5 Decisions You Need to Make Before You Build Your New Website

November 11, 2022

UPDATED: 6/6/23

When I started remodeling my house I was totally overwhelmed. Remodeling two bathrooms, the kitchen, screened porch, pantry and drop zone, removing walls and replacing all the flooring meant a billion tiny decisions about things I didn’t really know anything about.

I had no clue which types of decking would last longer or how far apart pantry shelves need to be! Which type of hardwood would hold up to my pets and kids or how to buy countertops without blowing my 401K.

At one point I actually interrupted a contractor who wanted me to solve a problem with kitchen backsplash if he wanted me to build him a website.  He looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

Then I said, “I can build a website. I don’t have the first clue about tile. That’s what you’re here for.”

Good news, my house is still standing and the remodel is almost done. I only cost myself hundreds of dollars in bad decisions, not thousands so that’s something.

Bad news, building a website is A LOT like remodeling a house. Tons of tiny decisions that interlace and impact each other and your bottom line. 

But more good news…you’ve got me and the rest of the MayeCreate Team in your corner, right? So you’re going to be just fine.

In our last episode, we talked about whether you need a website or not. And there was a quiz involved. If you are on the fence about whether or not you even need a website, you can hop back over there and take the quiz. 

The first step to building an awesome website is creating an awesome plan.

The first step to planning your website isn’t creating a pinterest board of million dollar kitchens to inspire your peanut butter and jelly budget project. 

You need to make some foundational decisions first. Decisions that will ultimately make it easier to plan and build your new site to meet your needs AND stay in your budget.

As an added bonus the answers to these questions will allow you evaluate potential web designers and enter conversations about your site with confidence (even if that designer ends up being yourself).

Five decisions to make before building your new website. 

Let’s start with an outline of the 5 questions, thinking of them as your planning process, then I’ll dig into each and explain potential answers and their ramifications. 

1. What is going to be on your site?
2. What does your site need to do?
3. What are your future plans for your organization?
4. Who is going to build it?
5. How is it going to be built?

Decision 0 – What is your URL?

What!?! ZERO? Ok you can laugh, but we’re starting at zero. Those of you who have a website already can skip this decision, but for those who don’t have a website, you need to pick a really awesome URL, a.k.a.  web address or domain name. 

I’m not going to dig too deep into this here. We have a podcast episode all about how to pick a domain name that doesn’t suck. You’ll go through all the steps and get all kinds of advice about how to choose an awesome domain name. 

Decision 1 – What is going to be on your site?

Outline the pages you think you will put on your site. Then, think about the functionality of those pages. Here are a few pages to consider that we see on most all the sites we build: 

If you’re not sure what pages to put on your site, take a gander at your competitors’ sites. Look at other companies who do what you do in other areas as well. After reviewing a few you’ll usually see a pattern of the types of information on a site.

After you have a rough list of pages ask yourself: 

• What types of information do visitors need or expect to find on each page?
• Will the page be more then just words? 
• What kind of images, videos, brochures or links need to be included? 

Decision 2 – What does your site need to do?

Now that you have a list of pages, take a look at those pages and consider if certain pages need additional functionality to give convenience to visitors or help your company run smoother. 

Do any of your pages or the site in general need to:

• Accept or send emails? 
• Take requests? 
• Have an email, application or intake form? 
• Allow people to sign up for events?
• Collect payments?
• Sell products? 
• Does it need to integrate with existing systems like a CRM, inventory, billing, events, donor management, email marketing or scheduling software?

The systems you use to power your organization need to talk with your website. 

Determining which systems need to interact with your site now will help you decide what website platform you will use to build your website later. *Spoiler, that’s in decision number 5.*

Decision 3 – What are your future plans for your organization?

Are you expanding to multiple locations?

Do you want to be able to host events or have online webinars in the future? 

Aspire to start using email marketing? 

Start blogging?

Offer online training for your employees?

Allow customers to view their invoices or pay online?

Taking orders online and integrating it into your point of sale system?

Consider how the future plans for your organization might impact the website. Knowing you’re going to make changes and having an idea of what they might be can help you determine what type of website you need to build today. 

Let’s say you don’t sell things online right now, but you’re planning on doing it in the future. You don’t want to build a website on a platform without the capability to sell products in the future. You’d have to move everything to another platform, which would take way more time (and money) than choosing a system to build your site that offers a plug-and-play e-commerce solution you could install in the future.

Decision 4 – Who is going to build it?

There are 7 types of web designers and we covered them each in detail in a recent article/podcast combo. We give expectations of price, timelines, quality, convenience and service level for each. So I won’t go through them all here.

If you’re thinking about building your website on your own, look over the decisions you’ve already made, and ask yourself, “do I know how to make those things happen on my website? Or do I need some help?” 

If you build your website on your own, consider signing up for an online course. Those courses are all over the place and will help you create a website and potentially integrate all these different systems you want. (Shameless plug, we have one too.) 

But DIY isn’t for everyone. For fancier websites, (or enormous remodel projects) DIY is usually not the best plan. For a highly functional site you’ll need to find the right company to guide you through the process at a budget you can afford. Not someone who’s going to insist on countertops or cabinets worth more than the resale value of your house.

If you’re not building your site, who is?

Like remodelers, some web developers act as a business advisor, guiding you through the twists and turns of the web process as painlessly as possible. Others are just doers. 

Do you need an advisor or a doer?

For some of you, a doer is all you need. You’re writers, you’re marketers, you’ve got this. 

For others, not so much. You know which camp you fall into. Pick a person who can fill the role you need. 

Doers excel at simple sites.

With a really simple site, you might be able to work with a freelancer, student, or super young design company. Any of those options might be able to fulfill your needs perfectly right now. 

If you choose a doer or lower-budget service provider, go back to decision 3 – what are your future plans? Will the site they build have the ability to be upgraded to reach your future goals?r Or is the site they build just going to be a bandaid?

Your website needs to be a stepping stone, not a bandaid. 

Other things to consider when hiring the right web designer: 

Work Locally or Remotely?

There are many great design companies all over the place that charge different prices depending on their cost of living. 

MayeCreate is in line with all of the other web design companies that have been around for as long as we have in our area. Now, if you look at prices for people out on either coast, we are cheap by comparison. 

Here’s the deal, we’re gonna produce you a baller website. We just live in the Midwest, and it’s cheaper to live here. We don’t have to make $200,000 a year in order to make ends meet. Therefore our products can sell at a more affordable price. Because of our lower rates, we do end up working with a lot of people in California, New York, Philadelphia, Texas or New Jersey. 

Now, if you are not comfortable working with somebody online, that’s okay. You want to be able to sit down and have a face-to-face meeting with people, shake their hands and hold them accountable in person. That’s totally awesome. I respect the crap out of that. Please go forth and prosper that way. 

Experience building sites like yours.

If you’re building a fancy site you want somebody, regardless of how much you’re paying, with some clue of what you need and how to do it. 

Let’s say you are building an e-commerce website. You need somebody who’s built an e-commerce website before. You don’t want someone cutting their teeth on you. 

Now, if you need to integrate your e-commerce site with your inventory system, maybe the person you’ve chosen doesn’t have experience integrating websites with your inventory system, but they have lots of experience building e-commerce websites. That’s a compromise you could probably make. 

Don’t make too many compromises, though. You need a functional product at the end to help you grow and not be a gigantic pain in the butt. It can’t be like a door installed backwards. 

Have I shared the story about the remodelers installing my basement door backwards? 

You had to open the door and back out of the hallway, then walk around the door and go down the steps. My dogs were so confused. They forgot how to go downstairs. Sometimes dogs are not exactly the smartest things. 

Anyway, what I’m saying here is you need to pick the right compromise of budget, skills and experience. You don’t want the website equivalent of a door that’s installed backwards. It works, kind of, but not how it should.

Decision 5 – How is it going to be built? 

The answer to this question is going to depend largely upon two things. 

1. What the site needs to do now and in the future. 
2. Who is building the site. 

We build all of our websites on WordPress because it is so incredibly flexible. It lets us extend it however we want, and not every website platform does that. 

I have heard so many stories of people with WordPress websites, built by some yahoo who didn’t know what they were doing, which made it difficult to use, causing them to hate WordPress. But as it turned out they didn’t really hate WordPress. They just hated their web developer. 

Ultimately you just need a website that will do the particular things you need. 

Your website might be able to be built in Squarespace, Wix or Weebly or another platform I haven’t even heard of. Just make sure to pick a platform that’s widely used by web developers and has a good library of support documentation. 

If you find the best developers ever, and they build in XYZ platform, then you’ll probably want to work on whatever platform they’re using. In most cases I would not however invest in a website built on a proprietary system. That makes it almost impossible to fire your web developer because no one else will be able to help you use that system. 

Decision 5.1 – Where is your site hosted? 

If you are building your website from scratch by yourself, you will pick your hosting platform. 

If you’re working with a web developer like MayeCreate, we’ll probably make the decision for you. Each server acts a little different. So web developers want to develop on the servers we’re used to because it’s much more efficient. 

Do you feel more in control right now? I hope you do. 

There you go! The five decisions that you need to make before you build your new website. 

Just like with my remodel, planning your website is the key to building a site you don’t regret later. 

No one wants an endless remodel that manifests into a money pit. 

You understand this website is an asset for your organization, and you’re building it for a reason. You want to grow and the website you have is holding you back. You’re not building it because you think wasting time is fun. You can do that on social media 😉. If you need more resources to help you on your website-building journey, we have downloadable resources that will help you plan what to put on your website. They’ve got it all mapped out for you.