A website is no different. It takes careful planning and precise information architecture before you can hammer that first nail, or in this case punch up that first string of code. And because search engine marketing success is so critically dependent on having a website with a solid underlying foundation, future efforts to optimize are riding high on your ability to deliver a cohesive plan today.

A successful website deployment depends on creating a detailed specifications document, just as the house you live in began on paper as architectural blueprints.

Fail to plan, plan to fail.

Whatever we do in life, it is important to be clear about what we want to achieve. Otherwise, we never know when we’ve reached the end of the road. Same goes for your website. Before you begin scripting a “spec doc”, learn as much as possible about the visions and goals for the website.

This can include formulating thoughtful questions that provide relevant insight, creating an in-depth study of the current website and the sites of any potential competitors, and a good old-fashioned brainstorming session with members of the design and development team is always helpful.

The snowflake effect.

A spec doc can be long or short. It can be filled with dazzling bar graphs and glossy photos, or stuffed with plain old text. An ecommerce site planning to sell only two or three different products will probably only require 15 to 20 pages worth of your ideas. A large ecommerce or news site might look like the manuscript version of “War and Peace.”  The point is no two will be alike. Every one is different.

However, stick to this basic structure and you should be fine:

• Purpose of the document
• Description of the project
• Front-end functionality
  • Common features
  • Sitemap and website structure
  • Description of every website page
  • Wireframes (home page and at least 2 other important pages)
  • Miscellaneous functionality
• Back-end functionality
• Use cases
• Conclusion

Delivering the deliverables.

A well-crafted spec doc allows designers and developers to move forward with a project while avoiding any surprises for the client down the line. It should give precise estimates of the time it will take to complete the project This helps control the scope of work and to keep costs from increasing during development.

7 killer tips for a successful specifications document:

1. Time spent on the spec doc should be proportional to the budget. Find out how much time is allocated to the spec doc and how detailed it should be. For example, 15 to 30 hours might be enough for brief document (15 pages and 3 to 4 wireframes), but a more detailed work takes no less than 50 hours. If the project has only 400 hours allocated, it doesn’t make sense to spend 100 hours writing the specs.

2. Don’t dive in head first. Before going into detailed specifications, spend some time thinking about the new website, drawing its structure, and drafting wireframes for the most important pages. Only start working on the specs when you have a clear picture of how the website should work.

3. Home is where the start is. For wireframes, start with the home page. It usually includes links to all important sections of the website, so if the wireframe of the home page is ready, it is easier to work on other sections.

4. Understanding is in the details. If you are working on the redesign of an existing site learn how all sections of the old website work. You’ll be happy you did later. If old sections are cut or left out, the corresponding or replacement sections on the new site should be noted. This is also important when redirecting old URLs that may be linked to from outside sources.

5. Not making a decision is a decision- a bad one. Do not leave empty sections “to be decided later”. Make sure that the spec document covers all website sections.  If anything is not clear, come up with the questions for the client.

6. Make the possible, possible. It is important to make sure that all functionality described in the spec doc is actually feasible. Empty promises lead to hard feelings.

7. We often do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. Avoid possible misunderstandings. Clients might be believe they understood what you said, but often they don’t realize that what they heard is not what you meant.Most clients won’t have knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, etc., but you should still be able to make this document clear for him as well.

Here are some key improvements made with the new design:

• Targeted service landing pages.
• More detailed “About Us” content.
• More attractive case studies.
• Stronger calls-to-action across the website.
• Clearly differentiating messaging on the home page.
• A slicker portfolio.
• Easier to read Blog and Business Learning Center.

Behind all of this design and content lies a powerful Content Management System that gives us total control over the entire website.

There are still many improvements to be made, and we will be conducting copious amounts of split testing to find ways to increase our conversion rates.

To learn more about our redesign, please take a look at this case study.

Good marketing brings in qualified traffic; good design turns visitors into customers. If you can improve both at once, the benefits compound.

The combination of traffic and a good conversion rate can be very powerful.

When we build sites, we’re looking at things from the customer’s point of view. And while our customers value good-looking sites, they’re making an extra investment in order to get a site that brings in more revenue. We’re always able to redesign a site so it gets more revenue per visitor — but what about bringing in more visitors?

If visits go up 50%, and revenue per visit goes up 50%, total sales will rise 125%, meaning that an extra investment in marketing can actually get an even higher return than the original redesign got.

We don’t just focus on hypotheticals, though. Consider one of our clients, R.A.G. New York. We rebuilt their site to make it more user-friendly and easy to navigate, but we also launched a long-term SEO campaign to get them higher rankings for the keywords that matter to them. The result? April traffic is up tenfold from where it was last year. But conversions have also soared — from 1.5% to up to 5% for some pages. This compounding effect means that revenue (and profit) have increased even faster than conversions or visits.

We didn’t stop at redesigning the site and marketing them online, though: we also talked them up in the mainstream press. That’s gotten great results, too: R.A.G. was recently profiled in the New York Daily News.

Also, while most marketing firms are forced to hire outside to help to do heavy web development work, we are able to do everything in-house. Our marketing team sends requirements to our professional development team who then execute any of the on-site edits that need to be made. Many SEO’s profess to be experts in design, development, and SEO, but we prefer to have specialists in each field work on a project.

We’re constantly on the lookout for new ways to improve the results our clients get. From building great websites to bringing in visitor to getting attention from the press, we’re determined to bring our clients attention and income.

When it comes to some of the coolest, most aesthetically pleasing, eco-friendliest, and trendiest items to own, SIGG is at the top of my list.

SIGG, “The Original Swiss Bottle” is an urban hipster necessity. The bottles themselves are made from reusable aluminum, and can be seen in the hands of the world’s trendsetters, from Sunset Boulevard to Park Avenue. SIGG can boast of over three thousand custom designs, and they win plaudits for their environmentally friendly manufacturing.

Recently I stumbled onto SIGG’s ecommerce arm (mysigg.com), wanting to buy another water bottle for a friend after receiving a SIGG over the Christmas holidays.

Let’s just say that my first impressions were a bit disappointing.

Having worked with successful ecommerce clients before, I could see lots of room for improvement. I asked my colleagues here at Blue Fountain Media a few questions about the site:

• “What do you like about mysigg.com?”
• “What are some of the things you dislike?
• “What are some suggestions?”

What do you like about mysigg.com?

This is a great example of how a great brand name and value proposition can really bring you great SEO results. The website ranks really well for relevant keywords such as “water bottles” and the variety of ways to qualify these water bottles: aluminum, stylish, eco-friendly, reusable. They have fantastic rankings within Google thanks to good quality links they have pointing to them, from sites like Backpacker , Wired Blog, and Worst Witch. — Alhan Keser, Director of Search Engine Marketing

I like the logo, the central area featuring various products, and the linking of smaller boxes in the lower part of the page. The photography is nice, the pictures in the shopping sections are very clean. They have a very nice use of Ajax collapsing and expanding on the FAQ page. — Lonnie Mann, Designer

Their “questions” page uses Ajax very well and is very thorough with some of the FAQ. I like the live chat feature, great customer service when you need it – very well executed! —Ishmael Vasquez, Social Media Associate

What are some of the things you dislike?

For bottles with great design that provide the consumer a sense of individuality, the site does not reflect this aesthetic design. The heads on the “About Us” page are a bit odd and the overall organization looks like a website template. —Megan Hilts, Account Manager

The plain text JavaScript popup upon the initial loading of the site in all-caps is a bit obtrusive. There is no padding on the left side of the left navigation, and the text is pushed right up against the edge of the browser window, which makes it hard to read. The lines (item name, price, quantity box, buy button) below the pictures and titles in the shopping sections are touching and need some space. The “Your Cart” button (and the rest of the column) sticks against the right side of the browser window, which on my screen, places it very far away from the rest of the content. — Lonnie Mann, Designer

The title tags could definitely benefit from some improvement, both for search engines and for users. They are not always helpful, as words are repeated and the more important keywords are not placed first. They are also too long. It’s great that they have such outstanding rankings for relevant keywords, but I really wonder about the conversion rate. Sending customer to a landing page that prompts users to click on an “OK” button before showing the products is not the best strategy for maximizing online sales. — Alhan Keser, Director of Search Engine Marketing

What are some suggestions?

Try to do more with less. Get rid of all the useless clutter and pop-ups, and focus on what the users want out of a website – easy access to the information they need. SIGG has a great brand name and a quality product, so with a cluttered website, the hard-to-navigate appearance may be the only factor between extra sales and better conversion rates. —Byrne Hobart, Social Media Marketer

I would suggest a redesign with a look and feel that reflects the design of the bottles that adds interactive features such as “inquire about the product”, “rate the product”, “add to wish list”, “recommend a product to a friend”, “design your own bottle.” SIGG is a significant product in the environmental and eco-friendly movement, and their website should reflect that. —Megan Hilts, Account Manager

“I highly suggest a custom website redesign to improve the conversion rate, build a community of loyal followers, and use their brand to increase awareness. Such a well-known website should start running pay-per-click at least on their brand name. However, I would not advise doing any type of paid search advertising until their website is improved. — Alhan Keser, Director of Search Engine Marketing

By implementing some simple changes like a website re-design, mysigg.com’s image as an eco-friendly, aesthetically pleasing, cutting-edge urban necessity will result in more sales and a better experience for the consumer.

“Specifications Document.” “Information Architecture.” What they mean and why your website quote isn’t complete without them

So you’ve called a few website companies and they may have told you it’s necessary to complete a specifications document, information architecture, research or discovery phase, but what exactly is that, and why is it necessary before giving a quote for the work?

Would you start building a house before drafting a blue print?

Where would the windows go, how many bed rooms would you have, how high are the ceilings? Similar questions need to be answered before starting an e-commerce or Web 2.0 website. The website company should walk you through a number of questions, much like an architect would, in order to draw up a blueprint for your website. Everything from the number of pages, how your users log in, whether user comments need admin approval, the purchase process, etc. For the majority of websites, this process should take a professional company about 40-50 hours and produce a document of 20-30 pages. It’s a back and forth, collaborative process with about 8-10 hours of feedback required from the client, but no technical knowledge on their part.

What should you expect?

Depending on the size of your website project, you might get 15-20 pages, or over 300. Either way, it should include the following:

• Detailed sitemap of main pages and subpages
• List of all front-end and back-end features and how each works
• Exactly how many hours each feature is going to take to design and develop
• How the user makes a purchase and how the admin collects, if the site is e-commerce
• How comments, rating, or other interactive features work, for sites with Web 2.0 tools
• Wireframes for homepage and a few other main pages to determine layout and structure

What does this document mean for my site?

Now that the site has been appropriately planned out, you and the website company know exactly how many hours the website will take to complete. The company can now give you the most accurate quote for the work. The document is so detailed you could hand it to a web developer you’ve never met and they would be able to complete the project with almost no questions asked. With everything on paper, it’s also much easier to decide which features are essential to the launch of the site, and which features you may want to put on hold for a Phase II.

When can we actually start the website?

Now the fun part starts, picking colors, images and nailing down the look and feel of the website to lay on top of the wire frames already completed. For a professional website company the rest of the website is easy to complete because everything has been detailed out for all the members of the website team from the designers to the developers. It’s now a streamlined process to getting your website up and running. Most websites from this point take about 6-10 weeks to complete the site. While the website is finishing the development phase it’s now time to give the online marketing team a call to figure out the best steps to help users find your website. The website is built to convert users into leads, members and repeat traffic; now it’s time to start driving qualified users to the site through online marketing tactics like Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Your website is getting traffic, but these visitors aren’t taking action. Is it time for a redesign? Before you scrap the whole design and start from scratch, consider if it’s only a few elements on the page that are hindering your success. And thanks to Google Website Optimizer, there’s an easy way to find out using real user behavior.

It’s a little ironic to talk about best practices when the whole point of testing is that websites are not one-size-fits-all; best practices for page layout, calls-to-action, and information architecture might not apply to your specific niche of users. Nevertheless, here are some tips for setting up experiments that should apply most of the time:

1. Don’t test too many things at once.

If you’re trying out different colored “buy” buttons, don’t try to test headline, text and product image variations at the same time. Unless your landing pages get an extremely high quantity of traffic, pick one or two variables at a time to avoid having your testing go on interminably to get a decent sample size, and then having to spend just as much time interpreting your mountains of data.

2. Get a decent sample size.

Don’t overanalyze in the first few days of testing. I’ve had variable combinations that looked like a sure bet in the first 48 hours, with a sample size of a few hundred, only to be left in the dust a few weeks later.

3. Be consistent.

While you want to do everything you can to improve your website, don’t scare users away by making changes on a landing page that will make them wonder how many designers you had working on your website if they decide to click through to the rest of your site.

If you’re already doing SEO or pay-per-click, provided it’s done correctly, you should have a steady stream of qualified visitors. You’ve already distilled an audience that is interested in what you have to offer; don’t squander this willingness to transact by leaving them to fend for themselves once they’re on your site.

Writing for search engines is becoming increasingly like writing for humans. Search engines used to base rankings for a particular keyterm on the frequency of the term in question on a page. Today, many more factors are taken into account by Google’s algorithms, with the goal of determining the relevancy of the document to the user’s search query. As a general rule, it is more important to write natural sounding articles than to target them at robots. Here are some of the various factors to consider when writing for search engines:

Make your copy bounce-proof: extract important information.

There is still much debate over whether or not Google takes bounce rate into consideration, but I feel that it makes sense for Google to use all of the data available when ranking websites, not just some of it. Assuming this is the case, if a website shows up for a certain query but has a high bounce rate – which is generally defined as the percentage of users who spend an extremely short period of time of the page – it probably means that it is not the best result to display for that particular query. Google will test out certain results to see how well they perform on page 1.

For example, if you write a dense paragraph about how to change a halogen light bulb, you can expect to have a high bounce rate (percentage of users who leave your website immediately).  Most visitors are unlikely to search through dense text to find instructions. Instead, they prefer a layout closer to eHow’s articles that clearly lay everything out, step-by-step.

This isn’t always possible, especially when you’re writing articles or essays. However, you may post a long, dense essay about the comic book industry of the 1940′s, but have a relatively low bounce rate because most relevant search queries result from users interested in the subject matter and therefore willing to read through your long paragraphs. However, if a user is looking for a quick fact – such as the name of the fellow who criticized the comic book industry for its lack of morals – but the name is buried in text, your essay-like layout is not ideal. The way around this is to have a list of key information alongside your copy, or in a table of contents like Wikipedia does.

Write to attract links:

When writing, while keeping in mind bounce rates and visually appealing copy (bold points, lists, useful sidebars, etc.), think about writing pieces that bloggers will want to link to, will want to save to their bookmarks, and tell others about.  Look at the homepage of Digg and Reddit. You will notice that the posts are straight to the point (i.e. right now an article entitled “Is foreplay really that important?” by the Sun is on the front page of Digg.)

Be kind, link out:

Bloggers who don’t link to anyone else often times don’t get linked back to. One of the best ways to encourage others to link to your website is to get their attention by using them as a source for an article. They will appreciate the link and are more likely to one day return the favor.

It doesn’t matter what you think it’s called, it’s how others refer to it:

Just because you know your products or services under a certain name does not mean that Google users employ the same words to describe them when searching.You will lose out on a lot of traffic and have a lower conversion rate if you use industry-only terms.

The on-page minimum requirement checklist:

However, sometimes even if your copy is great, your website is holding you back. Here are the most important points, which are minimum requirements to have for a successful SEO campaign.

Unique URLs: The website should have unique URLs for each article, which do not change. When I worked at the IHT.com, the URL of the same story would change over the course of the night, leading to what is considered duplicate content (the same content) which Google removes from its index.  Also, it dilutes the link value to articles across a bunch of URLs instead of focusing all links to one unique URL.  Another problem can occur if a website uses frames, which change the content of a page, without changing the URL by pulling HTML information from another source. Obviously if a website uses Flash and uses one URL for all pages, that is also a problem (for more reasons than one).

Crawler-friendly internal linking structure: Often times, people will wonder why some of their pages don’t show up in search results although they are highly relevant. The problem could be that search engines can’t follow the links from the homepage to the sub pages. Many times, complex javascript and especially Flash menus are not readable to search engines. To help solve the problem on the short-term, links can be added to the footer that accurately describe the contents of the pages being linked to, but the best thing to do is to link to each page from within a relevant body of text. Google takes into consideration the text surrounding a link so there is a big difference between one link placed in a sidebar among 50 links and a link in a paragraph describing similar things to what is on the page being linked to.

Use CSS instead of tables: In the code, content should come first, before sidebars, etc other junk that will reduce the relevancy of the page. CSS is the solution to this. You can place content below a menu visually, but above it in the code.

Page load time should be minimal: Search engine only wait for heavy pages to load when they consider them to be important for some reason. If your website is brand new and takes a long time to load, then it will most likely not get crawled at all or very often.

Page titles should be unique: The title tag of your article page should contain the few keywords you are targeting, but remain within 70 characters for best presentation in search result pages.

HTML code should be used as it was meant to be used: Every HTML document has a hierarchical architecture that permits search engines to determine what is most important. Besides the positioning of content, search engines also take into account the way HTML tags are used to surround it. For example, the title of an article should be in an H1 tag, other less important subheadings should be in H2 and so on.

But then again, I have come across a wide variety of literary pieces via Google Book Search that I would have never sought out in a library. It is very important for businesses to look into what format they should use when providing information to users. The point is to engage audiences and draw attention organically with strong content distributed in the right format.

Take the George Orwell journal entries as an example. All of these entries could have been (and may be) already published in PDF format, downloadable via a website. However, they are being posted one blog post at a time, on orwelldiaries.wordpress.com, 30 years after they were written – to the day. After reading about it in the New York Times, I was quite intrigued, but then found the content to be mainly comments about the weather – not the most interesting of subjects for an Orwell fan. Today’s entry:

August 26, 1938
Hot. Dense ground-mist early this morning. Many blackberries now ripe, very large & fairly sweet. Also fair number of dew-berries…(read the rest)

I expect the content to get more interesting, but the format is still engaging to audiences as it accomplishes a number of things:

1. Gradual release. The entries are delivered to readers as they were written in the journal, one at a time, so there is some waiting involved every day and each one is “bite-size”. No one wants to read through a giant document.

2. Connection to writer. There is the temporal connection of the entries being written exactly 30 years to the date.

3. Format-ready content. As the New York Times article points out, his writing is suitable for a blog. Orwell may well have been a blogger if he were still around.

This example proves that content is not always king, that maybe it is queen from time to time, when format can really play a strong role in engaging an audience.

Online consumers have become increasingly savvy about what a good website should look like. If yours does not fit the criteria then they are going to simply move on. Also there are basic features, such as strong calls to action, which push visitors to take action such as request a quote or contact you. Here are few things that you should pay attention to when re-designing your website:

Modernize. Web design trends are constantly evolving and you need to keep up. Multi-colored text was cool in the late 90’s but is definitely out of the picture today. Same goes for animated GIF’s. Now it is all about subtleties and classy web design. Minimalism has taken center stage along with sleek Flash designs.

Use Buttons. Give visitors something to push. Always provide your visitors with options. “Go here”, “go there”, “take a tour”, “request a quote”, etc. are all important means of keeping visitors on your site and encouraging them to take some sort of action, whether that be to buy or share your products online.

Don’t make them wait.
Most visitors do not stay on a web page for longer than 3 seconds. If your page does not load in that time, than there is even less of a chance of visitors sticking around. If your pages look great thanks to loads of Flash effects, but take a long time to load, then consider re-doing your Flash graphics to better optimize them in size and load time.

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