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Creating a Construction Website: Analyzing Competitors
February 13, 2008
You know who your competitors are, find their websites! Take a thorough look at what their websites include and what they are missing. Looking through your competitor’s websites can help you in many ways.
- They can provide possible ideas for your website.
- You can see where they went wrong, so you don’t make the same mistakes.
- You can see different aspects of their website that you like, and include those aspects in your own website.
When taking a look at your competition’s websites, make sure you check every page. Sometimes great ideas can be sitting in not so obvious places. Take time and write down everything you like and don’t like about their website.
You can also write down questions their website brought to mind. Writing them down will help you avoid leaving your viewers with the same questions.
It is best to look at each competitor’s website with the eyes of a customer. If you were looking at their website in order to have work completed, where would you go first and what would you look for? Does their website provide the information you need? Was it hard or easy to find? What made the information hard or easy to find?
Make notes throughout this process in order to help yourself when designing your website. If you are using search engines to find your competitors websites, write down the keywords you used. You will need these words for the Search Engine Optimization portion of creating your website.
While you are visiting your competitor’s websites, you can also take a look at the HTML source codes for their website. By Right-Clicking your mouse on the page, you receive a drop down menu. In that menu there should be an option titled “View Source.” By clicking on “View Source” a document will come up showing you this…
<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>Google</title><style>body,td,a,p,.h{"BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 140%;">
Yes, this is gibberish to everyone who doesn’t have a degree in computer sciences or who is not a teenage computer wizard. However, some useful information lies in these source codes. For example from the code above you can see the following:
- The font they used is Arial Sans Serif, size 20.
- They used color numbers 3366cc and 00c.
Those two pieces of information can help you a lot when creating your website. The code given above is from Google. The code provided is only a tiny, tiny piece of the actual code given when right-clicking. However, if you see a font or color you especially like, you can find out what exactly it is, in order to include it in your own website.
Creating a Construction Website: Introduction
Creating a Construction Website: Content Planning
Creating a Construction Website: Analyizing Competitors
Creating a Construction Website: Site Structure
Creating a Construction Website: Keywords for Search Engine Optimization
Creating a Construction Website: Writing the Content
Creating a Construction Website: Website Design
Creating a Construction Website: Website Builders
Posted by Samantha Vartiamaki on February 13, 2008 | Comments (1)
