Website Success

EXPERT Webmasters believes that the more you know about the components that make up a successful website, the more likely you are to succeed with your website. Website success goes far beyond just putting up a website with what you want to say and decorating it with images.

With almost every business having a website these days, knowing how you can effectively build and continually improve your website and your presence on the web is more critical than ever before.

We believe that the following components are critical factors in achieving Website Success:

Search Engine Optimization 
Web Standards
Web Accessibility
Web Usability
Web Marketing
Web Analytics
Web Design

With each of these playing an important role in your website's success, it is important that you understand what each is and how to use each to your advantage. A brief description is provided below on what each of these topics are:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of improving a website and its presence on the web to gain more targeted visitors from search engines like Google and Yahoo!. SEO concentrates on improving web traffic to a website from the organic listings of a search engine’s search results. SEO focuses not only on a website's architecture and modifying web pages but on acquiring quality links from other sites and monitoring web traffic to find ways to further optimize a site.

Tens of millions of people daily use search engines like Google to find and purchase what they are looking for on the web. Having your website ranking high in the search engines is critical to gaining more visitors, more leads and more sales. Remember, people on the web are looking for the products you are selling 24 hours a day. If they are not finding you, they are finding your competition!   Knowledge Center

Web Accessibility

Web accessibility refers to the process of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. When websites are correctly designed and developed, all users can have equal access to a website's content and functionality. Web accessibility focuses on addressing website visitors having issues with Vision (total/color blindness, low/poor eyesight), Sound (deafness, hearing impaired), Mobility (difficulty or inability to use the hands, muscle slowness, muscle control loss from stroke, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy), Seizures (flashing/strobing text or images), and Intellect (cognitive disabilities affecting attention, memory and logic skills, learning disabilities).

For example, when a site is coded properly with textual equivalents provided for images and with meaningfully-named links, this helps blind users using text-to-speech software and/or text-to-Braille hardware. Also, when pages are coded so that users can navigate by keyboard alone this helps users who cannot use a standard keyboard.

When websites are correctly designed and developed, all users can be accommodated while not impacting on the usability of the website for non-disabled users. With millions of people having a variety of accessibility issues, making sure your website will accommodate their needs so you don't lose potential customers is very important.

Web Analytics

Web analytics, in general, is the study of the behavior of a website's visitors. More specifically, it is the process of collecting data about the activities of your website's visitors and using this data to improve specific web pages or your entire website. It is an opportunity to learn more about your customer so that you can help influence future engagement. The data collected and analyzed can answer questions like... how did your visitors find you?, when did they visit?, what pages did they view?, what did they buy or download?, and what keywords did your visitors use?.

Web analytics can help determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage your visitors to buy a product or download a whitepaper. It may also include e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, & lead and sales information. This data is typically used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.

Understanding where your website's visitors are coming from and how they are using your website can tell you volumes on what you can do to improve your website and that is critical to your website's success!

Web Design

Web design is the process of creating the 'look and feel' of web pages for a website. The focus of web design is to layout the content on a web page so it is presentable, usable, and helpful to your visitors. Web design involves the arrangement of elements on a web page to create a page with a purpose for your visitors. The elements include text, images, animations, video, and sound.

There are infinite ways to design a web page and so many designs focus only on how appealing the design looks and not as much on the strategic placement of elements on a web page to accomplish the real purpose of the page. Being able to create awesome graphics for a web page so it looks cool is great but if it isn't strategically used with good marketing techniques, great content, and other complimentary elements then you will not achieve the goal for which the web page was initially created for.

Web Marketing

Web marketing, also known as online marketing, internet marketing or emarketing, is marketing that uses the Internet to achieve marketing objectives. Web marketing includes email marketing, search engine optimization (organic and pay-per-click (PPC)), banner advertising, ecampaigning, advergaming, and epromotions). Web marketing has the advantage over traditional marketing in that the internet is global and is accessible by anyone in the world for very low costs. Web marketing should properly be incorporated within an integrated corporate marketing strategy to get the most from your marketing efforts.

Web Marketing has seen spectacular growth as advertisers and marketers look to monetize dollars spent building corporate websites. It is believed by many that spending on emarketing will eventually equal or outweigh most of the more traditional forms of marketing and advertising such as television, radio and print. The more you understand about web marketing, the bigger success you can expect to achieve from your efforts.

Web Standards

Web standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specifications that define and describe many aspects of the World Wide Web. More specifically, it is a term that has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops these standards and focuses on the higher-level standards that most directly affect the accessibility and usability of websites. They develop these standards to help lead the Web to its full potential. Usually when a website or web page is described as complying with web standards, it means the website or page has been written with valid HTML (or XHTML) and CSS code.

It takes time for some web standards to be widely accepted and used. However, most web sites are far from complying to the newer widely accepted web standards that have been around for years. As web standards evolve so does the web. The longer websites wait to conform, the harder it will be to convert to the newer accepted standards. Also, there may come a day when browsers aren't as forgiving in displaying the worst of html code.

Web Usability

Web Usability is about designing web pages to meet your visitor's needs that focus on creating an excellent user experience. It means that your visitors can use your website and do so quickly, easily, effectively, and efficiently to accomplish their own tasks. Making your website as friendly as possible for your visitors is critical if you want your visitors to return to your website or recommend your website to others.

With each of these playing an important role in the future success of your website, it is imperitive that you start planning to integrate these into your new or existing website. To assist you with this effort, we do offer products that not only help you understand these areas well but show you how to use them to achieve greater website success.