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16 Things to Think Through before Creating Your Website

This article is meant as a guide for those of you who consider making a new blog/website for your freelance business. It’s quite easy these days to get both a domain and make a website using a CMS like WordPress.
Still, there are a few things you should think through first in order to be as successful as possible.
If you go through the process of making your own website (which most freelancers should do in my opinion) you obviously want as many people as possible to visit it. – AND you want them to come back a second and third time as well. Most of these tips mean making decisions based on how you want the website to turn out and how you want it to work for you. I hope you find these tips useful and wish you the best of luck and success with your own website!

1. Are you making the website yourself?

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The answer to this question will have a big say on the costs and more.
You don’t necessarily need much knowledge of web-design to be able to use a CMS like the very popular WordPress. If you on the other hand need something that’s very customized in some way, it could be a good idea to let someone more professional do it – unless web-design is your field of work.

2. Colors / visualise

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You may want to come up with a color-scheme that fits the personality of your brand/business. You want something that is serious, but not too serious or dull. You’d want some pictures, as that is something that generally keeps people reading on. Before you start getting the website designed, you should take the time to browse around a bit and get inspired. Choosing a set of colors to use is always something that will help a lot during this process.
Don’t leave these decisions until the website is being designed, it can leave you with a lot of extra work and/or costs.

3. Your own domain

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With the prices on web hosting, there aren’t many reasons to why you shouldn’t have the website on your own domain. Still you have to think through this and choose a name and a provider. Try to check out a few different options to make sure you get a good deal. Remember that the packages can be upgraded most places, and if you after some time find out that you want to change provider – that can always be done later on.

4. How much money/time do you have?

Picture by Michal Koralewski

Websites can be cheap, and they can be expensive. Make a budget to stay within to make sure you don’t spend too much money. Try to spend enough time and money for it to be representative of who you are. If you have a shoestring budget you would want to do as much as possible yourself or maybe have some of your friends do it as a favor or to a cheaper price. If you on the other hand have a huge budget you could include pictures taken especially for the website and pay a professional web-designer to add some extra cool features.

5. Making a setup

Picture by Hilde Torbjornsen

Before you start, you should try to plan how the website is going to be. This part of the project can be done entirely by yourself. If you’re outsourcing the web-design, you have to communicate with the designer to make sure your thoughts can be solved the right way. The reason why you should set this up before you start working on the website, is mainly to be able to keep focus. Once the design process starts, a new set of challenges will occur – meaning that everything that’s been taken care of beforehand will be a huge advantage.
You can also try to make a wireframe of the website for the webdesigner to work from.

6. What is your goal?

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Obviously the reason for why you want a website will be completely  critical for how you work with it. The goals can be one or more; to earn money, to get new clients, showcase your work/portfolio and much more. You have to agree with yourself what the goals are to be able to do evaluations along the process and see if you need to adjust or not.

7. What is your niche?

As easy as it may sound you will have to decide what’s your niche. You have to decide on what to write about and what not to. Even though everything feels very set in your business in real life, you have to think this over once you hit the web. Make sure that there’s no doubt what visitors will find on your website. If you try to write about too many topics you will loose visitors quickly. Make sure to only cover the things that are relevant and that you know well.

8. Will you sell anything from the website?

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If the answer to this is yes, – you have to read up on which options that are available. Make sure that everything around the process of selling whatever you’re gonna sell is thought of. Payment systems, sending/transfer, what to do if people complain and so on.

9. Why should people visit?

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You have to think over what you want to be the main reasons for people to visit the website. Do you want them to visit to read news related to your niche, to buy your products/services, to look at your art or to download something. There are many options here but you have to be able to mention at least a couple of reasons to why people would want to visit, or they wont.

10. Who will be visiting?

The design of your website will depend on many things. One of these will be who your target audience is. For example if your target is professionals within a profession you can allow yourself more technical language than if the audience is a mix of beginners. Wrong choice of content and language can leave you with no audience or the completely wrong one. This is why you always should keep this point in mind and be true to yourself and your goals.

11. How often will you be updating it?

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A very important part of making sure that visitors return to your website is how frequent you update your content. Generally for a WordPress powered blog/website I would advice at least a couple of updates weekly. If you have hundreds of thousand visitors each week you would want to update often, probably once or twice a day. But when you start your blog I would say a couple of times weekly is good. If you update too often it will take a lot of your time and keep it harder to have high quality on what you publish.
If your website is based on selling something, you would want to make sure that your products are always updated and notify of new and enhanced products when they arrive.

12. Will you use guest bloggers?

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Having other authors write a single post or regular posts on your website has a lot of positive side effects. It will bring more visitors, it helps you get enough quality posts and you can also then get other topics covered than only the ones you excel at yourself. Not many authors will write for free though, especially not for a new website, so prepare to pay for articles.

13. Are you putting ads on it?

A great way to earn some extra money can be to sell ad-space on your website. This can help finance your yearly costs for the domain and sometimes even more than that. The more unique monthly visitors you get, the more options on advertising open up. To begin with, Google AdSense and similar can be a solution.

14. Including your portfolio

Picture by Asif Akbar

No matter what you do, you most likely would want to get your portfolio or parts of it included in your website. This gives you a great way to show your work and gives the website a more professional feel instantly. You can either implement parts of your recent work as illustrations in the various parts of the site or make an own section called portfolio.

15. How will you get traffic?

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The ways to get traffic to your website are countless. You have to try to find something that feels right for the way you want to stand out from the crowd. You can advertise through Google AdWords or other similar ways, you can also comment on other websites linking back to your website (a very popular way of doing it) and the list goes on. One thing that works really well if you’re good at writing about the things that interest you, can be guest-writing for a website that has a lot of readers and lets you link back to your own website.

16. How will people be able to contact you?

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As trivial as it may sound, many people actually forget to be clear enough on how they can be reached. A “contact us” -page definitely should be present. You should also include en email address on each side if possible. If you also have YouTube, Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook and so on – make sure people easily find out how to reach you there.

Those were my 16 tips on things you should think through and have ready and decided before you take the step to create an own website for yourself/your freelance business. Feel free to leave any feedback below.

Good luck!

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Tags: freelance, website