Before you build, decide what will happen once it's up. 

Static, informational 'brochure' sites are a thing of the past. Today, competitive web sites are dynamic marketing engines that are a keystone of your business's identity.

To adjust quickly to market conditions, you need to be confident that you can set a strategy and execute it. Your web designer can help ensure you have that flexibility if they know how your company will use the site.

Some questions to answer:

• Who has the technical skills to maintain your site?
• Who in your company is responsible for content decisions?
• How will it dovetail with your larger social media strategy?

Knowing this information at the start of the design process will help you realize a better return on your investment. 

Let's take the questions one by one:

Who has the technical skills to maintain your web site?

Your Web Designer

Your web designer probably maintains a wide variety of sites, and, depending on your employees' skill set and the number of changes per year, that may be a cost-effective option. Of course, they must be able to make changes quickly.

Divert, Hire or Train

If that's not right for your company, you will need to find someone in your org who already has the skills to maintain content, or you will need to train or hire someone. 

Many of Quoin's sites are built on WordPress, and training is always a component of our new site design packages. Most people who can readily operate Microsoft Word can maintain a WordPress site through it's well-tested user interface. However, a basic knowledge of HTML can save time if a tag gets broken.

If you have an in-house IT department, this might be the answer to the question. But suddenly you're asking your IT department to support marketing. This is a relationship you (or they) may not be accustomed to. 

Who in your company is responsible for content decisions?

What we're really asking here is: Who is responsible for strategy decisions? What blog posts will support your new product release? You have a benefit coming up. What do you say about it, and how often? Does the content manager have the images she needs?

How will your new site dovetail with your social media strategy?

Your web site and blog posts are the foundation of your organic search results. These are fundamental to your site's success, whether or not you're also buying online ads.

Traffic between your web site and your social media network is a two-way street. People can find your site first, and then engage with you socially, or vice-versa. But your web site designer will need to provide the right tools for them to do that. 

Some common social media tools are:

• Facebook 'like' buttons for your company's page: When a user clicks this, your site's news begins to populate their feed, keeping you connected to them.
• Facebook 'like' buttons for your individual blog posts: When someone clicks this, they post that particular blog post to their wall, so their friends can see it.
• Twitter 'follow' button: When they click it, your user starts seeing all of your posts in their Twitter feed.
• Retweet button: posts that blog post to the user's feed.
• Many other social networks can be integrated with your web site, and it's a flexible process wherein networks can probably be added or deleted as your strategy changes. But it's best to know up front if, for instance, you're going to be making inroads into GooglePlus.

Set your strategy and stick with it

But not forever. The best thing about online marketing is it's flexibility. Sometimes that flexibility can lead owners and marketing managers to change tack before they know if a strategy has been effective. 

Decide how long you can wait to see results. A month is very short in search engine terms. Make sure you take baseline measurements before you put up your new site. Then stick to your time line. 

Having the right people and strategy in place to support your site will give you your best chance of success.

If you're considering a new web site, please check out our recent work.

Disclaimer: I read an article with (almost) this title today, and it was so close to the mark in some places, I wanted to add my own input to the global discussion.

When Should I Use WordPress for a Business Site?

WordPress is perfect for most types of small- and medium-sized business sites. It has advanced in every quadrant to become a top-flight CMS. It is free and open-source, and it’s fully search-engine-optimizable (SEOable), as long as a decent theme is used or built.

A high percentage of small and medium business web sites consist of:

• static information, including
  • company profile
  • services
  • marketing messages
  • case studies of past clients
  • testimonials
  • etc.
• contact information and email form
• a blog
• basic social media integration, such as facebook like buttons, retweet, etc.

Easy Content Management

All of these needs are readily fulfilled by WordPress, in a way that makes sense for most businesses.

A top complaint of business owners is the difficulty of maintaining their company’s web site. Because WordPress has beautiful, simple user interface design, clients who have owned web sites with clunky custom admin areas love using WordPress.

Writing and editing content is done in an editor that looks a little like Microsoft Word. Content maintenance becomes (almost) fun.

Galleries of Work

Many companies, including Quoin, need to display images of their work. There are a wide array of gallery plugins available for use on commercial sites. If you know CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), you can tailor them to work with your site’s branding.

Search Engine Optimization

WordPress-based sites are able to reach the heights of PageRank and hits in whatever keyword niche (or swath) you’re targeting. Available tools for SEO include

• Automated XML Site Maps which notify Google when you post new content
• Custom page titles, meta data for each page and post

Tools for categorizing and tagging your posts help both your users and Google’s search robots browse and organize what they’re seeing.

Content Management Permissions

Another tool provided out-of-the-box by WordPress is multiple levels of user access which allow you to tailor content management work flows to your company’s organizational chart.

Depending on how you set it up,

• subscribers can have access to read and comment on the site,
• contributors can post drafts which…
• editors can then check over before posting
• and of course administrators have god-like powers of creating and deleting any content and any user.

Company Intranet Site

Using the Private WP plugin, you can even create an simple, easy intranet site for your company to keep everyone on the same page. Yes, it still comes with the RSS feed, so everyone gets real-time updates even if they’re not visiting the site on a regular basis.

When shouldn’t I use WordPress for a Business Site?

Be Cautious with E-Commerce, Forums, & Social Networking

If you’re considering a specialized use for WordPress, such as an e-commerce (shopping cart) site, a forum (such as a software support forum where users can get answers about their product), or a social networking site, There are plugins out there for you. Make sure you (or your site developer) set up a test site that you can give a dry run before you put time and money into developing a custom WordPress theme (or even customizing an existing template). Some of these plugins work great. Others should be avoided.

High-Volume Sites with a Lot of Hits

WordPress can place a lot of demands on a server. Depending on how the site is contructed, the number of calls for external files can be on the high side. Thus, if the site is getting a high number of hits, a custom CMS is a good idea, or at least one in which some more control is available over the amount of resources the admin or dashboard area requires.

Custom Data Requirements

Larger sites with unusual custom data requirements might be able to still use WordPress, however, by the time the WordPress core has been customized to hold the data, you might be better off building from the ground up, or using another framework that is more specialized.

What’s the most unusual use of WordPress you’ve seen?

Seen a great idea lately? Please comment.
Quoin customizes and develops WordPress themes every day. If you’d like to learn more, just Email Us.

Sungari Pearl, a restaurant serving Chinese cuisine, felt their new business principles of simple, organic, locally-sourced food had changed their business completely. Along with needing to separate themselves from another restaurant with the same name, they decided it was time for a big change. They chose Seres, a derivation of the ancient Latin word for China, which symbolizes the very old relationship between China and the West.

Working from earlier designs we had created, Quoin tweaked the logo, built a new web site and updated their signage.

The website is built on the WordPress framework. It’s a small, flexible, extremely SEO-friendly platform with a wide range of plug-ins. This installation includes anti-comment-SPAM software, SEO tools, XML sitemaps to notify Google of new content, and a plugin that incorporates Google Analytics reporting code into each page in a highly-configurable way.

The owner or staff can update the menu at any time, and, most importantly, their blog allows them to keep in touch with their community and create content that boosts their search rankings.

See this Chinese restaurant’s website.

Google wants to know if your site’s content is trustworthy and valuable to their users. It uses the PageRank scoring system to describe your site’s popularity. One large factor of your site’s score is the quality and trustworthiness of the sites that link to yours. Such a link is called a “backlink” in search engine optimization (SEO) terms.

When a site with better popularity than yours links to you, it bumps up your ranking. Government (.gov) and educational (.edu) sites are more trusted by Google, and they are very valuable backlinks to have.

Beware of Toxic Backlinks

A site that is less popular can hurt you, if Google has taken disciplinary action against the site. A toxic site is one that has a history of spreading viruses, spamming people, or using ‘black hat’ SEO techniques to try to boost their popularity artificially on Google. Such a backlink could lower your PageRank.

For this reason, Quoin Design advises its clients to avoid signing up for “link farms” where people trade links in the hope that more links will equal better page rank. It just doesn’t. Your time is better spent writing rich content which is what Google wants more than anything else.

Before you trade links, make sure that the other site’s PageRank is higher than yours. If it isn’t, you might still want to do the deal for other business reasons, but make sure they’re a good internet citizen first. It’s the quality of the backlinks that counts, not the quantity.