The primary purpose of a web site is to keep visitors informed. To that end, the most important component of a web site is content. No matter how beautiful or flashy, if there isn't significant content few will visit more than once. The second most important requirement is not to annoy or offend visitors. That is why there are no flashing, spinning, blinking or otherwise animated graphics on these pages. They attract attention and are engaging for a short while. But read content on a page with something blinking to the side and you'll soon be looking for another site to read. Thirdly, it must be easy to navigate the site. If you can't find what you are looking for in a few minutes, it's onto another site. Lastly, it should be attractive, although it doesn't necessarily have to be. Tons of ugly sites with lots of content are hugely successful, while tons more attractive sites with little content gather cobwebs. But all things being equal, an attractive site is better than an unattractive one.
What is the most important information for your visitors? Is it on the Home Page? Amazingly, it frequently isn't. So what do users do? They bookmark the page they want and never see the rest of your site again. Put the same information on the home page and users will see all the announcements and changes immediately. If you put up something else they want, they'll know.
If you put the most important information on the home page, you reduce the risk that a visitor is looking for exactly what you have but doesn't find it before wandering off to greener pastures.
Additionally, by putting your most important information on the home page, you increase the relevancy scores on search engines, thus increasing the chance of inducing new visitors to click on your page rather than the other million sites with the same general subject matter.
Once the page is up and running, you are far more likely to update the important data (important to visitors, not you) regularly. Regularly updated content will bring users back and increase your search engine scores. Fortunately, there are quite a few sources for updated news feeds that can be incorporated into a website quite easily. They focus on narrow subject matter, so you can inform your visitors about things of interest to them.
Judging by the number of animations and other moving graphics on web sites today, you'd think that most visitors like them. Most experienced web surfers don't. But if a web designer puts them on a page, they look great in a 5 minute presentation to the web committee. As long as no one tries to actually read the content on the page with distracting movement adjacent, no one realizes that the flash is just to sell the corporate client on the design and that it will actually drive users away. Persistence studies (studies of how long users stay on a site before navigating away) indicate that users navigate away from busy, blinking sites way faster than from calmer sites.
Lastly, for anyone designing a page today (winter 2012) it is important to design with an eye for the future. For a nearly two decades we have been creating pages with the content, formatting and data all mixed up in one HTML file. That has changed for the modern website.
What the separation of content from formatting does is allow you to have your own formatting in a consistent way across all the data you use, yet grab data from here and there, consolidate it however you need it. It is possible for a doctor to have his calendar on his web page, display it in your browser and query for dates and times that were mutually available. Then you could automatically schedule yourself on his calendar by selecting a date. You wouldn't have to make a phone call (and probably wait on hold forever) and the doctor's staff wouldn't need to waste time trying to find a mutually agreeable time. This is a trivial example of what is possible.
Fortunately, there are tools to help maintain properly constructed sites. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains a validation page where you can check your pages to see what needs to be fixed to make your pages compliant. The W3C is the international body responsible for creating web standards.
According to The Small Business Social Media Survey 2011 survey, 78% of small business owners said they plan to spend more of their marketing budget on social media this year. Facebook is the favorite tool, with Twitter trailing. Google+ is too new for historical data, but it is certainly something businesses should plan for. If you plan on using any of these tools, we can help you incorporate them into your regular website. Take a look at the right column of our parent page for an example of both our Twitter and Facebook feeds.
We had a client who had his website on one of those easy to setup hosts where the host published everything. You cut and pasted your content into an edit window of the browser and the site took care of creating menus and populating the website. Worked great. Until the host sent out a notice that in 30 days they were shutting down their service and everyone had to find someplace else to go.
There were no tools to grab the current website, so we couldn't simply copy pages. We had to create a new site of over 100 pages of content -- and do it in a hurry.
Before you sign up for one of these easy-to-use sites, be sure to figure out how to get your stuff off of it if they go out of business or you become unhappy. At VCC we give you access to the code, which is entirely portable.
At present (2012) there isn't an international standards for displaying data on smart phones and tablets. Sites that look fine on an Android phone look awful on a iPhone, and vice versa. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3) has not completed a standard for Mobile Web (their term for smart phones, tablets, PDA's, etc.), but has released a recommendation for review. We create websites that will work with the widest group of phones and, more importantly, follow the guidelines of the recommendation. This means that when the final Standard is published, we will have a minimum of redoing to comply. Before signing up with anyone, ask them about their compliance with the W3 recommendations. If they give you a blank look, look elsewhere.
Smart phones are quite tricky. Their screens are tiny, figuring out which direction to scroll is difficult and frustration drives users away quite easily. Advance planning is critical. It is possible to iron out about 90% of the potential issues with the coming standard. Do you really want to rewrite 100% of your site?