The purpose of the past several posts is to give you some methods to examine and review your existing website.  The key here is that you are actually taking the time to do at least a base level of  maintenance on your website and to make you, as a business owner or manager, aware of some common mistakes being made and old ways of thinking.  You have a tremendous opportunity online to position your business as a leader in your market segment.  The only thing keeping you from reaching that goal is you.  As people say, "you only have once chance to make a first impression," and online you have the unique opportunity to make that experience as good or as bad for your visitors as you want. What have you chosen?

In our next post we will discuss features and functions that new websites should have and the value and importance of each including more on content management systems, search engine friendly (SEF) content and sites, seach engine optimization (SEO), blogging, using social media and more.

One of the greatest features of the Internet and websites is that you can track nearly everything that your users are doing.  This is impossible with all other forms of media.  Taking advantage of this fact is easy to do and free.

1.    How many people visited your site last month?

If the answer is “I don’t know,” then you’re behind the curve.  Web analytics are free (http://www.google.com/analytics) and essential to proper site design and marketing.  If you don’t know which of your content is popular, or where people are dropping off your site then you won’t be able to make the necessary adjustments to improve the site.

2.    What is the most popular content on your website?

As above, you should be able to identify key areas of your website and how frequently they are visited.  You can then build upon these successes in future content iterations so that you are giving your visitors what they want.  Deploying a content management system to manage your site will make gathering this kind of statistics extremely easy.  Because this information is readily available and farily black-and-white, you need to begin relying on this data and stop relying on assumptions that things are effective or that you know what visitors are doing on your site.

3.    Are you collecting user information on your site (name/email at least)?

If you have a website then you should give your users the opportunity to give you their personal information.  They’re on your site for a reason already and often don’t mind sharing this information if they know they’ll get something out of it like a coupon they can bring into your store, or a holiday discount, or just a quarterly newsletter from your company saying what’s going on.  This is a great way to remind past customers about you and to encourage them to come back to the site as well.  With so many tools out there that enable you to create an ongoing dialog with your customers, you should take advantage and give your visitors and customers what they want.  Please note that there are laws regulating how you contact people from online forms and there are also best practices.  Be sure to do your research before emailing people.

4.    Do users have the ability to respond to, or rate any of your content?

Gone are the days of websites being one-way streets.  People want to share their opinions and thoughts and you should listen.  Giving your customers the opportunity to rate your content products often scares business owners and managers.  After all, what if someone says something bad about your products?  First, these applications allow you to moderate comments made, so you can manage visitors that just go nuts and type all kinds of horrible things.  However, if a user legitimately has a concern about one of your products or services wouldn’t you rather fix the issue?  People know you aren’t perfect and if they see that you are responding to the needs and concerns of your customers then they will realize that your goal of keeping them happy is being met.  Also, this might let you know if some of your content or products are just plan crappy and allows you to adjust your business accordingly.

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Evaluation Conclusion

Properly written, frequently updated and easy to find content are critical to the success of your website.  Think of your website as a living organism and the content its food.  In order to keep your site healthy and looking good you need to feed it on a regular basis.  Well fed sites rank higher in search engines and drive repeat traffic.  Content starved, or more specifically update-starved sites fall by the wayside in search engine rankings and give people no reason to come back.

1.    Is your content searchable?

If your website was written from scratch then it’s likely that you don’t have a search.  People expect that function and you should give it to them.  There are some modules you can add to static sites, but your best bet is migrating to a content management system where searching is a built-in function.  This is especially important if you have lots of, or complex content.

2.    How often do you update your website?

I can’t tell you how many times I ask this question only to hear “never”.  Believe it or not, people want to hear what your business is doing, so tell them!  Beyond just informing your customers that you are alive and your business is busy doing things, search engines will love you if your content changes regularly.  The more it changes the more they’re forced to come back because it’s in their best interest to stay current also.  If your content never changes, your site will invariably be ranked lower than some with frequently updated content.  There are numerous ways to keep your content fresh and we will discuss some in the next installment.  Suffice it to say that if you are never updating your site then you are probably getting very few repeat visitors and your search engine rank is very low.

3.    How do you let people know about the updates?

Supposing you are actually updating your site, the next challenge is to figure out how to let people know.  This is another topic of discussion for the next installment, but in short, you need to let people know on your site that content has been updated (cross-linking and self promotion) and externally that content has changed via other outlets like social media, partner sites and blogs and more.  Some changes like adding inventory is not as critical as other updates like press releases but the objective for all of them is to drive new and repeat traffic to your site.

4.    Was your content ported from your company’s printed marketing materials to the web?

Web design is different from print design and unless a person with web experience made the translation, your web content might not be up to par.  It is common for companies to take pamphlets, flyers, newsletters and other print media and try to convert the content word for word to their websites.  This is bad practice.  What you can do is take the ideas and concepts that you are writing about as well as the overall design theme and build your website around this, but just copying and pasting is not advisable.  Content for web needs to be written slightly differently and most certainly formatted differently in order for it to make sense.

5.    Are you advertising other people’s stuff on your website (i.e. do you have banner or other ads on your site)?

We will start with the one exception to this.  If you are running a website whose entire existence is to generate ad revenue through traffic then clearly you need ads for other people’s things on your site.  However, if you are a standard business or a corporation and you have banner ads on your site then you need to print up all of those ads and paste them on your building or storefront for everyone to see because that’s all you’re doing on your website.  The people that design these ads are building them to attract people to their sites.  If they go to their site then guess what, they’re no longer on yours.  The $.05 generated by the click is probably not enough to offset the cost of a lost customer.  Stop advertising for other people.

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

The best design and navigation in the world is worthless if it requires a specific browser or application to run it, or if it generates errors at any point while visitors are on the site.

1.    Does any page on your site take more than four seconds to load?

Four seconds is a long time when you’re trying to just get to some information.  Imagine it taking four seconds for you to flip the page in a book.  Reading it wouldn’t be any fun.  Your website is no different.  Test it on fast and slow connections to see how everything loads.  Properly written code, limited scripting, proper use (not over use) of graphics and good hosting all contribute to the page load speed.  If any of your pages are taking this long to load then fix them.  People won’t complain about them, they will just leave and find somewhere else that has content that loads at a proper speed.

2.    Does your site force people do download plugins to work properly?

The only plugin that you should ever think about using on your website is Adobe Flash.  If users are required to download anything else then your site doesn’t work right.  People aren’t on your site to do anything but get information or buy things.  Stop making them do more work than is necessary to accomplish these tasks.

3.    Are you using Microsoft FrontPage or Word to create web pages?

If the answer to this is yes then you can skip the rest of this series and go to the part where we discuss complete redesigns and rebuilds.  FrontPage is fine for kids doing school projects.  It is not an acceptable tool to build professional websites.  FrontPage and Word violate a great number of standard web rules and put in absolutely huge amounts of code where none is needed.  This makes your pages extremely slow and frequently they don’t work on non IE browsers.  Again, if you are using FrontPage or Word then it’s time for a rebuild.  You will love some of the other tools that are out there and they’re no more difficult to use than what you are used to.

4.    Are you using any kind of content management system to manage your website?  If so, what?

Content management systems (CMS) are pieces of software that reside on the web server which help you manage the structure, navigation, design and content on your website.  If you are currently just uploading pages via FTP then odds are that you are not using a CMS.  You should be.  CMS have built in search engine friendly features and have the ability for you to drop in plug-ins and modules that extend and expand the function of your website with little or no coding.  They also allow full searches of your content by default and offer a host of features that make your content easy to manage and update.  The best part is that many of them are free (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, DotNetNuke).  The days of editing your web pages in DreamWeaver, FrontPage, or other HTML editors are over.  This is a subject that there are thousands of articles about, but in this case not using a CMS is not good.

5.    Did you know what your website looks like in browsers other than Internet Explorer?

Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari all have sizable market shares and all display content differently and you should absolutely test your site in all of them.  If you have not and don’t want to install a bunch of browsers on your computer just go to http://browsershots.org/ and type in your URL.  It will display the site for you and let you see how it looks in multiple browsers.  Do not, however, assume that your visitors are coming to your site only on Internet Explorer.  A sampling of browser statistics from November 2009 is:

(Data from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Content & Updates