Purpose of a website
- Provide information:
- Company, product, service, expert info
- Sell online
- Subscription service, products via ecommerce
- Marketing material
- Landing pages, videos, brochures and whitepapers
- Provide a digital product or service
- As a service model
- IT
- Integrate with other internal systems
- Customer support
- Help desk, knowledgebase
- Operations
- Reduce costs by streamlining a process
- HR and Recruitment
- Advertise jobs, communicate culture etc
Planning your website
- Review your current site
- Benchmarking
- Define goals and objectives
- Develop personas
- Use personas to develop user journeys
- UX and site design
- Choose a build option
- Technical considerations
- Build your site
- Test
- Measure against your goals
- Continually review
Website benchmarking
- Understand how your current website is being used
- Use Google Analytics to understand your users and their current activity profile
- Understand who is using your current website
- Use google analytics to understand demographic information about your current users ie age, sex, location, how they find your site etc
- Understand current goals and how they are being met
- Customers interviews
- Online surveys
Website goals statement
- SMART
- Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
- Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
- Achievable (agreed, attainable).
- Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
- Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).
Example website goals statement
- Generate more sales
- Increase monthly bookings by 15% within 6 months
- Increase sales conversion rate
- Increase the website sales conversion rate by 5% over the next 12 months
- Improve sales support
- Improve sales support on the website through inclusion of knowledgebase articles,
- Increase avg review rating to 4.5+ within 3 months
USER JOURNEY
What is a user journey?
- Series of descriptive steps
- Typically between 4 and 12
- Represent i real world scenario
- Demonstrate how a user currently does something
- How they could do something in a new and improved website
Why should we use user journeys?
- Demonstrating the vision for the project
- Understand user behaviour
- Identify possible functionality at a high level
- Define your taxonomy and interface
- Highlight similar journeys
How do I create a user journey?
- User’s goals
- Their motivations
- Their current pain points
- Their overall character
- The main tasks they want to achieve
What should a user journey include?
- Context
- Where is the user? What is around them? Are there any external factors which may be distracting them?
- Progression
- How does each step enable them to get to the next?
- Devices
- What device are they using? Are they a novice or expert? What features does the device have?
- Functionality
- What type of functionality are they expecting? Is it achievable?
- Emotion
- What is their emotional state in each step? Are they engaged, bored or annoyed?
Create a user journey
- Remember to consider
- Your user’s goals
- Their motivations
- Their current pain points
- Their overall character
- The main tasks they want to achieve
- Don’t forget to include
- Context
- Progression
- Devices
- Functionality
- Emotion
- You can have different feature boxes for different personas, addressing their needs
- You can utilize different color codes for these different user journeys
USER EXPERIENCE
Why does User Experience matter?
- Good design sells
- Strong consumer trust
- Perception of your product or server
- User-friendly content
- Good first impression
- Sets you apart from competitors
- Consistency = quality
- Motivate people to take action
What is UX (User Experience)?
- Human interaction
- Design / aesthetics
- Utility
- Usability
- Performance
- Ergonomics
- User Experience
How to do UX yourself
- User journeys
- Look at the entire process
- Prototype / wireframes
- Challenge the status quo
- Try new ideas
- Don’t just focus on aesthetics
- Simple is usually best
- Test with real users
- Prototypes first
- Once built
- Use date
- A/B testing
- Once live use analytics
- https://www.hotjar.com/
Digital Agency
- Offer full range of services
- Designers
- Developers
- UX experts
- SEO experts
- Project managers
- Things to consider when hiring a digital agency
- Do they work with similar companies to yours
- What project apprıach do they take – agile or waterfall
- How easily could you move from them if you wanted to
- Are they selling you their own website product or a known CMS
- What are their ongoing support and maintenance costs
- 4-6k standard website
- 10-15k custom website
- 10-30k ecommerce website
Freelancer
- Technically skilled
- Cheaper than an agency and may well have agency experience
- Flexible
- Usually a faster turn around than an agency
- Might work with other freelancers for design, SEO, PPC etc
- Things to consider when hiring a freelancer:
- Make sure you own the code / IP
- Be aware that they might not be available if they are with another customer
- Be mindful that they need to be paid on time
- They might work strange hours
WEBSITE FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY
Standard Features of a website
- Navigation
- Homepage
- Content pages
- Footer
- Contact form
- Newsletter signup
- Blog
- Carousel controls
- Video content
- Social links and widgets
- Custom features
Navigation
- Main navigation
- Footer navigation
- In-page navigation
- Internal links
- Off-page links
- Think about information architecture
- Categorising of information
- Meaningful ways for users to find and move between information
- List pages
- Paging controls
- Descriptive links
Homepage
- This is where you make your first impression
- Communicate your businesses personality
- Give visitors the information they need
- Provide options for routes into your content
Content pages
- Publish information about your business, product or service
- Standard layouts – maybe 2 or 3 page templates
- Concise and relevant copy
- Use images (ideally real images of your offering not stock images)
- Make sure content includes links to other relevant content on your site
- Consider SEO
- Include call to action (CTA)
Footer
- Contact details
- Address
- Phone numbers
- Legal links
- Terms and conditions
- Privacy policy
- Cookie policy
- Newsletter sign-up
- Social links
- About us paragraph
- Copyright
- Company number and or VAT no
Blog
- Communicate with your audience in an informal tone
- Publish domain expertise
- Present you organisations personality
- Build trust with your customers
- Attract inbound links
- Increase search rankings
- If you have a blog, make sure you post to it regularly
- Integrated or stand-alone?
Social widgets and plugins
- Great if you are active on social media
- Remember that your posts will be seen on your website so be mindful of what you post
- Some plugins and widgets are easy to add others require a developer
Choosing a domain name
- Choose a domain name that represents your business
- Avoid hyphens or numbers if you can
- Think about domain suffixes
- Com
- Co.uk
- Org
- Uk
- Since 2015 there are hundreds of new domain suffixes
- .london
- .name
- .agency
- .shop
Buying a domain name
- There are lots of places that will sell you a domain name
- Ultimately all domains are registered on a central register
- Make sure the domain is registered in your company name, not the company you are purchasing it via
- 123-reg.co.uk
- Costs range from 1-100 GBP
Hosting
- Your own server
- Located at your business
- Limited resilience / failover
- Requires IT to take responsibility for security and updates
- Dedicated server
- Locate in data centre
- Shared responsibility for security and updates
- Can be expensive
- Virtual server
- Located in a data centre
- One of many virtual servers on one physical server
- Often includes automatic security updates
- Cloud hosting
- On demand resource provision
- Very scalable and can be cheap at the entry level
Hosting and website builders
- Hosting is included
- SaaS model means you are in effect subscribing to a hosting package
- Check terms for usage limits
- Once your site is built and hosted with a service such as wix.com you can not move it another hosting provider
- Some builders such as wordpress do offer an export / backup restore feature meaning you can move it to another hosting provider
- This can be time consuming and might cause issues
Cross-browser testing (F12 key)
- Web browsers render HTML as web pages
- Each browser has a slightly different rendering engine
- Make sure your site looks the same in all browsers / devices
- Most website builders will have cross-browser compatibility covered
- Most frameworks ie Twitter bootstrap have it covered
- Most modern themes and templates will also have it covered
WordPress Plugin Recommendations
- Yoast
- Smush
- WP-cache