Need a website and don’t even know where to start? Check out these first steps.

Aug 12, 2019

Here are three useful tips before starting your website:

1. How to talk about your product? Answer: don’t.

Usability patterns, visual references, choosing the right tones and colors based on psychology, these are common tasks that make most checklists when creating a website. But startups still stumble upon a far simpler yet hard to answer question along the way: How to speak about the product? 

Teach your product to speak

Illustration by Jessica Svendsen / NYT

If you’re looking for conversions, forget the idea of making a website like your product’s instruction manual. In the end, people don’t read manuals anyway. Instead, convince them to try your product themselves, or at least make them want to learn more about your startup.

Save the time dedicated to explain your features in technical details and focus on the arguments that will make users crave what your product does:

  • Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and acknowledge their pains;
  • Work on a great value proposition. Talk about the customer, not you.
  • Present your startup as a solution for their suffering.

2. The answer lies in your goals.

Knowing exactly what you want to achieve and which role a website plays on the whole business strategy will tell if you need a corporate website, complex animated graphics or additional integrations and technologies or just a basic, simple landing page.

http://annek.com.br

Your site is part of a bigger ecosystem, a digital strategy which can involve other online and offline channels, social media, newsletters and so on. Taking this into consideration will make a more efficient, cheaper website.

When we are building a website, we frequently face the challenge: how to frame complexity and specific features in a way that the user can easily get? The solution we found for Cartesi, an asian blockchain company launched through the StartupKit, is a rich example and shows how a well structured digital strategy can facilitate website development.  

3. It must work for you as well

Ok, you can’t miss the customer needs when making a website. This sounds obvious. How about you and your team? After launching, who is going to maintain, run and update your website?

Depending on your routine, the website can become one of the many tasks your team must accomplish at the end of the day. Don’t make it another burden. You must ask yourself: How often will you update the site? Will it need new content every so often? If so, what type of content? Who is gonna create and upload stuff? What is the skill set necessary for doing this? Can it be done by someone already on the team or it depends on hiring someone else?

Asking these questions will tell what type of technology better fits your needs and the level of complexity of the work, thus having a direct impact on the time of completion and cost.

Up next: Less explanation, more context. Why do you need an explainer video.

More than help you to build a website, CONTRA can help you to build the strategy behind it. 

Know more about the Startup Kit

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