you to jump straight into the graphic design of your website,

but there's actually a number of really important things that you need to

do before you even engage a graphic designer.

The first thing is keyword research.

I highly recommend that before you begin any type of

website project at all, that you start with keyword research to understand

what it is that your target audience is actively looking for online.

Keyword research will allow you to

identify the most important themes related to your audience, and that will inform you

on how to set up your information architecture. There are a number of great free and paid

keyword research tools out there. The most popular one is the Google AdWords Keyword Planner.

The second thing that you're gonna need to have is your domain name.

Now, you can also use keyword research

to inform your domain name. I highly recommend that you choose a

domain name that is a combination of a memorable brand name plus your keyword. However, there's

a number of other considerations that you'd need to make around which keywords are used

and how long the domain name is gonna be. And you can find out that information on one

of our previous episodes about 'How to pick a domain name for your business'.

The third thing that you need to have ready is your

information architecture, need to have a

clear idea of how you want to structure your website pages.

So, you're gonna have a number of utility pages that

typically go with any website, for example, your About page,

your Team page, Contact Us. Of course, you have your Products page and any product

categories and sub categories. You might have Services, you might have a Press page. So,

it's really good to have a clear idea about what those pages are and how they're gonna be organized.

Another thing that you're gonna need to have ready for your graphic designer is a clear

idea about what platform you're gonna use and if that platform comes with any templates

that you want the designer to incorporate into their design. So, depending on what platform

you use, there might be templates that you find are appropriate to power your kind of

business. And so, rather than going down the road of having a completely customized design,

we're just gonna take you down the pathway of hiring a developer to customize the template.

You might want to choose an easier route, which is, pick a template that already works

for you, have the graphic designer base their website design on this template and just modify

the colors or the fonts, things like that... No major changes like layout changes which

sends you down the full customization route which can be more time consuming and expensive.

Another thing that you wanna have ready is your logo. And that's important too, because

if you have a logo for your business already, then you want your graphic designer to be

able to design a website that matches the look and feel of your logo. What you don't

want is a website design that has certain colors and fonts that completely clash with

the logo that you already have. Then, you have to re-brand your logo, which might actually

be a little more challenging if your customers already recognize your company based on your old logo.

So that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining us and for more information about

how to build a kickass website please go to entrepreneursforachange.com.