Expat Internet Services

Design and Purpose

Developing the appearance of your website can often be streamlined by purchasing professionally designed themes or templates and using them on your site. However, it is important to know what design elements contribute to an effective and flexible layout for your website. Using Web Design on a Shoestring you can learn the foundations of web design and, more specifically, the details that need to be documented in order to get the website your business or organization needs.

The summary on Amazon.com also notes that the author discusses how employing good markup and adhering to Web standards can make your site work on the widest range of browsers and devices and even goes over some fine points of proper XHTML. She finishes with some sage words on choosing and registering a domain name and comparison shopping for domain hosting. The book offers useful tools and reviews of content management systems and free resources to help a small team (or a team of one) to effectively plan and manage the development of a website.

Managing Content

If you have a website it is essential to think about updating your content to highlight news, events or draw attention to your products or services. The days of setting up a simple HTML site and creating multiple pages that require extensive editing any time the content changes have been replaced by a widespread reliance on content management systems (CMS). Numerous tools exist but two open source options tend to be easier to use when you are looking to manage your own website.

WordPress started out as a blogging tool and has evolved into a very flexible content management system that is well-suited for small to medium-sized websites. Despite the title, WordPress For Dummies, 3rd Edition has practical guidance for both beginners and more experienced users. With this book you can become better acquainted with WordPress functionality and management tips including: how to set up a MySQL database; the anatomy of a template tag; ways to enhance your blog with themes, polls, ratings, and widgets; how to manage multiple blogs and users; tips for tackling spam with Akismet (an anti-spam plugin); advice on optimizing for search engines; how to use WordPress as a content management system; and ways to style with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Another powerful and scalable CMS is Joomla, which also enjoys a strong developer community and numerous source of website theme templates and add-ons. In Joomla! 1.5: A User’s Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (2nd Edition) the author helps you to understand content management, what Joomla! does, and how its components fit together. He also explains how to build Joomla! sites from scratch and systematically customize them to your needs. What may be particularly useful is the included case studies showing how to build Joomla-powered websites for a school, a small business, and a blog.

Getting Noticed

Once you have your website set up, the next step is to ensure that is gets noticed by search engines and can be found by visitors and potential customers (for commercial sites). This is where search engine optimization (SEO) becomes an essential aspect of your online marketing efforts. Certainly, there are companies and consultants who offer excellent services to help you improve your search engine rankings and visibility but this requires an additional investment beyond your website development and hosting. In some cases, particularly for non-profit organizations and small-medium businesses, there simply isn’t a large budget available for SEO consulting. With Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, a website owner or manager can review and apply practical guidance on developing keyword strategies and planning advertising campaigns.

The book also looks at how business goals, creating appealing marketing messages and designing human-usable web sites form the foundation of effective SEO strategy. The authors include spreadsheet-based worksheets that you can use to accomplish specific SEO-related goals. The book’s guidance can be applied to small, individually-owned or large businesses.

Tracking Your Website Metrics

The final tool for website management involves measuring how and where visitors interact with your website. One of the more powerful utilities for this task is Google Analytics. The Google Analytics site describes the service as:

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

In Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, 2nd Edition you will learn about the installation, configuration, tracking techniques, and best practices of Google Analytics. Since this is a 2nd edition, the content has been updated to reflect changes in the Google Analytics interface and also addresses topics such as how to optimize your online and offline marketing campaigns and integrate Google Analytics data with third-party systems and applications, including your CRM system.

A useful overview of the importance of website metrics and how Google Analytics can be a valuable tool for small business is available on YouTube from justynalam in her video presentation entitled “Small Business Marketing – Why You Need Google Analytics”.

No matter how hard you have worked on creating an online presence through your personal or professional website, you will need to plan on spending time to make it “searchable” and “findable” for major search engines. A post over at the Globalpreneur points out these key concepts as SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing).

The post mentions “choosing words, content, and design. . . to meet the needs of search engines” – this translates into having a well-organized website that has a clear hierarchy (e.g., home page, other main pages, sub-pages) with links that can be followed by the search engines. There are a few ways to achieve a search engine-friendly structure for your site:

• Small content = fewer pages: if your site is concise and can express all of your key messages in just a few pages, you can have a very simple website structure that is easy to follow and index
• Rely on a content management system: when you have more content, it needs to be organized logically and a content management tool (such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, just a name a few) can help you build the structure and maintain your content with less emphasis on coding and more on writing.

Search engines want to find new and changing content. When you take the time to create a website, you should expect to invest some time each week into maintaining and expanding your online identity. When you consistently update your site’s content, search engines will create new index connections and make it easier for other internet users to find your site and link to your content.

When you supplement the standard search engine results with search engine marketing, you can draw attention to specialized content on your site or highlight new services and products. Google AdWords is a popular example of search engine marketing. You can spend some time and learn about how to use AdWords at the Google AdWords Learning Center. If you are just getting started, the online training can provide some practical background and explanations about online advertising and website promotion.

Good luck and don’t forget about other major search engines and the importance of looking at more localized resources and multi-lingual tools. You can find examples of international search engines with local language versions in the Wikipedia article on search engine marketing.