Defining what you want your website to accomplish may seem like an obvious thing to do and yet is often overlooked. The design of a website that simply feeds users articles should be very different than a website that is a search engine, for example. You need to build your website from the ground up with its main function in mind. Do not think about what your website looks like before thinking about how it accomplishes your goals. Do not design your website to look good, design it to attract the people who you are after. And if you require a web design company you will want to be able to explain to them what exactly you want them to do.
Figure out your website's obvious shortcomings. There are usually pretty obvious reasons why a website is not accomplishing what it is intended to accomplish. If your website is focused enough on its purpose then you must reconsider its functional design. But if your website has no traffic, then you cannot expect any amount of design to help. Knowing where to focus your efforts will save you time and money.
These three basic steps are seemingly common-sense but are often overlooked because many designers make things more complicated than they have to be. By spending time on each step there is no doubt that you will see great improvements with your websites overall performance. And by focusing your efforts on the fundamentals you will find that you are making much better decisions with your time and that your 10 minutes a day are more productive than ever before.
