Your website nowadays is probably one of the most valuable real-estate that you as an individual or company owns. The development of the web and it's accessibility on a variety of different platforms and devices combined with the explosion of social media means that you have to work that little bit more clever than you used to.
A website isn't just a site that's built and forgotten about, it's a sales tool that needs to be kept fresh, optimized and promoted using a variety of channels available to you. When you commission a website you have to think long term - it's cheaper than a brochure but it carries your 'brand' to the outside world so it's important that your site is as optimised and integrated into everything else you do effectively and you don't get worried if your web programmer/designer wants to review your site in 3 months. This is normal, in the digital world trends change daily and a 'review' is a good time to see what pages/content are performing well and what's not and to then adjust elements accordingly.
Here's a few pointers on website builds and third party integration
- Make sure your 'on-page' content and tags are fully optimised for the topic or service that page is promoting. Web copy is not the same as brochure copy. It's important that you develop your content using the 'keywords' you want to drive traffic to your site/page for. Web copy should be much shorter in length - people scan websites, so grabbing their attention quickly is vital
- Make sure the site is using clean coding practices and the programmer is adding key metadata to your site.
- All images should have 'alt' tags and 'title' tags used accordingly to aid usability.
- Place a contact form or email sign-up form to collect users who are interested in any email campaign you might send. WuFoo offers excellent integration with Mailchimp to make data gathering and broadcasting as simple as possible.
- Once live, submit your site to the leading search engines, local directories and put yourself on the map - using Google Maps. Also ask your programmer to use Google's Webmaster tools to create a sitemap and validate the site.
- Ensure your site has Google Analytics installed and that you have access to the monthly reports
- If you're a new business consider starting a Google Adwords campaign (remember to integrate to your Analytics account) to help promote your company. Google often offers £30 or even £50 starter amounts for news businesses or individuals starting their first Adwords campaign
- Place a contact form or email sign-up form on your site to collect users who are interested in any email campaign you might send. WuFoo offers excellent integration with Mailchimp to make data gathering and broadcasting as simple as possible.
- Consider creating an amazon associates account so you can strategically promote either your own media or media that you would recommend your followers, - you even get a small percentage of every sale that's made through your unique link.
- Start a Twitter account and feed this into the site. It could be a good way of offering 'web -only' offers or promoting your service(s). It's important to have a social media strategy in place as without this you could be jumping the gun and not having clearly defined goals with which to evaluate your social media push. If you're running twitter consider an analytical tool to help you evaluate it's impact - I recommend Crowdbooster, and at a basic level it's free! To schedule your tweets try Tweetdeck.
These are just a few of the points to consider and are by no means all encompassing but hopefully they give the un-initiated a few things to bear in mind.
If you're interested in my digital work take a look here: http://bit.ly/nMYOow
Here's some of the useful resources I've mentioned:
http://crowdbooster.com/
http://www.adwords.google.com/
http://wufoo.com/
http://www.mailchimp.com
http://www.tweetdeck.com/
http://www.twitter.com/
