Your website sucks. Fix it.

Posted on 24 September, 2009 | 3 Comments

I have been in the web design, marketing & development industry for some 10 years now, so I think I have a decent idea as to what should & shouldn’t be done with your website. The internet hit mainstream here in South Africa in the late 90’s, more than 10 years ago.  You would think by now that you would have learned what a good website would look like?  You would think that you have heard fo SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?  One would assume you have learned that a directory listing of businesses is so yesterday and simply doesn’t create a sustainable income.

But nay, you continue to think that 80’s styled, luminous colours are still what web users enjoy today.  Well, guess what! We don’t!  We don’t like tiled backgrounds, we don’t like animated GIF’s, we don’t like Microsoft Word Clipart, etc.  You get the picture.

It’s time you moved out of the dark ages and start looking at what is out there and what web users actualyl want to see.  Believe it or not (how some people don’t believe this is beyond me), people actually want to visit websites that are aesthetically pleasing.  They want to be able to get to the information they are looking for quickly and easily.

So, I have put together a few guidelines to get you started on designing a good website yourself.

The Begining

1. What is the sole purpose of the website?
2. What do you want to achieve?
3. Do you to provide information, at no charge? (A blog for instance)
4. Do you want something that can sustainably provide an income?
5. What is my marketing strategy?
6. Who is your target audience?

These are some of the basic questions you should be asking yourself before you being.  If you cannot answer these questions clearly, please don’t bother starting a website.  It will go nowhere very fast.  Look at websites like Thunda.com, BlueWorld.co.za, Facebook.com, etc.  They have put alot of thought, planning and marketing into their websites, and look where they are.  Doingvery well for themselves.

Ok, so you have the planning and idea out of the way, how do you implement it?  Well, I always start with deciding on the design.  You want to brand yourself.  You want people recognise the site when they see your branding.  The Coca-Cola brand is a prime example. Everyone knows coke.  They see the logo, they want coke.  The red & white with a curly bit.  That is what makes you want coke.  Your website is the same. It needs to have it’s own branding, and you need to constantly apply that branding to everything that the public consumes.  From banner ads to email shots to other mediums like print.

If you absolutely cannot afford to develop the website yourself, please use WordPress.  It’s simple.  You get hosting that includes PHP & MySQL from as little as R100 per month.  You download the WordPress package, upload it to you hosting service, create a database, and run the WordPress installation.  And there you have a it, a fully-fledged operational website that you can manage and update yourself with very little difficulty.

Then, once you have that setup, you can do a search and find a decent already made theme for your website.  There are absolutely thousands available, which can be customised if need be.  You simply install it using WordPress’ intuitive theme installer and it’s done.

Many think that WordPress is merely a blogging engine, and yes, you are correct.  But you can seriously do so much more with it.  For example, these websites www.thoughtleader.co.za, www.mg.co.za and www.moralfibre.co.za are all built using WordPress as the base system.  See how customisable it is?  And because most of the backend stuff is already developed, you can save a fortune by not having to employ someone to develop the entire site from scratch.

Ok, once you have the site setup, it’s so important that you get found on search engines like Google.  I use Google as my example as it currently has over an 80% market share at the moment.  You want to be found, because 80% of internet users begin their browsing at Google.com.  Search Engine Optimisation is the first thing you need to research and concentrate on before you launch your website live.  And it’s relativily simple to get the ball rolling.  Just make sure the following is done:

1. Titles of pages should be relevant to what content is on that particular page.  Don’t put “Pigs for sale” on the title if you are selling goats.  Google won’t find that relevant at all.
2. Keywords should point Google to what the content of the website contains.  Place relevant keywords that relate directly to the subject if that specific page.
3. The Description doesn’t have too much impact on SEO anymore, but what it does, is when a user searches on Google and your website comes up in the results, the first little bit of text below the link on Google is where the description comes up.  This is a great piece of marketing and you should use this to capture the users attention.  For instance, the user has searched for “Pigs for sale” and your website comes up.  The description should read something along the lines of “Find top quality, healthy pigs for sale PigsForSale.co.za.  We have 1000’s of pigs for sale”.  That will tell the user exactly what they want.
4. The content of the site must be comprehensive, not too much, you don’t want to kill your user of old age from reading too much information.  4 or 5 paragraphs for each subject should be sufficient.  Make sure the content contains the relative keywords.

And there are many other things that one can do to improve on your SEO. But it requires constant monitoring and adjusting.

Ok, so now you have your concept, your marketing strategy, your website setup and your SEO.  Now you can go live.  Look, let’s be real here, it doesn’t end there, I mean there is just so much in terms of marketing that you can use to add value to your website.

It’s a simple thing really, if you have a great idea for a website, research it, see what your competitors are doing, do it better.  Don’t just go out on a whim and ‘design’ a site.  Do it properly the first time!

3 Responses to “Your website sucks. Fix it.”

1. evl says:
   September 24th, 2009 at 5:20 pm

   Brilliant post and advice. So true, i sometimes cant believe people would still make a really bad html site with things like Wordpress around.

2. Reanne says:
   November 5th, 2009 at 11:36 am

   Heya,

   I just discovered your website for the first time and am loving it

   These tips are awesome, especially because I am about to try and put a site together in the near future – thanks for the handy tips!

   xxx

3. Justin McCall says:
   November 5th, 2009 at 12:31 pm

   My absolute pleasure Rea-Rea And I hope to add some more tips soon

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