Top-class sites hit the mark

By ADAM GIFFORD

Whether you have a small company or a big one, there is one thing a your website must do.

"It must support your business objectives - that is what matters the most," says Raewyn Whyte from @URL. With partner Derek Tearne, Whyte has been making websites for 10 years - almost as long as the World Wide Web has been around.

"There is more to building websites than using some software package that tells you it can do everything for you," Whyte says.

"The architecture of information is critical for whether people will find what they are looking for.

"Sure, high-school kids can build you a site using software or even just HTML, but keeping it up to date, making sure it provides the business information you want and that all its bells and whistles work properly takes more than that."

A website is now seen as being as necessary as having a business card, but many firms still spend too much, or too little, to produce sites which do little for their business.

While costing websites is like picking the length of a piece of string, it needn't cost a fortune.

"You can have a decent working site with forms and a searchable database for under $8000," Whyte says.

"The cost depends on the nature of the site and what you want to achieve, whether you are working with an advertising agency, whether you include and online store and inventory management, what sort of graphics you want - that can get expensive."

Before making a site, Whyte and Tearne will sit down with the client to get agreement on what the site needs to do. They bring in other specialists where needed.

"We deal with everything from sole traders to top-tier companies, and each has different needs," Whyte says. "Each business differs on what it needs the site to achieve, the nature of the information to be included, and who its target audience will be.

"The designer doesn't need to know everything about business but they do need to know the principles of websites. The questions we ask have been user-tested over 10 years."

Whyte says people wanting a site should look for a team rather than someone who claims to do everything.

"Graphic design is a specialist pursuit. Web programming is a specialist pursuit. Information architecture is a specialist pursuit. And you have to get the tone right for the intended audience.

"You need people who know how to optimise the site for search engines - and that is something that changes all the time."

Whyte says that integrating a database into a site is an extremely valuable business tool. It can be a web-only database or one synchronised with the company's main contact list or product catalogue.

"We have one network of franchises where each franchise has own its own database. Derek has created an online web database and the tools which allow each franchise to import and export their data to the collective database."

@URL recently built a site for Zenfro, an Ohakea-based breeder of Alaskan malamute dogs, which included a searchable database of pedigrees. Zenfro co-owner Sonja Bright said no other malamute site has one and that malamute people are obsessed with pedigrees.

"It is such a young breed, you can trace it back to its beginning. People will be able to come to the website and search, and we hope they will look at our current litters while they are there."

Bright has commissioned several sites. Her brief for @URL was to keep the Zenfro site simple and to include lots of pictures yet still have fast-loading pages.

"I am still on dial-up - I suspect most people are - so speed is hugely important," she says.

"I love a clean, unfussy, minimalist look. I spent a year researching this, and most other malamute sites have bright colours and music and flowers and snowflakes coming down and little graphics of cartoon dogs pulling sleds across the bottom of the page - I didn't want any of that."

Bright says traffic has been heavy since the site was launched a month ago - a result of making it visible to search engines by good keyword placement, and by swapping links with other breeders with whom Zenfro wanted to be associated.

Bright is now getting a site built for her boarding kennel business.

"We have talked to other successful kennels who say people want to see the facilities before they make a trip out there. They want to book online and they want to see what services you offer."

Whyte says websites need to be kept up to date and include some material that changes regularly.

"You need to allocate responsibility for someone to spend time on the website every week, even if only for an hour or so on Friday morning, or it will be out of date in no time."

Like many web design firms, @ URL builds tools into its sites so customers can do their own changes.

White said there is no need to go out and buy fancy content management software which covers the whole website when you only need to update a few pages regularly.


Golden rules of web design


* Test a site with users before you go live.

* You need keyword-rich text on every page.

* If your site search doesn't work, fix it.

* Pdf's should be kept small, under 300k, if you want people to download.

* Most people want fast-loading pages.


Helpful tips


* Web designers write a lot about web design and publish it on the web. There are some helpful articles at URL

* Web design guru Jakob Neilson has some thought-provoking guidelines at Use It

* If you don't look after search engines, no one will find your site.

* If you don't make an effort to have inbound links, no one will find your site.

* Put your web address on your business cards, letterhead, print material and any other associated collateral.

* Every site needs up-to-date information and some material that changes regularly.

* Flash front-ends hide your site from search engines. "Skip intro" is a valuable part of a flash page.

* Database integration is an extremely valuable business tool.

* People don't buy products online if you don't have prices showing.

Special Report: Turbocharging Your Business

(to be continued throughout this week)