Website Optimisation Wisdom: Continuous is Best

Urgent or easy tasks all too often delay website optimisation to the detriment of small and medium business (SMB) sites.

And not just SMBs either. In years of advising large and small businesses how to optimise their websites, I have often found that initial enthusiasm for changes is lost and changes don’t get made. Competing agendas push things down the priority list. Or the need for change is forgotten as clients struggle to keep on top of site maintenance, fulfilling orders, the day to day stuff.

Checking my YouTube subscriptions I came across some very useful insight into the importance of “continuous incremental improvement” and how to achieve it from three wise men of online marketing.

Shoulder to shoulder, Dr Ralph Wilson, Jim Sterne and Bryan Eisenberg talk through the issues — useful viewing for anyone struggling to find the time to make website changes because other tasks get in the way…

Bottom line: Make little changes to your website experience all the time to keep up with your competitors or fall behind. And find time for them by understanding what is important as opposed to urgent when maintaining your site.

Note: This is an issue I want to explore in depth in a future post because it is an issue that I come across a lot with clients both in terms of the value of my services and getting sites in the shape I recommend.

Think Your Website is Optimised?

Just quickly: If your website satisfies the 400 requirements in “The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period” then you should be patting yourself on the back. Or, maybe, giving yourself a stern talking to for being so complacent.

Put together by Search Engine Guide columnist Stoney deGeyter , the list is a comprehensive reminder that your website is never really optimised. There will always be something you should be doing…

Wordpress+Theme = Presentable Site with Capable CMS

After multiple false starts I decided to use Wordpress for this site. I found a customisable theme that offered the mix of pages and posts I was looking for and started tweaking. A month later I can report Wordpress is proving an able, affordable and low cost site building and content management system.

The current site is barely version 1.0 but Wordpress offers the flexibility to take us to 2.0 and well beyond.

If you are looking for an easily managed website consider getting your web developer/designer to modify a Wordpress theme. If you know what CSS* stands for, consider doing it yourself . The key to success is finding a theme that will suit your needs.

A Presentable Small Business Site Shouldn’t Cost You Your Entire Marketing Budget

The days when a getting a presentable small site required an investment of thousands of dollars are past. Options now abound when it comes to building a small site like this. Indeed, there are almost too many of them with most web hosts offering some sort of site building facility and multiple software options to download or install…

I know. I’ve tried a few (which I might revisit here). I found they either:

• required too much effort,
• offered too little flexibility in templates,
• lacked functionality options
• or failed the search engine friendliness test.

In short: the end result ended up looking amateurish or required too much customisation.

I didn’t want to spend any more than was absolutely necessary. What to do?

The Wordpress Option

I had used Wordpress to blog but a couple of things made me consider it more seriously for the blog-site combination I was after:

1. My long time employer/client Netconcepts adopted a Wordpress platform for its site.
2. I read a series of articles about an experiment with launching a ecommerce store using a modified Wordpress theme

It took a while to get to the point where the site is live — life’s competing priorities, etc. — but after reading the series of articles I decided Wordpress was my best site option.

Choosing a Theme and Making it Mine

As I write this I realise I have much more to say than I have time to say it…

I’ll expand on the process of choosing and customising a Wordpress theme — think “website template” — in the article I am now planning. But, long story short, a long search for a free theme that fitted the bill ended up with many options but nothing that really felt right.

Then I came across a theme that had the sort of mixture of functionality and layout I was seeking. The increasingly popular Revolution Theme cost me US$75 but considering what a bespoke site with comparable functionality would have cost…

It has lived up to its “ïnsanely customizable” billing as I have fiddled to take it from here:

To here:

There is much to do — all sorts of things I would point out to a website benchmarking & review client populate a growing “Not doing as I say” list… A website is never optimised!

I’m pretty happy though. And the last month has shown Wordpress’s worth as a content and site management tool.

Bottom line:
Working with Wordpress is probably easier if you have a level of understanding of CSS and HTML. But the right theme and host will minimise the need to delve too deeply into the PHP code & MYSQL database that makes it all work. And you are more than likely to find a theme that suits your needs without customisation, if you are less fussy than me.

*CSS stands for cascading style sheets a way of determining how your site looks and feels via one file rather than having to modify individual page files.