We had some discussions and brainstorming on what is that we are trying to achieve by making a website for Kizuna India Badminton Strings. Some of the thoughts that came out are as follows:
The objective of our website is a virtual location where our prospects would be able to visit and see what is that we offer them. They must get a feel that we are a legitimate business that can be trusted with their money. We must be able to do this without much clutter with a straight forward format. Our prospects would visit our site though their smart phones from bandwidth constrained locations all over India. The information must be light weight that will be easy to load in their phones in low band width. We must be able to convey all this in the short attention time that they will have during their site visit.
In the short term, we were influenced by books like Making Websites Win by Karl Banks and Ben Jesson and Positioning The battle of your mind by Jack Trout making decisions on the website in particular and marketing and selling Kizuna badminton strings in general. Of course, it is our past experiences, books that we have read and the peers is what influences us in what we do.
As it is going to be a simple website we decided that we will employ a designer whom we have worked with on some other projects. We decided on word press as we wanted the site to be easily editable and also because we had some experience with word press. It was also decided that we will use some resource from Upwork.com to do the technical aspects of the site.
We presented wireframes, links to Kizuna Japan and Malaysia sites and available art material like logos to our designer. She came up with some designs. We had to scale down on graphics part as that was not according to the plan. One of the issues here is that graphic designers are focused mostly on the aesthetic part. Their sole focus is that it has to look good. It is difficult to convince them that function precedes form. The graphics and the colours are meant only to assist in the conveyance of the message.
We decided on a technical person chosen from upwork whose past work was pretty clean and decent. His rates were modest also. One issue was that he had experience only on elementor whereas we wanted to use a theme called onepagepro. He told us that he will do the work in onepagepro. However, what we got in the end was a website in elementor theme. He changed our catalog to his own version of the design we gave. He was not receptive to our suggestions. He kept on ignoring our requests to make some of the changes. We were running out of time and budget.
Although we were not fully happy with the work, we felt it is passable and will meet our purpose for the time being. By this time we spent less than $200 on it. And a lot of our time. I think whatever we got was worth more than the money we spent on it.
Thus was born Kizuna.in
Social media, marketing, database in next post
