Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Lazar Bošković, marketing, PR and internet consultant
Some only want to design them, some just want to program them, and these websites, in order to be good, deserve to have someone thinking about their concept and content …
At the end of the nineties of the last century, one of my acquaintances – knowing that I was dealing with ‘that Internet thing’ – asked me to create a website for his company. My question for him was: “OK, but do you have some texts, photos … something that we’ll put on that site?” The answer was epochal: “Meh, forget that man, just make us a site!”
It sounds weird but even today there are people who don’t understand what websites are and where begins work on making a site. And websites have always been (and will be) composed out of three components: content, design and programming. The number, type and volume of content has increased in the last two decades. Their design modernized and beautified. Programming technologies changed, and with it the complexity of the functioning of websites. Nevertheless, today and in the future, the first step in working on any website is the design of its concept. Find out more about all this, and about why content is the most important component of each site, in the story that follows …
Concept first, everything else second…
The concept of a website affects all of its three mentioned components, and therefore is the first step in a serious approach to website design. The concept provides answers to many questions, and the two most important are: what is the purpose of the site, and to who is the target audience? From this comes what should or should not appear on the site, as well as how to distribute it on it. You also must know what visitors are expected to do on the site, that is, what are the desired effects of the site’s existence – promotion, sale, sign-up, support, or something entirely different… The answers to these questions tell us how all of it should look like and how it should work.
Through concept, the structure of the website is defined, examined through the themes that are processed on it, and the logical units in which the content is distributed. The content distribution in the sections of the site and web pages gives both a form of navigation and the number of levels of navigation through the site. The target audience and the target market affect whether the site will be hosted on a national internet domain (such as .RS and .СРБ) or a generic domain (.COM and others). The needs and capabilities of the site owners also define whether additional names of the internet domains may be necessary, in order to fully protect the online identity. Also, if there are multiple language versions of the site, targeted for markets in different countries, each language deserves a separate website in an adequate national internet domain. When the necessary functionalities of the site are examined through the concept, they are also a prerequisite for site’s content creators, designers and developers, and at the same time they very much influence the choice of an adequate manufacturer of the future website.
Content – visitors are looking for it, and Google is searching it
The crucial element for success of any site is content, which must be tailored to both people and search engines. Content that is appropriate for visitors, logically structured and regularly updated, is why visitors come to the site, why they come back to it and recommend it to others. However, no less important is the fact that content is what Google is searching, so SEO is mostly based on optimizing the content of the site. Professionally written texts, with well-distributed keywords, are liked by visitors and search engine machinery alike. And in the search results this machinery gives priority to sites that are on national internet domains, because in 97% of searches via Google, users, logically, are looking for sites dedicated to the local market. This is true for any country in the world, including Serbia.
Good internet content is formatted in the right way, and is linked through internal and external links, but also optimized for sharing through social media. In addition to texts, all other content on the site (illustrations, multimedia, personalized and interactive content) have special standards for proper optimization for publishing on the site, which means using the file format that best suits visitors, while retaining the desired content quality. For example, it matters whether a photo is in a GIF, JPG or PNG format, because the decision on the file type has numerous effects related to the degree and mode of compression, and directly affects the display quality and file size.
And when visitors see and read what’s on the site, almost all site owners want to communicate with them in some way. The basic way of business internet communications is still the e-mail address. It would be frivolous not to have this address on your own internet domain, where the site’s address is also located.
Design adjustable to any gadget
The design of a website can be solved in at least two ways: by purchasing (or downloading for free) a finished theme (the design template), or through purposely created, original design. The latter is, of course, more expensive, longer lasting, but also more giving in terms of adapting to the needs and habits of the target public, and this unique visual identity is what distinguishes it from other sites. The key requirement for website design is to be a responsive web design, one that adjusts to display on different screen sizes, on desktop, tablets and smartphones, as the percentage of web site browsing on mobile devices has exceeded 50% long ago.
Work on the website design begins with defining the layout of the web pages and the navigation system, in accordance with the adopted concept, structure and content. The designer must also take care of the graphic standards of the client, the required site functionality and other specific interface requirements. After adopting the visual identity of the site in the form of images, the next step is its implementation through coding in HTML and CSS, and creating a template for the required number of different web pages. In the final design check, the optimization of graphic elements is done and screening in different readers and on mobile devices.
Coding that runs the site
The name itself – Content Management System (CMS) – confirms that the essence of each site is the content that this system manages. CMS can be based on open source, custom and other solutions. Popular open source solutions are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, and the right solution depends on the needs and capabilities of the owner of the future site. A modern CMS is expected to fully support, among other things, SEO tagging and SEO friendly URLs, WYSIWYG editor for easy and fast content formatting, different formats of illustrations and multimedia, website analytics …
While the site is being programmed it should be on some hidden, working internet address, something like test.domen.rs. At this address, the integration of design into the CMS is done, the insertion of content in the CMS, checking all the functions of the site, verification of the correctness of HTML and CSS, checking of content and SEO elements, and the removal of the observed problems. Before switching from this development to the main hosting site, you need to protect the hosting and CMS from unwanted access – and the site is then ready for visitors.