In last weeks blog we gave some (hopefully) useful advice on how to pick the right web foundation for your business. So now you’re a little more clued up, we’re going to delve deeper into this web building malarkey and provide some words of wisdom on what to consider when in the process of developing or upgrading your website.
Choosing a domain name and hosting company
There are a million (or more) web hosting and domain selling companies out there. Our sister company recently wrote a brilliant, very informative article on how to choose the right hosting company.
To summarise the key elements, make sure you: Assess whether your website will require shared hosting (for new/ small websites), VPS hosting (for growing, content rich websites receiving a healthy amount of traffic) or a dedicated server (an entire server dedicated to your site; for those receiving a huge amount of traffic and requiring advance features unavailable on the other hosting packages). Check the server uptime record; which should sit above 99.5%. Find out whether your host has a phone number for emergencies and are easily contactable. See if there are some valuable offers that make them stand out from the crowd.
If it’s free, it’s too good to be true, we promise!
In terms of selecting a domain name, there a few elements to factor in: Think about what keywords you would expect a user to search with and try to find a domain that would include or easily be associated with these terms. For example, if you were setting up an online estate agents, a user may search for ‘advertise my house online’, a good domain name would be, www.myhouseadvert.co.uk as it links well with the search terms and explains the service offered. Make it simple, short and easy to spell. Although it is becoming increasingly popular to choose weird and wonderful suffix domains, .uk and .com are still the most search engine friendly.
Clean design
Keeping your designs clean but bursting with information can be tricky, but something we advise doing. A large amount of graphics and too much text can be overwhelming for the user and also distracting. The design of your website reflects the quality of your business and service. Keep it informative but easy to read and navigate through.
Branding & effective colour scheme
Creating a strong brand, logo and choosing an effective colour scheme is more than just a case of what you think looks nice, it’s actually rather physcological! If you look around at all the top companies globally, you’ll often find the use of blue, orange, green and/ or red! For example, take a look at eBay, Google, Facebook, Starbucks. These colours have been selected specifically because of the emotions and feelings they evoke consciously and subconsciously, so do some research before selecting yours.
Content Management Systems
If you want a site that’s more than a collection of static pages, you’ll need a Content Management System (CMS). The nucleus of a CMS is a database that stores user information, articles, blogs, and so forth. The CMS is the brain of the website, and the design is it’s pretty face. The most popular content management systems are Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. These are all free and customisable, so very popular with a huge amount of designers and developers!
Original content
We’re sure this is a pretty obvious point to make, but we have seen some really awful sites in our time. Making sure your site content is original is really important because your website will be penalised by the search engines otherwise. (This is something to take into consideration if you’re wanting to transfer your website to a new domain! Check over the search engine policies before doing so!) Your design agency may employ a copywriter in house to assist with writing content that will generate leads, such as subtle ‘calls to action’, all of which will encourage and influence the visitor’s level of engagement and improve your ROI.
Functionality, Navigability & Usability
These are 3 key focal points for web designers/ developers. Before your website goes live, check, double check, and triple check that everything functions correctly. Is the load speed good? Are all the links working? If you have a call back form, does it definitely send the information to you? etc.etc. Any slip up in functionality, and that’s likely to be a customer lost. Your website is your chance to impress a potential client and if it doesn’t function, it will reflect poorly on you. The navigation streams of your website need to be obvious and easy to follow as well. If a potential client reaches your site and doesn’t understand how to get around it, they’re unlikely to convert. Display your product and services in a way that will encourage interaction and make it user friendly.
Indexable, SEO friendly code
Not only has your website got to appeal to the user, it’s got to appeal to search engines as well, otherwise, you’re unlikely to even get the opportunity to appeal to a user because you won’t have appealed to the engine that will position you in front of them! It’s hard work trying to please everyone, isn’t it? So to perform well on the search engines, your site needs to be coded in a way that will help guide their spiders/ bots to your site and find it relevant! Your most important content should be written in HTML. And as a warning, never, ever build a site entirely in flash as it will appear barren to the search engines. (At some point in the near future, we shall write a more detailed blog on how to make your new website appeal to the search engines!)
Compatibility with multiple browsers
There are such an array of browsers on offer, so it’s essential that your website is compatible with the big boys like Chrome, Safari, Internet explorer and Firefox!
Mobile/ Tablet friendly
With a huge volume of users searching from their mobiles and tablets these days, it’s vital that your website works well on all devices. When taking this into consideration you’re likely to be a little stuck between choosing a responsive web design or a mobile site. A responsive web design creates dynamic changes to the appearance of your existing website depending on the screen size and orientation of the device being used to view it. It’s very clever, but pricey too! Whereas a mobile site is built and tailored specifically for mobile devices, separate to your existing website, on a slightly different domain. If developed correctly, we would favour a responsive design, since we’re an SEO company and it makes our work easier. But there are a number of articles online that list the pros and cons of both so take some time to read through them and speak to your developer about the two options.
Security
Keeping your site secure for your own interests, and for your clients, is imperative. There are an array of viruses, malicious code infections and more nasty bugs out there, so you need to be smart and keep ahead of the hackers! You can make your site secure with HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), which protects the confidentiality of your users’ data. In addition, making use of an SSL certificate, which should be provided by your web host, is advised, especially with websites where payment transactions are/ are going to be made.
Analytics
Once you have your website pretty much ready to go, make sure you have some analytical tools set up so that you can monitor and follow the traffic that reaches your site. These tools will enable you to learn so much about your websites functionality e.g. see what pages of your website are most visited, how often a visitor usually stays on your site, and which visitors reach your goal page; the sign up, checkout, or contact page. This information will give you such a useful insight and may benefit your websites development process. We recommend Google Analytics, as it’s free and works well alongside all their other product offerings such as Shopping, AdWords and more.
Testimonials
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, testimonials are crucial to online success. Only real ones, obvs. Make sure you have set up a page on an independant review centre, such as www.trustpilot.com or www.reviewcentre.com, and in addition have reviews on your website itself. Make sure your testimonials show the testees name and contact details, where possible. The more you can reassure your potential client that you’re the best at what you do, the better.
Active social profile
In addition to ranting on about the importance of testimonials, we’re often blogging about the importance of having an active social profile, whilst keeping ours active too. Even as your website is under development you can create Facebook/ Twitter/ Instagram pages and start blogging about what’s coming up, or anything that relates suitably to your website! Your activity across the web will have an impact on how relevant the search engines deem your website, and therefore, will affect your ranking.
We hope that this blog has been insightful and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Until next time!
Annabelle
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