Part I: Overview of the Web

Overview to Knowledge Center

by Pauline Sugarman

Created December 2006

This article follows a general sequential unfolding of the steps to creating a successful website. I say generally, because some aspects are sequential, while others are elements to be considered as a whole as you prepare to define and create your website. It is my hope that by the end of this article you will come away with a strong sense of the important elements that go into the website development process. We will start by reviewing the history of the web, because its roots, in sharing knowledge and creating communities, are still the main principles driving the web today.

History of the Internet - Boom and Bust

Most of us recall the internet coming into focus sometime in the mid-1990s. We became aware of the 'web' and of web sites and the ability to search on the internet to find information on a growing number of subjects. But, the beginning of the World Wide Web actually started with World War II and the desire to create radar to defeat the Axis powers. This initiative spurred the development of computers to process the complex radar messages. Research and development continued After WWII, into the the Cold War years, with monies being given to MIT and the first high-tech companies, one being Bolt, Barenek and Newman. They developed a system for the Pentagon called the ARPAnet, which by 1969 had networked 4 computers!

During the 1970s and early 1980s, the “net” spread to scientific communities and to universities. By 1991 Tim Berners-Lee had built and made available the first web browser (text only) that would run on any computer which enabled other scientists around the world to access documents across the internet. Thus the net was established as a new means for knowledge to be shared freely between people around the world.

1992 was in important year for the internet. Up until 1992, official policy for the Internet forbade anyone from using the network to make money. It was a U.S. Rep. Frederick Boucher who proposed dropping the restriction with an amendment to the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. Also, in 1992, Mark Andreessen at the University of Illinois developed the first graphic oriented browser which became known as Netscape.

With the development of Netscape and the Amendment to Act 1950, Microsoft decided that the “net” was a go. In 1995, Microsoft released Microsoft Internet Explorer and included it as part of the Windows 95 operating system. This was really the start of the internet as we know it today. By the late 1990s the hi-tech “boom” was in full swing. This period is now looked on by many as the most astonishing burst of irrational exuberance in history.

Many people remember all too well what occurred next. As more and more ventures developed their product and came online, it became apparent that very few were making money, or would ever make money. By 2000 the internet’s boom days seemed numbered. As more and more ventures ran out of money, their dreams of changing the world with their internet creations went bust. By late 2000 and early 2001 the news media announced the demise of the internet. It had failed and it was over. If the big ventures couldn’t make it work, how could anyone? But, while the reports kept coming in on all the failures, many smaller, less glamorous undertakings were beginning to have success. They found niches that worked - and some actually started making money. (To read more about the History of the Internet, see How it All Got Started and Where We Are Today.)

Principles Guiding the Internet Today

What has emerged from their efforts is the strengthening of fundamental strategies or website design principles that underlie successful websites, the principles inherent in the web from its inception. These website design principles continue to guide the evolution of the internet today and are very important to any business, from the smallest to the largest, wanting to succeed on the web today. These principles are:

Creating Communities - We Belong
Power to the People
Give and You Shall Receive
Integrated Marketing (not a purely internet principle but important enough to include)

YouTube is a strong example of a website driven by these principles. But a business does not have to be large to incorporate these principles into their design. Think of way to create a feeling of community. If you are selling a niche product, you will already be drawing to you like-minded users. Many websites create forums where people can talk with each other and share information. Power to the people is another way of say interactivity. How can you empower your customers? Can they give you feedback easily? Do you have a way for them to make comments or reviews? Giving and you shall receive is another way of saying that knowledge should be shared freely. The more knowledge you have to share on your subject, the more you will be looked on as an authority in your field and the more Google and the search engines will reward you for your efforts. Keep these principles in mind as you start to design your site. The more these principles are active in your site, the more successful you will be on the web. (To read more about this, see Important Website Design Principles Guiding the Internet Today.

Do I Even Need a Website?

Before we start to explore creating a mission statement and more, it is important to point out that not every business needs a website. If all your business is coming from your immediate area, your needs may differ from someone who's business is primarily from outside the immediate area. (You can read more about this topic in Do I Even Need A Website? - Local versus Global Business)

Defining your Mission, Goals and Audiences

Whether you create your own web site or use a professional web site design firm, you will need to define your mission, your goals and the audience or targeted demographics for your web site.

Once you have defined your mission, goals and the different audiences, consider what the needs are for each group. What problems do they have that you will be able to help solve? What benefits are they seeking from you? This is a very important step, as from here on out, every aspect of your web site design will be primarily geared to fulfilling your audience(s) needs. That's as it should be. Yes, you want to be highly ranked in the search engines, but it does you no good to have a potential client enter your website, only to exit because they did not feel the website helped them solve their specific problem. (To read more about defining your mission and goals see Defining your Mission, Goals and Audiences )

Your Website's Role in Your Marketing Plan

Along with defining your user group(s) ask yourself, what marketing mediums do your targeted user groups use to find your services or products? What role will the website play in conjunction with these other marketing outlets?

Planning Your Website to Ensure it's User Friendly

Initial Design Phase

Referred to as "usability issues" in the web community, usability is all about making sure your web site speaks to and fulfills your specific audience. Once you have defined your mission, goals, audience and the benefits they seek, you're ready to begin the layout and design of your site. There are many varying views in the web community about what constitutes 'good' design, but almost all will agree on some basic design principles. First and foremost, when you are planning out your website, remember that it needs to be about fulfilling your clients' needs. Every aspect of its design, from layout, to color, copy to graphics should be focused on creating an atmosphere of ease of use and fulfilling this purpose. Following are some important guidelines to help ensure your success:

As you are planning the layout of your site, consider the groups of people that will be using it and what will make them feel the most comfortable on your site. The easier it is for visitors to form a mental model of your site, the more likely the site will have good sales conversions.
Place yourself in your visitor’s shoes and imagine navigating through your site. Are there any moments when you would feel lost, or frustrated? If customers feel lost or frustrated, they may abandon their visit (and go somewhere else).
Does every element of your page design help further your goals? Nowadays, people are enamored with Flash animations and bells and whistles. But these may actually lessen your users' experience rather than enhance it. (see The Dos and Don'ts of Flash Design)

Other design elements that all websites should include are:

Make sure your logo is visible and that "what you do" is spelled out right up front.
Your website needs to be easy to navigate.
Include contact information on every page.
Make sure there is enough contrast between the background and your choice of font color.
Include a Site Map - a page containing a link to every page in your website.
Pages should load quickly. Branding sites can load a little slower, but shopping site pages need to load within 4 seconds.

Usability Testing

No matter how well you may have designed a web site, there is no way to know exactly how your customers will react to it until you have them sit down and use it. They may come up with all sorts of questions that you may not have thought of. Usability testing allows you to get first-hand feedback from your targeted groups before publishing your website. Usability testing has become very sophisticated. But there is a simple test that works very well for helping to correct any stumbling blocks in the design. For this usability test try to find an objective 'sample' audience comprised of 5-6 sample test users, preferably customers or persons from your targeted users groups. Give them a set of tasks to complete and watch carefully their ability to complete these tasks. Watch where they are looking for items on a web page. Ask them to talk out loud as they perform their tasks. Do not answer their questions or try to help them complete the tasks. Are there any stumbling blocks? Is there any point where they become frustrated and want to give up? Use this feedback to refine the site until it is a usable as possible before publishing it (uploading to the web).

Completed Site - Measuring Success After the Launch

After the site has been launched and has started to be found in the search engines, it is a good time to explore your website's logs and stats to track the actual use of the website. For instance, you may find that people are coming to your website but instead of completing a task (such as buying an item) they are leaving at a particular page. (You can read more about Usability Issues in the Ensuring Your Site is "User" Friendly article.)

Search Engine Optimizing

If people are using the internet search engines, such as Google, to find your type of products or services, you will probably be interested in increasing your chances of landing at the top of an organic search results, called “search engine optimization” or "SEO". While this section comes at the end of the article, search engine optimizing is an integral part of the website design and creation. It takes a lot of work and a long-term commitment as well as creativity to work your way up to the top of the search engine rankings. And after all your work, there is no guarantee that your website will achieve a specific ranking in a search engine or that your ranking will stay the same. But the rewards can be great. And for those companies that profit from the web, it can be well worth the time and effort.

Search Engines use what are referred to as “spiders”, also knows as “robots” to crawl from link to link through the vast web of pages currently uploaded to the net. As they crawl they create indexes of the Web, which in turn are searched according to certain criteria (the algorithm). Once searched by the criteria, the results are delivered, ordered by relevancy to those search criteria. These search engine spiders are considered pretty primitive in some ways and are still fundamentally text driven. While the crawling capabilities may advance in the coming years, text is still the safest route when creating websites with the desire to be highly ranked.

Be the Very Best within Your Community

To reign supreme in Google (and the other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN) means to be the very best, most informative website for your area of interest. Google wants to return the best results to its searchers. If your site has the most knowledge to offer, Google will more likely reward you. And you will naturally be sought out by other websites that have similar interests (your "community"), who will want to link to you as a valued resource. This means that you will naturally, over time, have many relevant websites linking to you, called "relevant links", Google's second main criteria.

Keyword Phrases

Both Google and Yahoo rely in good part on searching through the text on each page to read what that page’s content is about. If it finds that the phrase called the "keyword phrase" entered in the search field is also prominently used on the page at hand, it boosts that page’s ranking within the search results. For example, if someone searches for 'green felt hats' Google and Yahoo will search through their index of pages looking for results that match this phrase. Therefore, incorporating keyword phrases into the copy and on the page help the search engines to recognize what that page is about.

It does us no good to be ranked high for terms that are irrelevant to what we truly are about. So, before we can place a keyword phrase prominently in our text, we have to decide what search terms we want to be found by. Ask yourself, what exactly do you have to offer? Notice also that I called this section Keyword Phrase, not Keyword. One-word terms are almost always too vague. What we want to do is bring traffic to our site that is looking for exactly what we have to offer. Narrow your definition so that the traffic that comes to your web site is highly targeted. There are two great tools for keyword research. I recommend Wordtracker at:http://www.wordtracker.com/. There are other elements that are important to search engine optimizing such as Title Tags, copy writing, Google Site Map Submission and linking campaigns. To learn more about Search Engine Optimizing see the Search Engine Optimization section of the Knowledge Center articles.

Paying Your Way to the Top

Many website owners are now bidding on certain keywords and if their bid is among the top bids, their ad will appear on the search engine’s Ad area or “sponsored listings” area. Once they secure their spot, they pay each time someone clicks on their ad. It's a way to get listed in the search engines without having to wait for Google or any other search engine to 'discover' you. But the downside is that there is no ceiling to how high the bids may go. As big businesses, with their bigger budgets, become more active on the web, bids continue to rise. Usually, a combination of natural optimization and paying per click can be the best route for ensuring your visibility. To read more about Paying Your Way to the Top see the Search Engine Pay for Placement section of the Knowledge Center.

This concludes the Overview to Succeeding on the Web Today. It by no means covers all the aspects of the web, but should give you a good start to understanding the most important factors to consider when creating your site. The arrow below will lead through individual articles that expand on this article....

How it All Got Started