Hello
@helen0722, fisicx and AllUpHere are trying to be helpful and point out that a website is an extension of your company and should be built to deliver your business plans; e.g. sell/promote the services that make you money, rank well in search engines and convert (sign up) up potential new customers.
You should think about the whole process like that, extending your business plan to cover online/digital if you have one, creating one if you don't.
We'd suggest having a think about what you want to achieve & cover: -
What do you intend to do with the site
- Are you prepared to do some of it yourself; e.g with WordPress, you could buy and use a theme as is, carrying out basic styling and adding your own copy/content (if you have any)
- You may need to have web design and theme customisation carried out to get the site to look and behave in a way that attracts and converts customers
- Do you need any graphic design work as part of the process; e.g. new logo, assets created for any areas etc.
- What external functionality do you need to integrate; e.g. online payments, email CRM, finance systems etc.
- You need to make sure the site is secure, plus PCI & GDPR (for May 2018) compliant, so that it's actually a legally compliant site
Marketing, SEO & copy/content
- What are your marketing goals and do you have customer / services / competitor research; e.g.
- Customer age range, demographics, areas you want to target
- What are the services/products you want to promote and who are you competing against
- What do customers/companies search for in relation to these services
- What does success look like; e.g. amount of leads/contacts, cost, ROI etc.
- How many pages & what content do you need to achieve the marketing goals
- We'd recommend full technical SEO as part of the build; e.g. writing compelling titles & meta descriptions, h tag setup, alt tags, sitemaps, decent taxonomy & internal link structure etc. with a compelling journey for your customers
- Do you need copy & content produced for the site, or are you creating your own; e.g. lots of companies and individuals we get involved with write good copy of their own. However, they use lots of internal industry language and never research what customers actually type into search engines, or look at their competitors sites to make sure they're doing a better job
- Do you have a good handle on what makes a business rank in search engines and allows you to track performance; e.g. Google Search Console, Google Analytics and Google My Business setup and your NAP/markup, so that you can monitor the site and ensure that the local element is consistent everywhere & that leads/sales are tracked
I know this sounds complicated, but by going through this type of process and then into more detail once the services, customer targets, lead and traffic requirements are understood, you'll set yourself up for success.
We only work like this with our clients, as it ensures you get a site that's designed for the business needs and doesn't languish on page 5 of Google's search results. A website is the start, not the end of the online process.
For £2k you should be able to carry out all the research, create the copy and content, plus build a decent website and marketing process.
