Congratulations! By now, the planning phases are pretty much over and the “build” is underway.
8. Be clear about content and be sure content is clear
Even the most gorgeous website will have little impact if what’s on it is presented poorly. Or, to be positive, great content will produce great results.
What do we mean by “content”? Text, of course, that describes your product or service, but also photos, video, audio . . . anything that expresses who your company is and what it has to offer. For text, content should be crisp and precise — people expect to read fast on the Internet — and also mix in keywords that the search engines can use to find your site. Photos should be clear and crisp; video should be relevant and present information in a format that will engage the viewer; the same is true of audio.
Who prepares content? Web developers and SEO (search engine optimization) experts may offer to write your text for you. That may work if what you have to say is simple, but it may not work well if the ideas and concepts you wish to present are at all complex. If you write the text, be prepared to work with the web and SEO experts to adjust it for maximum impact; if they write the text, explain first what you wish to emphasize and then be sure the results meet your objectives. (More on SEO in a separate post.)
Photos can come from a number of sources. Stock photo sites offer a zillion choices and usually are of good quality. (More on whether and when to use stock photos in another post.) Beware of snapshots taken in poor light or at low resolution — they won’t represent you well online. The same general rules hold for video and audio. (Copyrights may apply to some materials; be careful that you have permission to use the photos, etc., that you put on your site.)
Remember that the site cannot be completed without the content. It is your responsibility to be sure the developer has what is needed and on time – the completion of the site will be delayed otherwise.
9. Be engaged
Even with the best plans, challenges can pop up unexpectedly. Be active in keeping track of progress; a weekly conference call with the developer is a very good idea.
Be prepared to make minor adjustments to your site if this improves the ability of a visitor to use the site. Perhaps you don’t really need a page you had planned or perhaps one page needs to be split in two. Or maybe the “signposts” you planned are too busy for the page. This happens, but such changes should be the exception if you developed a full siteplan in step 7.
If your company is putting up its own content, i.e., “populating” the pages, then the responsibility for keeping on track rests with you as much as with the developer. Factor this into your planning.
1o. Test, test, test, and test again
Any good website developer will deliver your site to you in nearly — or completely — perfect working order. The site should have been thoroughly tested and checked, including any usually hidden features such as confirmation or error pages. As an example, a think tank whose staff has an amazing number of combined years of education was shocked when an error page appeared after launch that read: “Please not to worry. We work on this.” Funny now. Not so funny then.
Delivering a perfectly working site for small sites is the norm; not much can go wrong. For more complex sites, one or another bit may need tweaking; it is possible a feature won’t work quite right and will need to be corrected. Before your site goes live, read every word, click every link, fill out every form — the right way and the wrong way, download all possible files, place an order, send an email with a link to a page, and do anything else a visitor could possibly do — and more than once. And think about hiring a proofreader — anyone who reads the same text over and over again will miss typos and other simple mistakes. Only when you are satisfied it all works as it should, OK the launch.
Once the site goes live, do all the testing again. Recently, we consulted for a site whose developer did not test well — after launch, the hyperlinks didn’t work; if a visitor emailed a link to a page to someone else, that link opened only to an error page. The site should not have gone live with that mistake and the developer, not the client, should have caught this one first.
Remember to build requirements for testing and tweaking into both your timetable and your specs document.
Most developers allow a period of time after launch for finding and fixing bugs as part of the initial contract; usually 2-6 months. Be sure you know what the details of that service are and keep testing.
11. Enjoy and promote
You have a website! Be sure it is submitted to the search engines — at least the key ones. It takes anywhere from a week to three to four months for your site to be indexed by the search engines. If your site has a blog, the search engines may pick it up sooner, assuming that you are posting frequently.
Send emails (or even postcards) to all your past and existing clients announcing the site. Be sure your web address is in your email signature, on your business cards, on any other printed materials, and is clear in any other online presence, such as yellow page or other listings.
This isn’t the end. Websites need nurturing. We’ll cover that in a subsequent post.
To view all the posts in this series, click here.
The Mattison Group specializes in providing consulting in the planning, design, development and maintenance of small- to medium-sized websites. We develop small websites in-house.
In this era of influence via social media, nobody wants to be left behind. Still, using all the available platforms can seem overwhelming. Is it necessary?
“Blog” is a word most people have heard hundreds of times — and many of us have even read one or two blogs. Or have we?
The Internet offers a myriad of ways to get out information about scholarly research. Websites are one obvious source; search engines and services are another. But is this enough? In a competitive world, probably not.
Inevitably, even if you’re doing it yourself, getting a new website built and ready takes longer than you had planned. The last few days are likely to be a hectic rush of last-minute fixes of any bugs, correction of typos, completion of internal and external links, and a myriad of other tasks that seem to go on and on ad infinitum.
Nothing is as certain in life as change, and nothing will date a website as quickly as not keeping up with change. We are not talking about redesigning a website here, but about keeping yours fresh and up to date. A stale site is a lost investment.
6. Evaluating the proposals
