The Beginning
The World Wide Web came into effect in 1989. It was sluggish and it was cumbersome. Slowly through the 1990s, it improved, providing a new way for businesses to connect with their customers. Sites were extremely basic, at the start we were in the dial-up era. It sometimes seemed all you had to do was look at the screen in the wrong way, and it all came crashing down. As the web developed, it became imperative for businesses to develop a web strategy. As speeds improved, so did the overall stability, along with the scope of how your business could now be displayed or presented to your customers.
Fast Forward to Today
Since its inception, the development and growth of the internet have been exponential. Today 60% of the world is connected by the internet with 4.3 billion users. As technology and infrastructure became more accessible, so did the access and use of the internet. Everything started out desktop. On average, per capita, users still spend 39 minutes per day connected via desktop. The next round of evolution came from the introduction of laptops for business, now users could connect on the go. Next technology took a leap forward with the introduction of touchscreens, leading the way to the tablet and mobile era. A vast contingent of the population in lower socio-economic groups subsequently skipped desktop and went straight to mobile. This remains the method in which they connect to the web. As the internet evolved and became more complex, having a web strategy became an essential part of every successful business.
Machine Learning
‘Data beats opinion’ and data is the only guarantee of a digital world. Facebook and Google gain knowledge through algorithms, they subsequently turn these likes and preferences into appealing propositions. People are persuaded or influenced in different ways. 200 superficial FB likes fed through an algorithm can predict a person’s behaviour, their psychological traits and their preferences with higher accuracy than what can be achieved by a person’s life partner. As social media would respond, WTF.
Web Strategy
Being absent from the internet was once a choice for business. As internet penetration increased, it became increasingly more imperative to participate. Post COVID-19 the choice has pretty much been removed, you’re either digital and successful or analogue and the death of your business has already started. It is now not only vital for you to have a website, but you must also, have a web strategy.
The web can be an unruly place, filled with pitfalls and unscrupulous players. Let’s not even start discussing the dark web. As we navigate through sites and searches, we are subconsciously looking for clues for bogus or outdated sites or potential hazards. A website gives credibility and trust to a business.
You’re either digital & successful or analogue and the death of your business has already started.
Outdated / Unstable Sites
Poorly designed, cheap websites or websites with broken functionality or links send up red flags for users and search engines. Google subsequently penalizes accordingly. It is therefore imperative for any legitimate business to have a well-designed, highly functioning and maintained website. This needs to constantly evolve and keep up with changing capabilities and requirements of the internet.
Users have higher experience expectations. They expect websites to be stable and dynamic. Users are demanding richer and richer content. Video, images, galleries, multimedia are not nice to do anymore, they are an essential part of the experience. It always flabbergasts us to see how many big sites are unstable and continuously crash, people rarely go back after a site crashes.
Where we Start
We start at the beginning developing your web strategy regardless of whether we are designing a site from scratch or if we are refurbishing a site. We will leverage assets, but find it is always best to start with a blank slate.
When we review web addresses, we consider where the company is based and its audience. Dotcom domains work better for businesses looking to operate internationally. Locally focused businesses should look to .ca for their domain, it not only improves SEO, but Canadians put a lot of stock in businesses who have .ca versus .com.
Research Phase
We start by determining the objective of the site and its purpose, along with its target audience. What do you want users to do once they visit your site? We develop comprehensive website objectives which include smart goals, KPI’s and metrics, along with determining the functional requirements needed to achieve these targets.
Once we have established the intent of the site, we spend some time evaluating the competition. We evaluate users’ expectations for the site, along with what they are experiencing within the space from similar competitors. In addition, we start considering the basics website address, web hosting and design platform.
At this stage, we start working on forming a simple wireframe based on website flow, pages and what we want the users to do once they have landed in your site and what the call to action will be.
WordPress
We recommend designing your website on the WordPress platform. WordPress is the most comprehensive platform available today, with 37% of all websites designed using the platform and 60% of all content management systems. Smaller sites have an option of using smaller platforms, but this does results in some limitations.
Next, we start considering the website theme (how it looks). Plugins, content holders and what we’re planning on measuring start to form the skeleton of the site. Building and producing the right content for your site, from sourcing images to generating material, can take an incredible amount of time and needs to be kicked off in parallel with the development process.
We evaluate all the big beats of the site to ensure requirements and expectations are either met or exceeded and that users have an optimal experience.
Wireframe
We leverage the wire framing phase to communicate to clients how the site will look, including the site structure and flow. This is a crucial stage where we define and review the fundamentals along with the complete functionality of the site. Next, we evaluate all the big beats of the site to ensure requirements and expectations are either met or exceeded and that users have an optimal experience.
Building the Site
We start to set up the page structure by creating and publishing all the pages without content. We optimize the settings and create the navigation structure.
Content is being generated as we hone the overall design. Content is king, and it will always determine if your site is valued or not by visitors.
Refining / Testing
We continue to develop the site in conjunction with our client’s input. We ensure all the functionality requirements are incorporated and operating correctly. Furthermore, we review accessibility requirements. We test the site and review in mobile, constantly refining and optimizing. This ensures clients have the best site possible, so in turn, users have the best experience possible.
Mobile
The mobile era of internet access was fraught with challenges. Some sites went to a two-site model, with mobile users having to settle for a scaled-down version. Excluding tablets, mobile represented 54.8% of internet traffic in Q1 2021. Users are also, more engaged on mobile spending on average 155 minutes per day on the internet. Google sees the future of the internet as mobile and subsequently favours and promotes sites that support mobile accessibility. Your site must work on mobile. Design and functionality must be considered and addressed from the outset of the design process.
Mobile also, opened the ability for websites and apps to use the functionality of the phone. For example, mobile websites now have direct calling options, available. Geolocation can be used by either sites or apps along with the camera application. This opens elements like QR codes, and apps now have the ability to interact with users using push notifications. Pre-pandemic QR codes were generally poorly used, but this is another area that got significantly more popular during the pandemic. Bars and restaurants could now allow patrons to view menus on their own devices, versus using those viruses ridden paper copies.
When we test our sites, it is not only imperative that they function on all device formats, we also, need to keep up with trends and new functionality. For example, Apple launched dark mode in 2019, which uses light-coloured text and icons on a black background to improve the battery life of mobile devices. Subsequently, a lot, of sites look terrible in dark mode with non-transparent logos or poorly cropped images.
Googles Mission
Google – Our company mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Regardless of your opinion of Google, they have been successful in providing a controlled, stable and measured access point to this unruly beast! That’s why Search makes it easy to discover a broad range of information from a wide variety of sources. My only question is, what have they been doing, or what do they plan to do with all the data they have vacuumed?
Googles Monopoly
When we talk search engines, we’re normally always referring to Google. As of June 2021, Google represented 92.47% of all search results and 65.13 goes through Chrome.
Is it right to penalize or suppress an organization that has only innovated and left its competition in the dust? As previously commented, the internet is a dark and unruly place. Google has been relentless in improving users’ experience and promoting businesses that do things right, they have long worked to the notion ‘don’t be evil’.
Since 2010, Europe has launched three separate antitrust investigations into Google. These investigations were based on Google’s dominant position in the market and for violating the EU’s competition laws. These cases resulted in formal charges against Google pertaining to Google Shopping, Google AdSense, and the Android operating system. Again, in 2011 Google was fined for breaching EU antitrust rules based on the Android mobile operating system, which was seen to prevent rival competition. In October 2020, the Justice Department and 11 states in the US, stated ‘Google had illegally maintained a monopoly over online search engines and the ads that appear in users’ results. Additional cases against Google in other states are expected to follow.
Governments have also, started to respond. Europe has crafted the Digital Service Act Europe. The Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act aim to create a safer digital space where the fundamental rights of users are protected and to establish a level playing field for businesses.
SEO
We have just outlined Google position in search. SEO, is a science and an art, there are requirements and expectations for sites that determine where Google ranks your business. Where you rank can be critical, and gaining a position can be extremely complex and finicky. Make one mistake or break one of the requirements, and you will fly down the ranks. Keywords, meta tags, description length, key phrase density, organic, link juicers, bots, slugs, naming conventions to name a few are all elements that impact your SEO.
SEO is a continuous and constant race that you’re always trying to lead.
SEO SOS
SEO is a complex game played in the dark with Google. When all aspects of SEO are completed, and the site is live and being indexed, it can take between 4 hours to 4 months for a site to be crawled by Google (and other search engines) and attribute authority to the domain. Test & learns can be set up to test different tactics. You don’t want to do SEO the wrong way, some ‘SEO experts’ artificially inflate SEO like a souffle. This increases your ranking, they take your money, and then the air starts to creep out and your site shoots down the ‘search engine results page’.
After exhausting other options and waiting, SEO can always be supplemented with paid keywords using Google ad-sense.
SEO is a complex game played in the dark with Google!
Post launch & On-going Maintenance
After the site is launched, some companies make a critical and dangerous mistake, they move resources on to new projects and let the website operate without involvement. This can lead to so many preventable problems. Links become broken, images don’t display, rankings plummet. For your website to be successful, it must be continuously maintained and supported. It is essential to run regular site diagnostic checks. We can help either facilitate or manage this aspect of web management for you.
Just because you finished your site doesn’t mean technology and functionality, stop evolving and adapting. Expectations are now extremely high pertaining to how businesses are expected to present themselves in the digital realm. Your site needs to keep up with trends and expectations, or your fickle audience might just move to your competitors.
Google Analytics
Measuring what matters will be outlined in your web strategy and will determine if your site is a success or not. We set up all our sites with Google Analytics which allows us to track and report website traffic and behaviour, we monitor and measure all aspects of how your site is performing.
Local Versus Offshore
At Sterling Steps, we strongly believe in one-on-one interaction and do not believe in outsourcing. Providers in other countries do not know the Canadian landscape and, likely, do not know Canadian regulations. While taking these routes can save you money initially, the long-term cost to your business can be grave. With long lead times, the potential for miscommunication, and the possibility of subpar or poorly presented deliverables. Your website represents your business and should therefore be held in extremely high regard. Cutting corners will only negatively impact your reputation over time and impact the performance of your site within search.
Cutting corners will only negatively impact your reputation over time!
Summary
Websites and the digital landscape can be a minefield. It is constantly evolving and constantly developing, having a web strategy is crucial. Failure to keep up with trends or not meet your user’s expectations will result in lost business. It is essential for the hub of the business, your website to be fully and comprehensively designed and constructed. This is just the first part, in order to ensure success, post-launch it must be analyzed and optimized on a regular ongoing basis.
Your website and subsequent digital tools become the face of your business!
