Website has the potential of being company’s most important salesperson, if you know how to unlock it.
On this newsletter Lead Web Developer Alberto Grande Sauci will reveal how to ensure your website does its job.
Alberto has exceptional expertise in web development, having previously led DELL’s QA for EMEA website before joining our team. Alberto’s insights are a goldmine.
What are the core requirements of a good website?
Alberto: Every website, regardless of whether it is a personal blog, e-commerce, corporate website, or a mix of them, should have some minimum CORE requirements to be successful.
Here at Menestystarinat, we treat each client’s website as if it were our own, and that’s why I like to work here. We aim for the best possible output while carefully considering all these minimum CORE requirements I will mention briefly:
VISUAL ASPECT: First Impressions Count!
A clean layout visually adapted to your branding and intuitive navigation? Yes! That’s exactly what we do.
Having clear CTA (Call To Action) and guiding the user to have a ”nice experience surfing the website” summarizes what needs to be achieved during the design phase.
STRUCTURE: The website’s skeleton!
At first glance, this may not seem important, but as a 360° Digital agency, Menestystarinat always takes into account SEO, Analytics, ADS, and other possible future services for its expansion.
Properly organizing the site’s data and separating it into different sections and subsections will facilitate other departments’ jobs. So this is always a win-win for everyone.
CONTENT: An important part of the ”Visual Aspect” and ”SEO”
Original copy-content will make a website look unique. As it is this newsletter article 😉
At the same time, it will ramp up SEO as good image-assets will improve the general ”VISUAL ASPECT.” Saying this, I think content itself is very important, and if there is a defined company’s tone of voice and branding, it should be respected.
SEO: A world behind it!
In order to make sure a site is successful, it needs some basic SEO in place and let the search engines understand what is going on behind the scenes.
Good & original writing content is one of the master keys. By using keyword techniques and balancing between “human language” and “robots language,” we make sure a page gets visitors, but to get high-quality visitors, advanced SEO jumps in.
SEO deserves a few more posts because it is a very long topic, so keep tuned to our upcoming posts, which will launch when our SEO experts will have it ready 😉
MEASUREMENT: Measuring the success.
Obviously the best way to know if a website is successful or not is to measure its success.
We, as Google partners, love measuring every aspect of a website to observe and improve it constantly.
Thanks to the measurements we do, we can be proud and say that during 2022 we reported an increase of 23% revenue of our clients (.pdf, FI) on average so….. I think numbers speaks for themselves.
SPEED: Every millisecond counts in this world!
According to turn around time and conversions, this is a very important point that affects the secret formula of SEO as well.
Wallmark & Amazon reported 2% and 1% increase in annual conversions and revenue just by improving their website speed by some milliseconds! And I don’t lie, so I just googled where it was and BOOM: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/impact-page-speed-ecommerce-performance-franco-folini/
CONTINUITY: Evolve or die.
As technologies are fast, growing, and constantly changing, we need to also constantly evolve. Improving ourselves constantly allows us to bring new and innovative solutions to our clients.
One of my biggest recommendations always is to get Menestystarinat Web Maintenance service after a web project because only then we can continuously improve and measure the success of our new ”baby-born website.”
Summarizing, because I can see I already wrote as much as I usually speak:
Every website should have a minimum of planning before starting. We should plan the main structure of what we want to build and collect all possible info. Once building it, we need to keep special attention on many points but especially a base of good SEO. And once done, we need to measure its success and improve it constantly.
What are the most important things to avoid during web development?
Alberto: I think I have a clear answer to this Ville 😉 so I will try to answer this shortly:
The most important thing to avoid during the development of a website is to include unexpected new requirements not initially established in the planning phase.
”Planning” is an essential phase before starting any new website, and during the planning, all requirements should be discussed. Adding new requirements can affect the project negatively, increasing budgets and delaying the timeline.
From the other hand, I love flexibility, so here in Menestystarinat, some small requirements can come ”on the fly” during the web development, but if the requirement involves complexity, then it’s better to apply it during a second phase.
What does it mean that website is not ready when it’s launched?
Alberto: A website can be launched and LIVE and still be waiting for a new feature to be launched.
There are 2 kinds of websites in this world:
- The websites that never or poorly get updated, which usually leads to websites with low visitors.
- And the websites that evolve constantly and look for improvements, keeping the users interested and coming back.
Saying this, I would like to say that under my personal opinion: A website is never 100% ready; there is always room for improvements.
How would you compare developing a large corporate website, like Dell’s, to a small local restaurant’s website?
Alberto: Ok. This is a tricky question, which I will try to answer as shortly as possible, but I think that it might deserve a new whole post as well just for this comparison.
Big corporates use a huge amount of resources in digitalization because they know that having an appropriate presence on the Internet directly affects their numbers.
Small/medium businesses usually don’t see these numbers ”behind the scene” because they might need a long tracking history to appreciate it and good measurements. So that is why they spend a smaller amount of resources when I think they should spend more.
1% of €100M Revenue = €1 M per year in digitalization
1% of €100.000 Revenue = €1000 per year in digitalization (As smaller a company is, the more % should invest in its future.)
This is how I personally think about small businesses:
Owners think that a simple website will not make them sell more. But I can assure It will help them sell “BETTER” 😉
What would you like to say people wondering whether they should remake their website or not?
Alberto: First of all, I would like to say: ”Don’t be afraid of changing. We can take care of everything!”
Why do I say this so clearly? Well… one of the biggest fears could be the amount of work that a new website could generate (And even more if the content and structure changes).
In Menestystarinat, we can take care of everything: from designing a new branding that can be used for the website and any other visual digital material to creating new original copy-content for your site.
Muchas gracias Alberto, this was the most valuable interview ever!
Alberto: Anytime, Ville.
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