Your Nephew Shouldn't Be Your Webmaster

Things To Consider When Building a Website

Every American has a nephew who knows how to make a website, and plenty of businesses employ these nephews to manage their sites. But in most cases, these nephews, even the few that completely own CSS, neglect the countless considerations that make a site a business-building investment rather than a tolerable expense. Listed below are some key considerations for crafting a site that markets, versus a site that floats around in cyberspace waiting for you to show your friends.

Design

There are more sayings about first impressions than there are about honesty, hard work and being nice combined. What do people feel the first time they land on your home page? Do you portray yourself as a competent, successful company that stands by your services, or do you seem shady, unstable or out of touch? Do they recognize your brand? Do they think you look pretty cool? Are they emotionally moved to do business with you? Is your site one that they'll recognize and remember the next time they come around, or is it just plain lame? Design is, typically, where most web developers invest all their talent, so if they can't get this one right, forget everything else.

Construction

Not all web publishing technologies are created equal, and there are plenty of designers out there using antiquated layout methods comparable to carburetors in car engines. Out-of-date tables and framesets make your site illegible to search engines and the blind (seriously). They also make your site load slowly, and in many cases, display information in a counterintuitive fashion. Oddly enough, there are plenty of designers out there still doing layout with tables, while industry best practices have mandated CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, an excellent technology) since at least 2004. Ask your designer if they use table-based layout or CSS. If you're confused when they finish talking, give us a call!

Search Engine Compliance

A site that isn't marketed is like a billboard on a country road. While there's a lot to watch out for when shopping SEO, there really are a lot of things you can do to rank higher with the search engines. Most of them involve building a really good site with really good content, not trying to fool Google with black hat techniques. Primarily, your site should be clear and legible to both people and robots. Pages within your site should link to each other, and a good web marketing campaign typically involves linking from other (appropriate) sites back to your own. Most importantly, your copy should be well-written so it's something people might want to read once they arrive, as opposed to hitting the back button!

Call To Action

Secret: A person's greatest desire when looking at your web site is to click on something. Your goal is to have them click on whatever it is that makes you money! From a visitor's first arrival, they should be able to intuitively navigate through your site and find whatever it was they were looking to buy when they came. Getting them to pick up other little bits along the way is an added bonus, but the path should always lead to the closing of the sale (whether that means checkout, free estimate, or whatever the site objective).

Usability

Sites should be pretty, like a garden of lush information ripe for the harvest. But if the garden is a maze, your visitors are going to run out those little emergency gates.

Web users are accustomed to sites working a certain way. For example, the main menu is always across the top or down the left side. Hyperlinks are always bold, underlined, or brightly colored. Common page elements are in the same place everywhere on the site. These are things that you just naturally assume, but web designers who like to "make a statement" enjoy mixing these things up for the sake of their craft. If you want your site to work, Form should work politely with Function, as opposed to strangling him.

More subtly, usability isn't limited to page layout, but applies just as strongly to site structure. When a site map is designed, dead ends should be eliminated. Important bits of information should feature prominantly and redundantly, and there should always be more than one way to find something.

Cross-Browser Compatibility

Microsoft finally got on board with Internet Explorer 8, but older, inferior versions are going to cause issues for several years to come. A good designer makes sure a site looks right in all the major browsers: IE, Firefox, Safari...because it doesn't just happen by chance!

Nowadays, with  smart phones on the rise, the way different devices view sites is going to be more of an issue than browsers ever were. If your site needs to be a quick reference to people on the go, having it designed to comply with all the major devices is a worthy investment.

Content Management

For decades, people have suffered from Web Monkey dependency. Remember the time your marketing director got married and assumed the name of her spouse? You called your web designer for an update, but he was at a comic book convention for three weeks. Then he took eight days to return your call, and by the time he got the spelling right your marketing director was on her anniversary cruise. He billed you the 1-hour minumum charge of $75 and thanked you for your business.

That umbilical cord can now be cut. Content management systems allow a person with basic word processing experience to log in to a site and make lots and lots of changes on their own. While lots of businesses prefer to keep web site maintenance with the web developer, simple changes shouldn't cost you a disproportionate amount of time, money and heartache.

Tracking

Who's coming to your site? Where are they coming from? What are they looking for when they find you? How long do they stay? Which pages attract the most viewers? Understanding your site traffic does wonders for a marketing plan. Robust, user-friendly tracking tools from familiar sources like Google can be built in to your site to give you extremely detailed reports about how it's all working. If a designer isn't too concerned about whether your site gives you a return on investment, they suck.