So, you have decided to start building your website and you are excited about finding inspiration for the website design, what about the more technical requirements you should be looking at?
Website building can be a tricky activity if you don’t have prior experience or technical knowledge on what is unique required for your website. Most website developers usually throw you a standard website proposal that might not cover all your concerns and future consideration. In this article we will run through 15 things to look out for and ask the website developer in charge of your website these questions!
1. Creating a concise sitemap
In our previous article on sitemaps, we talked about the importance of creating an effective sitemap to help Google understand how to crawl your website. Along those same lines, it is important to also keep in mind how your website visitors might interact with your pages. Do you have pages that are redundant that might ruin the user’s experience? Is it to detailed or too generalized which might result in a frustrating experience on your website?
At the end of the day, you want your website to remain user-friendly, easily navigable, and clean.
2. Minimal custom designs
If you are a WordPress user, you might be familiar with this issue. You want to change the way your content is presented but are unable to or face great challenges because of the custom template design. Whilst custom page designs might be very attractive in the moment, it is likely to go out of style in a few years. Hence, if you are looking to stretch your dollar, make sure you communicate with your website developer to minimize custom template designs to ensure you have flexibility to make changes on your own down the road.
3. Content Delivery Network Management
A Content delivery network helps your website to load faster by utilizing a highly distributed platform of servers. As Google as showed, page load speed is a factor in the ranking algorithm, while most website developers may provide this as part of the package, you will still want to ask what you get with your package to ensure you get the best deal. And if the “free” version is not sufficient, at least you are aware of available upgrade options.
4. Schema Markup
If sitemaps are what helps Google understand the bones of your website, schema markups help Google understand the flesh of it. It works by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.
5. Mobile Responsiveness and AMPS
As more and more people experience the world through their mobile phones, most of the population are also surfing the web using their mobile. Keeping that in mind, having a mobile responsive website could be one of the most important things your website needs to have.
An alternative would be accelerated mobile pages (AMP) which we have covered previously. AMP is a simple and robust format to ensure your website is fast, user-first. This requires additional coding but if you are using WordPress, there are plenty of plugins out there to help you achieve the same result.
6. Global fonts
One thing that is easily overlooked are fonts on a website, while your business may use a custom font, not every computer would be able to download and load up your custom font. Thus, it is important to ensure that your website developer suggests a web safe font. Some web safe font examples are: Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif.
7. Minify jquery, CSS and HTML
Also mentioned in our previous article on improving your Google page speed load score, getting your website developer to assist you in minifying jquery, CSS and HTML is very important to keeping a clean website. Not only will you be rewarded by Google’s algorithm, but it also helps your website load a lot faster.
All in all, while you might think you are getting a good deal from most website developers, you will realize that when you start asking the right questions about what your website really needs the proposed package might start to look different. You may also looking into website development rfp to get additional quotes available. Apart from that, at Adssential Marketing, our team of website developers and designers aim to build you not only the best looking and user-friendly website but one that will work effectively for your business for years to come. If you are interested in consulting our team about your website requirements, please feel free to contact us here!
