A few simple tips to help you get the best out of your investment and maximise your organisation’s digital strategy. If you want a good digital presence you need to put the hours in, find out where to begin.
By Lewis North
So you’ve got a website or you’re thinking of creating a website? What are the top tips we can give you to ensure your website is a long term success?
First things first – what is your website for? Be clear on what you want your website to deliver. What are your objectives? How is it going to help your business? How are you going to measure the benefits? This is basic stuff, but keep challenging yourself with these simple questions, even once the website is established.
Building a well constructed, targeted, information rich and SEO focussed website takes a lot of time, effort and ultimately money. As the website guardian, it is your job to ensure that all your long term targets and objectives are met, that improvements and fixes are implemented quickly and that the whole system is meeting or exceeding expectations.
With larger e-commerce projects and bespoke web applications the importance of planning increases exponentially. The website will be interacting with more internal systems, encroaching on other departments remits and generally throwing it’s weight around more. The importance of planned introductions and improvements can not be underestimated. Knee jerk reactions to implement a new piece of functionality often causes more problems than leaving things alone.
It is worthwhile investing in a suitable project management solution – be that offline like MS Project/OmniOutliner or online like Basecamp – these systems will help you to plan your workloads, timescales and delivery dates more accurately.
Write a full and detailed website brief. There are a many reasons for doing this, but the two main ones are that it ensures you get what you want and that deliverables are set and agreed by all parties. It it will also help you to think about all the nuances of your project – for want of a better phrase, it will get the creative juices flowing. Quite often, it’s only when writing the full website spec do you realise, ‘Oh, actually I need it to handle the lack of VAT on international exports’ etc. Writing a spec is a good thing and will result in a happy website owner/developer relationship.
Your website content should not be an after thought. At Method & Class we consider the content right at the start of the web project, and this forms an integral part of our design process, influencing the look and feel, the functionality and the structure and navigation. So if you work with us you won’t get away with leaving you copy to the last minute!
We are of the strong belief that content can make or break a website. Creating interesting and well written copy is a skill. If you don’t have the skill or time to dedicate to doing this properly, pay a professional to do it for you. This is often an area that customers think they can cut some costs and do themselves – and more often than not it’s very evident in the final result. Copywriters aren’t hugely expensive and they will do a better job than you will! Similarly good photography is essential to a good website. Instead of using the camera on your mobile phone, pay for a professional to come and take some pictures. This is particularly important if it’s product photography or location focused.
A lot has changed in approaches to search engine optimisation (SEO) in recent years. The tide has turned (thankfully) against reams of keyword-laden nonsense cluttering our websites, and Google has got wise to artificial back links. So what can you do? SEO remains something of a dark art, and if you’re serious about it, you’ll want to have a separate SEObudget and engage a creditable expert to help you with a dedicated strategy. However, there are some simple things you can do to help yourself:
The initial build of a website is exciting and takes up a lot of resources. However you mustn’t forget that this is now your mouthpiece to the world – you need to keep the momentum up and the new content flowing. Not only for search engine purposes but also to keep your customers coming back to you. They will be interested to see what you’re working on, what new products or services you’re offering and how you can help them improve/expand/reach more customers. So consider it your job to ensure that content is added monthly as an absolute minimum – it will be worth the effort in the long run.
Almost everything has a shelf life, particularly in the rapidly changing digital age, where technological advances mean improvements can be made quickly and with sweeping effect. So you need to consider that your website will have a shelf life. What is possible now will be different in 3 years time. What is all the rage now will be old hat soon. You need to continually evolve to stay with the pack. It is worthwhile bearing in mind that websites typically have a life cycle of between 3 and 5 years.
As we’ve covered, the world of the web moves quickly. Even industry veterans struggle to keep up with the latest advancements. That’s what makes it so exciting! (We warned you we were mega geeks – right?) However, unless you live and breathe the web, the chances are there are all kinds of improvements or regulatory updates that might have passed you by. If you have a relationship with a good web agency, they’ll consider it their responsibility to keep you in the loop. So if you get the odd invite to a catch up meeting, phone message asking for a chat, don’t just assume that your web agency is trying to squeeze more money out of you. As a rule we’re a friendly bunch and we like to share – we might just have stumbled across a nifty little widget that would be just the thing for your site. So pick up the phone – who knows what we might have up our sleeve!
Good luck, and if you need any help, please get in touch today.
