All too often businesses get their new websites designed and then forget about them and expect them to do the rest. Business people sometimes assume that if a website doesn’t take off, that the web designer hasn’t done his job correctly, that may be true in some cases, but for a website to really excel it needs to be treated like a high maintenance girlfriend. Here is my list of the top 5 things you can do to set your website on fire and make it really take off.

• Blog – This brings us back to the old cliche about content being the ruling monarch or some other such drivel, the point is that your content is everything. Good wordy content drives search engine ranking up, it also encourages people to spend time on your site and it motivates visitors to return to your site again and again. Blogging is the best way for a website owner to add content to a website regularly and tools like RSS help disseminate that information and drive traffic too. Set a schedule and stick to it, one new entry a week, or a day or whatever works with your schedule.
• Inbound links - Probably as important to website ranking as good text content is inbound links, that is links on other sites that point to your website. There are a myriad places online where one can get linked. Online directories related to your local area or your particular industry, reciprocal links, blog comments and discussion forums. It takes more time and patience than anything else to find these places and get linked, but your efforts will be rewarded as your search engine ranking rises. Search engines aside, inbound links are good for the traffic they generate too.
• Social networking - Another great way to drive traffic is to get your business on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking websites. Be aware though that simply creating a presence on these sites is not enough, you need to contribute to these communities by connecting to others and posting relevant information. There are tools available now that will connect many blog systems to your social networking account, so for example, when I post this article to my blog it will also appear automatically on my Facebook and LinkedIn account. This saves time posting to a lot of different sources and makes short work of keeping all your online marketing efforts up to date. Other tools of use in this area are sites like http://ping.fm/ that can post to various social networking sites at once.
• Email newsletter - A great way to market to your web contacts is by implementing an email newsletter. This is fairly inexpensive to set up on your website and can bring great returns because once you are set up it costs you nothing to send out as many of these as you have names in your database. If you are going to set an email newsletter up on your website take the time to schedule a time each month (or whatever schedule you want to keep) to write and send out your newsletter, a newsletter system that doesn’t get used is money wasted.
• Mix things up - A static site does not encourage repeat visitors, update your website frequently. This is especially true of your home page, at least once a year you should change the look of your home page. This gives the impression that your company is active and will encourage people who have been to your site before to spend some time digging deeper to see what else has changed often times reading information that has been there for a long time.

A well designed, well thought out website can do a great deal on its own, but to really excel it needs care and nurturing. This doesn’t need to be expensive, in fact all of the above suggestions you can do yourself, you just have to make the time.

Any other ideas? What have you done to make your website take off? Leave comments below.

1. Easy to use admin interface: this is critical, for a web publishing platform to be successful it has to empower the website administrator, making it easy to add and maintain content quickly and easily.
2. Extensibility: the system should be able to add new functionality and features as needed, relatively inexpensively and quickly.
3. Easy to use templates: the look and feel of the site needs to be easily customized, so the tempting engine should be easy to work with.

I recommended Drupal for awhile and used it on a number of websites and it works pretty good. But I found that adding functionality to Drupal beyond what it was designed to do out of the box, was quite difficult. Also, the Drupal admin interface was difficult for some people to come to grips with.

For the past year or so I have been using WordPress with fantastic success. WordPress makes it so easy to keep a website up to date that people are more likely to add new content. The admin interface is very simple and easy, I have no reservations about introducing the most computer illiterate users to the WordPress admin interface, it’s that easy. Additional functionality can be easily added to a WordPress site and I have been able to quickly and easily customize a website’s look and feel because the templating system is very easy to work with.

The number one thing you can do to make a website more successful is to add more content. More content means more things for people to look at and read, more reasons for people to link to your site, more pages for search engines to index and link to, more reasons people to return to your site. So an easy to use web publishing platform encourages more and better content by making it very easy to add and edit content.

Call and talk with me about making your web site more successful by adding WordPress.

• Capture visitor’s attention: Your home page is like the cover of a book, it has to grab attention and encourage people to explore deeper. Your usual “Welcome to our site” copy is not enough, you have a very brief period of time to make this impression, it must be made graphically or lots of people will leave before they have time to read anything. Balance is required in the area of home page graphics, balance between eye-catching images and download time since a fast loading home page is also important. This does not mean that your home page should be all images and no text, it needs to have both, images to catch people’s eyes, text to explain what you’re all about and for the search engines to index since they can’t read images.
• Direct visitors to the content they want: The home page is not just the cover of the book, it also needs to be the table of content. The best way I know of to get web visitors to leave your site is to make it difficult for them to find what they are looking for. The days of the Flash intro page are long gone, visitors expect to see the global site navigation on the first page of your site. The site navigation should be obvious, simple and intuitive, give them that and they may stay around long enough for you to tell your story.
• Establish the credentials of your business or organization: While grabbing visitor’s attention and helping them find what they are looking for is important, it all means very little if your website leaves the impression that your 12 made it during summer vacation. The professional image of your website is as important as that of your office and your dress. Visitors form opinions about your company based on the image portrayed by your website, make sure that is as polished and professional an image as you can offer.

Creating a successful home page requires a delicate balance of all three of the above items. If your website’s home page is able to grab peoples attention, make the content of your website easily accessible while portraying a professional image you are sure to reap the benefits.

If you have any doubts about your current website’s home page, we would be glad to talk with you about it to offer our professional advice or a bid on what it would cost to improve.

• Look good – This goes without saying and is the part you probably already knew. A good looking website portrays a positive image for the business it represents.
• Work on a wide variety of the most popular browsers and operating systems – Every web browser will render a page slightly different, there are also mobile phones, video game consoles and other odd platforms to think about.
• Be easy to navigate – the end user must find the site easy to get around in and not confusing or they will go to the competition.
• Achieve it’s goals – Whatever the site was intended to do, be that getting potential clients to call or producing online sales, the site needs to be designed to naturally interest visitors and funnel them towards that goal.
• Play nice with search engines – Almost any site will benefit by better search engine ranking. So another thing the website must do is make it easy for the search engine spiders to index the content of that site.
• Be easily maintainable – At some point every site will need updates, a well put together site will be created with updates in mind using includes, comments in the code and clean, easily readable HTML.
• Load quickly – Obviously, yet it is often not made a priority in web design.

There are many other things a website needs to do, but these are the big ones in my opinion. These are the items that separate the men from the boys in web development, the lowest bidder is most likely not going to nail these points. Likewise a person trained in traditional graphic design will not have all the skills necessary to create a great website, it takes someone who understands the intricacy of website design, someone who understands things like:

• graphic design
• cross-browser and cross-platform website compatibility
• information architecture and web usability principles
• search engine optimization techniques
• W3C HTML standards
• server side scripting languages
• image optimization

A really great website has to look good, work across all browsers and platforms, be easy to navigate, achieve it’s goals, be fully indexable by search engines, be easy to maintain and load quickly, among other things. Creating a website that can do all these things requires a wide variety of skills that you won’t find at every business offering web design services.

• Is your web designer offering you a custom design?Some web designers charge you like you’re getting a custom web design, then give you a template. There is a huge difference in price, if you are getting a template design the price should reflect that.
• Does your web designer create web standards compliant code?Designing your website to meet current web standards ensures that your site not only looks good on current web browsers, but will most likely continue to look great on future web browsers too.
• Will your web designer’s code be search engine friendly?Not the same as search engine optimization, but in some ways more important. Search engine friendly code means your website is built in such a way that search engines are able to easily index your site and can determine what it’s about.
• Will your web designer stand behind the website for the long term?Like any piece of software, many problems with a website may not crop up until after you take delivery. Will your web designer continue to provide support for any code they wrote? For how long afterwards?

We would be happy to talk with you about these or any other web design related questions, free of charge. We never charge for consultations or just friendly conversation about our industry and what you should expect.

While there are many business offering search engine optimization, you need to be careful because some are offering substandard service, either they don’t really know what they’re doing and taking peoples money, or they are engaged in “black hat” methods, that is those techniques that are considered unethical and could result in a site being banned by search engines.

So what goes into effective “white hat” search engine optimization? It used to be about meta tags a few years back, hidden tags in the header section of a page’s HTML that told a search engine what that page was about. Thanks to people abusing meta tags, they are not used by most search engines today, you will still want to have them, but the big 3 (Google, Yahoo and MSN) will not use them to determine your rank. The most important thing you can do to improve your search engine rank today is to develop inbound links. An inbound link is a link to your website from another site not in your domain. The number of links to your site tell search engines how relevant your website is, the higher the PageRank of the site linking to you, the more that link counts for. There are a lot of other things that will improve your site’s standing in the search engines like using carefully researched keywords and the use of those keywords in the headings, subheadings, title and body of your page, still the most important thing is having lots of inbound links.

How do you go about getting inbound links? There are lots of places online where you can buy links, be careful if you choose this option that the website you are buying the link on has a decent PageRank itself, otherwise it may not be worth what you’re paying for it. There are also opportunities for reciprocal links (you link to me and I’ll link to you), but some search engines are now recognizing reciprocal links and giving them less weight when determining a website’s relevance. The best way to develop lots of good inbound links is still the old fashioned way, develop great content on your website that will make people want to visit your site and link to it.

At this point it’s obvious there’s quite a bit of time and/or money involved in getting a website search engine optimized, researching keywords, building those keywords into the content and the meta tags, developing inbound links, not to mention making sure the code is clean and properly formatted so the search engines will not have any trouble reading it. What can you expect to see for all this? First of all let’s make some assumptions about your website’s conversion rate. A conversion rate is the ratio of the number of visitors who take a desired action (fill out a form, make a purchase, etc.) to the number of visitors who view the page. The average conversion rate for many websites is around 4%, if your website sells widgets and has a conversion rate of 4% you will get 4 new customers for every 100 visitors to your website. I can see that the search term “widget” got 23,867 searches last month (September 2006), If you could get in the top ten results for that term and capture even a tenth of those searchers you would have 2,387 visitors a month which would result in 95 widget sales. Obviously the cost of search engine optimization is minimal compared to its potential to make money.

With these kinds of returns you can see why SEO is something that should not be an afterthought for a website but something that is built in right from the start.

1. Fresh Content – The most obvious reason is that your website will be easier to keep up to date. It just takes a minute to add new content, if it’s easy you’re more likely to do it and your website benefits by staying fresh.
2. Lots of functionality is available to you at little cost. There are hundreds of free modules available that plug into existing content management systems adding complex programming features with very little effort. Meaning that the cost of adding certain features to your site drops significantly. Some of the modules available include:
   • Site search
   • Polls
   • Password secured content
   • Email newsletters
   • Blog
   • Discussion forums
   • Photo galleries
   • Much more.
3. Dynamic categories, not only can you add new pages easily, but new categories can be added and the site navigation will expand gracefully to match.
4. Extensibility, new modules are being written all the time and since modules are developed in common languages like PHP, almost anything can be custom tailored to work within the system.
5. User friendly interface, the technical features of a CMS may tend to intimidate, but fear not, the interface is user friendly and easy to learn. So while the your CMS may have lots of technical features available, your interface for adding new content is user friendly and easy to learn

The content management system used to be practical only for large companies, but with lower costs to implement and the advantages listed above any website can benefit and see a quick return on the investment. Contact us for a free quote on a content management system and see how affordable it can be to add these advantages to your website.

If you are planning on paying for search engine optimization services you should get answers to the following 5 questions before choosing a company.

1. Are they eating their own dog food?Many businesses talk a lot about what they can do for your website through SEO, but the proof is in the pudding. Unlike web design where the results are more subjective, successful SEO is easily measured. If the company in question is so good at SEO they will apply it to their own website, how does their own website rank? You should do your own research. The point is if a company can’t get their own site on the first page, do you want to trust them to get yours there?
2. Are they obeying the rules?There are certain sneaky practices used by some, not-so-respectable SEO firms, that can get your site banned from Google or other search engines. Once your site has been banned it can be very difficult to get reinstated and can take months or even years. Make sure whoever is working on your site is following the rules.
3. Are they hanging out in bad neighborhoods?Inbound links, that is links pointing to your site from other sites, are a major component of your website’s search ranking. One way these inbound links are developed is by trading links with other sites. There is one thing you need to be careful of however, if as a result of link trading, your website ends up with links to spam sites or other websites the search engines consider unsavory, it can be penalized. So it is very important that you trade links only with above-board, reputable websites to avoid being penalized.
4. Do they promise the moon?Nobody can guarantee you a certain search engine ranking. If somebody makes outrageous claims like promises to get you on the first page of Google this should be a red flag alerting you that this company is not reputable.
5. What century are they living in?The web is still rather new, and the way search engines work has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. At one time a few years ago, SEO was all about meta tags. Today meta tags are of very little importance, yet there are still companies out there selling search engine optimization based on meta tags. Make sure the firm you employ is using up to date SEO practices.

You need to be careful when choosing a business to perform your SEO work because the wrong choice can do very little for your website, or worse, even damage it’s reputation to search engines. These five questions are a good place to start when determining what company should be doing search engine optimization for your website.

I’ll let you in on a little secret of web design, search engine optimization does not necessarily produce a successful website, better expressed as SEO ≠ $. While it’s true that search engine optimization (SEO) is very important to a website’s success it is by no means the only element of it’s success.

The goals of individual websites may differ quite a bit, for one the goal may be to get a visitor to buy a product, while another may be to get a visitor to call, or fill out a form to request further information. Whatever the end goal is, reaching that objective is called a conversion, in web design we refer to the ratio of conversions to visitors as your conversion rate. The nice thing about web marketing is everything is measurable, we can know how many people viewed each specific page, how long they spent looking at it and where they clicked when they left so we can use these figures to analyze how a website is performing. We are interested in improving your conversion rate, here are the top 5 ways to do that.

1. An attractive, professional looking website. It has long been known that the look of your website effects peoples opinions of your company, but recent studies have shown that lasting impressions are made very quickly, a visitor to your website will form a first impression in just a 20th of a second.
2. Well written copy. The most under-appreciated ingredient of a great website is copy-writing. People read differently on the web than on paper, they scan more and read less. Copy-writing for the web is a topic for another article but suffice it to say that well written copy will significantly boost you conversion rate. If you are serious about it think of paying a professional copy-writer.
3. Keep content fresh. Nothing can turn off website visitors faster than stale content. Make sure you keep up with dated content like event calendars or company news pages, when these kinds of things become outdated it looks as though your website is not kept up and visitors will move on. You will find that changing around your home page or any other “landing pages” every few months will generate renewed interest as returning visitors notice the changes and take a closer look.
4. Eliminate hurdles. Whatever your goal is, make it real easy to do, with as few steps as possible. If you’re selling a product, put it on the home page, if you’re collecting leads put the contact form on the side of every page, if you want people to call you put your phone number at the top of every page, whatever it is make sure your visitors have to perform as few steps as possible. For contact forms you will get the best results by requiring the fewest fields possible.
5. Keep download times to a minimum. As of March 2006, 22% of Americans were still using dial-up internet access. The best way to lose a visitor is to make them wait too long for the page to load, and when I say “too long” I mean around 4 seconds!

What good is search engine optimization if you abuse your visitors once they get to your website? Give your web visitors a quality experience on your site, make things easy for them and they will repay you by trusting you with their business.

1. You will get what you pay for
   Your nephew said he can make your website for you, he can, but it winds up being like the Rolex that you buy from some guy on the street, it looks nice but later you find out it doesn’t work. The same goes for low budget web design firms, if they are offering to do it cheap chances are they are not giving it the necessary time and attention to create a quality product, which leads us to our next point.
2. Designing a good website takes time
   To make a website that works on all browsers and platforms, downloads quickly, performs well on search engines, meets current web standards and all the other things required for a website to be successful not to mention looking good and being easy to navigate takes many many hours. In addition a really good website won’t be done quickly partly because of the next point.
3. There’s a lot of code behind a website
   When you look at a website you are just seeing the end result of a whole lot of code, try viewing a website’s source code sometime. And that is just the HTML portion, there may also be many additional files for scripts and style sheets. The point is, don’t judge a book by its cover, a web page has much more to do than just look pretty.
4. Know what you want, plan ahead
   It’s helpful if you approach your web designer with some idea of what you would like in your website. Look at your competitors websites and make notes about what you like or don’t like. Your web designer will find it much easier to be creative with some initial ideas to work around.
5. Every browser will render your website differently
   There are more different web browsers available now then ever and each handles things a little bit differently. What your site looks like on your browser is not what it looks like on everybody’s browsers. There is no way to make one website render identically on every web browser, the goal is to allow it to degrade gracefully.
6. Every screen resolution and monitor will make your website look different
   This is like the previous point, depending on the monitor being used and the screen resolution along with various other settings like color depth, your website will look very different from one computer to another. It is often a game of compromises to make it look as good as possible on all and the best on the most monitors.
7. Fonts will look different on different computers
   Windows and Macintoshes handle fonts very differently, furthermore the individual fonts on a computer vary widely. So this is yet another example of what may look one way on your computer may look different on another, once again the web designer looks for a compromise that looks the best on most computers.
8. Honor Google, it holds the keys to online success
   Google has about 43% of the web search market to the nearest competitor, Yahoo’s 28%. Any website hoping to be at least mildly successful online needs to do well on Google which means playing by their rules for search engine optimization.
9. Visitors will not flock to your site when it’s done
   The road to internet success is littered with the remains of websites that have failed to make an impression in the market. The key thing to remember is that a successful website does not just happen. People need to be able to find your website on the search engines when searching for relevant keywords. You will need to promote your website to current and prospective clients. And one other thing is required to make it successful, our next point.
10. Your website will need to change… often
    People will return to a website that changes often, but not to a brochure website. The most successful websites are those that are more than just static information about your company, consider incorporating a business blog, community forum, RSS news feeds, photo gallery or at the very least have the ability to go in and change things around occasionally.