Feature-Rich Website Designs
1. Know Your Visitors
2. Getting Listed
3. User-Driven Content
4. E-Commerce
5. Pushing Your Website
1. Know Your Visitors
A website is one of two things: it is either a useful tool, or it is a waste of time.
For example, let's say you operate a website. Some basic questions are:
- Do you know how many visitors your website had today?
- Do you know what pages of your website they viewed?
- Do you know if any visitors encountered problems, such as broken links?
Visitors are everything. Websites are pointless without them. If the above questions can't simply be answered with a "yes," then your website isn't very useful. Because as far as you know, no one is even looking at it except yourself.
I learned this lesson myself the hard way. So to remedy this problem, I created an advanced traffic analysis tool that knows things such as what pages are being viewed the most, what visitors are interested in, the duration of visits, and so on. Such information provides great insight into what works—and what doesn't—with respect to your website goals.
Based on the concept of sessions, this tool goes far beyond what basic "stats" and server log files can tell. It is the single most important tool in assessing your website's performance and worth to your business. That's why I developed it, and that's why it's included in all my website designs.
2. Getting Listed
Perhaps you've seen the myriad of offers to get your website listed on "all the major search sites" such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These offers are dubious at best. If you really want prominent mention of your website with Google, for example, all you need to do is contact their advertising department and they'll tell you how much to send.
By far, the manner in which websites become available on Google and the like is simply by being there in the first place. All the major search sites regularly and freely "crawl" websites—including yours—for stuff to make searchable by users on the Internet.
However, sometimes it can take a while for Google etc. to crawl your website. But there are steps you can take to give yourself a headstart in the "getting listed" game.
Google created something called Sitemaps, which are actually used by all the major search sites nowadays. If your website has one of these special Sitemap files in place, it will tell Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc. precisely what pages of your website you want listed, when they were last updated, and so on.
Rather than leaving to chance the search sites find your content, Sitemaps explicitly guide "robots" (the programs that do the crawling) to exactly the pages of your website that matter to you. Sitemaps are an indispensable part of any modern website, and that's why they're part of all my designs.
3. User-Driven Content
Many websites today are oriented around online communities: people blogging, families sharing photos and videos, folks posting on forums, authors publishing their work and so on.
There are several "free" versions of such tools out there, but each is mostly an attempt to be an end-all-be-all solution. As such, they always fall short when attempts are made to integrate them within an encompassing and unified website design.
User-driven content is a great way to get your website out there and noticed. In keeping with the idea of seamless integration, I've developed a set of content management tools including forums, blogs, email/subscription lists, and media albums that fit and work together with your overall website goals.
4. E-Commerce
If your website wishes include offering services and/or products, you'll need good tools to make it easy for your customers to find what they want, place the order, and finalize the payment.
Building a successful business is hard enough as it is, and by no means is a website any guarantee for added success. But if you intend to "tool up" your business with a website, there are certain expectations any e-shopper has that your website needs to meet.
Towards that end, I've created a set of tools including secure and intuitive "fewest-clicks" shopping carts, customer accounts that are easy to create and manage, and integration with payment options such as PayPal.
5. Pushing Your Website
These days, having a website sitting there waiting for clicks isn't enough. Modern websites employ subscription-based techniques to push their content out to users.
One such technique in heavy use nowadays is called RSS: Really Simple Syndication. By creating an RSS "feed" for your website, users can subscribe to it and be notified automatically of updates, news, promotions, etc. as they occur.
Another technique is tried-and-true email subscription. Users simply sign up to receive updates by providing their email address. When updates and the like occur, subscribers are automatically sent an email about it.
Both of these push-based techniques are available in my website designs.