Tekpals

With such head-starts, the five figure medium-sized website cost quickly becomes four. The four figure small business website cost becomes three. The home-grown sideline business goes from three figures to two (many premium WordPress themes designs are available for only $50). You can even get a WordPress website on their sister site for free. Buy a domain name for it and you’re in business for just $10.

To the short-sighted web developer or designer it’s the end of days. To the business owner it should be the start of getting the website they always thought they were going to get, but never quite did, for a price they can justify, and that everyone can use. via – WordPress The Quiet Revolution

I found this quote on a website for web developers and I think that the implications of this trend are fantastic. In the old day of web development, any organization had to throw their hopes over the webmaster wall and hope for the best. They were dependent upon the webmaster for every part of the website including the design and getting the content just right.

The result was that websites were expensive, cumbersome and really didn’t help an organization deliver their message.

In my experience in developing many sites, I’ve actually found that the most challenging part of the process is defining the organization’s message. I actually believe that developing a website is the best thing that any organization can do because if forces a reflection on what the organization is all about.

I’ve worked with several organizations to refine their organizational message – their elevator speech that describes what they do in less than 30 seconds. Let’s look at an example. I recently completed a project with Taproot to help a small non-profit redo their website. The technical work to redo the site took less than 40% of the calendar time; the bulk of the calendar time was helping this non-profit define who they are.

Stagebridge helps older people fully express themselves and live life to the fullest. Their old site made it difficult to quickly understand what the organization was all about. Studies show that most people take around five seconds to decide if they’re going to stick around on a site before moving on. These five seconds are important to let someone know who you are ans what you’re all about.

After several brainstorming sessions we quickly narrowed all their work down into four overall categories. These categories not only helped Stagebridge refine their elevator speech, it formed the foundation for the organization of the new website.

The new site uses few words and some rotating slides to convey the message. It shows the possibilities of healthy aging and how Stagebridge’s offerings help older people live life to the fullest!

So, yes, I’m glad that the days of expensive unresponsive website design are numbered. I’m excited about the possibilities of using a new website as a catalyst to refine any organization’s message!

Sometimes we step in a big pile ourselves and we thought it would be useful to share what recently happened to the Tekpals site and what we can learn from our mistake.

Google Webmaster tools is a suite of tools to give you information on the health and ‘searchability’ of your site. We recommend that all website owners regularly use these tools to find problems with their site. (We’ll cover all the major features of Google Webmaster tools in future blog entries.)

So, we usually follow our own advice and took a look at the Tekpals site using Webmaster tools. One of the pages we look at is crawl errors, which shows pages that the Google search crawler tried to find but couldn’t. Take a look at the highlighted line in the screen image. (We added the highlighting.)

That line tells us that 49 pages are linked to www.tekpals.com/index.html and that this page couldn’t be found. Yikes!

So what happened? A few days before, we changed our site from a custom html/css site to WordPress. The index.html page is the main home page that usually loads whenever anyone types in www.tekpals.com. (Usually a web server will automatically load index.html then, if that file isn’t found, it will look for a few others.) WordPress doesn’t use index.html; it uses a different file – in our case it looks for index.php – which it found. So our site was loading correctly whenever someone typed in www.tekpals.com, but if someone typed in www.tekpals.com/index.html, they would get a Page Not Found message.

So, there were 49 existing links that were looking for the old index.html file. We needed to fix this problem and we can’t change the links on other sites. An additional challenge is that WordPress doesn’t need an index.html file and if we created one, it would just confuse things. So we used a web server feature called redirection to direct anyone looking for index.html to go get index.php instead. This solved the problem. If someone types in (or clicks on a link to) www.tekpals.com/index.html they’ll still get the default home page even though the file index.html doesn’t exist. The user isn’t even aware of the redirection (unless they’re really paying attention.) Problem solved!

The lesson here isn’t about the technical details of what happened and how it was fixed. The lesson is to pay attention to your site and use some commonly available tools to monitor the health of your site.