Fergal's Blog

No, it's not. With all the current palaver about Web 2.0, emergent this and that, video editing on your mobile etc. I think the 'techies' are starting to lose it. So, instead of talking about the next big ting™, let's go back to basics and address some perennial questions.

Yes, there are just so many bits of technology you can throw together to make a web site these days, it's not surprising that the average client is so frustrated.

Here at Adnet, 12 years of experience has taught us one thing: your web site is your business - it's sometimes the only thing people see of you before deciding to use you (or deciding to hit the Back button). Like any investment, like any employee, in order to pay its way, your website must do its job.

Web Site Job Description

In order to do its job, a web site must:

1. Be found when people are looking for this kind of thing;
2. When found, make a good first impression;
3. Back that up with plenty of easy-to-use information;
4. Having given the visitor enough information to act, support action which is of value to the site owner and visitor alike.

Qualifications

Thankfully, a web site which does the above is not difficult to build. It just takes care and attention to detail, in all the steps from initial discussion with the client, through design, implementation, content preparation and deployment. In fact, by thinking along these lines, you are putting your effort into exactly the right bits of the job (the ones of most value to the client).

The four things 'every web site must do' above are listed in the order they are checked by every visitor to your site.

1. Seek, and ye shall find about 10,220,345 ting™s

This is number one. Your site is there to communicate for you. This is not going to happen, no matter how great the design or impressive the tricknology, if you are not found by your intended visitors.

Since the web ignores location, the three things you need in order to be found are content, content, and content! The fourth thing you need in order to be found is a search-engine accessible web site. The four things you need in order to be found are content, content, and content, and a search-engine accessible web site. Good content is all that the search engines care about, and providing that content in an edible form is what an accessible web site does.

We have a client who gets 250 people walk in to his web site every day from Google alone, simply because he has such good content, and Google can see it.

2. You never get a second chance to << Back!

People on the Internet are not called surfers because they wear colourful shorts. It's because they are catching waves of links and riding them until their attention is ripped suddenly from under them, when they just look for the next wave.

Your visitor will give you 10 seconds. Use them or lose them.

I would recommend having a chat with your trusted experts in engineering your first impressions - your design company. The guys who do your business cards, your flyers, your hoardings. Those guys know you, they know your strengths, your appeal, how to get your message across in a single glance.

Talk to your design company about designing your web site. We have turned our whole business in a new direction - you talk to your design company about your web site, and tell them to talk to us about making it happen. Trust me, everybody wins.

3. All hat and no cattle (aka "Fur Coat and No K^&%=#s")?

There's nothing as saddening as, when you start to talk with someone stunningly attractive, and then the moment they start to speak your whole image of them crumbles.

Make sure your site backs up your splashy visuals with plenty of solid information, organised in an accessible and approachable way. This is the content you'll need for "Job 1 - Getting Found" so here's your chance to get the humans to digest it too.

You'll need to cater for both the 'checker' (just checking that this goes with that, or that there's plenty of technical specs for this widget) and the true collector of in-depth information. Don't forget, the person making the final decision may be fooled by the flashy appearance of your site, but they will get their techie or nephew to check out the details before committing.

4. Don't think, function

The whole point of your web site is to communicate with your customers/suppliers, and that's usually with some further transaction in mind. Your site must do at least one (preferably more) of the following:

1. Measure - give you feedback on numbers of visitors, what they are looking at and what brought them to your site. (Logs, Google Analytics).
2. Collect Contact Information - provide an enquiry form so people can ask for details of your product or service, and meanwhile leave a record of themselves for follow-up.
3. Survey - gather detailed information about visitors, what products/services they are interested in, any special requirements they have etc. Detailed product enquiry forms are useful here.
4. Transact - allow users to request an actual quotation, to book a service, or to make a purchase. Sometimes this cannot be completed without the intervention of one of your sales people, but it can certainly be initiated on your site.

With everyone talking about Web 2.0 this weather, it's nice to just deliver something simple and elegant like our recently launched site for the BDI (stands for Biomedical Diagnostics Institute, but I prefer the acronym) at Dublin City University.

As usual with a site designed by one of our design partners - Dara Creative - the site is tight and crisp. Our biggest contribution, apart from implementation and attention to detail, was the dynamic navigation index. (Visit the site now so you can see what I'm talking about).

The overriding idea (originally developed for Rennicks, another Dara Creative design) is to empower the site visitor to explore the content quickly, hiding unnecessary information until just the moment when she chooses to view it. Then the content is delivered without the disorienting gap caused by waiting for a whole page to load.

The details of the Web 2.0 technology which delivers this user experience are not the important thing, just as long as it works.

We've hooked ourselves up with Google Analytics, the new name for the system bought as Urchin last year. Once off the waiting list and signed up, you simply add a website to your (currently limited) list of sites, and embed a little Javascript in your pages.

As our most popular site, the Burren Yoga site was clearly the one to look at first. As ever, Dave has been an ideal beta tester, asking me exactly how many people from the UK were leaving one of links pages as soon as they arrived, and then exactly what keywords these people had used to get there.

A service which has had less fanfare is Google Sitemaps, which allows a webmaster to provide an XML feed of page URL's to the search engines. As part of the deal, you get information from Google about link errors on your pages, how your PageRank is distributed through the site, and - maybe best of all - how your top 20 keyphrases perform on actual searches.

More on these as we get to know them better

We're often asked to assist in 'Search Engine Optimisation' - getting yourself listed as high up the ladder as possible on the search engines. While we do provide some services in fine-tuning a client's website to optimise the quantity and quality of traffic they get from the search engines, our advice is always to start by focussing on the content of your website.

As Paddy has explained on Adnet's main site, there are a few simple principles which can be easily applied to your site to maximise your visibility and profile on the search engines.

One of our flagship clients, the Burren Yoga Centre, has applied these principles to excellent effect.
Dave Brocklebank, principal of the Burren Yoga Centre, has spent the last several years composing and compiling a large volume of Yoga-related content, both general and specific to the courses and activities available at the Centre. He has seen his traffic and level of bookings rise accordingly.

In 2005, we updated his site to provide him with an improved platform for reaching and retaining visitors to the Centre, and have recently added a Yoga Teacher listing service. Constant, incremental improvements like these are key to growing and maintaining the 'reputation' of your website, and this pays off when it comes to getting traffic from the search engines.

email remains one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to use the Internet for your business. As part of our ongoing development, we are constantly upgrading and improving this vital channel of communication. Our latest development is the addition of segmented mailing lists for Rennicks.

Working closely with the client, we have extended the standard single mailing list to cater for a large number of 'sublists', each containing a number of recipients sharing a common sectoral interest or customer category. The extension has also enabled us to add a 'live preview' facility which provides the client with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get view of the mailshot as it will finally appear to the recipient.