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Building a Business Website - Lessons Learned
- 1. Building a Business Website Lessons Learned from A Knight’s Tale Victoria Cole – Marketing Manager Disclaimer: Idonot ownanyof thephotographspertainingto themovie “AKnight’sTale” andtheseareownedbythecreatorsof this movie. Please notethat allimages arebeingshownunderthe“fair use”guidelinesfor commentaryandparody purposes.
- 2. Victoria Cole Marketing Manager, Vincents 7 years experience in professional services marketing Journalism background as well as marketing – I enjoy the written word immensely Storytelling is my passion. There is raw human emotion hiding behind everything in business - you just have to find it and reveal the magic. Fan of the movie A Knight’s Tale. Relevance will quickly become apparent. vcole@vincents.com.au or (07) 3228 4069 2 A bit about me
- 3. Website design can be extremely complicated – it’s imperative you plan, plan plan your attack. If you’re going to be your company’s champion website fighter, I will take you through five battle tactics to help you achieve a satisfying victory (otherwise known as a go live date). BUT if you take ONE thing away from today it’s that the attack is never truly over, because a successful website is a FLUID beast. Ever changing, ever evolving… Today we’re going into battle together.
- 4. 01 TACTIC ONE: KNOW YOUR END GAME Website purpose, mission statements and USP’s. 02 TACTIC TWO: KNOW YOUR COMPETITION Industry trailblazers and SEO leaders. 03 TACTIC THREE: KNOW YOUR WEAPONRY Content Management Systems (CMS) 04 TACTIC FOUR: KNOW YOUR SQUIRES Website Developers 05 TACTIC FIVE: KNOW YOUR BATTLEFIELD Site Architecture Preparing for battle
- 5. Tactic One: Know your end game.
- 6. Decide what role your website is going to play in your end game: Static; Shopfront; or Virtual marketer (blogs and lead generation/automation). Every small business website is different because every business is on a unique mission. 6 Know your end game. Why are you building this website?
- 7. What does your company do? Do your plans for this website align with : • your mission statement • and your USP (unique selling proposition); and • your company values? Incorporate these into your website design to achieve clarity 7 Know your end game. Mission statements, USPs and Values
- 9. Engaging the audience with questions – silent marketer role What our values and mission are a second time
- 10. Tactic Two: Know your competition.
- 11. • We all compare – and we all have our favourite competitiors out there in our respective business niches that we’d like to get that one-up on. • Who is capturing your attention out there in your market? • Why? i.e. social media presence? video marketing? thought leadership? How are they trailblazing out there? • Study these websites and look at what they are doing that is out of the ordinary. Are they storytelling? Are they offering a lot of value add material? Is there contact with their audiences constant? 11 Know your competition. Industry trailblazers
- 12. • Just as important as looking at competitors that inspire you is examining the cold hard SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) facts on who is leading your field. • SEO is the process of getting traffic from search results on search engines – i.e. Google. • Paid vs. Organic 12 Know your competition. SEO leaders and tracking Paid result Organic result
- 13. • Tracking competitors’ search rankings, content, social mentions, emails, and anything else they do to boost business is actually not as creepy as it sounds… • Some great free tools exist out there (in addition to a stack of ones you pay for) for those keen to embrace their inner spy: – Google Keyword Planner – finding keyword opportunities - FREE – Google Alerts – brand mentions or keyword alerts – FREE 13 Know your competition. SEO leaders and tracking
- 14. Tactic Three: Know your weaponry.
- 15. • When choosing the back end for your website, you need to consider the range of CMS systems out there and select one that will be the easiest for your business to be able to maintain on an ongoing basis post launch. • Think of your website as a “fluid” marketing tool. This was the “ONE THING” that I empowered you to take away from today. • Your website should always need to be updated, should always be moving – and is something that therefore needs weaponry with the ability to evolve as your business does. 15 Know your weaponry. Content Management Systems
- 16. Ideal CMS systems are those that have the ability to set up: User permissions Security groups Editing, approval and publishing rights Customisations/ Plugins API (the ability for the website to talk to other software programs). 16 Know your weaponry. Content Management Systems – the Wish List
- 17. • Can be a good fit for companies looking to stay relatively small in size and to only use a few plugins. • Easier to learn • High quality templates • Limited customisation and API code freedom • Outgrowing them a possibility 17 Know your weaponry. Wix and Squarespace
- 18. • Solid CMS platform upon which to build your website empire • Not as easy to pick up as Wix and Squarespace – due to a lot more features • Vast collection of plugins and themes available – but due to the volume, not all of them will be as high quality as the smaller library of Wix/Squarespace ones • Great setup for user permissions • Works with API codes and plugins and is more friendly for customisations • Beware of the lure of customisations… 18 Know your weaponry. WordPress
- 19. Tactic Four: Know your squires.
- 20. • Most businesses will need to outsource at least a portion of the website development to a website developer. • Assess internally what skills your company would benefit the most from outsourcing to developers, and what parts may be able to be covered in- house. • For example, you may have a graphic designer employed, or already have visual branding and content in place that you don’t want to change the look of – but need help with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), hosting and CMS (Content Management System) endeavours. 20 Know your squires. Website developers
- 21. • Go to market – collect more than one tender in the process • Local Digital agencies – high cost but usually high quality product • Offshoring – do the potential positives (cost) outweigh the potential negatives (difficulties in face time/communication, sometimes a lower quality product without the right guidance). • Whatever you choose, ensure that you are project managing and not them – they may have the technical expertise but you have the unique insight into your business that they do not. • Engage your professional but work alongside them closely from start to finish. 21 Know your squires. Website developers
- 22. Tactic Five: Know your battlefield.
- 23. • The way different levels of pages are designed and the order that they follow is known as IA (information architecture). • Good websites are very well organised and follow specific IA. • They are easy to navigate, uncluttered and above all professional and eye catching. • Work closely with your web developers and key stakeholders in your organisation to ensure that the IA you choose will satisfy all areas of your business and the products you are pushing. 23 Know your battlefield. Information Architecture (IA)
- 24. 24 IA tactic 1 – browsing our offering through a specialties drop down menu
- 25. 25 IA tactic 2 – seeing our offering through business unit icons and browsing based on a smaller amount of information first
- 26. 26 IA tactic 3 – seeing our offering through call-to-action questions (for the user that may not know specialty names but knows their pain points)
- 27. 27 IA sub menus – make the navigation experience as easy as possible for the user
- 28. That “ONE THING”
- 29. Questions? “Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week…” Chaucer, A Knight’s Tale
Editor's Notes
- Marketing Manager, Vincents 7 years experience in professional services marketing Journalism background as well as marketing – I enjoy the written word immensely Storytelling is my passion. There is raw human emotion hiding behind everything in business - you just have to find it and reveal the magic. Fan of the movie A Knight’s Tale. Relevance will quickly become apparent. For those that aren’t fans – I apologise in advance. Also RIP Heath Ledger – gone but not forgotten. My contact details are as follows – reach out to me on LinkedIn too – always happy to gab about anything website or marketing in general.
- Website design can be extremely complicated – it’s imperative you plan, plan plan your attack. If you’re going to be your company’s champion website fighter, I will take you through five battle tactics to help you achieve a satisfying victory (otherwise known as a go live date). BUT if you take ONE thing away from today it’s that the attack is never truly over, because a successful website is a FLUID beast. Ever changing, ever evolving…
- Every small business website is different because every business is on a unique mission. Before you dive into the process – whether that be starting your first business website or redeveloping an existing website – you need to decide what role this website is going to play in your company’s’ future. It may be fairly static (i.e. after initial content is set up on service lines there are not blogs or frequent changes made to the homepage) and simply exists to provide more information to potential clients about your services and credentials if they want to check you out online. Personally I think if your website only plays this passive role then you will miss out on a lot of opportunities to help grow your business. Another role your website could play could be to sell products and services directly online. Hopefully though, in addition to these first two, your end game is to use it as a virtual marketing platform to ease your business development load – it could provide articles or information you've written to provide useful information to clients and potential clients. You may even choose to start a blog to interest and engage potential customers as part of your overall social media strategy – with automation options in place and calls to action to take you up on offers. The possibilities are endless with this option!
- The most important thing you must do is convey – right from the word go on your homepage - what your company does. This may seem obvious to you but will it seem that way to your customers? Don’t make visitors to your website trawl around for precious minutes to discover if your company can do what they need doing. Users leave websites when they don’t get what they expect or want. Really drill down into what your company does - do you have a clear mission statement? What is your point of difference in the market? What are the values that guide you on your journey? Your values should be more than just words to you – they should help you make the many choices that you face in your business each day. Thinking about how these core values, selling proposition and mission statement can be incorporated into your website design (through imagery, words, tools, resources and the way you showcase your products and services) will all go a long way to ensuring your website acts as an effective ‘silent ‘marketer and that visitors to your site eventually convert into clients, champions/supporters, business partners or even employees!
- Everyone knows to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, you should keep track of your main competitors. Success is often determined by a company’s ability to respond to changing market conditions - so understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses is necessary to improving your competitive edge. We all compare – and we all have our favourite competitiors out there in our respective business niches that we’d like to get that one-up on. Have a think about who is currently capturing your attention out there in your market? Often this attention is captured through a social media presence that points the user (like you) back to the company’s website, as well as video marketing and thought leadership. Study these websites and look at what they are doing that is out of the ordinary. Are they storytelling? Are they offering a lot of value add material? Is there contact with their audiences constant? Take note of the aspects of each site that appeal to you (as well as those that don’t!) and discuss with your developer (or as I refer to them your squire – more on that later!) to determine how these findings could be incorporated into your own website development without losing what makes your business unique.
- Just as important as looking at competitors that inspire you is examining the cold hard SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) facts on who is leading your field. For those that don’t know, Search Engine Optimisation is the process of getting traffic from search results on search engines – mainly Google. All major search engines have primary search results – where websites and other content like videos and local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine deems most relevant to the user. You can have paid results ( in google these appear up the top of the search results with a little Ad icon next to them or what’s called your ‘organic’ results (with a green tick icon next to them that follow the ad items). It all depends on the user, but as a searcher my eyes tend to go straight to the top of the organic listings because I know those have credence to them and are more likely to be ranked due to the relevance of their content and not the price they’ve paid. I therefore spend more time on getting good SEO in place on our website rather than paying for Google Ad Words – but both are very useful tactics to help you stay front and centre of search results.
- Tracking competitors’ search rankings, content, social mentions, emails, and anything else they do to boost business is actually not as creepy as it sounds… In fact it’s very important to remain competitive. Some great (and free!) tools exist out there (as well as a lot you do have to pay for!) for those keen to embrace their inner spy and use that intel to help boost their website project: Google Keyword Planer - This is without doubt the most well known keyword research tool. Provided by Google for Adwords (as we saw on the previous slide where you can pay for a keyword in search engines to place your website up the top of search results), the Keyword Planner is pretty straight forward. You can search by individual terms, group by keyword topic, set filters against specific locations and more. Most people use it for regular keyword research, however you can also enter in a competitors URL and do a reverse lookup to see what keywords Google thinks relate to the site itself. Definitely a tool that you should be using if you’re involved in SEO. Google Alerts - Have you ever wondered where and how your competitors might be getting exposure on the web? Well wonder no more. Google Alerts allows you to monitor any phrase you want – and as it’s picked up on the web by Google, they’ll email it straight to your inbox. How cool is that? This is a great way of monitoring your competitors brand, or target keywords that you might be interested in ranking for. It’s also a great content marketing tool, especially if you’re wanting fresh up to date content on a certain topic for curation purposes.
- When choosing the back end for your website, you need to consider the range of CMS (content management systems) out there and work with your developers (or as I refer to them later, your ‘squires’) to select one that will be the easiest for your business to be able to maintain on an ongoing basis post launch. Think of your website as a “fluid” marketing tool – This was the “ONE THING” that I empowered you to take away from today. Your website should always need to be updated, should always be moving – and is something that therefore needs weaponry with the ability to evolve as your business does. So let’s check out what weaponry we’ve got on offer…
- Unless you want to outsource all website changes on an ongoing basis (which can be quite costly), the ideal CMS system for a business would be one that has the ability to set up user permissions and security groups for editing, approval and publishing rights. This way the content can easily be kept current and pertinent to differing business needs. You also need a website to ideally be malleable – meaning you can add in lots of customisations if you need to (but more on why that is and isn’t such a good idea later) as well as incorporating API code (the ability for the website to talk to other software programs – similar to plugins and customisations).
- Platforms like Wix and Squarespace can be a good fit for companies looking to stay relatively small in size and to only use a few plugins. They’re relatively easy to pick up Their templates are of high quality – but customising them is difficult and very limited. There’s also difficulty with API code freedom in these programs. If you ever outgrow them, transferring all of your site content to a new host can also be difficult.
- WordPress is an example of a solid CMS platform upon which to build your website empire, with a vast collection of plugins and themes available to users that make future expansion easier. Not as easy to pick up as Wix and Squarespace – due to a lot more features – but worth the learning investment Vast collection of plugins and themes available – but due to the volume, not all of them will be as high quality as the smaller library of Wix/Squarespace ones so be wary of this and look at them carefully. Great setup for user permissions and security settings Works with API codes and plugins and is more friendly for customisations Finally, be wary of making too many customisations to existing themes that have been chosen in your respective content management systems – as these often require coding to maintain and therefore are not as easily actioned as the rest of the changes in the back end of the system (and also therefore costly if your developers need to take care of it). Try to avoid too many of these where possible – needing a lot of them may mean that you need to work with your developer to choose a theme that caters more to your needs. Lots of customisations can also slow down your site speed.
- Once you have a clear goal in mind, most businesses (unless they have a full scale marketing team in place) will need to outsource at least a portion of the website development to a professional to get the support they need. I call these professionals squires – and they are more commonly known as website developers. Assess internally what skills your company would benefit the most from outsourcing, and what parts may be able to be covered in-house. For example, you may have a graphic designer employed, or already have visual branding and content in place that you don’t want to change the look of – but need help with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), hosting and CMS (Content Management System) endeavours.
- I can’t stress enough the importance of shopping around – go to market and get a range of quotes to consider! With your Local Digital agencies – be aware of the high cost but consider if it’s worth the investment – you usually get a high quality product - i.e. what you pay for… Offshoring – do the potential positives (cost) outweigh the potential negatives (difficulties in face time/communication, sometimes a lower quality product without the right guidance)? Don’t discount the value in face to face planning meetings – these are so vital to get you and the developers on the same page. Will you achieve that same vision alignment if you pursue an offshore option? Whatever portion of the process you decide to outsource, it is crucial that a member of your business be in contact at key points throughout the redevelopment – because as much as the expertise of professionals should be taken on board, they will not have the unique insight into your business that you do. Work with your developers to create a perfect link between your industry know-how and theirs.
- The way different levels of pages are designed and the order that they follow is known as IA (information architecture). Good websites are very well organised and follow specific IA. They are easy to navigate, uncluttered and above all professional and eye catching. Work closely with your web developers and key stakeholders in your organisation to ensure that the IA you choose will satisfy all areas of your business and the products you are pushing. If your IA is too intricate and visitors need to navigate too many pages in order to get the answer they are after, they will lose interest and leave. Instead, grab their attention – stir their emotions – and easily give them what they need!
- Once your website goes live, take the time to really enjoy all that you have accomplished – but remember that your journey is far from over! There is certainly no doubt that your business will have made a significant and rewarding first step – and for that you should be well pleased. A company’s website, however, is never really complete. As mentioned before, you need to think of it as a fluid marketing machine- and the key to continued success is to constantly add or enhance the elements and content within it. Stay on top of developments in SEO, web applications and mobile design changes/responsivity. Above all, always remember to keep adapting your website offerings (and for that matter, all your business offerings) to meet the changing market needs of your clients.