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While building an expensive new website for your business, you want to take steps to make sure that website fulfills the intended purpose for years to come. Good design and good planning are the keys here. Good planning includes thinking about search engine optimization (SEO) before launching the site. Good design also ensures you have a site that is fast, easy to use, and running on technology that will be supported for years. Good planning ensures you will do the ongoing research, updating, and marketing it takes to keep a site visible and valuable as time passes.

Futureproofing Your Site Through Good Design

A good site design is one that makes it easy to attract visitors and then keep them on the site. This is where SEO plays a key role in your website. Smart, deliberate use of keywords will increase your search engine rankings. Using things like meta-descriptions and headings properly will also help visitors find your site. Use keywords to describe images, too. Focus each page on one primary keyword. Make content easy to skim using subheadings and short paragraphs. Make sure your content is both of high quality and relevant.

Use the right technology to implement the site, as well. At the very least, insist on a mobile-friendly site. The future belongs to mobile device users, so make sure your site works as expected on Android and iOS devices. Accessibility for the visually impaired or hearing impaired deserves some consideration. Some of the steps a developer takes to make a website accessible will also help your search engine rankings.

A website generally has to have a content management system to hold all the content you create. Once you investigate the technology landscape, you’ll discover plenty of options. Stick with big names that have been around for a few years. If you rely on a template and hosting service to create a website, what if their site gets hacked? What if the company goes out of business? Who will add custom functionality that you might need over the next several years? How good is their security? You may never know.

Futureproofing Your Site Through Good Planning

Here you want to think about marketing, content, and coding. Now, about the content. You’ve probably heard that “content is king,” and this is still true. If your site has lots of up-to-date content that helps visitors, they’ll come back and they’ll share or link to your content. These things help your search engine rankings. Offering “evergreen” content that deals with ongoing challenges or interests of your target market will help your site, and your company, stay relevant for years. So, plan to strike a balance between “timely” content and evergreen content.  

Plan to promote that content over time, as well. We often think in terms of publishing a new blog post, promoting it on social media, and then moving on. Do this, but also plan some ongoing promotion. Your blog post of a guide to making a smart buying decision will still be valuable in a few years. Your commentary on the biggest industry story of 2020 might not be so valuable. However, content that’s not so time-bound can be updated and republished.

DevDigital Excels at Design and Planning

Ideally, you’ll start thinking about the future of your site before it goes live. If you would like to build a website that is ready for the future and easy for customers to find, draw on our experience with hundreds of projects. Don’t hesitate to get in touch so we can discuss your website development project.