Hosting Solutions
- Shared hosting – this is usually a low cost option and typically costs about $5 to $10 a month per site. I have set up sites on Hostgator and Digital Ocean. Pros: cheap and great customer service. Cons: very poor performance.
- Cloud Hosting – The only cloud solution I set up was on Amazon Web Services. Pros: can be cheaper than shared hosting (below $1 in some cases) and the price scales to usages automatically. Cons: It takes considerably longer to configure.
- Custom Hosting – If you are using WordPress, there are some hosts that are tailored to WordPress. Pros: exceptionally fast, auto backups daily, integration with Git, built in CDN solution, exceptional customer service, several built in solutions, support with migration. Cons: costs $35/month.
Content Management System (CMS) deployment
- WordPress – I have built several sites with WordPress. Finding development or theme design for this CMS is really easy. You can find pre-made themes as low as $50. You can get custom themes made for very little as so many know that framework. Someone that knows what they are doing over seas will charge about $20/hour, someone locally will charge about $50/hour, and an agency will charge about $200/hour. This is one of those cases where the most expensive solution is not always the best solution. In fact it is rarely the best solution. Setting up WordPress can be done in under an hour. I can also configure most plugins like Google Analytics. The reason so many people like WordPress is there are over 40,000 plugins maintained. PHP developers are pretty easy to come by if you need a custom plugin, but usually you can find pretty much whatever you need.
- Drupal – I started with Drupal and I think it is more flexible than WordPress, but there are not as many plugins or themes available. Basic install times are the same as WordPress, as are the costs of themes and plugins. Drupal calls plugins modules, but the concept is identical. A lot of the larger agencies use Drupal.
- MediaWiki – I have set up MediaWiki and I think a lot of companies don’t realize how great a tool like this can be. MediaWiki is the open source platform that Wikipedia is run on. You can set up your own Wiki. There are two ways you can use this. MediaWiki is great for manuals for your users or the public. You can set it up where only your company can edit or you can add users as you see fit. You can also leave it open to the public to modify where if a modification is made. You can monitor each page so that you know when a change is made. In this way the community can improve your manual. You can also set up a Wiki strictly for internal use. Only your employees would have access. If you have a large number of products or parts, a solution like this can be really useful. Let’s say you make software. Your marketing team can list key points for sales teams and link to specific use cases. Sales teams can note features commonly requested. Development teams can list known issues and even provide temporary fixes, show system requirements, explain complicated processes, and list features currently under development. It seems every company has it’s own language and acronyms. You can make a single reference point for everything about your business. The time it takes to deploy something like this just depends on how you want it configured. A simple, out of the box configuration can be done in about half a day. To see what that looks like, you can check out ProDeum.org. Things that you might want set up for this is a custom logo, analytics, permissions, and notifications. Out of the box, the permissions are set up like Wikipedia.
Search Engine Optimization
I have worked for companies that have entire teams dedicated to this. Fundamentally, this is straight forward. Obviously the more sites competing for a search term, the harder it gets. Any agency that does SEO is going to tell you there are on going things that need to be done. The only way to ensure that you are always at the top is to pay to be there. These are the fundementals:
- Submitting your site – Search engines need to know to look for you. They have programs that scan your site (crawlers) and check where links go and how the well the site is set up, but before that happens, they need to know you exist. They have a process to submit a site. This can be done really quickly. I can do this in an hour. There is a catch. These tools report crawl errors and if you don’t address them, they really hurt your ranking. It then becomes important to monitor these crawl errors. These crawl reports can be integrated into most analytic tools and you can set them up as part of a dashboard and address them if they have problems.
- Content – When search engines like Google start crawling your site, they are going to monitor how often you create new content. If you have a static site that never updates, that is not going to rank as well as a site that is constantly getting updated. There are several ways to go about creating new content. I can help outlining a strategy but I am not interested in creating content. Companies should utilize their marketing teams for this or outsource this to copywriters. You can find some really good writers that work for about $0.10-$0.50 a word.
- Formatting – This is probably the biggest reason for using a CMS. A good CMS will constantly update to make sure it is using the latest best practices. By using a CMS like WordPress or Drupal, you automatically will be using the best practices. At that point you just need to be sure the team creating the content understands those practices and uses the built in tools provided by the CMS.
- Backlinks – In the 90s there were dozens of search engines. The problem was they didn’t know how to validate or quantify the value of a site. Google came up with a solution that has become the industry standard and put them as the most visited site ever. Backlinks. How many sites like to the target site? How “good” are the sites that link to the target site? How many people follow those links? This can be tricky. You used to be able to make dummy sites that link to your site, but Google has gotten increasingly more sophisticated at smelling out those that would try to game their system. Gaming the system, or “black hat” can really, really hurt your site rank. Since Google does not explain how their algorithm works, SEO experts are left guessing. You might pay a firm to help you and they might end up doing serious damage. Google basically says to just make good content. There are some “white hat” methods that are pretty safe and effective. That is why having a good analytics system in place is so important. If you have a bunch of negative links, you need to address that.
- Responsive – This has become a big buzz-word in theme development. Although Google keeps their algorithm a secret, they do give guidelines and they have been really clear that your site needs to work well on both desktop and mobile. One way to test for this is to take your browser window and start changing the pane size. Do does the layout shift when you get to the approximate pixel dimensions of a tablet and then shift again at the dimensions of a mobile phone? Another way to test this is to look at your site on different devices and browsers. There are a lot of frameworks out there (for instance, Bootstrap) that theme developers can use to make sure this is done well so the trick is to know what your theme developer is using to address this. Most themes made for a CMS in the last few years will be responsive.
Analytics
My background is in Marketing Analytics. I am also certified in Google Analytics. I have setup and monitored dozens of sites on several platforms. I have also set up custom dashboards. The great thing about Google Analytics is it tracks about everything. Which can also make it hard to use. Having a custom dashboard, one page that shows you the big picture, can really be helpful. A buzzword used a lot where I used to work is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). My favorite book on KPIs is actually a book by baseball written by a man known for business books. Moneyball. Generally, I would put five main things on a dashboard: total traffic, how many of those people fit my target demographic, what channel did they take, what pages are they looking at, how many of total visitors convert a target or goal. Those five are going to be different depending on your goals. A news site is going to care more about traffic and the pages viewed. An e-commerce site is going to care more about products, sales funnels, conversion rates, and demographics. A service based company is probably going to care about getting contact information and tracking touches. Not only can you set up dashboards in Google Analytics, you can pull that into Google Sheets and embed those sheets on pages only some people can access. I set up a basic one here. Not pretty, but you can see how it would work. That page updates every day automatically. Once it is set up, it does the work itself. It doesn’t have to be a webpage, it can be a sheet that only a team or a few people can see. Google has a really robust permission system built into Google Analytics and Google Sheets. You can set up permissions for teams or individuals and remove access as needed.
Social Marketing
There is a great book called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook written by Gary Vaynerchuck. Gary has been a little bit of an internet celebrity when he took his father’s liquor store from a small mom and pop liquor store to a business doing tens of millions of dollars. How? Youtube. He made a channel that reviewed wine and a site that delivered wine to the surrounding area. He has since been an early stage investor in big hits like Twitter. To condense his formula down it would be 1) pick the social presence that is right for you (in other words, Facebook isn’t always the best bet), 2) post quality content and 3) give more than you ask so that when you ask, your customers will respond because they feel a sense of obligation. There are countless social sites and new ones pop up daily. What is the right strategy? There is no easy answer. It is going to depend on what you do. You will likely want more than one and you will likely have both paid and unpaid. It is important to understand tagging links and integrating that into your analytics solution. It isn’t enough to know where they came from, you need to know if you paid for that click through, what campaign generated the click through, and if it resulted in a goal conversion. Facebook can get you countless pageviews but if it doesn’t get you a goal conversion and increases your bounce rate, I would argue it is hurting more than helping.