Key elements for Optimal Performance of your New Website

Here are some things to support your new website

 1) Search Engine Optimization can be used not only to find your meta keywords, but also for the name of your new website or business.  Try doing a keyword search and see which ones score as easier to gain ranking (usually shown as a green percentage).  When using SEMrush, this would be magic keyword, Google has "Keyword Planner", Google Search Console has "Search Engine Terms visualization" and you can check this article for even more alternatives.

2) While it might be okay to build your site by yourself, it is always good to consider hiring an SEO expert, especially if your page ranking is important to you, and if your website is going to be your primary source of income.  At the very least, start to learn how to use your Google Analytics information, and make sure your website is connected to this so you can be checking your stats and see how any advertising or social media posts have or have not driven more traffic to your site.  It will give you a basic understanding of how much you might need to add to your budget for advertising, especially if you have deadlines to meet.

3) What do you want to learn to do in order to make your website a thing? Directing the work is its own job, if you prefer not to do the actual work.  Keep in mind that no matter who you choose to do the work, it often helps if you learn some basic lingo to make sure what you're talking about is clear.  For instance URL or website addresses are going to be one of those kinds of basic things to know how to use and where to find.  Here are some more words you might want to use in sharing information with your designer: file format, font, serif, sans serif, size, (width x height) resolution, video format, scrollbar, menu, floating menu, favicon, and logo design.  Also if you are still not sure about how to find a document you've saved, you might want to learn to do that prior to asking someone to do this work for you.  It will make it easier for you to learn to direct someone to do what you want.  As a designer, I always try to be sensitive to everyone's needs, and while it does slow down the pace to have to teach anyone, it is also part of my job to make sure my client(s) trust me. That usually means, I teach people as much as I can and I try to be clear and patient. I think what usually gets difficult is that clients themselves often lose patience with the learning process, and sometimes even the act of communicating these issues themselves can be what is trying.  This is understandable because this is why most clients hire a designer.  So it is important to take breaks and make more meetings as needed to cover what work is needed.  A good rule of thumb is not to spend more than twenty minutes at a time on any one problem.

4) Text to HTML Code Ratio should be high. In other words, when your website is not word content heavy, and tends to have more images than words, or more code than words, your website might not rank as high as it could. Text includes all the readable text within the HTML code, such as content within the meta tags, alt attributes for images, and even scripts.  Alt tags for images are often neglected by new website builders because they are not visible from the front end of a website, but they are instrumental in helping identify the images for search engines as well as people with disabilities. Most people agree that the ratio should be between 20-75% but Google search analytics rules are not specific about what these "should" be.  If your ratio is low, let your web designer or seo expert know and decide with your team how you want to bring it up.  Sometimes, it's about downsizing the number of styles you're choosing on the site, and sometimes you may need to add more content. 

5) Figure out how much time you have to commit to updating your website. Do you like writing? You should probably include a blog in your website.  Don't forget to read other people's blogs so that you can support each other as well. Referring others to you is often about finding them and connecting to other great authors first.  Do you enjoy making art or taking pictures?  Consider putting in a gallery on your website that reflects your personal style.  You can also title those images to help people understand your mindset. Are you craving some attention to a hobby that no one knows about you?  It's never a bad idea to pull in something off the wall somewhere if you think it will enhance the style of your site, and give people a sense of who you are.  I would suggest whatever it is you pull in, that you are consistent about posting, dedicating at least x times a month or year minimum to that thing.  You can choose your schedule and good on you if you can support your readers/ watchers/ audience by letting them know your own personal social media calendar.  I'm trying out something called Buffer to help me organize my social media calendar deliveries.  I'll put in more about it as I learn how to use it.

And here are the things you probably don't need to know but I'll share anyway because I have lived through all these changes in technology over the years.  If I were a specific dinosaur, I'd probably be triceratops, but one that has always longed to be a Pteryodactyl.

•   There are many ways to make a website, but the bones of most sites are the same, and ultimately they are coded in HTML or HTML5 with some CSS and JavaScript.  While you don't need to know any code these days, if you have problems with your site, it's always helpful to learn some code to get around those issues.  Understanding the basics of why someone might want to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for instance is helpful for people who have only used in-browser file transfer systems. Filezilla is a great tool for people learning FTP, although there are many good alternatives.  Another platform to learn about that I'm not all that adept with is the PhpMyAdmin or MySQL, which is often used to help set up Wordpress websites for the first time and often is going to be one of the only ways to access databases, if that is something your website contains.  Another kind of website that will inevitably have databases are bulletin boards.  There are a lot of reasons you might need these kinds of servers, but again, with the advent of website services like SquareSpace and Carrd, a lot of these things are no longer as important to learn as they used to be.  Another outdated software that I used to be relatively good at is Adobe Flash. Nowadays the program has evolved to something called Adobe Animate, but I don't think anyone uses it the way they used Flash back in the day. In other words, the fully animated website has gone the way of the Dodo.
  
  
• SSL certification is as of 2018 or so the norm and a necessary element of websites that want to share information to any user.  This is because of the problems that often occur with hacked websites, as well as privacy concerns that may arise from this.  Another legal issue that often gets neglected with website building is having a privacy policy laid out on the website to address how the site manages any contact information that the business or personal site receives from interested parties.  Finally, and this one is a relatively new one for me, although it is California law for websites, you must have a cookies button, and most people use a pop up so that people are forced to acknowledge and be able to turn them off if they want to.  Cookies, for those like me who tend not to notice are things like Google Analytics which tracks whether or not you are on the website, and how you interact with the site. It might be able to tell whether or not you've scrolled part way down the page, or whether or not you've clicked on any button.  I've only recently learned to put the cookies button on my site, but I'm still learning how to make it able to give people the option to turn it off.  This is also something that as a user, you can learn to do without the button, usually found in the settings of your browser.
  

•  Images. I feel like I'm learning about a new image format every three years or so. The latest ones I've been learning about are SVGs, which are some of the fastest loading animations you can find because they are basically not images but are vectors simplified into algorithms.  Some of the more common images include PNGs and GIFs, which can both be transparent.  I recommend Squoosh.io for any compression of images.   These days with HEICs, the apple iPhone has made it feel like there is no difference between an image and a video.  You could say that was true with GIFs too since they are both stills and animated, but iPhones have made the imgs much more generic.