Other issues to consider about websites
This website enjoyed a spring-clean in January 2010 - wrapping everything in a new, Drupal-powered design and thinning down much of the content that used to be in place. I wanted visitors to get to 'the meat' without having too much text to wade through.
This page helps counter-balance some of that thinning-out by listing some of the key aspects that need to be considered when commissioning a website. There are lots of pieces to the jig-saw and they need to be assembled with care.
Content
“Content is King” and we forget this at our peril. Content is what brings visitors to your site in the first place; it’s what they’re looking for. When you take your site’s content to your website designer/developer, everything should revolve around that content. At the end of that process it should be clear that your message hasn’t got lost in the telling.
Design
A website’s design can set it apart from the rest of the web. Ideally, it should be distinctive, memorable and pleasing to the eye. But it also needs to be easy to navigate, easy to read and as accessible as possible.
Even though a CMS website, whose content you can edit yourself, is a complex beast, it can still be dressed in clothes as luxurious as those used to dress any other kind of website.
Findability
Search engines constantly crawl the web, extracting content, indexing it and ranking it. Your pages need to be written in a language that the SEs understand and it should conform to a collection of ‘web standards’ which the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) manages. This helps to secure your business's visibility on the web.
Security
Internet security company Sophos has reported that 95 percent of all email is now spam. When you display your email address on your website, you should obfuscate it, making it visible to the human eye but not to spambots. If you have a contact form, it should be secured against being hijacked by automated processes.
Good communication
If you ask me to build you a website, at the end of the process I'll give you the keys to the safe: a summary of how your site was built and a document that details all the passwords associated with your site. Surprisingly, not all web designers do this.
