Keys to a successful web site project

A good web site is content-driven
The only thing that matters in the long run is content. You will never get a high rate of returning visitors with bad content and you will never get a good search engine placement with bad content. If you pick up a magazine and the articles are boring, you would never buy it again would you? You need to think of the content right from the start – what value will my content give the visitor. The design process and the technical process must both take the content to the heart and create their processes on it. The design must communicate the content in the best way and the technical framework must channel the content in the best way.

Be agile

There is only one person who can tell you if your web site is working. You can’t, you can only guess. Your agency can’t, the can also only guess. The only person with the real answer is your customer. And the customer won’t give you the answer until you have released the web site. You can try to trick the customer by bringing them in for focus tests, eye tracking studies etc, but you still won’t get the real answer until you release your project to the world. As Henry Ford said – ”If I asked the customers what they wanted, they would have answered that they want faster horses. No one would answer ‘a car’.”. Therefore you need to be agile – you need to be able to change your opinions. Don’t build a fortress and lock down your positions – be prepared to move with your customers. You can spend weeks on perfecting your signup process and believing that no one could ever misunderstand the design – and yet the customers never get past the first step. Be agile – be ready for changes.

Use the fork, Luke

Your market will change and your needs will change. Often more rapidly than you think. To be able to respond to those changes you need to think ahead. There are heaps of tools that will help you and give you that possibility – free and commercial. If you are building a site with more than say 10 pages, use a content management tool. Don’t build your own solution, it will most certainly be very expensive both to build and in the long run (and you will suffer hard from the lack of search optimization techniques and efficient cache systems). Use the 960 grid design system, it will both save you time and prepare you for design changes. For the database access layers, use tools such as SubSonic to dynamically generate a DAL from your database (you will save months of hard work!). There is a vast array of tools that will both save you time and help you to be ready for rapid changes along the way – use them!

Statistics, statistics, statistics

Even if you think that number crunching isn’t your cup of tea, try to get into it. The numbers will be your best friends when it comes to determining how your site is performing. As soon as you embark on your project, start collecting data if you can. If you already have a web site, analyze the numbers, check the funnels, learn the statistical package. You will benefit greatly if you know your way around the numbers. Personally I would recommend you to try out Google Analytics if you don’t use it – it’s free and it got all the bells and whistles you need.

The spiders are your friends

When you build your web site, don’t forget the little unvisible visitors – the spiders. The search engines sends out their spiders to crawl your web site to gather all the information they can. Build your web site in a spider-friendly manner. Make all your content visible to the spiders and make all your pages easy to locate. Build sitemaps and supply them to Google Webmaster Tools and the equivalents at Bing and Yahoo. Do everything you can – but stay clear of the black hat SEO-techniques. They may give you an upside in the short run, but ultimately may cost you the web sites presence in the search engines in the long run. Remember that Googles core business is to try to provide quality content to the searchers, and if you supply quality content you will end up in a good place.

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