New Website Checklist and Online Marketing Strategies

Website # design and development is not JUST design and development. If you are at a point where it’s time to update your website, it may also be time to update your other online marketing strategies as well. That is why the following new website checklist is comprehensive and treats your website as a central marketing hub for every aspect of your business’ online marketing strategy.

Whether or not you use every item on this list is depends on the purpose of your website, your preferences, and your budget. Please note that this list isn’t written for the development of an e-commerce website, however, it could be considered a starting point.

This article is constantly being updated and added to. Please feel free to leave your thoughts and questions at the bottom!

Before you Begin

• Answer these common questions.
  • What is your “Measure of Success”? (At what point will you know that this project has been a worthwhile undertaking?)

  • Will there be anyone maintaining the website after the initial build? Eg. making minor changes, writing/publishing blog posts, and adding additional photos to photo galleries.

  • Besides what you do for a living, what are some other natural strengths of yours? Depending on how you answer this question, your consultant should alter their online marketing strategy to make it easier and more exciting for you to contribute content to your website. Here are some ideas if you’re stumped:
    • Researching/learning,
    • Designing/sketching,
    • Writing (storytelling, quick wit, clear communication, opinion-making, historical viewpoints, ideation),
    • Oration/public speaking,
    • Photography/videography,
    • Networking,
    • Teaching,
    • Event planning,
    • Analyzing/strategizing,
    • Goal-setting/focus,
    • Consistency/discipline,
    • Empathy,
    • Leadership.

• Based on your marketing budget, your designer/developer/online marketing strategist (Let’s call it D/D/S for short) should:
  • Give you a quote that itemizes all the work to be completed and how much time it will take to do each piece. At the end, the DDS will state their hourly rate and calculate your total cost. Quotes are usually iterative. Since there are lots of questions in the beginning of the process, your first quote will be “squishy”, most likely a number range. After a few conversations with your D/D/S, you will be able narrow it down to a final figure that will be included in the contract.
  • Give you signed contract clearly stating the measure of success, schedule, deliverables, and payment. I cannot stress enough the importance of this step. If communication lines are open, questions are being asked, and tedious attention is being paid to the contract details, you will have a much easier and stronger relationship with your D/D/S. Clients, be aware: Proceed with care and attention.
  • Take a screenshot of the current website’s homepage for posterity. Add a few more key pages if the site is very large.
  • Benchmark search engine results for the top ten key phrases by searching for and finding your website in a private browsing session.
  • Develop some very basic personas that represent the people for which you are building the site.
  • Develop a sitemap that includes every page to be built within the scope of your contract. Some special considerations may have to be made according to your keyword research. Start small at first–more pages can be added once the website is live.
  • Sketch out a wireframe for each page in the site map.
    • Layout the key elements that will be on the page: Sliders, content, images, forms, etc.

Technical Stuff (Getting Started)

These are things you should ask your website designer/developer/online marketing strategist (D/D/S) about:

• Up-to-date Keyword Research
  • If you’ve never had keyword research done for your business, I strongly urge you to consider it. In fact, it’s such a vital part of being visible on the web, that I do keyword research as a complementary service for any website over 15 pages.
  • Keyword research is great for people interested in blogging. Because so many people “ask Google” for information about a vast number of topics, research will reveal exact phrases that work well as article topics, and allow you to optimize your post perfectly for those searches. Also, keyword research will sketch out a list of possible categories for a better organized blog.
• An SEO-ready domain name.
  • Consider these seven things while selecting your domain name: historical domain equity, availability, domain cost, ease of use, brand, location, and service/product. Read the Article: Selecting a Domain Name.
  • If you are keeping your current domain name, and have a very large website, set up a separate area on your host devoted to developing your new site. Something like dev.mycurrentdomain.com.
  • Your Deliverable: login credentials for the account you purchased your domain name from.
• Determine who will be hosting the new website.
• Ask your D/D/S if they have a proprietary host to migrate any current assets over to.
• My personal preference is to host my clients. I have a trusted contractor that manages a controlled hosting environment. This allows us to be more responsive to sudden issues that arise with your website, as well as the ability to perform backups and migrations when needed. Note that we prefer Linux/Unix based servers and can’t support Windows. If you’d like to provide your own servers, we will occasionally need access to them. We will need your login credentials, or have your host include our public SSH keys.
• Your Deliverable: login credentials for your hosting provider.
• Related to hosting: determine who will be hosting your email.
  • My personal preference is to not host my client’s email database on my server. I will refer you to other hosting options like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail.
  • Your Deliverable: login credentials for your email hosting provider (this might be the same provider of your web hosting).
• Install Google Analytics
  • Exclude I.P. Addresses of users that frequently visit the site. (I.e. clients and administrators)
  • Set up conversion tracking. What is the ultimate goal of the website? What steps do the users take to reach that goal?
  • Set up event listeners for key actions taken by users.
  • Install dashboards as needed, and set up monthly reporting.
  • Your Deliverable: user name and password to your analytics account.
• Ensure proper permalink structure

Design Assets & Website Mockup

• Client-Approved Logo
• Preferably, you’d have some kind of branding guidelines for your business, but if not, that’s okay. Be aware however, that your designer will have to glean your information from your logo and select a consistent color scheme that reflects your businesses’ personality. Your Deliverable: branding guidelines.
• If you have ever purchased images from a stock photo site in the past or have a cache of images that you’ve taken, compile all of these in one place and get them ready to send to your designer or developer. Your Deliverable: stock images.
• Theme selection.
  • If you are using a content management system like WordPress, there are thousands of themes to choose from. In my experience, most clients do not have the time or understanding to select just the right one that both meets their needs, and is both robust and feature-rich. Ask your D/D/S for coaching on this point.
  • Your designer/developer should have the know-how to customize and apply your businesses’ branding guidelines to your selected theme.
• Tell your designer how many different mockups you’d like to see, and how many revisions you’d like to have on your favorite  mockup.
• At the end of the mockup process, you should have a very good feel for how the site will be laid out, and what it will look like when it’s built. This is a point in which website projects can derail, so I can’t stress enough how important it is to ask for any further clarification if you need it. Clients, be aware: Proceed with care and attention.

Pages

Here is a list of possible pages you might want to include on your site. Each additional page that is added to the overall site map is an exponential increase in development and maintenance time–not linear! Having said that, be sure to include only the pages that are vital to your online marketing strategy.

• Home page
  • Stunning visuals, product demonstration or video
  • Clear call to action
  • Unique value proposition
  • Credibility factors (Awards won, high-profile clients, business partners)
  • Testimonials
  • Risk-reversal proposition
  • Whitepaper download.
  • Blog feed
  • About section
• About page
  • Company History
  • Our Staff
  • Career / Employment
  • Environmental Responsibility
  • Locations
• Product/Service page
  • Free product demos
  • Pricing page
  • Process / How it works
  • Frequently asked questions.
• Blog page
• Portfolio, Case studies, Repertoire, Before & Afters, Photo Galleries
  • Image-heavy portfolios very time intensive. Usually, the client has a folder of images that are not categorized, are all different resolutions, sizes, and orientations. This puts a lot of the pre-production burden on your designer or developer. Images work best if they are organized, sized identically (no bigger than 800px by 800px), oriented the same way (profile, landscape, or square), and are 72 dpi. Additionally, if you are showing “before & after” images, the before and after should be in a single image–not two separate images. Depending on the nature of your business, you may be able to rely on a third-party website that make it very easy to upload hundreds of photos, tag and sort them, and also offer robust iframes or plugins that integrate well within your website. Clients, be aware: Proceed with care and attention.
  • Third parties. Using a third-party website like flickr our Houzz is especially beneficial if you are not very tech-savvy, but want to keep website maintenance costs down by doing some of the legwork yourself. Both of these websites (and others like them) have undergone massive testing and research to provide the easiest possible experience for you.
    • Hair Stylist | Primp Your Hair. This client wanted to show how adding hair extensions can produce dramatic transformations, but she also wanted the ability to add more images to her site without having to know how WordPress works. We used a flickr plugin called “Slickr Flickr” and set up an account on flickr. When she adds new images that are tagged with the matching gallery i.d., it will be automatically added to this page.
    • Landscape Designer | Terraforma. This client had lots of images for a wide variety of jobs. I set him up with an account on Houzz so he could upload and organize his images himself.  As a landscape designer, having an account on Houzz is relevant to his business and  he puts himself in the path of homeowners that are looking for his services.
• Event page
  • Workshops / Seminar
  • Upcoming Concerts
• Contact. All contact forms should keep fields to a minimum and have a captcha. One exception to this perhaps, if you are getting too much mail (a legitimate pain point!) you may want to add more fields to further vet your lead to meet the criteria of an ideal customer. Once the form is submitted, have it redirect to a “Thank you” page. Let the user know what to expect next. Give them prompts to complete a secondary action such as liking or following your social channels.
  • Other ways to communicate with your website visitors: Customer Service, Support, Forums
  • Contact forms are great because we can track their submissions. We call this a lead, and is a key performance indicator for your website. Ask me about optimizing the entire lead nurturing process to close more leads.
• 404 Page
• 302 Page. If you are not bringing all of your old content over to the new site right away, have a page that collects any traffic that comes from search results. This way your site visitor is not met with an error, rather a page that welcomes and offers a contact form to get in touch with you.

Building a Website

• Optimization of every page for search engines. Consider your user’s intent. What do they need? What do you think they are looking for? What search query should bring up your page in the user’s results? Select a keyword (KW) you’d like to optimize for, and if you are a locally-based business, include a nearby major city as well.
  • Each page should have:
    • Meta Title (include KW)
    • Page Title between 40-70 characters (include KW)
    • Use keyword in the URL.
    • Subheadings, such as h2 (include KW)
    • Images–all of them should have an alt tag (include KW)
    • Have at least 300 words of unique text on each page.
    • Include KW in the first paragraph of text.
    • Include KW more than once in the entire text.

Social Media / Engagement

• Placement of relevant social media icons in header and/or footer.
  • Top social media platforms: Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin, YouTube, and Four Square. Just because all of these social media sites exist, it doesn’t mean you should have an account on every single one to appear well connected. You should have and maintain an account that fits best with your business’ strategy. Read the Article: Social Media Strategy for Businesses.
• Blog integrated with social media.
  • Blog disclaimer: Do NOT, under any circumstances have a blog if you are not committed to keeping it up-to-date.
  • Automatically generated “share” buttons to all of the top social media sites.
  • Recent posts automatically pushed to the businesses’ social media accounts.
  • Link your WordPress account to your Google+ profiles for better presentation in Google’s search results. (This step possibly out of date now)
  • Use a reputable commenting system to prevent spam (i.e. Disqus)
  • Placement of RSS feed button to allow easy subscription to your blog feed. Also, run the RSS feed through a service like Feedburner to make it more user-friendly.
  • Format default post author’s name and profile page.
  • Your Deliverable: login credentials for your social media accounts.
• Email Capture field integrated with your choice of email software (i.e. Mailchimp, Constant Contact). Your Deliverable: login credentials for your email newsletter provider.
• If you use email alerts as a way to engage or sell to your customer, let’s QA this feature to ensure that you are maximizing your leads.

Odds-n-Ends

• Phone number prominently displayed in header, footer and contact page.
• Copyright (©2015) at the very bottom of every page. Don’t forget to add a line to credit yourself!
• Favicon. This is the little image that appears in the address bar before your website’s URL. Typically it’s branded to match the site.
• Offer live chat / assistance.

Technical Stuff (Finishing Up)

• Before you launch the site, thoroughly test your website.
  • Cross-check with as many browsers (and browser versions) as you can: Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome
  • Test your website’s search bar (if applicable) with a few sample terms.
  • Check the responsiveness of your design and ensure that it is rendering properly across desktop, tablets & mobile devices.
  • Click every link you can find.
[tg_alert_box style=”notice”]Lets face it, websites can be expensive, and it’s hard to find good people that know what’s what. If you want your website built according to current best practices, and receive marketing coaching along the way, consider contacting me for a free consultation. Looking forward to hearing from you!
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