Hard Core Website Requirements: What You Must Have First and Why

 Creating a website is such an art form that I shouldn't be surprised when people turn their home pages into art rather than the business tools they should be.  I've seen so many beautiful sites.  Flash pages that incorporate short films and elaborate audio tracks, exciting product catalogs that shuffle and flip images like playing cards at a blackjack table, amazing bio pages with professionally shot pictures . . .  So much sophistication to admire.  

It is such a pity that a fancy web page can put a good enterprise right out of business, isn't it?  Web developers and I might like all those bells and whistles, but Google doesn't and neither do most busy customers.    So, here's what you need to ensure your site has if you actually want it to make money on the web: 

• Build your site on a content management system (CMS) that Google can spider.  Don't hard code the pages in HTML, JAVA, FLASH or anything else because you can't be sure that Google will be able to read through all that stuff optimally, and all that custom coding makes your site something you pay too much to create and maintain. If you are any kind of normal business, your website should be built on standard technology so going online takes just a few hours, and what you build is easy to update and customize.  That allows you to benefit from the millions of hours others have spent in making the CMS Google friendly and robust.  If you are building a web application like SurveyMonkey or Pearl Accounting Software, or are creating a website for a feature film or video game, you get an exemption from this CMS rule. You also get to budget a lot of money for site development and testing.
• Make sure people can buy things in four clicks. People who know what they want should be able to get to your site, find the right product, and click the Buy button without wading through pages of content they don't care about.  If youf catalog is visually appealing but can't meet this need, it must be replaced.  Make sure the credit card or PayPal transactions are quick, and that confirmation of the sale pops into the buyer's email in box within seconds. Ideally you should be able to create a link to any product on your site that you can paste in emails, press releases, or blogs. That lets you turn almost any web page on the Internet into an order form for your product.
• Ensure your site content is search engine optimized.  If you sell watches, the domain name you buy should have watches in it. Every page on the site should talk about watches, and the title of every page should reflect that.  Google and other search engines spider your website to determine what it's about.  If your website is about watches, but you talk about chronometers and timepieces all the time . . . you are just confusing the spiders.  In return they index you wrong.
• Incorporate links to social media like Facebook, Reddit, Digg, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon onto every page.  Why?  First, Google looks at the popularity and number of the pages that link to your webpage in order to determine where to rank your page when people search for it's keywords.  So lots of links from very popular sites, like those just mentioned, puts you closer to the top of the relevant listings. That translates into sales because people can find your products and services more quickly.  Second, people who post those links are usually posting them for others with similar interests to look at. This means you'll get more customers from those links than you will from most other pages on the Internet. 

Once you've met all those requirements, you are free to make your site as exciting as you like.  These rules should serve as a framework not a straight jacket.  Lots of cost effective experts are around to customize Content Management Systems like WordPress and Joomla.  They can add all those great user interface features you like on other sites without making your site disappear from the search engines or turning it into haiku only they can maintain. 

If launching a site to these specifications sounds way too difficult, I hope you'll come to the School for Startups "Made in 48 Hours" course in September.  We'll literally help you bring your site live during this hands-on event.  You can learn more about that class and the other courses we offer at www.schoolforstartups.co.uk.  We post new articles and videos there several times a week as well.  The best way to keep up with us is on twitter @s4s.