web.erratica

note: this is an article from the monthly newsletter i send to my clients

What makes a good site and what are the basic steps you and your designer should follow in order to get there?

R Buckminster Fuller once wrote, “When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

Ask the right questions
A good design provides the solution to a problem or is the solution you arrive at after asking pertinent questions. An elegant design is a simple solution to a complex problem.

If your project is a public facing web site then some very important questions might be:

* Who is (are) your target audience?
* What message(s) do you want them to receive?
* What action(s) do you want them to take?
* How can the site contribute directly to increasing your business, easing the burden on your staff or both?

The most important step is to ask the right questions and to know what problems you want to solve. Perhaps the problem is simply that your site has become stale and needs a fresh look. Then again you may have decided you want more interactive components, the site may not be attracting and retaining the traffic you had hoped or you want something that can be updated in-house. A larger company or organization will be dealing with additional issues such as changing management priorities, shifting market requirements, a new focus by one or more stakeholders or wanting to increase the strategic use of technology to meet fundamental business goals.

Build your site to support your original objectives
Every decision regarding your site should be made after the fundamental questions, and business problems you hope to solve have been considered.

The design and architecture (how people navigate through your site) should support the site mission by making the important areas easy to find. Site layout should be clean and focus on ease of use.

Page coding should adhere to current web standards. You may not know the difference but your web developer should. This will speed download times, increase accessibility and improve the ability for search engines to index your site. Accessibility is simply good practice. If your site was developed a few years ago chances are it is all table based.

Programming and back end decisions should be made based on the current needs of your business, the requirements of your site and your budget.

Hosting decisions should be made based on what will best support the sites needs including the size of your site, the security it will require, any legal compliance issues you need to consider and the traffic you expect to receive.

Finally – Traffic: Finding you is not automatic
As of September 20, 2007 , based on figures provided by Netcraft, there were 54,400,000 active sites and 136,000,000 domains on the internet – and thousands more every single minute. If you want people to find yours, more is required than just creating a site and launching it onto the web.

At minimum you should include your web address on your business cards, advertising and letterhead.

Get yourself listed in as many reputable online directories that cater to your business category as you can.

Consider even a small PPC [Pay per Click] campaign.

This will make a big difference in your traffic and therefore your bottom line.

There are a number of plug-ins you can use with WordPress. One of the most frequently requested website features is a gallery.

I looked closely at the features of several galleries created for WordPress and was most impressed by NextGEN Gallery.

A quick and dirty basic implementation is below.

Almost every client I have dealt with over the past few years has asked for either a simple way to update portions, or all, of their site without knowing html, or have asked specifically for a “Content Management System”. Of course “ways to update your site without knowing html” are all a type of content management system but not all content management systems are “ways to update your site without knowing html”.

There are a few really important questions you will want to ask before you evaluate management systems:

• How often is your content apt to change?
• What content will change? For instance news, press releases and events are prime categories. Products and product information will need updating if you have a shopping cart.
• How many people are apt to be adding content and what are their existing computer skills?
• Do you need to have the ability to revert to a previous version or track when and who made changes?

No matter what system you finally decide upon remember that no CMS is a substitute for a good web administrator. Besides, content management systems are designed to allow you to swap out or add content not alter the design. If your business is fairly large you will probably want one or several people on staff to deal with technical issues and to make design or coding related changes. If you want a polished professional presence you will want a copywriter or content editor who specializes in content for the web and, honestly, perhaps a few more staff members depending on your needs. If your business is smaller it is a good idea to retain your web firm or developer on an ongoing basis to perform those specialized functions.

If you are a very small business and have neither the time or the skills it may be best to simply leave the content updating to your web developer as well – especially if the number of updates you are likely to need are few in number and the rate charged for updates would be far less over a several year period than implementing content management.

Even the easiest content management systems to use can produce unexpected results upon occasion. If you have ever wondered why your margins or formatting went all strange in Word – believe me it doesn’t get better in a CMS.

• Always make sure you receive sufficient documentation or training.

Two to consider:
Two excellent content management systems are WordPress and Joomla. WordPress is a good, easy to use content management system that, depending on your need and desire for customization can be used “out of the box” or be highly customized. There have been a number of plugins created for WordPress including calendars, galleries and more. WordPress is essentially blog software and therefore requires a developer who knows their way around it to customize it so that it will function as a simple CMS. Once that is completed it is one of the easiest ways to manage website content out there.

Joomla (like its also recommended and related product Mambo) is a full featured, enterprise ready Content Management system that allows a number of Extensions. This is the one to use if you want to have registered users, varying levels of access rights, sell products, reservations and more.

Both Joomla and WordPress are free but the implementation won’t be. It takes time and skill to install and customize any of these solutions. The upside is that to obtain even half of the functionality from scratch would cost many thousands of dollars.

web.erratica is built using WordPress. As of this writing minimal customization has been done to an existing template. I uploaded a photoshopped version of a flower from my garden, chose specific widgets (the sidebar elements) and was up and running.

You can view Joomla in action here. The installation is the default with a few minor changes. I will link to a more customized version soon.