Designing a Successful Website

Index
A. Domain Name Selection
B. Selection of a Host & Server location
C. SSL & CDN
D. Website Designing
E. Website Design Technology
F. System Communication
G. Performance & Load time
H. Testing

I. Digital Media
J. SEO
K. Blogs and Forums
L. Promotion
M. User Engagement
N. Site Communication Branding

O. Information Collections & Processing
P. Cookies
Q. Mailing List
R. Policy & Legal Disclaimer

S. Monitoring and Safety measures
T. Update and Upgrades
U. Site Backup & Archives
V. 3rd Party Service Integration

W. Target Customer and Regions
X. Build Customers for your customer
Y. Assessment and Reports

Domain name – selection, management, safety

1. Domain name must be easy to type, short and uses keywords.
2. .com should be preferred
3. Book multiple domain of the name (.co.in, .in etc)
4. Domain ownership should be in the your name
5. Secured email id “domain@gmail.com” from gmail for domain admin contact and using this id for all other backend purposes, including website monitoring, 3rd party services, social, blog etc.
6. Domains should always be in locked status.
7. If host allows – create a child ns on domain panel, use these child ns for setting up the dns server and hosting a/c.

Selection of a host and server location

Server location
Hosting server should be strategically located; so as to load the site faster and minimum hops. Singapore (recommended) has international gateways and well connected with indian isps and all other internet backbones of the world.

Server side technical support
Make sure development agency should provide 24×7 email support. Also to check the incidental cost if any besides regular hosting services/features.

Failover and backup strategies
Know the incremental backup and archiving strategy of hosting agency. Keep back-up and all website versions. Host should be able to support the incremental backup and should have last 30 days backup.

Websites load time and speed
Besides the site and database optimisation tools and techniques, have the hosting which could provide faster data connections, approximately 10k (cdn enabled) concurrent http connection, latest compression tools and gzips with dedicated ram and other resources.

Web developer to endorse hosting
Let the web developer endorse hosting requirements and you must consult them before making a decision on hosting.

SSL & CDN – Security and content delivery
Ssl – stands for secure sockets layer. It provides a secure connection between internet browsers and websites, allowing the data to transmit online in secured layer (browser and server). If need arises buy a ssl and install it.

CDN
A content delivery network (cdn) is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver static web-pages and other web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user.
Cdn caches static resources including javascript, css and images. The dynamic content continues to be served direct from your web server automatically.

Website designing

The 5 second rule you have five seconds to explain your value proposition to users when they enter to the site first time.
Building trust building trust is critical. Polices, legal, logistics, content, freshness and content timing, bank assistance, arranging site visits and genuine testimonials are just some important facts to be incorporated.

Have a polished, professional logo–and link it to your home page. Favicon and apple touch icons.

Keep it fresh, content is still king, think local and write global, content quality, image quality are to be created keeping global audience in mind. Make sure that things like currencies, measurements, dates, and times are clear so that all the readers will know exactly what you mean.

Get rid of clutter
Give visitors breathing room. Use natural colour. Website visitors can sniff out generic photos in a second. Choose fonts that are easy to read across devices and browsers.

Don’t forget buttons
“the ‘submit’ or ‘send’ ‘reset’ ‘call us’ ‘enquiry’ ‘buy’ button must be so appealing to visitors. They just have to click it.” in addition, “when a visitor hovers over your submit button, it should change colour, gradient, opacity or font treatment.

Technology
Understanding the design elements and scalability, using a dynamic tool to build your site must be preferred.

Other important elements –

1. Responsive design—so that site automatically adapts to the devices being viewed on, including mobiles and tabs.
2. Text to html ratio keep in mind the text to html ratio; anything above 25% would be better.
3. Not appending/changing core php or theme file.
4. Signing up with sucuri (3rd party tool) to monitor security
5. Signing up with smtp service provider for transactional email
6. Signing with zopim for real time chat and tracking visitors’ visits.
7. Google webmaster tools for site performance

System communication & api

How and when the site should talk to the visitor.

1. Login, forget password, signup, news letter subscription and api’s
2. Building api’s with fb & youtube for delivering contents across platform.
3. Allow visitor to login using social sites.

Site load time

1. Clean code and optimize images and optimize the database.
2. Optimize homepage exclusively to load quickly.
3. Using caching plugin.
4. Disable hot-linking and leeching of content.
5. Turning off pingbacks and trackbacks
6. Reduce file sizes and all other css/js code.
7. Use content delivery networks enabled web-host.

Site testing

Assess the usability of site by undertaking various design and performance test.

1. Design and functional test – a/b testing alternatives design and function to be tested with test users
2. Test website for speed, performance, security, load time.
3. Check performance on concurrent connection.
4. Check performance on different isp’s, connection.
5. Check performance on various devices.
6. Check performance on all available os and browsers.

Digital media – branding and promotions

Survival of the fitting
Digital darwinism is the evolution of consumer behaviour when society and technology evolve faster than some companies’ ability to adapt.

We will keep the fundamentals the same, but adapt change as per opportunities and platforms.
Each digital platform has a dedicated audience of users who prefer that particular method of interaction over others.
Creating stories & articles on great contents across platforms for enhancing brand awareness.

1. Build brand on ideas worth sharing
2. Keeping target audience data and stats ready.
3. Produce and distribute great quality content
4. Search listing – generic and paid
5. Wiki, directory listing, back links, maps
6. Leverage video marketing
7. Press release and media
8. Email marketing
9. Landing pages / conversion forms
10. Consumer engagement

SEO – optimising site for various search engines

SEO an integral part of digital branding; which would help your customer find you in this ocean of information.

search engine optimization (seo) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results – often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. Seo may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines

Key points in SEO

1. Clean up page titles, headers, css/js and unwanted divs.
2. Heading tags the way they were meant to be used.
3. Alt and title tags in images
4. Use keywords in the addresses (page name) of your pages
5. Well placed navigation – at the top and bottom of all your pages
6. Create and maintain a sitemap, sitemap.txt, sitemap.xml and sitemap.gzip
7. Block duplicate content with robots.txt
8. Great and powerful headlines
9. Original, engaging stories
10. Creating contents around keywords
11. Blog development

Blogs and forums

Increase website visibility by enabling blog & forum for users to participate.

1. Current news in industry
2. Legal documentation, tax structure, advantages, issues, past history related to industry.
3. Industry expert’s advice

Policy and legal disclaimers

Setup a clear and transparent information on – terms of use, signup contracts, disclaimers, legal, content propriety and credit, 3rd party services, information collection and processing, user consent, email, sms, authenticity is equally important.

Mailing list

Maintain a high quality mailing list. Ask visitors to sign up for your newsletter when they come to the website. Give them an incentive to do so such as a free report or pricing trends, legal advice etc.
Having said this, respect your visitors and their time. Be sure not to send out your newsletter too often, perhaps once a month and occasionally send a special announcement. Also, make sure to put quality content in your newsletter and give your subscribers an easy way to opt out.

3rd party service integration

1. Social sites
2. Youtube
3. Transaction email provider
4. Sucuri
5. Google maps and analytics
6. Clicky
7. Zopim

Target customer and regions

Remember at the end of the day customers are still real people
A lot of people forget this; they are not treating their customers as real human beings and are not putting themselves in the customer’s shoes. Customer service will always be around, that’s why we need to stay good at looking after our clients. If you can’t help them with their request, get back to them and let them know that you have exhausted every avenue to find a way and maybe even refer them onto someone who can help them.
Even though you may not be able to help them at that very point in time, they will remember you went the extra mile for them and will tell their friends via word of mouth or by social media (which would be great promotion), either way, we can rest our head at night knowing that you are doing everything you can to hold a good name for your business and that every one that deals with you is satisfied.

Building customers for customer

1. SWOT analysis of site visitors (prospective customer for builders)
2. Engaging visitor by zopim, newsletters and offers.
3. Respond to visitors promptly and in line with branding
4. Give your visitors a reason to come back
5. Cta, engagement forms, inquiry forms and tracking every user and input made to the site.
6. Create visitor database and their detailed profile

Assessment and reports

1. Custom analytics reports – when are people viewing your content?
2. Which keywords are bringing visitors to your articles?
3. Content impact report – this one shows some very useful metrics together in one report: number of bounces, average time on page, and can be used to show goals. (in our case this is things like report downloads, emails sign ups etc)
4. Referring sites report
5. Real-time dashboards – a content marketing dashboard
6. Blogger dashboard – thanks to dashboard junkie for this one, which shows some key blogging metrics, including most popular posts, how people find you and where the links are coming from, all in real-time
7. Facts about visitors – where they’re coming from, which devices they’re using, screen resolutions etc
8. Content marketing reports
9. Social media reports
10. Site speed reports (page timings)
11. URL errors in webmaster tools