All hail WordPress. It certainly feels like it sometimes when you think about how far we have come in terms of website development and design.
Back in the day, before this whole “social media” addiction and your fancy website builders, those who wanted to build websites had to learn coding. Not just to familiarize yourself with it, you had to actually learn to type it out, know what worked how, and be able to sift through all the chaotic text mumbo-jumbo when trying to fix a problem. And often, fixing the problem was as ‘simple’ as removing an extra space between code that accidentally was placed there. Translation: You’d usually have to look for a needle in the haystack. A single space, a single letter, a single dot that was out of place could break your website. Imagine doing that every time you had a problem on your site.
Today, we have WordPress, and setting it up is literally as simple as a plug & play devices. Want to add a feature? Just install a plugin. Need to troubleshoot? Deactivate a couple recently added plugins and reactivate as you check each time to see which is not cooperating. Let me tell you, that’s far easier than staring at 1,500 lines of code. However although the designing of websites has become far easier today than ever before the development of websites has become far more complicated than it was 10, 15, or 20 years ago.
Even with WordPress, a common mistake is often made by many people building their websites. So many people buy hosting, get WordPress and think things will be easy, but without a plan set before production, it’s not hard to stray from what you want your final product to look like, and do.
Planning your website is one major step towards starting to build a website. Planning is of high importance to get what you want to achieve. The theme you choose on WordPress, the potential it has, and the looks you expect it to have in the end can change drastically without planning ahead.
Individuals excited to have a webpage up and running may rush without a plan and create something that doesn’t really serve the purpose of the business. Business owners may be too pre-occupied with everything else to sit down and clearly develop an idea of what they want to create.
Not planning properly can cause you to make several delays from launching your site, and to go over budget.
But there is a couple solutions. First of all, you can map out all your details prior to going into the project. Check out all the different kinds of plugins available first. To stick to your planned details, I suggest you try to ignore suggested or trending plugins later on in the process. It’s too easy to stumble on a plugin you didn’t realize existed but suddenly really need. It’s like impulse buying. If you go in hungry for features, you’ll come out with all the junk you didn’t mean to get. (Not calling the plugins actual junk) But if you don’t have a need for the greatest plugin on your website it will simply take up space and slow down your site.
If you’re looking for a planner with experience, find a competent Website Management Team. Professional Web Managers know the incredible importance of planning their website projects and their Website Management Teams have plenty of experience implementing the plans.
When searching for a Website Management Team, remember that the budget you set for hiring the team is not an expense. It’s an investment. You may feel what you’re spending seems a little high at first, but their skilled team will set up a professional site that’s going to sell your products or services to people who may not have known about you previously.
And how they’re going to build your website for you is by PLANNING. The Web Manager will have a few meetings with you to ask you what you’re looking for, how you want things to be displayed, the colors you wish to use. The look, the feel, the features you wish to incorporate, and where. They know what to ask you so they can properly plan your website the way you’ve dreamed of. In terms of development and maintenance you need to plan that out as well for the sake of marketing strategies you are going to employ. Are you going to utilize SEO and SEM to drive traffic to your website? If so have you planned ahead to incorporate these into your website design? What about social media, landing pages, ecommerce functionalities and the list goes on and on. Plan ahead, then sit down with your developer and discuss options to enhance your plan, but always have a pre-configured plan.
Just because you don’t require special coding skills to create beautiful websites it doesn’t mean you don’t need to plan for it. Mastering a CMS also has its own learning curve and if you are not technically sound the frustration may not be worth your effort. So have a plan, execute your plan and make your web designing life a lot easier.