If you are an early stage entrepreneur, just about to launch your very first
business website, or if you already have a website but are going
through a much needed website overhaul and redesign,
I'd like to leave you with this very important piece of advice. A mistake that I see many
entrepreneurs do over and over again. That is focusing on the visual aspects of your
website design before mapping out your website structure and information flow.
This process is known as setting up your website architecture. And even though it sounds like
a really complicated thing, you can actually do it in three easy steps.
Step one begins with researching your keywords.
Now, every month, your target customers are
typing in keywords into search engines.
These are keywords that they're using to find the
products and services that you provide online. So you can figure out what these keywords
are by using any number of keyword research tools, the most popular one being the free
Google Adwords Keyword Planner. So I recommend that you begin a brainstorming process using
the Keyword Planner Tool or another keyword research tool of your choice, and begin researching
the keywords that are most relevant to your products and services that have the highest
monthly search volume each month.
Step two involves scrubbing your keyword research list.
So, in step one you researched a bunch of keywords
related to your industry. Now you want to start weeding out the ones that
are not as relevant to your business. There might be associated keywords that are not
quite related to what you do. There might be keywords that don't have enough search
volume. So the goal is to identify the most relevant keywords that have the highest monthly
search volume, and then start to group those keywords into their respective product categories.
So lets say you have a e-commerce store and you sell organic cotton women's clothing.
So some of the obvious keyword categories would be dresses, shirts, pants and possibly
accessories like shoes or handbags. In any case, as you go through this process it will
start becoming obvious to you. So you want to gather the most relevant keywords and organize
them by categories and even subcategories if that's relevant to your business.
Step three, you want to build out your site map.
Now this process is actually easier than it sounds.
You can build out your site map in Excel.
You can use Microsoft Word, Powerpoint,
or a flowchart software program. But essentially, if you've gone through the process of organizing
your keywords into categories and subcategories then mapping this out in your site map should
be fairly straightforward.
A site map is essentially a hierarchical representation of your website with all its levels and pages.
And if you've gone through the categorization process, then it should be fairly straightforward.
From there you'll hand over your site map to your web developer. Your web developer
will then take that information and create wire frames. Now wire frames are essentially
a linear representation of your website pages. You might have wireframes for your homepage,
for your product pages, your category pages, your blog post pages. You will review these
wireframes with your developer and come to an agreement as to how your layout ought to
be presented and from there your wire frames will go to your website designer, who will
then focus on the visual, graphical representation of your website pages, including the colors,
the fonts, pretty pictures, etcetera.
Your web designer will then create these pages typically in Photoshop as a .psd file. The
.psd files will then go to your web developer who will integrate them with your website.
Thanks a lot for joining us today, for more practical and evolutionary information about
how to start a change making business, please visit us at enrepreneursforachange.com.
From there you can get a free gift to kickstart your world changing business today. It's called
the Business Changemakers Toolkit. And finally if you like this video, please do subscribe
to my channel and give it a thumbs up so more people can find this useful information online.
Thanks a lot and bye for now.