Ask the Egghead’s Holistic Approach to Web Design
What is holistic web design?
Most web design and development agencies are so eager to push new features and designs out to your site that they forget to ask what your organization needs, or how your organization can be more efficient or more effective online. They never ask what your online workflows are like, or /how and where does your organization disseminate information.
At Ask the Egghead we are constantly thinking
How can we create a better experience for your site visitors and increase the effectiveness of your online efforts?
How can we help your organization be more efficient and more effective?
At Ask the Egghead this starts with a holistic review of your current site and the demographics of your visitors, as well as a review of your business model and goals.
This review should include every aspect of your organization’s online efforts, including but not limited to:
Lead generation (sales)
Information dissemination
Efficiency in employee interactions
Recruiting
Social networking
Your Website as the Focal Point
We believe your organization’s website should not be the afterthought in your information sharing plan! Your website should be the focal point of anything and everything that your organization does online. Information should flow directly from you or your designated employees to your website and from there be disseminated to any and all other applicable platforms. What platforms you choose should center around your organization’s needs and the demographics of your client’s (site visitors).
The Retail Analogy
In a retail based scenario think of your organization’s website as the store and the social media platform as the mall or shopping center. The social media platform (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) like a mall or shopping center has great traffic and you need to attract some of this traffic to your store to increase sales, but your goal is not to increase traffic at the social media platform, mall or shopping center, your goal is to get people in the door of your store or to your website. And to this end you want to use these social media platforms to drive traffic to your site, the online representation of your organization, and not the reverse! These platforms are in place to feed you traffic, you are not in business to feed them traffic.
This is why all information should flow through your website initially and from there be disseminated to any and all online platforms. This way all roads back from anything you share online lead to your website. And your brand’s message remains consistent across all platforms.
Holistic Review Checklist
Some of the other factors we consider in our holistic review of your website are:
Does the site meet current functionality and security standards?
- Does it have an SSL certificate?
- Are all internal and external site links directed to SSL encrypted pages?
- Are all photos and embedded media linked via SSL?
- Do any of the site’s pages throw SSL warnings or errors in any of the 4 major browsers? (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, & Explorer)
Does the site meet current SEO standards?
- Are the pages laid out with proper tags, titles, and meta?
- Ask the Egghead’s SEO monitoring includes over 30 data points for every page on your website!
Does the site pass the Google Structured Data Testing tool and are all of the organization’s data points properly coded into the schema markup output?
What is the page speed?
- Does it meet or beat other similar industry website load times?
- Are compression and page caching properly installed and utilized on the site?
Google’s current algorithm grades a web page’s SEO by looking at how accessible it is on mobile devices. On average, mobile users make up over 82% of all site visitors on the sites managed by Ask the Egghead as of 2019. This mobile score of your web pages factors heavily into your site’s overall SEO score and can drastically impact the site’s SEO rank if deficiencies are found. We find numerous deficiencies in more than 90% of the sites we review.
Managed WordPress Hosting Plans
Why Consistent Naming Conventions Are Essential for Your Brand
Does your brand have clear and consistent naming conventions everywhere online?
This is so incredibly important as both Google and Bing look at social media profiles to see if your organization has consistent naming conventions everywhere it maintains a presence online.
For example;
If your company name is Quick Copy Inc. And your website is www.quickcopy.com.
Then your organization’s naming convention on social platforms should mirror this domain name as closely as humanly possible.
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/quickcopy
Twitter
https://www.twitter.com/quickcopy
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/company/quickcopy
Etc. etc.
This naming convention strategy increases your organization’s SEO scoring and protects your brand. It also gives your current and prospective client’s and customers a clear and easy to remember naming convention that they can use to follow your organization anywhere.
A little further on the topic of brand protection. I cannot stress enough how important it is for small businesses to take active measures to protect the their brand. Most small businesses don’t have the legal department’s the likes of Coke, Disney or Apple. And, for most small business owners the thought of million dollar lawsuits to protect their brand is an unrealistic and impossible brand protection strategy. As such we as small business owners are forced to be more proactive in our brand protection measures.
A good example is LinkedIn, several of our client’s come to us with a LinkedIn page for their business that is actually not a LinkedIn “company” page. What I mean to say is that they have a presence on LinkedIn, but all they did was create a personal page and name it for their organization, and as such it has the following naming convention; https://www.linkedin.com/in/organizationname.
This is problematic on two fronts; first it leaves your brand exposed and any other organization can create a “company” page and grab your brand’s best optimized page name on that platform. Second, personal pages are not afforded the same information sharing systems as “company” pages and as such the “company” page will not count in your SEO strategy nor will it be able to continue to grow with your organization. A correct “company” page on LinkedIn has the word “company” in the URL. https://www.linkedin.com/company/organizationame.
Why Partner with Ask the Egghead
All of these moving components can seem extremely overwhelming to most business owners.
This is where Ask the Egghead comes in. We are experts at setting up, correcting, and managing all of these moving parts.
We take ownership and responsibility so you don’t have to.
We put systems in place to ensure compliance.
We design websites with functionality and features to make your organization more effective and more efficient.
Our chief Egghead, Steven May, is an innovative, profit-oriented, Senior Executive with demonstrated success in increasing revenues, market share, and earnings, achieving cost reductions, and improving client satisfaction in customer-centric operations. He specializes in bringing new ventures from initial conception through completion with effective management as well as establishing new value within existing enterprises.
F.A.Q.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Praesent sapien massa, convallis a pellentesque nec, egestas non nisi. Mauris blandit aliquet elit, eget tincidunt nibh pulvinar a. Curabitur arcu erat, accumsan id imperdiet et, porttitor at sem. Sed porttitor lectus nibh. Donec rutrum congue leo eget malesuada. Nulla porttitor accumsan tincidunt.
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