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Reining in scope, part 1: Picking from the four main web strategies

Four Daisies

Scope, with regard to project planning, is a definition of clear project boundaries. For websites, this defined area can be tiny or enormous, depending on the project. This could mean difference of hundreds of development hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars when a project goes from tiny brainstorm to huge idea over the course of a single discussion. Since you don’t want to commit to a project you can’t afford, it’s important to have a very clear definition of a site’s scope before you do anything else.

What do you want from your website and how do you figure that out? That’s a biggie that a lot of people struggle with when first thinking about the scope of their website. The first step is really quite simple. Here’s how it goes…

Choose the main mission of your website with regard to how (or if) it will make money. At the current time, nearly every site on the web falls into at least one of the following four main web strategies: (The $ is the potential for making money with that particular strategy while the * means revenue not intended.)

* – The Resource Wiki

These sites are entirely about facilitating other activities and are not intended to generate money directly and perhaps not even indirectly. They’re usually used as tools to look up information. Many of these sites are extensions of an organization’s intranet. Examples of these are government and educational system sites where public access to information is important.

$ – The Lead-Maker

These are often the smallest and simplest kind of sites. These sites don’t directly generate revenue, but they may generate offline revenue as a result. Typically, these sites employ few or no advertisements to help the organization stay as legitimate as possible (ads detract from that). They are an organization’s official online business card.

$$- The Residual Revenue Machine

These sites don’t sell anything necessarily, but instead use content to make residual money. These sites provide content (information, tutorials, how-to’s, webinars, podcasts, blog articles, images, movies, music, social networking opportunities… all other kinds of free web content) in exchange for revenue from advertisers.

$$$ – The Straight-Up Online Marketplace

This category contains any website that directly generates money from selling merchandise, services or content online. These sites take advantage of the power of ecommerce in any of its many forms.

Of course, the most successful sites are almost always some combination of these four categories, but to start, you should choose one main category. You can expand from there as you take other variables into consideration. The main idea is to really solidify the purpose of your site at the very beginning.

Coming up next on the scope agenda, “The fifth element of scope.” What are the initial elements of a project that you need to consider when tightening down your scope? Find out in the next installment of this study!

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I like to move it move it…

King Julilan

Well, like might be a strong word. Maybe I need to move it move it would be a better description. ;-) At any rate, it’s moving!

Here’s what’s up: I finally have some time to sit down with my web content and get strategic. I have so many different kinds of content that I decided that some of it has to move or else it is going to eventually cause a clutter cluster.

First up, Madlantern Arts. Up until really recently, that included the clipart collection and then pretty much anything that came to mind. You might have noticed that some topics that were here before are now gone. (It’s ok, they’re still alive. I’ll tell you where to find them in the next paragraph.) Some things will move and there will be a redesign (not fully certain how that will take shape yet, but it will take shape soon). What will be left here at Madlantern Arts will be the clipart library, the design & development rants, experiments in photography and other related reflections that come up. That covers quite a bit of ground, soooo….

I have split my plant and gardening content off into a brand new home called “Up From the Roots”. Plants are a HUGE topic and will be best kept separate from the rest of what I do. I also hope that with Up From the Roots I’ll have other contributors some day — Spring is coming up and I’m recruiting. Anyone want to contribute?! ;-)

“Brew Love” is a blog and resource site I’m working on for my significant other and fellow brew lovers. (I drink homemade beer, but I don’t brew it… maybe I’ll grow hops this summer and then can say I’m part of the brewing process. Hrm… is that a brew blog or a garden blog topic?)

And moving on up the list is “Creatives Connect”; a networking and lead-sharing site for creative artists and developers who want to collaborate on projects. This one is still down a bit on the list, but I aim for a summertime release.

Also, almost every site in my portfolio is in need of a redesign. It’s been more than 5 years since many of them have been touched. (If I’ve worked on your site in the past and you think it’s time for a change, please get in touch with me ASAP! This is a great opportunity to reserve some of my time, but I don’t know how long it will last!)

That’s how I like to move it right now. :-)

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Five Simple Search Engine Optimization tips even beginners can use

(Just a note… I’ve retouched and reposted this article from 2009, because today in 2012 it applies just as much as it did 3 years ago!)

SEOThe buzz phrase “Search engine optimization” (AKA “SEO”) is a topic of discussion (or perhaps argument) that I’ve been participating in for years. Over the past few years, the buzz has been intensifying. Maybe it’s the bad economy driving more people online in search of new business leads, or maybe I’ve just been listening closer, I don’t know. Whatever the cause, I still feel like the buzz is about 90% hype. You know the kind… that “Cross your eyes this special way and search engines will rank your pages better” hype. Or better yet, the “Pay us to hit you over the head so that you’ll be dazed into thinking search engines are going to rank you better” hype.

While either of the above might cause the number of web visitors to your site appear to double, it’s most likely just an illusion. ;-) Here are some things that even beginners can do to help improve page rankings… for real!

Write good content

Good content scores you lots and lots of points. :-) This is the #1 thing that you can do to attract people to your site. And yes, you want to think of it as attracting people, not attracting search engines. The creators of modern search engines are writing increasingly complicated algorithms to help them gauge which content is interesting to actual humans. Some search companies have even hired actual humans to help them rank pages. The question then becomes: What attracts people? You already know the answer. You want things that you can use. Provide useful information for people to use. Make sure your site is also easy to use. Even hideously ugly sites can rank highly if they are easily navigable and provide useful content.

Title your pages well

This is one of the first things I teach my students, whether they’re learning HTML for the first time or taking my Intro to Dreamweaver class. There is a reason that the title tag is one of the first things that you’ll type in your HTML and that the title box is one of the first things that you’ll see in Dreamweaver. Titles are important! Make sure your page titles are brief but descriptive. Search engines love that. People love that too, because a page’s title is the most prominently featured thing in search results. Even if the content of a page is ingenious, you might be docked some points for calling it something vague like “Ingenious Stuff”. Also, when you’re saving your documents, name the file something descriptive, if possible. For instance, I might name this page simple-SEO-tips.htm.

Pay attention to document formatting

I don’t necessarily mean graphic design, but instead, the way you design your content. Break your pages into sections with headings and be descriptive with those headings. When possible, use heading tags (<h1> <h2> <h3>) instead of paragraph tags to indicate and title important sections of your pages. Also, make sure you put alt tags on all images. Alt tags provide a very brief description of what the image is of. Search engines, people that are visually impaired, and folks who don’t enable images on their browsers need that short textual description. This is good practice, in general, but I bring it up here specifically because headings are sometimes done as a graphic when designers want to use a custom font face.

Write relevant and descriptive meta tags

Meta Description and Meta Keywords are two bits of HTML code that you can add to your pages specifically for search engines to see, and almost no one else. There’s an ages old rumor that you should brainstorm as many keywords (words that people might search for) as you can and put them in your meta tags or else search engines will be less likely to find your page. Not so much true, though it doesn’t hurt to have a short meta description (two sentences is a pretty good length) and between 8-20 relevant keywords. Honestly, I’ve seen wildly successful pages that included no meta tags at all and pages with great meta tags that never got hits. The quality of your content outweighs you page’s other ranking variables many times over. Make sure your keywords are also present in your content. Don’t make it uncomfortable for humans to read, but do use them as they seem to fit.

Keywords that are completely unrelated to your content could even cause more harm than good. Here’s why: In the old days when the Internet was slow, search engines relied pretty heavily on meta tags so that they wouldn’t have to index entire pages. Ultimately, some unscrupulous web publishers learned that they could increase their visits by weaving popular search terms into their meta tags, even if the words had nothing to do with the content of the pages. Search companies began writing smarter and smarter algorithms to keep that from happening and eventually the speed of the Internet increased to the point where indexing the content of entire pages was doable. I haven’t ever written pages with bogus meta content, but I have heard (and agree it is deserved) that such a thing should be punishable by page downranking.*shrugs* egh..? Just like when you’re writing your visible content, keep it real with your meta data and you should be good.

Get linked up to other sites

Have a “links” page and ask for reciprocal links on reputable sites that are related to yours. Join web rings, participate and post on forums, start up Twitter, Facebook and other blog pages… these will all help you build your site’s “reputation”. But, again, it really all comes back to good content. If you write good content, sites will be more likely to link to you!

I think that’s all I can wring from my brain this evening. Time for sleep… Good night!