What makes a good website in 2014or

Top 8 features and priorities for company websites in 2014

Otto KekäläinenSeravo salad lunchTampere 30.1.2014

LINUX SYSTEMS CONSULTINGAND SUPPORT SERVICES

1. Responsive design

1. Responsive design

1. Responsive designThe share of mobile devices is growing all the time so

websites are required to work on devices of all sizes.

In general the website must work on a broad spectrum of devices and browsers. HTML5 is the best technology (not Flash).

While at it, update the design to look stunning. People have grown accustomed to ever more good looking and easy to use websites and apps.

2. Search engine optimization

2. Search engine optimizationThe majority of visitors to a website come via search

engines (Google).

With search engine optimization you get free search engine visibility.

The heading and texts should describe the company using the most common terms.

2. Search engine optimizationSemantic contents:

Navigation and content separated. Images described in meta attributes. Prices, opening hours, addresses etc. marked using micro formats.

3. Loads fast

3. Loads fast The amount of mobile users (who in general have slow connections) has

increased, and the speed of wired connections hasn't significantly increased either.

Websites should be ever more impressive, but the file size of big images should not grow.

Even small differences matter if there are lots of users: Amazon reports that their sales grew 1 % for each 100 milliseconds their site was optimized to load faster.

Fast pages get better higher search engine rankings. Do you want more users, who stay at your site for longer and are more return more often?

4. Good web addressesShorter equals better: Easier to remember, easier to

type on a touch screen, easier to fit in the 140 characters of a tweet...

WWW is useless. Simply example.com is enough.

Big impact on search engine results: for the seach ”auto” the first results are: autotrader.co.uk,

autoexpress.co.uk, auto-europe.co.uk, auto-italia.co.uk, autocar.co.uk

5. Social media integration

5. Social media integrationA website needs to share content where people

already are, so that the content gets visibility.

Visibility sparks interest to visit the website.

While users visit your website, promote sharing to social networks.

Two-way integration leads to a positive loop!

5. Social media integrationAlso remember map services and directory services

Traditional channels still have their users: provide a RSS feed and an e-mail subscription option

5. Social media integration

Biggest social media referrersExample seravo.fi

VisitsVisits Visits VisitsSocial network

5. Social media integration

Biggest referrers in generalExample seravo.fi

Visits VisitsSource / type

6. Visitor analytics

As an example, a customer's site in 2013

All traffic

Visits per day

6. Visitor analyticsFor most businesses the point of a website is to

increase visibility among potential customers. Well, how many potential customers has there been then?

All investments into a website should be guided by the expected results (ROI). Results should be evaluated from visitor statistics. A weekly PDF report is easy to automate!

7. Easy to updateStylishness is an important part of the visitor impression,

but content in most important. At minimum the content should be correct and current. Wrong information (e.g. price, address, opening hours) on a website will make people angry and spur mistrust.

Management must always remember the website and value it as the most important communication channel. Updating the contents should be so easy that even the CEO can do it

alone, without delay or costs.

7. Easy to updateThe more contents, the bigger the likelihood to be

seen on somebody’s search engine results page

In social media, only new content has potential to spread, not old.

”Sure, I'll update as soon as I have time and can properly concentrate on it...” There must be a dead easy tool for content management!

7. Easy to upgrade

The administration view in the WordPress,available in over 70 languages

7. Easy to update

Full screen mode helps to focus when writing

8. Affordable to improveThere is always something to improve. But there's not

always lots of resources?

Development must be affordable, otherwise it will be infeasible to update the website to the standards of 2014. And 2015, and 2016...

Own your contents, save documents in an open standards format and prefer systems that are open source Break the vendor lock! Even an initially good solution will by time

become just a vendor lock = monopoly = expensive.

8. Affordable to improveAvoid vendor lock-in, choose an open source content management system.

The most popular are WordPress (17%), Drupal, Joomla, Typo3, Liferay...

Contact us when you want Seravo Oyto develop or maintain your

Linux-based information systems

Open seravo.fiMore tips in our blog