Hi everyone, I'm Bijan! I'm here to give you a rundown about website management, what it is, how much work goes into it, and how to do it right the first time. This is a pretty comprehensive guide, and it's exactly the ideology I have when I develop each one of my websites, so I hope you learn a thing or two today!
Website Plan
Ah yes, the dreaded planning phase, extremely boring, yet so very important. So let's talk a little about what goes into planning a website.
What is a website plan?
A website plan is a detailed document that outlines the purpose, design, customer journey, and functionality of a website. The purpose of a website plan is to define each step necessary in the process of building a high quality, well optimized website.
How to create a website plan?
When developing a website plan it's important to keep in mind the customer journey and figuring out how your website is involved in helping that customer choose your business for products or services.
Define what your business does.
Your website should be built and designed around what your business does. You shouldn't think of a website any differently than an in-person storefront. It is the place where your customers will be interacting with you, so giving them a good online experience, just like in-person, is very important.
Understand your customers.
Customers act differently in every industry so knowing how and why they interact with your website is important. Knowing this information helps you tailor design, products, and services to better serve your customers.
Decide your Tech Stack
A Tech Stack is a fancy term for all of the different tools you will be using to build your website. You will need to decide on things like a content management system like Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix, or many other options. You will have to decide which tools best suit your business and which ones have the best cost to feature ratio you are looking for.
Be sure to understand the long term costs and risks associated with using popular platforms. They can be great and convenient to start with, but they also serve a wide range of customers which can have unintended consequences for your business.
Tech stacks are very important for long term planning.
Develop content with strategy
The only reason for anyone to visit a website is because it has content they are looking for. If no one is looking for what you're putting on your website then you aren't going to get any traffic. Doing research on SEO strategies can help with this and there are even great free and cost effective tools that can really boost your game when it comes to developing your content strategy. Good SEO is all about developing good content that's worth sharing. It doesn't matter if it's a product, information, blog content, videos, or whatever, just make it good.
Build trust and authority
Once you have great content, and you're posting regularly, customers that come to your site will see that you have a great understanding of what your product or service is/does. This helps them be confident in their decision to purchase from your business and makes them comfortable to come back again.
So now that we've made an outline of what we need in our plan, we actually need to build out the website. That's where the tech stack comes in. Depending on the tools you've decided to use to build, your objective should be to build a website that is optimized for converting your customers.
Building the Website
I'm going to talk about my process for building websites. I make custom coded websites, so if you plan on using a builder like Wordpress or Wix, you can still take advantage of this knowledge, you'll just have to adapt it to your workflow.
Customer First Design
When building your website, you need to design everything to help your customer understand what they are supposed to do. From buttons and text, to navigation, every little thing matters. Your key goals should be developing easy to use elements that reduce friction points for your users, making your website's user experience easy to understand so that they are guided to where you want them to go makes for the most optimized website experience.
Designing for your customer doesn't just make for a better user experience, it just makes your website better.
Simple Design
Less is more on the web. Good design is functional design. Everything on your website should have a reason. Decoration is nice, but overdone can cause you to lose customers. It can be tempting to make something that is flashy, but flash comes at a cost. Usually, it's a performance cost. With every second you save loading a page there is a higher likelihood a user will convert.
Eco-Friendly Design
You probably don't think about the environment when it comes to building websites, but you should remember that everything has some sort of environmental cost. Your website runs on a server which needs power, there are raw materials in the hardware and the hardware is powered by a fuel source.
What are Eco-Friendly websites?
Eco-friendly websites are websites built with sustainability in mind. Every website uses resources powered by a server, so to develop a sustainable website means optimizing for performance to reduce server resources. This isn't just about sustainability, this is also what's best for your website. What's best for the planet is also what's best for your profits!
Your website is stored on a server, that server requires energy to run. The more performant your website is, the less power it draws and the faster it is. The faster your website is, the more it converts. The more it converts, the more money you make!
How to build an Eco-Friendly website?
Eco-Friendly websites prioritize performance. So here are 4 eco-friendly website building tips to keep in mind:
- Make sure your code is optimized
- Only use JavaScript when absolutely necessary
- Only use decoration and design when it has a purpose
- Use proper image optimization techniques
- Server smaller images at smaller screen sizes
- Use webp for image compression
Clean Design
Don't place things just because they look or feel good. Everything should have a rhyme and reason.
Clear Communication
Being upfront and honest about what your business does, what information you collect, and what the purpose of your website is important within the eco-friendly philosophy.
Accessible Design
If you're interested in diving deep learning about website accessibility, I recommend starting with the MDN documentation. We only briefly talk about accessibility here, but we believe it is extremely important and should be kept in the forefront of your mind when building. It's not all or nothing, there's a lot to know about web accessibility so implement things at your own pace and as you learn about it.
And keep in mind how many users you could be missing out on because a screen reader can't properly read the content!
What is website accessibility?
"Accessibility is the practice of making your websites usable by as many people as possible. We traditionally think of this as being about people with disabilities, but the practice of making sites accessible also benefits other groups such as those using mobile devices, or those with slow network connections."
How do I build accessible websites?
Start with semantic HTML. Semantic HTML is a way of using existing HTML elements to help tell browsers and search engines what type of content you have on your website.
For example, if you run a blog on your website, you should be using the <article> tag instead of a <div> tag. This tells browsers and search engines that the content within the container is an article intended for reading, and not just informative text.
Once you build out your website with semantic HTML the next step is to build functionality with as little JavaScript as possible. JavaScript should only be used when absolutely necessary. This helps reduce load times, increase performance, and decrease bounces.
A lot of accessibility comes from simply using the correct elements and techniques in the correct ways. This boosts SEO, performance and profits!
Mobile Design
This is simple and I won't go into much detail, I'm sure you've heard of responsive websites by now, so here's the quick rundown. Over 50% of internet users come from mobile devices, so if your website doesn't work on mobile, you are ignoring over half of your traffic. You need to build a seamless experience across all devices.
Hosting and Future Maintenance
So after you've built your highly optimized website, now what? It's time to host it! So that means we'll need a server. Chances are you probably don't own a server, so you'll have to do research on a hosting provider where you can rent a server. If you are building on Wordpress there are plenty of options out there for you that are specifically designed for Wordpress.
Hosting websites can have it's own issues, so if you are planning on self hosting your website make sure you are prepared to learn about servers. You are most likely going to be using some sort of managed hosting option, this is probably good if you don't know anything about running a server. Having an expert handle server issues is the best way to go in most cases because that's an entirely different skill set from web development.
After deciding on your hosting, you need to plan for the future. How are you going to add content? Who is going to add content? What if you want a new feature? What if… what if… what if. What are your what ifs? You don't need to build everything from the start, but is your website able to scale? Adding new pages or functionality can come with other costs and barriers as well, especially if you are built in a page builder. If you are adding functionality through plugins or apps, you will end up paying many subscriptions every month just to have the basic things you're looking for.
URL Hookup
By this point you should have already bought the domain name for your business, if not, go do that! You can do this with any domain registrar. We recommend Cloudflare, they have great prices, and we recommend using their DNS security to help prevent DDOS and bots. They also provide you with free SSL certificates when your URL is proxied through their servers.
You'll need to adjust your DNS settings to point to the server your website lives on, then after that you should see your website at your pretty new domain name!
Recap
So let's go over everything before we head out. Your website should be: clean, simple, easy to use, responsive, performant, accessible, and unique! After that you throw that beauty of a website onto a server from a provider of your choice, hook up your URL to point to that server, then admire your new website.
Keeping a consistent flow of high quality content and expanding on website features is essential in building a healthy online presence.
If you're looking to build a website correctly from the start and you need some help, feel free to send us a message!