Website Strategy, Web Design and Development, Ecommerce

What is a Website Strategy?

The purpose of a website strategy is to blend your business goals with the website design process. Remember, we’re not designing a website just to look pretty. We’re designing an interface that is usable and accessible, one that helps your business meet its objectives.

A plan that takes this into account is called a Website Strategy. At Waqa Studios, we consider defining this to be the most important step of any online venture… and it doesn’t matter whether you’re replacing an existing website or creating a completely new one. In many larger projects we’re involved in (if they involve building a website), the actual designing and building of the website itself can sometimes be a smaller task compared to everything that we do to plan for its success beforehand.

This biopharmaceutical spinoff was being readied to launch at a big investors event hosted at JP Morgan, but they didn’t have a website to provide updates on their latest R&D progress – either to investors or to potential partners and clinicians.

Find out how the solution we developed allowed them to present their research pipeline graphically.

Tools we often employ.

How your website is designed and built would depend on what it’s for, who it’s for and how it’s meant to work. These should all be investigated and defined with a Website Strategy before any work is started.

We regularly make use of the following platforms and technologies for different types of projects.

WordPress

Shopify

Django + AngularJS

Strategy is key to website design and development. For this 170 year old spirits importer we developed a website that presented their product library in a way that was easy to navigate on all device sizes.

Don’t rush into designing or developing a website. Work with experts to understand what will work best and what will help you meet your goals.

A strategic approach.

A website strategy should contain several key stages or tasks.

Definition of your objectives.

Your objectives will influence every aspect of your website, from its layout to its content. Without understanding what you want to accomplish you could end up building the wrong website altogether – lacking focus, lacking information or being a mess of overwhelming excess of information. We’ll work with you to understand and then define what your objectives should be.

Identification of your audience.

Knowing your audience is key to delivering them the information and experience they are looking for and expecting. If your website doesn’t look like it will deliver what they want within the first few seconds, you’ve lost them, they hit that back button and they’re gone forever. We’ll use techniques to understand and pinpoint your target audience.

Adapting and applying branding.

Your business has been carefully branded to represent its offerings and to appeal to a target market. But how could your brand be expressed best online? We’ll expand upon your branding to define and document how colors, typography and other elements should be used. We’ll create a web style guide to add to your corporate identity document for you to follow in the future. Your website design will follow this guide.

Planning the Launch.

Website launches can be simple or intricate. It depends on their purpose. A soft launch and gradual testing might be the best approach for a business that wants to test the waters, but a highly publicized and widely announced website launch might be something that’s important for an event or a new product. Planning the launch might be key to success.

Measuring Results.

Whether a website is brand new, or whether it’s replacing one that already exists, prepare to measure. For an older website we’d benchmark the current metrics and compare with those post-launch. For a new website we’d measure after launch and compare further down the line. We’re then able to suggest improvements.

Continuous Improvements.

In the business world things change and can change quickly. Even if we arm you with the right tools, we don’t want you to head out alone. We’ll be with you on your journey and help you adapt to changes quickly with services to rapidly respond to changing needs.

With a focus on identifying the different types of website visitors and their needs, Waqa Studios developed a strategy to direct visitors to the most relevant sections of the new website.

Designed and structured with a focus on results, existing members, newly joining members and those interested in attending ChIPs events are now all able to quickly find the information they need.