If you’re a new web designer/developer, what’s the first thing you do when you get a contract to build a site?  If you’re like most people, the first thing you do is sit down and begin constructing a Photoshop or Illustrator mock-up of what one or two pages will look like.  If this is you … STOP!

Students who’ve had at least a class or two with me already know that you’d get a quick lashing for this.  At the very least, the first thing you should do is plan, plan and then plan some more.  There are way too many things you need to consider before you can even begin to think about “looks” and more often than not, the superficial aspect of the site will end up developing itself from the plan.

 

For example:

• What is the client’s goal?
• Who is the target market?
• What kind of traffic will there be?
• What types of operating systems and browsers does your intended audience use?
• Have you built a (site) architectural diagram?
• Is there marketing strategy?
• Is the business solely internet based or does it support an existing product or service?
• Is this a rebuild or a build-from-the-bottom?
• Have you considered usability issues?

And this only touches the tip of the iceberg.  One area that we consider paramount to the scheme of things and the success of the site but often goes overlooked is monitoring traffic and getting into search engines.  I would urge you, after 13 years of practice, to do this very early on.  Fortunately, Google provides you an enormous and powerful bank of tools to do it.

Early on in the process, create a Google account (if it’s for a client, it should be accessible or owned by the client).  It’s relatively simple and painless and you can use any email address.  Once you’ve created the account, sign up for Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools right from the start.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool for logging and monitoring traffic.  In short, instead of using (or as a complement to) a tool provided by the host (such as Wusage), Google will do the work for you.  More than that, it can tie together other Google tools (such as AdSense and AdWords). 

Google Analytics is simple to use – just add the provided Javascript code to your pages (immediately above the closing </body> tag).  Do this during the design phase and it will make your life easier.  Trust me on this one.Once you begin receiving traffic (and yes, this includes your own though you can exclude it if you know the IP address), you will start getting reports.  The base report shows the most current week and provides you with a day-to-day page count, source of visitors and even a geographical map of the location of your visitors.  The reports are nearly endless so you will have to spend time going through them and finding out which ones suit your particular needs. I do urge you to look into the Referring Source report (Marketing Optimization > Visitor Segment Performance > Referring Source) which will show you graphically and tabulated the source of your visitors.  If you click on the analysis options icon next to the “google [organic]” listing, you get a sub-menu – click on Cross Segment Performance and select Keyword from the next sub-menu.  This report will tell you the exact keywords and keyphrases that visitors who came through Google searches used to reach you (for those of you who know a little HTML, think “meta” and “h1″ tags).Google Webmaster ToolsSo how does the information get to Google in the first place?  In the old days we used to rely on spiders and crawlers (bots) to feed the search engines but those days are pretty much long gone.  In the new world, you TELL the search engines what to look for.

Google Webmaster tools involves a few steps:

• Sign up,
• validate (verify),
• submit sitemap

Once you’ve signed up, you will need to validate your site.  This can be done one of two ways.  The first is to add a special meta tag to every HTML page.  If you’re a static designer, this can begin to be a real hassle, so I would urge you to do the alternate.  Alternatively, you can upload a single, blank file with a special name to your web root (it will look something like google61e555c7edab53af.html – the actual filename will be provided by Google).  Once Google locates this file, you are verified.

The second and most critical step is to upload a sitemap.  Google allows you to use one (or more) formats for sitemaps.  At the very least, upload a text file with one line per URL.  For example, this site might have:

http://www.mobimeet.com http://www.mobimeet.com/resources/ http://www.mobimeet.com/resources/ajax-scripting/ http://www.mobimeet.com/imd302/ http://www.mobimeet.com/imd402/ http://www.mobimeet.com/soapbox/ http://www.mobimeet.com/wp-login.php http://www.mobimeet.com/wp-login.php?action=register http://www.mobimeet.com/tricks/luhn-10 http://www.mobimeet.com/tricks/

You can also use the Google Sitemap Protocol, OAI-PMH, or a Syndication Feed.  A syndication feed is an XML document in RSS format.  If you do not already know what this is, as a student I highly recommend that you learn it (if you are expecting to take Advanced Scripting Languages, Designing for Dynamic Websites, UCD-Usability or Designing for Server Side Languages, you will get this as part of the curriculum).

The information contained in the RSS file should match your page titles, your H1/H2/H3 tags and the primary content of your site.  This is what ends up in Google’s search engine results so make it count!

Regular updates will force Google to download it more frequently, or if you have a new page or news item that you need to push, resubmit it manually.  Most blogging software (such as WordPress which is what I use for this site – click on the RSS Entries link in the footer) automatically generates the RSS feed, but there are many other tools available for creating one if you are not using blog software. On a side note, Yahoo! and many other search engines also provide similar tools that use RSS so you need to be aware of the differences in how you approach them.  And you should get yourself listed into DMOZ which is a directory listing engine that many smaller search engines use for data.The bottom line is that a little planning and a little foresight will give you more credibility as a designer/developer with your clients because you will have the tools available from the day you launch the site and the client sees his reports right from the start.