As mentioned in the previous article of this series, creating a well-defined content strategy is the first step to creating a new website. A content strategy will help your content and online marketing teams create and publish content on your website that is effective and improves your conversion rates. After you have created and described audience personas in your content strategy, the next step is to decide the tone and voice that you need to use in the content – professional copywriting services are well-equipped with helping out in this regard.
Deciding on the voice and tone of your content
Even the tone and voice of your content should be clearly mentioned in the content strategy. You can use different tones and voices for different audience personas. For example, if you are targeting the older population with medical articles, your content needs to be professional, factual, authoritative, and objective. On the other hand, if you are writing about celebrity fashion styles to target a younger audience, the tone of your content must be casual and fun. After all, the main purpose of copywriting is to cater to your audience’s needs.
Content management
Most companies make the mistake of leaving out content management specifics from the content strategy. Content marketing is a complex process and needs to be monitored carefully to ensure that content development, creation, and publishing are carried on smoothly. A content governance plan must be described in the content strategy so that everyone involved in the content marketing process is aware of the people, processes, and technicalities involved in creating and publishing process.
Another important step that many companies miss is setting up a content editorial calendar. Once your new website is launched you also need to worry about updating it with new content regularly. A content editorial calendar will help you keep track of the kind of content that needs to go out, when content pieces need to go out and how often. You can also define content marketing channels like social media platforms, blogs, etc., and research options in your content editorial calendar.
Your content management strategy also needs to include the metrics and methods used to measure the success of your new website. KPIs or Key Performance Indicators should be chosen depending on the goals that you wish to achieve with your new website. Some commonly used KPIs are conversion rate, bounce rate, abandonment rate, daily visits, etc.
Choosing web technologies and platforms
After you have created a thorough content strategy, the next step involves deciding on the web technologies and platforms that you need to use to match your content publishing goals and your brand. You need to ensure that your website stands out from the rest and is easy to maintain and update. Firstly, you need to decide on the blogging platform or content management system that your website will be using. Some of the best options out there are WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform and CMS as it is highly customizable and is very easy to use.
When your new website is in the development and testing phases, you need to choose a temporary or staging server that is fast. The staging domain that you are using should at no cost be indexable by search engines. Next comes choosing wireframe tools to design the layouts of your screens. Every web page on your website should be wireframed before it is coded.
Your new website will obviously include dynamic components like sliders, charts, etc. and JavaScript is the best option for creating such dynamic components. However, there are numerous JavaScript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) libraries available nowadays that make the task of creating dynamic components very easy. JQuery is a great JS library that you need to consider for your new website.
Just like you need a content management strategy, you also need a website management strategy. Launching a new website or redesigning a website is a huge and highly complex task and to make sure that each web page is perfect, you need a website build management system. After the website launch, you can use your website management system to collect feedback and to help make minor changes to the site.