It’s always great to go live with a new website – it’s our stock in trade. We’ve launched a new site for Africa Ignite – www.africaignite.co.za.
This client is very visual, and they work with crafters and desingers very actively, so the site is really bold and colourful, which is great. A special feature on the site is an awesome GoogleMap setup to showcase Africa Ignite’s latest publication, Burning Bright.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is vitally important when it comes to building a website. Google drives more traffic through the internet than any other site, so it’s naturally important that a website gets found on Google. But that’s only half the picture.
Very simply, SEO on its own is a waste of effort and money. A site needs to be well optimised for search so that it attracts visitors from Google and other search engines, but it also needs to be well set up for those visitors to find what they need, or to make an enquiry, or the buy a product. Usability is the factor that determines if they can do these things.
SEO gets a lot of attention, especially from website development firms, because it is fairly quantifiable. It has the advantage that by getting a site up in Google’s rankings, the site will enjoy a certain amount more traffic. That is a pretty sure thing.
The flip side is that Google isn’t trying to please the SEO experts, it’s trying to please the people that ask for search results. Factors like the age of the website, incoming links from other websites and blogs and volume and consistency of content play a big part in getting Google to consider a web page as an authority on a subject. Those are factors that can’t be built into a website – they need to be built up through time and effort. To get the pages on your website to feature well in the search results for a broad range of keywords, you need to be creating content on those subjects week in and week out, through News articles, Blog posts and pages on your website. You also need to give it a couple of years of evaluation of the site’s traffic analytics before you can properly measure results.
The majority of traffic to your site will come from places other than Google – most sites that we operate show that less than 40% of traffic comes from people typing a keyword into Google. Because people generally come to the web after they’ve been introduced to a brand or business (through personal contact or advertising), they tend to type in www.yourbusiness.co.za to look for you. If this gives them no joy, they’ll eventually land up on Google, where they’ll type in your company name rather than a keyword related to your company.
No matter how visitors have landed up at your site, the most important thing is to give them good service, which, in the virtual world of the internet equals good usability. If someone has had an easy time getting finding information on your site, they will be more likely to call you or to come back for related information. If someone found you at the top of Google but then had a hard time getting the information they wanted – they’ll never come back, and they’ll never call you.
YouTube is great – its a simple and effective way to store and display dynamic information about your business and services. Barak Obama uses it to chat to America every week. One of our clients uses it to show their work in progress.
YouTube has a nifty feature which allows you to embed any YouTube video into a blog post or a website. You set the size you want the video, copy the embed code and paste it into your blog post or web page. In a blog editor, you simply place the embed code into the editor. YouTube even has a lady in a nice YouTube T-shirt explaining how its done:
On a website through a CMS it can be a bit trickier:
Our CMS has a special editor that allows you to add raw HTML to a page. This is great because you can place code from Google Maps and other 3rd-party online content providers – and you can place YouTube Embed code into this editor. The problem is that the column width of the website isn’t always right for the sizes that YouTube offers, and, because YouTube is Flash based, it sits above the editing controls in the CMS. We’re developing an new CMS editor that sorts this out, allowing you to overwrite the width & height values in the YouTube embed code.
