Creating a Website

Why do you, or your company, have a website? What does the company do with it? Is it part of their marketing plan? Does your company have a specific marketing plan or strategy for it? Think about it. Most companies today have websites, and most market the websites to facilitate customer acquisition, to increase their customer base, and improve customer retention rates. But what does a website need to be successful?

Among the major things any web site needs are:

1. Good web site content - things that encourage your potential customers to browse and return often.

2. Simple navigation - make it easy for people to find what they are looking for

3. Website promotion - a marketing strategy to attract prospective clients to the website.

4. Execution - All 3 of the above tied together properly to ensure a clean overall package.

Building a website is a lot like building a house. First you buy a lot - your domain name; choosing the right domain name is like buying the right lot for your home. Buy a name that contains a message about what you do. Some search engines look at the URL for keywords. If you are in the rock-climbing field, buy a domain like "rock-climbing.com" (Yes, it's gone).

This first step helps people, and the search engines understand what you do. Once you have the domain of your dreams, you start planning what the web site itself will look like - where to put everything. It doesn't matter if you are starting from scratch, or redesigning a page. Make a storyboard, or flowchart to facilitate visualizing how it all ties together. 

When you look at a house, you don't expect to find the bedrooms in the basement, and the laundry rooms on the top floor with an ocean view. Designing a web site takes as much thought as designing a house. Carefully draw out how you expect your visitors to flow through the building. Is everything easy to get to, logically linked together, and clearly identified? If so, that's your planning stage done.

Next, start construction. This is the easy part. Get out your copy of Microsoft FrontPage, and start making your storyboard come to life. Identify what you do and don't like about other web sites similar to the one you are building. If there is something that you consistently see incorporated into a web site design that you dislike, find out why. Perhaps it's a principal support to the construction, and you really need it. But perhaps it's just a common mistake that you want to avoid. 

Examine the web sites a little bit closer. Do they meet your criteria for a well laid out and thought out web site? Does the navigation flow naturally? Once you're satisfied, and sure you've covered all the bases you can begin.

Here's a checklist to help you make sure you have covered the bases.

Does The Design...

• Flow naturally? Is it easy to navigate?

• Have a feedback form, or other means to contact you to request information?

• Allow you the flexibility to update content at will? In the early stages you will probably need to make dramatic updates to the content of your web site.

• Will it facilitate your online marketing campaign?

• Is it search engine friendly? Is there anything to prevent an optimization package from being successful?

• If it's an ecommerce site, does it allow your web site visitors to easily make a purchase?

Next, start the decorating process. This is the tough part for you. It means creating all the content that people see in the web site. Try to keep the content on each individual page short and to the point. Focus on keeping the message clear, and consistent throughout. That includes not just all the text that your visitors, and the search engines, will read, but also the images - with their alt tags. 

Make sure you write down enough information so that your visitors can properly understand your message. Don't forget, you are the expert. You know what you are writing about. Don't just use acronyms, or make the assumption that your visitor knows or understands what your abbreviations and bulleted lists mean. 

When planning out your content think about the web site as a whole.

Does The Content...

• Clearly identify the need or problem that your product or service addresses and solves?

• Clearly identify the solution to the problem?

• Help your web site visitors decide that your product or service meets their needs?

• Make sure that the web pages load quickly. Are your graphics optimized to load quickly, and still look good? A lot of people connecting to the Internet still have slow connections. Keep the web site design and presentation simple, and clean.

• Provide information, in images and clearly written text, to allow the visitor to the web site to make a decision?

• Allow your web site visitors to easily make a purchase?

• Will it load in not just the latest browsers, but also the prior version? Don't worry too much about 4 year old versions, 95% of people have upgraded, but also make sure that your visitors don't need to jump through hoops for the latest gadgets. Most won't bother.

If you are doing everything yourself, get lots of feedback from friends and family. Ask them to be brutally honest. Make the changes that make sense. Get a second round of opinions, and see if the reviews improved. This will be a never-ending cycle. You will always discover things that need improvement, or updating. That's great. These updates and improvements will keep your visitors interested, and coming back for more.

Once your web site is built, start reviewing your statistics reports. Some reports will be daily, and some monthly. As you tune your web site, you will observe gradual changes in the overall averages. You will see how changes you made last month helped or hurt your overall traffic. Be careful not to change too many things at a time, or else you will be hard pressed to determine which changes worked, and which did not.

At this point, you now have entered the phase of web site promotion, or marketing. You built your web site using a good foundation. This means you also built it with search engine performance in mind. But while you built it the search engines changed some of their algorithms. Not to worry, they do this constantly. If you built the web site with an emphasis on content, and clean simple navigation, your web site will still be fine: it will just need some ongoing optimization. There is not a single web site that cannot use search engine optimization on a regular basis. If you want to do it yourself, that's fine.

Here are the basics that you should be doing:

• Read the latest Search Engine Optimization newsletters, guides.

• Review your existing content, and note any changes.

• Ensure that your new pages are properly formatted, and do not contain any roadblocks to the search engines.

• Update your search engine markers for each page you want the search engines to index.

• Write to other web site operators about exchanging reciprocal links.

• Resubmit your web site to the search engines. 

Although performing all these activities properly will take a serious amount of time, these are the things that must be done to ensure that your web site is successful within the search engines. If you care to do it yourself, do it right. You will need to set aside at least 40 minutes per day, or about 20-25 hours per month.

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