Assignments & Tasks

Task Allocation for Phase 1 of Your New Website Project

During Phase 1, your web developers will be busy working on configuring the CMS, and if necessary, making customizations to meet your needs, as well as building the database functionality that you requested. Make sure that the CMS solution being implemented will make your life easier, especially when it comes to SEO. Here a few key features to look for in your CMS:

• Uses page templates so you can change the appearance of the site without having to modify hundreds of files.
• Allows you to quickly create new pages.
• Provides tools to help you create site navigation bars and menus.
• Allows you to reuse "content blocks" so that identical content can appear on multiple pages and can easily be edited.
• Has a tool to let you build and submit a sitemap to search engines.
• Has built in RSS / content syndication capabilities, for both consuming and publishing syndicated content.

As far as managing visual design of your site, you should focus on getting a clean and attractive website design. Ensure that the page layout doesn't do anything too fancy and most importantly doesn't inhibit your ability to optimize the pages for search engines. Remember SEO is the key to getting people to your site without having to pay for clicks. Some design mistakes to avoid to keep your pages SEO friendly:

• JavaScript based navigation bars, menus, and links.
• Dynamic website pages that pass lots of variables in the page name (URL and querystring).
• Site navigation using server side post-back technology (use standard links instead).
• Excessive use of Flash.
• Excessive use of Images.

Website Owner / Project Leader Responsibilities

While all of this design and development work is going on, what are you, the business owner supposed to be doing? You will really have three roles during the development of the website.

First, considering the fact that you are paying people to work for you, you need to be there for them to promptly answer questions and help them overcome any obstacles that come up so they can keep making forward progress.

Second, you need to be writing copy, the actual text content that is going to make your site unique. You can have the best CMS and the coolest graphics and design, but that is not what defines your site on the web because Google and other search engines don't recognize coolness or beauty. Search engines only see the text and rank it based on how relevant, detailed, and informative it seems to be.

Third, you will need to review the work of the design and dev team and constantly test and retest the functionality of the site to ensure it is working as you requested. It is common for a feature to have been working last week, but some code has changed since then and today the site is broken - you should verify that everything continues to work as the site construction progresses.