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Don’t forget the behind the scenes stuff
Filed Under General
The biggest influence for website development has been and always will be how good your website looks. But you can’t forget all of the stuff that goes into a website. Here are four key questions that you really…REALLY… need to be asking your web designer before committing to any changes:
1. Will my customers be able to find my site?
The latest stats show there are over 20 billion web sites in the world with well over 1 trillion web pages. A pretty website won’t make you first on the search engines so make sure that you have an excellent SEO plan.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is just how it sounds, making your website optimized to perform the best on ALL major search engines. This involves a lot of standard practices which aren’t that hard to implement but do take some time to get right.
Along with SEO here are a few more acronyms you need to know:
SEM – Search Engine Marketing
SMO – Social Media Optimization
SMM – Social Media Marketing
The difference between optimization and marketing is pretty simple, optimization involves configuring your website (or Facebook page, or twitter account, etc.) to return results that match what your customers will be searching for. Marketing takes it one step further by paying for advertising space on search engines and social media sites.
2. Can my information be stolen?
The quick answer is, you cannot 100% prevent theft in the real world, the same goes for the virtual world. The Internet is based on transparency and making information easy to find, but there will always be company confidential information that you need to hide.
If you have a “secure” section of your site, ensure that section only has the absolute necessary information and nothing more. At the same time ask questions about the security procedures that will be implemented within the website coding.
3. Will everyone be able to read my website?
Strange question? not really. How many varieties of computers exist in the world? will your customers be looking you up on a Blackberry or an iPad? Your website needs to be compatible on all types of online mediums. Different web browsers interpret your website in different ways, make sure your website gets tested on as many platforms as possible…even after you get a report from your web developer go ahead and check it out for yourself.
4. Is my website confusing?
Cool designs don’t always mean easy to navigate. How easy is it for your customers to find your phone number? To identify what you are trying to sell? If visitors to your site get confused they will be turned off quickly, give up and move on to the next company. Make sure your website is easy to navigate. Put yourself in your customers shoes for a two minutes and see if you can get enough information from your site to make a sale. Two minutes will be enough as most web visitors never spend more than that on a site.
5. Can I get a coffee while this page loads?
Just like the last question…two minutes may be all the time you have, so make sure those pages will load fast enough to get that information out there before the visitor moves on.
I could spend all day adding question after question to this…but these ones everyone should know and always ask when building, upgrading or maintaining a website.
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