Small businesses, brands and corporations from all backgrounds know the value of a web presence in today’s globalized world. From search engines and social media to email and mobile, there is plenty of traffic to go around for brands that know how to attract the right visitors. Whether you are building a website for the first time or are planning a major re-design in order to improve existing performance, it is important to consider a variety of elements before you begin. If your website is being built or rebuilt from the ground up in order to reach more people, more effectively, then continue reading to learn about three things you’ll need to know and plan before doing so.

Establish Your Goals

Building a new web design requires a lot more than mere technical expertise. It requires vision and an understanding of what you need it to do. Because of this, it is important to have initial goals for your website established from the very beginning. The big questions with regard to pinging your website with a new design are fairly simple: who are you targeting; what are your requirements, deadlines and limitations; what do you need the website to do; when do you need the new design to launch; and why do you need a new website? With this information in-hand, you’ll be able to plan ahead and design a rough draft of sorts for your new planned design.

Find Your Content

Whether you are planning on hiring the services of a firm or building the new website yourself, you will need to collect valuable content before beginning your work. In many cases, it is necessary for brands to have content already available so that it can be properly inserted and envisioned as the new design is being developed. This can range from blog posts and contact forms to social media widgets and embedded videos. What exactly in terms of content will be added to the new website or carried over from the existing design? It is important to have all of this planned out in advance and equally important to incorporate this content into the design as it is being built; you’ll be able to more clearly envision the final product when the content is included from the first stages.

Accommodate Different Audiences

When redesigning your website, it’s important to remember that different audiences will find it through different ways and different mediums. This doesn’t mean that your web design needs to target a variety of different and completely unrelated audiences; rather, it means that people will come from different backgrounds looking for the same information, product or service. For instance, mobile users will need to be able to use your website just as much as traditional desktop users, but their experiences will be different. From messaging and color schemes to mobile-responsive design elements and keywords, you need to be pinging your website to as many different audiences in an optimized fashion as possible.

Is this your first time redesigning a website? If not, what is your least-favorite part of the process, and if so, what is your biggest concern? Let us know below what you think and/or what you’ve experienced thus far!