graphics or traditional communication.

Creating an effective website in web design involves taking into account 4 principles:

the user wants quick access to information. In a few seconds, he will scan the web page on which the search engine brings him and decide to stay or go out,
in more than 50% of cases this user browses his smartphone or tablet. The small format of these media involves conciseness,
user benchmarks have gradually imposed themselves on the internet. As examples:
a button to access a private area is always at the top right. This benchmark has become essential because the banks' websites work like this and we are very likely to visit them every day,
the logo allows you to return to the home page,
the menu (or navigation bar) is at the top of the page.
Website creation must match the expectations of search engines:
a responsive website design optimized for mobile reading,
web pages that load in less than 2 seconds so that you can view them even with 3G connections,
an url address in HTTPS.
Because of these different constraints, having a streamlined design is crucial if you want to create a professional showcase website:

quality templates. A template is a template for presenting a page and can quickly create a website.
a limited choice of colors. Web design specialists recommend 3 different colors maximum for all the web pages of your website,
a unique font ("font") for all the site,
high quality images. A beautiful image is at least 960 pixels wide, it must be understood in 1 second and therefore not have thousands of details,
a menu (navigation bar) with up to 6 links to pages on your site,
access to all pages with up to 3 clicks (what experts call "depth"),
action buttons (CTA) in small numbers on each page (Maximum 3 buttons: top, middle and bottom of web pages),
a recourse to limited flat colors. The usage is to write on a white background and our eye is programmed for that. Imposing color variations makes reading more complex and anything that makes access to information more complex encourages users to leave your website,
information modules harmoniously arranged to allow rapid transverse reading,
texts interspersed with titles, images, words in bold, to give a perception of simplicity of access to the info. A page can be very long, if it is justified, but the paragraphs should ideally not exceed 10 to 15 lines maximum,
In the same way, the profusion of carousels, pop up, graphic effects is rarely effective because all these elements make complex the navigation of the surfer who comes looking for information.

Hubspot (one of the largest inbound marketing software) did a survey that showed that 76% of people say the most important feature of a website is ease of use.

This facility also makes it possible to demonstrate a form of credibility of the website concerned. Indeed, no need for graphic effects if the information is of quality.

What really matters to users?
All studies show that an effective website is a website in which:

the information in a showcase site is organized in a logical way,
the information is up to date. This seems obvious but how many websites have not been updated in the last 3 months: a majority,
there are links to quality sites.
When creating your website do not hesitate to ask your customers or employees about how they perceive the ease of use of your website. To avoid falling into the "I like" "I do not like" which is perfectly subjective, ask them specific questions:

have you easily found the web page that talks about my products,
by clicking on a link did you know what you would find in the destination web page,
have you had all the answers to your questions,
have you bought (or made contact).
After publishing your showcase site , you can analyze the behavior of your users to detect misunderstandings.

To start a simple reading of your Google Analytics control tool can help you detect problems.

For this in the menu on the left click on "Behavior" then "Site Content" and "All Pages".

In the blink of an eye, you can know the number of visits to each of your site's web pages, visit duration, and the bounce rate.

If the stakes justify it you can use professional software such as Hotjar that allow you to understand the activity of your visitors on your website.

As you can see, the wow effect can play tricks.

The effectiveness of your website depends a lot on how it is built. If you go through a web agency, confirm that it has the necessary skills to create an ergonomic and easy to use site.

Are there tips for Google SEO?
The SEO of a website does not perform any magic operation. Your site will be well referenced if it meets the expectations of search engines (Google, Quant, Ecosia, ...). All work the same way.

First, it is computers that scan web pages to detect, in specific places, information enabling them to understand what they are dealing with.

Then, when a page is referenced, the search engines offer this page to users according to the requests they make. They analyze the behavior of Internet users. Do they stay on the webpage for a long time, browse the site, buy it, come back.

Finally, because they are computers, they need specific rules to quickly analyze your web pages. These are the technical aspects of SEO too often underestimated.

Start creating a well referenced website!

How to reference a website?
All SEO experts will tell you the same thing. SEO is a process that requires method, time and based on 4 distinct phases:

a) Understand how people search
We are talking here about the famous keywords. What are the words typed by internet users on the search engines.

This is the basis of Google's SEO which consists of knowing all the keywords used by your target to find a company like yours.

At Orson, we have identified more than 450 keywords in French and almost as many in English. All are not equal.

Some are key words that correspond to the phase of reflection of a customer (how to create a website, what is the price of a site, ..). They are sometimes quite far from the act of purchase but being identified on these key words makes it possible to be known of prospects at the very beginning of their decision process.

Others are clearly used by our target in situation of purchase (differences between Orson and Wix, how much costs the lodging of a website, ...). Using these keywords is essential to creating an effective website.

b) Include in your website the keywords in the right places
Each page of your website is summarized by a title and a description (meta data). This is what you see first in the search engine results (in blue or purple for the title and in black for the description).

Each of the titles and descriptions of each of the web pages of your site must include keywords. This allows Google to understand the specific goals of each page to present them to the right people.

If this sounds obvious, the reality is that more than 50% of the websites have neither a title nor a precise description. At an internet site audit this is the first thing that SEO experts will analyze.

Then everything is about logic. A page is structured with generally a title (H1) subtitles (H2) texts and images. Keywords should be used in titles, subtitles, at the beginning of the paragraph of text and in the titles of images or videos. It is not more complicated than that it is just a work of method and rigor.

By doing this, you allow search engine robots to understand precisely the purpose of each page of your website and thus present them to the right people.

c) Animate your website
A website is a showcase. In the physical world it would come to no shopkeeper the idea not to animate his shop window. It's obviously the same on the internet.

Your prospects want up-to-date information, search engines focus on recent information so you have to animate your website.

This is all the interest of a blog, a web page news that can produce new content and enrich your site.

The ideal is to publish each week a page of 300 words minimum and to make it known through the social networks (see paragraph below).

Of course, this implies that you are autonomous to animate your site what is possible today with the site creation software that offers responsive design templates that are easy to modify.

d) Work Inbound Links ( Backlinks )
The most essential step of any natural referencing process. Your showcase site or your e commerce site is rich in content, regularly animated, so it is more and more visited and appreciated by Google.

This is the moment to identify the websites with which it is relevant to enter into relationship to propose an exchange of links. Each site has a page rank (a mark expressed in index from 1 to 100). Moz SEO is a free software that lets you know the Page Rank of any website.

The challenge is to get backlinks from sites that have a higher page rank than yours.

To put it simply, and utopically, if your site has a page rank of 10 (low) and a site with a page rank of 90 (very high) puts up a backlink to your profit your life changes. Do not dream that will not happen. It is necessary as always on the internet to work with method and to advance step by step. Aim sites with a page rank of 20 then as and when 30 ....

Technical aspects related to SEO
Responsive design
Making a website responsive design is a must. Indeed, more than 50% of visitors to a website come from tablets or smartphones. This has led Google to decide not to present non responsive design websites during mobile requests. The impact on the traffic of a website can be considerable.

The responsive design consists in automatically recomposing the page templates , according to the size of the medium by which they are accessible.

If you have to redo your website, your agency will certainly charge you this service because most of the software they use (WordPress or Drupal in particular) require a specific validation phase.

The most modern site creation software (SaaS mode for Software as a Service) does not pose this difficulty because they integrate management rules to make the responsive design unbreakable.

HTTPS
The e commerce sites are built in compliance with the HTTPS standard since the origin of the web. This standard is not new. What is new is that Google has decided to impose this standard on all types of websites to strengthen the security of data on the web.

If your website (showcase or blog site) is not in HTTPS, from October 2017 the Chrome browser will display a warning message to visitors to your website if pages on your site contain a form to fill or a search field.

Given the content of the message, the effect is guaranteed. Your visitors will prefer not to enter your website rather than run a risk.

The goal of Google is to impose HTTPS on all existing sites. The HTTPS is a transfer protocol that encrypts data and thus provides more security for readers of your website.

Passing your website from HTTP to HTTPS is like doing a website migration. Schematically 3 steps are expected:

modify your hosting contract to acquire a suitable SSL certificate. The cost of your accommodation will increase significantly (count on the order of 100 to 200 € per month),
HTTPS migration of all your web pages,
check that all plugins that are used in your website (plug in) are HTTPS. Otherwise, the pages of your website concerned will be considered insecure.
Depending on the software you use this work will be more or less complex so more or less expensive to achieve:

your site was made with an open source CMS (WordPress or Drupal) In this case it is likely that you went through a web agency that realized your website.Contact it to get an estimate of the cost of the migration. importance of your site (number of pages and visitors) the cost can go up to a few thousand euros,
your site was built on a CMS cloud software (a website builder like Jimdo, Orson or Squarespace). It is likely that you have realized your website independently. In this case, the HTTPS migration of your site will be done automatically so without any additional cost on your subscription.
The loading time of your web pages
It is certainly the technical element least often taken into account when creating or redesigning a website.

Google values ??web pages that load in less than 2 seconds to ensure a quality user experience even when mobile browsing 3G.

For your pages to be fast they must respect the technical standards of the HTML 5 language (say W3C) and you must be particularly vigilant on the weight of the images that can slow considerably the loading of the web pages.

The best way to optimize loading time is to compress your images with appropriate software. As an example we use the free software Tinyjpg which allows to win between 70 and 80% of weight without any impact on the quality of the images.

Regularly do not hesitate to test your pages. We use for this the service of Pingdom which allows to know the loading time of a page taking into account the distance between the server and the user.

Should it be present on social networks?
There are more than 100 social networks, the best known Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Youtube are used by a large majority of your prospects and customers.

It is therefore relevant to create a Facebook page or to animate your presence on social networks.

Benefits of being present on social networks
1 - Develop the proximity between your company and its prospects
A website is a cold media that generates little proximity to your prospects and customers.

Conversely, social networks are emotional media through which your prospects express themselves spontaneously and directly.

For example a satisfied customer will not hesitate to give his opinion on his Facebook page or to relay your messages on Twitter. The criticizer will do so in the same way but you will know his opinion and can interact with him.

2 - Enjoy the virality of social networks
Social networks are great echo chambers. They allow you to make as many as possible your offers, the latest publications of your blog for example.

The principle is simple, the subscriber of your page will discover your publication and relay it to his relatives. So a person can communicate your message to dozens of other people who will do the same thing in their turn.

Of course this virality is organized and does not work suddenly.

This is where brand empathy makes sense. You are close to your customers, you use a nice tone, you put people at the heart of your communications and you will see your results soar.

Better yet, networks are an opportunity to encourage your prospects to talk about your company or your products. organizing contests, questioning, offering benefits are all practices that encourage your target to share information about your brand.

3 - Optimize your SEO
Social networks are the natural extension of your website.

You publish content regularly in your blog, by commercial offers or in any other way, take the reflex to systematically communicate on your social networks to publicize this content. They are the demonstration of your know-how. Each new visit on a page of your website gained thanks to the shares on your Facebook page is taken into account by the search engines.

How to create an effective website: the pitfalls to avoid
There is not really one, each, even a TPE, is able to create an effective website that generates business.

First and foremost it is essential to understand and accept that Google SEO takes time and work. All the promises of the type "to create a free site", "on the first page of Google", "quality backlinks for 200 €" are to flee.

Then, a good principle is to only delegate what you understand in order to be able to control the provider. It's the same thing on the internet.

The challenge of your digital communication is such that it is essential that you train yourself and that you audit your website to understand where are your sources of optimization.

How to create a professional website: summary
Creating an effective website is not complicated.

What it does that it will be effective and boost your business is based on 3 essential levers:

a good marketing diagnosis of your company to identify the arguments that make the difference,
a good methodology to create an effective website, work on its SEO and animate it in the long term,
a permanent measure of your results in order to put in place the necessary corrective actions.