Domain Names
If you’re a brand new start-up, the first thing you’ll want to do is to secure your business domain name – which is really just the address for your new online site.  Check if the name is available and have your domain name registered.  Even better, if you can secure several domains do that – for example if you can get domain.com and domain.co.uk you should buy both.  Domain names are relatively cheap – if you need any assistance or advice, speak to us or your web design company.

Hosting
Your new site is going to need somewhere to live – hosting is the web server that your site will be housed on, so it’s available to users on the internet.  Commonly, shared hosting is sufficient and this is where your site is shared on the same server as other websites.  Large scale sites may require dedicated hosting where the web server is home to just one site – and therefore not competing for resources with other websites.  Be careful when choosing a hosting company – and be prepared to pay for good, reliable and secure service.  For good shared hosting, expect to pay around £9 or £10 per month.

Design and Building your website
It’s worth investing in a professional web design company – the free /cheaper services you can find will tend to be built on generic templates that are often found for free.  The problem here is that these templates usually have limited scope for customisation – and therefore they tend to all look similar and offer the same functionality.  You can expect to pay anything from a few hundred pound to tens of thousands depending on the web design agency you choose, the functionality and complexity of your business requirements.  Whatever you decide, ask for recommendations from other businesses or check the portfolios of web design companies you like.

Getting customers to your site
Many businesses stumble here – they get their new website up and running, and stop there.  Getting people to your new site takes effort – whether users come along by directly typing your URL, using a search engine, pay-per-click advertising or links from other websites.

So to get started, make sure your website URL is used on all your marketing materials – from letterheads and business cards to promotional goods and email signatures.

SEO just means search engine optimisation and focuses on improving your site’s ranking in search engine results.  To do this, you need to make sure the content on your site is optimised and the meta data used to describe or tag the page has been thought about carefully.

Advertising and Pay-per-click in a way allows you to buy your way to the top of the search engine results - Google Adwords is probably one of the best known providers of pay-per-click.

Social Networking
In addition to setting up a new website, you should make sure to register and setup on the social networks  – get a YouTube channel, twitter account and a Facebook page – all free of charge.  Platforms such as linkedin have over 100 million members and allows businesses to gain exposure and meet new contacts. For creative professionals, behance.com is the world’s leading platform and you can setup a portfolio of your work.

Keep content fresh
Think about having your website built on a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress.  That way your business can update content anytime – without having to go through a web design company.  As well as that, if you’re able to keep your content up-to-date and fresh, you’re more likely to encourage visitors to come back to your site.

Monitor and Improve
Finally, you should definitely setup Google Analytics – a free service that will track your site traffic, and present you will all sorts of useful statistics about your site visitors and their usage of your website.  Once you have clear facts on what your visitors want from your site – you’re in a better position to plan changes and improvements in the future.

Rather than adding all your subscribers to one mailing list, it’s become common to collect information such as gender, location and user specific preferences – so you can segment users and target marketing efforts more effectively.

Effective segmentation however requires careful planning – if you get the balance wrong, you can do more damage than good. The more information you ask the user to enter, the less likely they are complete your form. Therefore you should only ask for what’s important and nothing more, using clear call to action that’s in the user’s view.

Here’s an example of a sign up form that collects information that can be used to segment users in future.

Sign up form on 4 Pines Beer Club

In this example sign-up form, harveynichols.com gather minimal information and use a large call to action button that in clear and in the user’s vision

harverynichols.com registration form

As each site is different, so too will be the information that’s relevant to you.  In this final example, footytube.com gather relevant information that segements their users and would allow them to target content to the users most likely to be interested in it.

Sign-up form on footytube.com

People read content on the web in a very different way to how they would read a magazine or newspaper. Typically the online visitor will scan content quickly, so it’s important to get to the point quickly and clearly.

When thinking about content, here are a few points to bear in mind.

1. Have a plan

To get off to a good start, make an editorial plan – looking at content channels and how content is to be distributed. Make these plans available to everyone on the project team and make sure everyone involved knows what they’re responsible for contributing. Sloppy content comes around from teams without a clear path planned out.

2. Understand the purpose

Knowing the purpose of your content is critical. What are you trying to make? and how will this result in your business getting to where it needs to be.  Consider also the customers Рare they going to be happy.

3. Getting your message across

Work out what your key messages are and convey these clearly, quickly and accurately so you get through to as broad an audience as possible.

4. What do your readers want next?

Nine times out of ten, this is going to be the hardest thing to get right. Start by asking yourself ‘What questions will my customers have after they read this?’ That should help you anticipate what content they’ll want next – and be in a better position to satisfy their needs.

Setup a feedback form on your website and keep in touch with your readers by making the most of twitter, Facebook and of course your company blog. One of the easiest ways of knowing what your customers’ want is to ask them directly.

5. Know what NOT to do

If you fail to engage your site visitors – your site content is wrong. Avoid overly long content that takes forever to understand, and keep your content fresh!

The main point is that you need to get to the point and fast. Having said that, you need to get the balance right and give you users something of interest that they can engage with.

Design for Growth will be co-hosted by Lord Michael Bichard and David Willetts MP, Minister of State for Universities & Science. Leading international names in design and business will kick off the debate, including Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice-President of Industrial Design for Apple, Ian Callum and Gerry McGovern, Design Directors at Jaguar and Land Rover, and Kevin McCloud, author, broadcaster and designer.

Visit the Design Council website at http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/Insight/Design-for-Growth/ to find out more