Launching a web project is not an easy thing. But it is even harder to keep afloat and not miss anything from what your product needs. We created a list of 10 must-haves, you need to do for your web project before it turns 3 years.
How to use this list?
The purpose of this list is to gather in one place all important things that are usually set aside for better times. While more acute issues will be grabbing your attention, you might be missing these ones, which influence the success of your project in no less way. We are pretty sure you have heard about the majority of these points, so now it is the perfect time to make sure you haven’t left anything out.
1. Have a development plan
The first thing you need to do for your web-project is to set a development plan. Without having a clear plan what you wan to achieve it will be extremely hard to adjust your strategy. Besides, it is important for the whole team to know where you all are driving at, which boosts inner motivation significantly.
2. Know your audience
Besides knowing what you want, you should now exactly for whom you are doing this. Target audience is not something marketing managers take out of their heads just to sound more important. It is an extremely important factor based on studies and usage experience. Having a better knowledge of your audience will let you target your efforts better and spend promotion funds wiser.
- Generation Y: Benefit-Driving Audience of the Future
- Infographics on How Gender Influences Marketing Strategy
3. Be SMM present
The best part of being SMM present is that it barely costs you a thing, when you just start. Log pages on most popular social media platforms like Facebook and Linkedin, so that users could find info about you there.
If your resources allow you, it might be a good idea to post something on these two together with Twitter, Google+ and Instagram (if it fits your market). You will figure out yourself how many posts per month you can allow. But it would be good for you if you find something to post at least once a week.
4. Tune your SEO
SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is something that shows great results in long-run period. This way it is better to start optimizing your pages as early as possible. This way you won’t be buried by tons of SEO tasks later. Even some basic optimization might do you a lot of good.
5. Formulate your brand values
Formulating your brand values might sound like something unimportant. But in fact it is one of the basic things you need to do. In fact brand values make it easier for your to reach connection with your audience and deliver a clever message to the Users. And selling a product with a message is much more efficient than without one.
6. Aspire quality
Make sure that from very beginning you are longing for quality over quantity. Of you decided to outsource software development, make sure your vendors are professional, the choice of technology and server is well thought. Otherwise you risk to end up with a non-scalable software that would be prompt to crashes. And at some point you will have start it all over from the scratch, so all you efforts will be in vain.
7. Start a blog
One more good initiative is to start a corporate blog. On the one hand it will one more time prove your professional level to your customers. On the other one, it can become a perfect place to exchange knowledge between your team members, so you will kill two birds with one stone.
8. Have logo and identity designed
Remember, you can’t make the second first impression. This way it is better to do some investments in logo and identity before trying to make a connection with your audience. If you can’t afford spend a lot of funds on it, it doesn’t mean that you can skip this part. Order the best you can and make redesign later.
9. Learn how to do A/B tests
A/B tests are a corner stone of modern web-research. With comparing User behavior at different versions of your landing page or some parts of your website, you can get some insights that in other way might take you years to understand.
Instead of guessing the right option, test it right away with A/B tests. The best thing here is that it is free – all you need is some time and a bright mind.
10. Track your progress
And finally, make sure you have goals set and results tracked at least once a month. There are plenty tools that can help your business to do this and it would be a crime to act blind, when you can take grounded decisions with just a little more effort made.
We hope this list was useful for you and let you figure out some areas for improvement. And what you think business should do in the first three years? Share with us in the comments and check a quick report about future of business automation according to McKinsey & Company!
