A website aimed at overseas buyers is a different proposition from a domestic one. The visitor does not know the company, cannot visit, and is comparing it against suppliers they also do not know. That changes what the site has to do, and the order in which the decisions should be made.
Establish the market position first
Start with the industry the client’s business actually sits in, and analyse the outlook for it. Understand what the market expects from a website in that sector, because that expectation sets the ceiling on what the site can achieve.
Then look at competitors. What do their sites do, and what do they do badly? Set that against the company’s real capability, and you get a realistic view of the budget, the technology and the people the site will need, along with the competitive ground it can actually take.
Decide what the site is for
Is it there to present the company, to sell, or to open a new market? Those are three different products. The purpose decides the functions, and functions decided after the design has started are the usual source of overspend.
Choose the technology to fit
Scale, performance requirements and functional complexity decide the stack. A catalogue site and a transactional B2B portal should not be built on the same foundation, and choosing the foundation for familiarity rather than fit is expensive to undo.
Plan the sections and the content
Content is what brings visitors and what keeps them. It has to be good, and it has to be aimed at the type of site: product specifications and certifications for a manufacturer, applications and case studies for a supplier of solutions.
Then watch whether it is working. Feedback on the content tells you what to adjust, and adjusting on evidence is considerably cheaper than commissioning a redesign.
Test before launch, then maintain
Before the site goes live it needs a rigorous test: the server responding properly, pages loading, forms submitting, checkout working where there is one. Buyers in another time zone will hit the site at hours when nobody is watching.
After launch, the work continues. Assess the server and the surrounding infrastructure on a schedule, and maintain the site rather than leaving it. An export site that is slow, broken or three years out of date does more damage than having none, because it is the impression a buyer forms before any conversation happens.
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