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Invest wisely in your website

By Damien, Senior Web Designer on 09 June 2010 | Category: Resources 1 comments

Sourcing services of any kind can be difficult, particularly without recommendation, and sourcing a web designer is no exception. With web design it’s a bit like taking your car to the garage, you’re told that it’s going to cost all this money to make it right swiftly followed by a jumble of technical jargon, but how do you know if you have been given a fair price or if they are actually delivering what they promise. Like any procurement you want a cost-effective and high quality service, and it is that balance that can be hard to find. That’s why, having just launched the fourth generation of our website, we thought we’d share with you the key considerations that we feel should be standard to any successful web design project.

Creative design

It’s a fact that web users generally have a short attention span, so it takes a compelling attractive web design to quickly communicate your brand and business offer before visitors lose patience and bounce back to their Google search results—other search engines are available. A strong unique professional web design will help generate more traffic to your site by grabbing your website visitors’ attention when they first arrive at your site and install confidence with your visitors and confirm that you are a trustworthy professional business. A good web design shouldn’t only look great, a good web design should also consider brand perception, user experience and accessibility.

Design may well be the first point here but should not be the first stage of a web project—content, search engine optimisation and wireframes should be tackled long before the design is considered.

Great content

It’s not only important to provide a visually interesting user experience, but it is also important to maintain that interest with well written, interesting and original content. Working with an agency to develop an interesting copywriting style and produce informative content will help to increase visitor attention through return visits and also through new visits via search engine referrals if the content is also written with search engines in mind. However, content should be written for the benefit of your visitors first and foremost, but if written by an experienced web copywriter content can be created in a way that will assist search engines in ranking your web pages without upsetting the flow or interest of your content. Once the content has been planned it is then the job of the designers to determine how and where that content should be displayed throughout the pages of your website via a series of wireframes. Wireframes are vanilla spatials, usually made up from grey boxes, that do not contain any visual design but aid everybody to visualise and agree the content and heirarchy for each page.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Great content is not only important to users but also to search engines, SEO is the art of constructing web pages that are individually optimised around one or two keyphrases in a way that is easy for search engines to read and index. Driving traffic to your website by displaying your web address within printed advertising and literature is fine, but only with a well optimised website can you reach the widest possible audience via search engines. Far too often SEO is deemed to be a layer that is applied to a website at the end of its creation, when really it is essential that search keyphrases are researched and agreed during the early stages of a web project as these keyphrases will likely influence decisions on the sitemap and wireframes, determine page titles and assist with copywriting. These chosen keyphrases should then be referred to continually throughout the project to ensure no deviation from original plan has occurred. And post launch it is essential to continue to monitor and tweak optimisation to maximise the sites performance in tandem with off and online marketing.

Accessibility

Once you have opened your site up to as wider audience as possible it is paramount that as many of those visitors as possible can access the content your website has to offer. Much the same as your business premises, your website should also be accessible to as many people as possible no matter what their ability or situation. The Disability Discrimination Act, which refers to the provision of goods, facilities and services, specifically mentions accessible websites. At Optima we aim to comply with as many checkpoints as possible within the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The WCAG checkpoints are set into a three tier “must”, “should” and “may” abide by principle and are considered to be the best way to comply with the DDA legislations. Accessibility is not only about making content available to users living with disabilities, accessibility also considers users with older web browsers, mobile devices and users without access to plugins such as FlashPlayer, etc.

Web standards

To allow better access to the benefits of web-based content to as many web users as possible there are a number of standards bodies, including the W3C, who are actively publish standards for the technologies, such as HTML or CSS, used to publish and distribute content across the internet. These standards are documented for use by web designers and browser vendors to ensure the consistency and long-term viability of any content published on the internet. A professional web agency adhering to the latest web standards will help to ensure your new website is available indefinitely to as many browsers and devices as possible, including mobile devices and tools used by users with disabilities. Our experience in utilising the latest web standards has proven that they make for web pages that are less expensive to develop, more cost effective to redesign/redevelop, more accessible and viable long-term.

A proven Content Management System (CMS)

As with all websites we build now, a CMS is always a requirement. Everybody wants to be able to update their website, whether it be simple news posts or adding new product ranges to their online store. Having a CMS is fantastic for many reasons providing it is flexible, cost-effective and easy to use. At a Optima we use a CMS called ExpressionEngine, it is without a doubt our first choice for content management for many important reasons. ExpressionEngine is driven by a huge global community of developers, so it is continually developing and improving, there is nothing worse than becoming stuck with a content management system that doesn't evolve with the rapid development of web technologies. Essential to any web designer implementing a CMS is suppport—the large community behind ExpressionEngine means that support is always available for those more tricky challenges from the dedicated support team or from the vast community of web designers using the CMS. A good CMS should also be totally flexible—ExpressionEngine can be extended to perform virtually any task we wish and it is very reasonably priced making it a cost-effective solution for full-featured CMS. And as with any good CMS ExpressionEngine can be tailored to be a simple and intuitive system to use for all levels of technical ability, the usability of ExpressionEngine has been much improved over time and continues to get better.

Project management

A new website or website redesign can be a long process requiring input from numerous parties. To ensure delivery of your new website is on time and more importantly on budget requires carefully planning before the project begins and firm but fair management throughout to ensure key milestones are met. At a time when resources are either diminishing or occupied elsewhere it is essential to be able to rely on your web agency to take the reins, drive the project through and communicate with you at all times.

Web analytics

Once your website is complete it is essential that you monitor the user statistics to get a handle on how your site is performing against your targets and to help identify areas for improvement. In our opinion Google Analytics is the best tool for the job and we install this on all of our websites as standard. Out of the box Google Analytics provides you with a huge amount of metrics about the number of visitors, how they have found your website, how many pages they have visited, etc. But, if customised to the individual website's goals and objectives, Google Analytics can tell you a whole lot more, such as when a new member registers on the site or conversion rates for an online store or identify which pages individual members have visited.

Email marketing

It is very likely that your website will incorporate data capture in one form or another. This might be as straightforward as an enquiry form, but nevertheless it is an opportunity to gather contacts into a new or existing database for marketing purposes, including email marketing. Collecting data online means you can aggregate registrants by their preferences or by their behaviour on your website so that your email campaigns can be more targeted and relevant to your recipients. With careful consideration email marketing can be a successful and cost-effective way to encourage return visits. And the great thing about email marketing is that it is totally traceable, most good email marketing software can tell you the number of emails opened, who clicked through to your website, who forwarded the email to a friend, etc. And most email marketing software makes creating and sending new mail shots a breeze as well as automatically suppressing users who choose to unsubscribe or any other problem email addresses for you. Best of all, email marketing is a sniff of the price of any mail shots sent through the post and you can’t track a postal mail shot like you can email.

Ongoing support

A website can never be called complete, a successful website should continue to evolve and grow over time to keep both visitors and search engines coming back for more. Content management is part and parcel of most web design projects nowadays but, like anything else, unless it’s used frequently it can be easy to lose confidence in making changes to your website. That’s why it is great to have an agency at hand to assist with more challenging content changes or to make substantially more advanced upgrades to your website. It may benificial for you to take out a support contract with your web agency to assure you have a set amount of time allocated each week/month for any updates or assistance you might require. Support contracts come in many different shapes and sizes, but are usually flexible and available at different levels based on how much time you’re likely to require.

The end... nearly

This article could have been the length of a novel if it covered every aspect of the web design process in detail, this article is merely an overview of some of the key offerings that make for a successful web design/redesign. The size and requirements of your web design project will determine whether or not all of the above points are relevant to you. Every web design project is unique and it takes a good agency to recognise this and tailor a package that best suits you and your objectives.