What makes a good website in 2014? What are the top 8 features and priorities for business websites in 2014? Presentation held on 2014-01-30 at Seravo salad lunch in Tampere, Finland.

1. What makes a good website in 2014
or
Top 8 features and priorities
for company websites in 2014
Otto Kekäläinen
Seravo salad lunch
Tampere 30.1.2014

2. LINUX SYSTEMS CONSULTING
AND SUPPORT SERVICES

3. 1. Responsive design

4. 1. Responsive design

5. 1. Responsive design
 The 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.

6. 2. Search engine optimization

7. 2. Search engine optimization
 The 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.

8. 2. Search engine optimization
 Semantic contents:
Navigation and
content separated.
Images described in
meta attributes. Prices,
opening hours,
addresses etc. marked
using micro formats.

9. 3. Loads fast

10. 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?

11. 4. Good web addresses
 Shorter 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

12. 5. Social media integration

13. 5. Social media integration
 A 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!

14. 5. Social media integration
 Also remember map services and directory services
 Traditional channels still have their users: provide a
RSS feed and an e-mail subscription option

15. 5. Social media integration
Social network
Visits
Visits
Biggest social media referrers
Example seravo.fi
Visits

16. 5. Social media integration
Source / type
Visits
Visits
Biggest referrers in general
Example seravo.fi

17. 6. Visitor analytics
All traffic
Visits per day
As an example, a customer's site in 2013

18. 6. Visitor analytics
 For 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!

19. 7. Easy to update
 Stylishness 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.

20. 7. Easy to update
 The 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!

21. 7. Easy to upgrade
The administration view in the WordPress,
available in over 70 languages

22. 7. Easy to update
Full screen mode helps to focus when writing

23. 8. Affordable to improve
 There 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.

24. 8. Affordable to improve
Avoid vendor lock-in,
choose an open source
content management
system.
The most popular are
WordPress (17%), Drupal,
Joomla, Typo3, Liferay...

25. Contact us when you want Seravo Oy
to develop or maintain your
Linux-based information systems
Open seravo.fi
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