Some time ago, one of our clients was faced with a dilemma: do what he wanted with his site OR get support from O’Matic to meet his needs. Unfortunately, he chose the first option, saying to himself “I can do it, I know how to do images, text, and the web is not complicated after all!”.

“Creating your website is easy.”

So yes. Some things are easy, but not everything.

Placing elements is simple, but making sure they are in the right place requires thought and a certain amount of distance.

Since I wanted to make sites, whether for this website or for O’Matic’s, I have faced several “problems”:

• I first wanted to test WordPress with a Lite theme encouraging me to upgrade to the Premium version. I was quickly confronted with customization, because I could not move or modify the style of the blocks (even just the color). So I had to customize using a lot of personalized CSS (Thomas, if he had been there, would have cursed me) and FTP access to be able to change images.
• I then bought a premium theme, the current one, which contains several examples of templates and allows me a lot of customization within the pages.
  So it is a success, you would say?
  Not really, because the theme is very heavy and makes my site lose performance and speed.
• For the O’Matic site, we did it four-handed with Thomas. After a lot of monitoring on similar agency sites, I created the model on Figma by imagining everything with a charter and animations that I liked (illustrations, hover, animations, etc.).
  Here again, I had to deal with the technical side when Thomas, seeing my model, said “Yes, but no, we’re not going to be able to meet the deadlines.”
  That’s why we iterated the creation of our site by first creating an MVP (minimum viable product) with the necessary content and adding content as we went along: articles, expertise, etc.

So… let’s start from the beginning!

What will your site be about?

As Thomas would beg you “Don’t make a site for the sake of making a site!”, that will get you lost.

Think a little about the content of your site, what are you going to tell and offer to the world?

Rest assured, this part is actually quite simple: Are you making a site to showcase your products? Your services? Your creations? …
Depending on what you choose, it will have an impact on the structure of your site.

Without answering this question precisely, your site risks being completely unstructured.

What is your site for?

Knowing what your site is going to talk about is one thing, but the crux of the matter is to make sure that your site has a specific objective that corresponds to it, whether it is to sell products, obtain prospects, collect a survey, etc.

So before even designing your site, you must think about what your users will be able to do on it and how, this is what we call the Golden Path. It is simply the ideal path that your users will have to follow to achieve the objective that you have set.

Thus, a news site like rts.ch, aims to inform you about the latest Swiss and world news. Its “Golden Path” is therefore to offer a home page that displays a summary of all the content with links directing you to the information you want to obtain.

What are your deadlines?

Yes! Because creating a website takes time, because you have to think about a lot of points (like for an application).

Maybe you need your site for a specific date and in this case, it is necessary to take it well in advance to have the best version on D-day, by having professionals accompany you.
If you are not limited by time, you can allow yourself the long term without rushing and according to, make your site by yourself.

What will it look like?

Do not forget the appearance of your site! It is not necessarily the most important (because if there is no thoughtful content behind it, it will only be an empty shell) but it is in the top 3 things to think about.

A site that is not necessarily pretty (example: Amazon, let’s admit it, it is not very sexy) will make a lot of conversions because it will have been thought out and tested at length beforehand (this will be the subject of another article) while a very well-designed site will be “just” pleasant.

You must therefore think about your site as a whole where the design of your site must encourage people to go further and remain pleasant enough to stay there.

How to bring people to your site?

There you have it, your site is online (yes, I skipped several steps otherwise this article would have been way too long and Google would have rapped us on the knuckles)!

Now ask yourself the question: how are you going to bring users back to your site? Are you going to advertise? Create content? What content? On social networks? Articles…

That’s a lot to think about, isn’t it?

Do you need help creating your website?

As you will have understood, creating your site is therefore not easy.

Of course, there are methods so that you can do it alone, but is it really the right solution?

Having support from professionals who know how the web works will allow you to focus on what really matters to you and not get distracted and waste time at the risk of doing things badly.

At O’matic, we like to help you realize your ideas, whatever they may be, whether it is to create your website or to redesign it for a better version.