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Jumpstart - LOA Montreal Meetup
- 1. Jumpstart Insightful & Professional Website Advice Presented by Tom Hartman Head of Operations (Uniseo) Senior Programmer (RedstoneX) Lead Web Developer (Goose & Gander)
- 2. As Easy as it Gets Simple pieces of information for web entrepreneurs.
- 3. On Today’s Agenda Starting Your Website (35 minutes) Improving Your Website (45 minutes) Money Making Models (10 minutes) E-commerce Suggestions (5 minutes) Useful Tools (5 minutes) Questions and Answers (20 minutes)
- 4. Starting Your Website Look before you leap.
- 5. Is a website a good idea? Is my audience mostly online or offline? Do I have the time, money and energy to invest? Can I afford to fail? Am I willing to learn from others? Can I trust others to work on my behalf?
- 6. What is my ultimate goal? Do I want to make money? Do I want to spread information? Do I want to provide entertainment?
- 7. How will I know when I’ve succeeded? How much money do I want to make? And how often? Do I want to reach a large number of people or just a certain group or type of person? Is this an ongoing project or a short-term one?
- 8. Improving Your Website No such thing as a finished website.
- 9. Does my website’s design need to be revamped? Is the design of my website helping or hindering my success? Is the text easy to read? Do all my images support my goal? Are my colors distracting or alluring? Is my layout intuitive?
- 10. Does my website’s code need to be updated? Am I using the most up-to-date version of my software? How long has it been since my code has been reviewed? Does my website work on mobile devices? Does it need to? Do I have regular backups of my website?
- 11. Backup Your Website For crying out loud: Back. It. Up.
- 12. No, really. Backup it up. Seriously. Before you go to sleep tonight, make sure you have a backup.
- 13. Is my website properly optimized? Can my website be found by search engines (SEO)? Does my website take too long to load? How many clicks does it take to get from my home page to the content people are looking for?
- 14. Am I marketing my website the way I need to? Am I gathering statistics about my visitors? Do I know if my existing marketing strategy is effective? Can I even define it? Am I clear about the marketing options available to me? Am I marketing to people or to patterns?
- 15. Money Making Models • Sell individual physical and digital products • Advertising (contextual, native advertising, advertorials, data sale, affiliate) • Direct or indirect service offerings • • • • Subscriptions Website flipping Donations Investors
- 16. E-commerce Suggestions • Use OpenCart • Images sell your product • Easy checkouts = higher conversions • Optimize category pages
- 17. Useful Tools • • • • • • WordPress Google Analytics Google Keyword Planner CrazyEgg Facebook Insights Forums, Forums, Forums
- 18. Questions and Answers If there’s time…
Editor's Notes
- Don’t guess. As much as possible, base your decisions on concrete data.Spend some days and even weeks browsing like your target audience.What sort of keywords would they use? What websites am I finding myself going to repeatedly? Are they any relevant conversations happening?You need all three: time, money and energy. Time, to avoid rushing. Money, because you can’t do it all. Energy, because it ain’t easy.If you can’t afford to fail then don’t do it. Period. You’d be better off betting it all on red. You’d have immediate results and can move on with your life.Chances are your idea is not at all original.Research your competitors. Call them up and find out what you can about how they work.Ask questions in forums to your target audience to find out what they really want. Don’t assume.If you hire someone to do something for you then trust them to do it. Don’t look over their shoulder or backseat drive.If you don’t trust them then don’t let them work for you. It doesn’t matter how low their price is.
- Don’t confuse your ultimate goal with your proximate goals.Here’s how you can tell your ultimate goal: would you sacrifice the proximate goals for your primary goal?You can have a mix of these goals on your website, but never lose sight of your ultimate goal or you’ll make terrible and short-sighted decisions.I’ve seen clients spend thousands on a logo that they have no intention of printing or emphasizing.Want money? Every piece of text, image, and link should be geared towards that goal.Want to spread information? Make sure it is WELL WRITTEN and have it professionally translated if need be.Want to provide entertainment? Don’t put out subpar content that will burn your early adopters.
- Not knowing your success milestone(s) means you have no idea where you’re going.It’s like parachuting without an altimeter. Don’t eyeball your success. You’re either stop too soon or waaay too late.What’s a good amount of money to make? All the money, time and effort you put into the project * 2Anything less and you might as well by stocks.If you’re spreading information your success might be to have a certain number of unique/returning visitors per month.Or to have a news station pick up your story.Or to have a specific person talk about your website.Ongoing projects require you to pace yourself. Allow for at least a year before your goals are met.Short-term projects require quickly burning your resources while taking much finer measurements (pivoting)
- The following section is the meat of the presentation and will be valuable to those without websites as well.
- Your first impression is your last impression. Your website’s design is as important as anything else on your website.Put another way: You want to be found, you want to be liked, you want to be convincing. Design helps you with the liked part.Design has four main components you need to look out for: text, images, colors and layout.If your designer gives you a design that doesn’t specifically address these four components then you’re not getting an idea design.Text is easy to read when you can read all the text in one go without mixing up lines or feeling as strain on your eyes.Long blocks of text are tedious to read. Don’t separate text into ideas, separate them into morsels.Dark text on light backgrounds are generally easier to read then the opposite.Never use black text. Only off-black.There’s too much that can be said about colors. But the long and short of it is distracting or alluring.As a rule, blue is the best color for a website.A website’s color theme is appropriate when you hardly notice it. (yes, even beautiful color themes can hinder your success)An intuitive layout is one that automatically directs your eyes to relevant content.Eyes flow from the top left to the bottom right. Use this information to lay out your information.Example, if you have a sidebar on the right of the page you’ll want to place you call to action where the text in the main area ends
- If you are using a CMS then you’ll want to update your software regularly.Website’s don’t have problems until they have problems. And when they do it’s usually big and dramatic.Updating your software forces you to recheck your website every time thoroughly which is a good habit to haveOften I speak with clients who’ve had websites for years without ever looking at the code of the site.Do you have any idea how fast the web is evolving? You can hardly make it a year before there’s a better way of doing what you’re doing.The longer you take to update your website’s code, the more it’ll cost you to do it.There’s a simple answer to the need for a mobile website. How many of your visitors are accessing your website on mobile?At least 20% then mobify that sucker!
- I have sat through sob story after sob story of clients who have lost their entire livelihood because they didn’t back up their website AND DIDN’T CONFIRM IT.“Oh, my website’s never been down.”“I can easily recreate it.”“My website’s not big enough to be attacked.” (your server might be)“My web host says they have backups.”
- If your website is already up, then the simplest way to check is to do site:[url]Read your snippets. Did you customize your title, description and url? No? Why not?Your snippet is essentially a free ad. Use it as such.Have you done a keyword analysis to see what words you should be using throughout your website?You want your website to load as blazingly fast as possible. Now this isn’t always feasible. Proper optimization takes money and/or know-how.In this situation, it doesn’t matter how fast your competitors websites are. If your website takes too long to load then you’re likely going to lose that lead.Long story short: you want about a 2 second load time.Your website is a funnel. There are essentially only four options users have: read, scroll, click or leave.If you account for all four of these options on every page then you can greatly increase your conversions.
- If you’re not gathering stats on your visitors then you’re not really in the online game.Data collection and interpretation is the driving force behind web success (other than flukes like Pinterest).A marketing strategy is well-defined when you can say something like: I am doing A to generate B so that it will lead to C by path D.Ex: I am publishing an article on this online magazine to access this particular audience so that they will click on my bio link and land on my website and learn about what I do.Ex: I am sharing one post per day on my Facebook page so that people will get used to seeing my business’ name and make it more likely their click on my Google ads and land on my services page.Ex: I am spending $500/month on this ad on a popular blog to get 20 clicks/month to my product I’m selling at $30 to net $100/month. If you’re doing your own marketing then you owe it to yourself to read marketing websites to stay up to date with trends and options.If you’ve hired a company to do your marketing then you still owe it to yourself to read marketing websites.Just contact marketing company’s and ask them to send you rate sheets and provide feedback. They don’t like doing it but it’ll get you doing.Here’s the big secret to marketing: There are no people. People don’t exist. Demographics exist. That’s who you’re selling to.Put it another way: People are simply patterns of behaviour. They are what they do, and they don’t do alone. Whatever one person does you can bet that many others do the same.What you’re trying to do is direct flows of attention. It’s how a crowd moves.A crowd doesn’t applaud because each of them is specifically told it. It happens in one place, then another, and soon the whole crowd is clapping as one.It’s much easier to market to patterns because patterns are bigger and broader.You have to be seen, big and prominent.Or you can be surgical, being at exactly the right place at the right time. But only data will help.You will know your data is actionable if you can tell what to do by looking at it.