A definitive guide to creating a User-First website

A MUST READ for your Marketing Department

Ind

ex What we strive for in

developing your website

6-7 User-First Design 8-9 Super-Fast Loading10-11 AMP Framework12-13 AMP Stories14-15 Easy to manage content16-17 Targeting Featured Snippets

The Website Development Process

18-19 Process 20-25 Discovery26-27 Design28-31 Development32-33 Deploy34-35 Launch36 Support37-41 Expert Optimisation

I N D E XIntroduction

Think of your website as a showroom. Enticing your customers in, giving them all the information they need, whilst addressing their concerns. First impressions count. A great website will iron out all the details to convert your visitor to your customer. You’re reading this because you want to reach new clients, yes? Of course you do. A brilliant, workable website will do this for you.

Reading this is going to give you all the data and tips you need to achieve website success that’s going to look incredible at your next marketing review meeting.

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We understand how to develop an optimised website, a website that will take your business to the next level.

You’re going to want to know how we do this, and the steps to get there. What follows are the benefits and journey through working with us from first contact to supporting your new website. Working with us is always a two-way process. We aren’t about taking on every company in the nearest vicinity, or anyone who shows the slightest bit of interest in what we do. We’ve been in this website developing game for some time now, and have pretty much narrowed down our potential clients to companies with a marketing department providing services to other businesses.

Working within the B2B service industry, we predominantly provide services for innovative and forward-thinking clients.

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Of course, you understand the vital importance of a website that not only looks good, but WORKS. Most flashy websites taking forever to load are not our jam. Flamboyant websites may please you, but we’re targeting your prospects, and what they want is answers, fast.

In the beginning days of the Internet, everyone expected sites to load slowly. That was just how the world wide web was, and people didn’t expect anything else. But today, it’s a different story. The sites of 2019 and beyond need to load faster than the sites of 2009 or 1999, and Google values fast-loading sites more and more.

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nA great website has purpose and direction.

Having an all singing, all dancing, fancy pants website with a load of uncontrollable navigation makes it incredibly difficult for customers to find what they want. If your sales team don’t use your website as a resource, why not? Is it not easy to navigate, or is the information unreliable? If it’s not good enough for your sales team, then what use is it to your prospects?

Just three clicks – if you’re lucky – is the time the average user expects to find the information they are searching for on your website. They’re not looking for bouncy animations. If they can’t find the answer to their question, solution to their problem or reassurance of their concerns, fast, they’re likely to leave and never return.

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The branding elements including your logo, tagline, and any other graphical elements on the site should make it easy for new visitors to understand why the site exists and why they should stick around. Remember, people will be approaching your website asking themselves, “Why am I here and what’s in it for me?”

The quality and design of how we present content can mean the difference between:

• A new visitor staying or bouncing.

• A regular visitor getting excited or bored.

• A potential customer buying from you, or buying from your competitor.

• An existing customer being satisfied, or asking for their money back.

You can have the best content in the world, but without good design, you might not make that lasting first impression.

3XOur number one aim in website development is to ensure your potential visitors stick around and convert to become customers. You’ll find out how we do this in the next section.

Can your visitors be confident that they will find what they are looking for within the initial few seconds of a page loading?

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nWe develop websites that are User-First.

This simply means we are focussing on the end user experience, even if it means it’s trickier for us to develop.

A website needs to meet its business needs. It’s our job to create a website that your prospects will appreciate more than you. Kudos for increasing conversion rates, not for making it look pretty. A website needs to appeal to its customers, if not the whole project may as well be scrapped.

If you baffle your website visitor, they will simply find another website. Images should be used to a great effect, and always make sure all the key information is really easy to find.

If you put the user first, you will increase your chances tenfold to having a successful on-line presence.

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Guaranteed super fast loading is what we doEfficient design is the most important feature of a website. In today’s society, where everyone wants stuff immediately, there’s no time to waste on slow loading websites.

Ain’t no-one got time for that!

Google are well aware that visitors use their platform because they provide reliable answers, and quickly. For people to keep using their service they must serve reliable and fast results, which therefore means linking to websites that provide the answers quickly and reliably.

User experience (UX) is paramount for website performance. How users navigate your website and how fast it is to find the solutions that answer their problems are essential to high conversion rates. And high conversion rates mean PRIZES. And by prizes we mean meeting KPIs.

We promise to deliver less than a second loading time. Anything longer is unacceptable.

1sec10%

BBC noticed that for every extra second it took for their site to load, they lost 10% of their users

[Source: www.officialbryangrey.com]

1sec20%

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Let’s get that lightning symbol and take your website to the next level

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) are the way forward. AMP is an open-source, publishing technology project designed to create web pages that are compelling, smooth, and load near as dammit instantaneously.

Paving the way for the fastest loading and most optimised websites, this is where your business wants to be. We develop AMP pages that are mobile first and fully responsive to work on all display sizes and modern browsers.

The advantages of developing your website with AMP are remarkable. It will provide your website with elevated visitor numbers and conversion rates, particularly with mobile visitors.

Let us show you the future of AMP and what it can do for your business.

Research sponsored by none other than Google demonstrates that “AMP leads to a 10% increase in website traffic with a 2x increase in time spent on page”.

You can identify a page that is using AMP as a little grey circular lightning bolt symbol displayed next to the link on mobile search results in Google.

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TO AMP

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Visual storytelling for the open web Very similar to Instagram stories, and designed with mobile websites in mind, this is a powerful tool used to immerse your visitors in fast-loading, full-screen experiences.

But the content created with AMP doesn’t get added to an app. It’s another opportunity to rank on Google within a special stories section similar to Featured Snippets, News carousels and location maps. All of which have proved very popular at increasing visitor numbers.

AMP is an open-source project that was created in response to the fact that mobile users now spend more time on apps than in websites. It’s not all about mobile, however. AMP stories also work perfectly on desktop browsers, and do not require apps or accounts to access them. Super accessible!

AMP Stories are a new way to create immersive content for your customers

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Creating visual narratives with engaging animations and ‘tappable’ interactions.

Reach your visitors in a different way by delivery news and information as visually rich, tap-through stories. Creating AMP stories is as simple as drag and drop, giving you the power to deliver information whenever you need to.

And as we’ve come to expect with AMP, AMP stories are of course lightning-fast, so your audience stays engaged and entertained.

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When it comes to CMS, we are all about MODX.

A CMS (Content Management System) is an application used to manage web content, allowing multiple contributors to create, edit and publish pages. Content in a CMS is typically stored in a database and displayed in a presentation layer based on a set of templates.

We have developed MODX to be highly efficient and flexible, with the ability to add any templates you wish. This means we create websites that can be managed very easily by people who aren’t website designers! With the addition of Content Blocks within MODX, this turns the content field into a powerful canvas. With a complete set of flexible content types, we can build immersive landing pages and complex designs, without the editor touching any code.

MODX doesn’t rely on Plugins and Themes that add to bloated code and security risks, making it the fastest, most flexible, scalable and secure open source CMS. We like it a lot.

It’s simply a case of drag and drop – easy peasy to update and amend content yourself.

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This CMS enables us the flexibility to create efficient and fully optimised code that helps Google understand your content. MODX is professional and scalable, it will work for small websites as well as large multilingual, multi context, multi departmental websites.

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When a user asks Google a question, it might show a search result in a special featured snippet block at the top of the results page. This featured block includes a summary of the answer, extracted from a web page, plus a link to the page, the page title and URL. Google programmatically detects pages that answer the user’s question and display a top result. Like so....

We’d be so bold to say that winning a Featured Snippet is the equivalent of a golden ticket to the chocolate factory.

You need to be informative, factual and provide a concise answer to the user’s question. Targeting the correct keywords and finding the correct balance in providing awesome answer content that wins both the Featured Snippet and the click.

The obvious benefit to ranking #0, of course, is that your site is at the very top of the search results. Not only that, but featured snippets stand apart from the rest of the organic results. In other words, they’re not just at the top, they’re occupying their own space separated from the rest of the pack.

If one of your web pages occupies rank 0, you’ve got some obvious prestige.

One more thing, these snippets are often used for Google assistant responses.

We are talking the future of SEO here people…

.com You might be under the impression that the best you can do is rank your website in the search results at position #1. Think again.

There’s a rank that’s even better than position #1.

That’s position #0.

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Be the star at your marketing review meetings! With your high-performance website, developed and optimised using the latest data-driven technologies specifically designed to increase conversion rates.

We love developing not only a high-performance website, but also areliable, honest and longlasting relationship with you. A successful website is ongoing; things will always evolve and improve along with your business.

Can a website be improved?

Of course.

In fact, it should be improved, and it will continue to be improved for as long as it lives within the world wide web.Your website should evolve as your company improves, growing and adapting with the times. We believe websites shouldn’t be redeveloped every five years but instead, evolve over time.

Website Optimisation and long-term success are our goals for a redesigned or new site. Sacrificing those efforts for a website efficiently built with quick wins makes no sense. We can confidently assure you that every page on your new site has good, keyword optimised meta descriptions and title tags. Google approves.

Learn about the process we follow when developing successful websites starting with the all-important and often forgotten discovery phase...

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Now we have seen the benefits and features of a highly optimised website, lets look at the process of creating it.

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Let’s begin.

We need to know your customers.

Do you want a website that you like, or that your potential visitors like..?

Of course you want potential customers to find your website and convert, rather than just attracting people you already know.

You know how it works. The internet is great, but sometimes you want to talk directly to the experts. We go one step further and work alongside your marketing team, in your offices if possible, to fully understand your business.

We will spend time with you really analysing who your website needs to target and how your business ticks.

This isn’t just about marketing. Integration with CRM, sales processes and accounts means we can not only provide you with an outstanding website, but make your business more streamlined too.

We can reduce duplication of workload, processes and reduce touch-points to provide a clearer insight.

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Planning typically starts by creating an avatar of your target clients.

This is such a useful tool. We can then visualise your clients - where they work, their social activities, their buying habits.

What is an avatar?We are talking about your customer avatar. A clear representation of their alter ego, if you will.

You can’t hit a target you haven’t set

Let’s think about this for a minute. Aiming your marketing with your customer avatar in the forefront of your mind gives you near super-human abilities. The ability to communicate powerfully with the people who are most likely to become your customers.

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We now have a very clear image of Martin, and how he thinks and behaves

As an example, here’s Martin the MD, and his avatar showing who he is, as well as his business goals and worries.

Martin is in the prime of his life, he’s between 45-55 years of age

He’s got two kids, heading to University soon

Secretly looking forward to having the house to himself again, however having to deal with his emotional wife dreading empty nest syndrome

Martin drives a Mercedes, possibly an Audi, but definitely a high-spec German car

He’s only in the office 2-3 days a week

Martin is well travelled and frequently working away on business

Martin’s pain points include a lack of time to think about leading the marketing team

He enjoys providing business opportunities for others

Martin focusses on increasing profits for shareholders

Martin wants to manage his time effectively to ensure business is improving and able to withstand any bumps in the road

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We also have Marketing Michelle, and her own set of thoughts and ideals:

Michelle is 35-45, with young children at school or pondering starting a family

She lives in a small town and commutes daily in her SUV

Michelle works 5 days a week, sometimes from home

Michelle juggles her work life with her family life, all the while trying to think of something her whole family will actually eat for dinner

Her main motivations are providing positive reports that demonstrate continued improvements in performance. That extra pay rise or bonus could help pay towards the ideal holiday.

Monthly review meetings with the MD always cause her minor alarm. She worries the latest reports she has generated are not going to show the KPIs rising as much as the MD is expecting.

Michelle is always seeking to source reliable information to arm herself with all the key information, so she can be as informed as possible with how the business is performing.

The avatar we create together alongside the developing process will be kept at the fore-front of our minds at every step, ensuring we always aim our attentions at the right place.

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We create a visitor journey map, to highlight preferred visitor behaviour. A journey map will look at multiple starting positions, call-to-actions and way-points to answer the questions and concerns of our avatars.

This visitor journey map is essential to making sure your potential visitors stick around to convert. We really get to grips with the avatars’ thoughts and behaviours, and how they are most likely to browse your website. We can then funnel them to exactly where we want them to be. In addition to this, we use the current website analytics to further enhance our findings.

The next thing we do is a make project plan with tasks, so we can keep track of the progress of the website and project manage the entire schedule from start to finish. This includes a full check list, breaking down each element of the website. This allows for full project transparency, and a timeline for tasks to be completed.

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Using the wireframe and journey map, a detailed design is created providing a visual representation of how the website will look on completion. Placeholder content is typically used as a visual representation to aid in the development and content creation.

We use Adobe XD which allows for creative design and user functionality. It’s quick and easy to use for website design in mind, and can be reviewed and commented online by clients. XD also allows you to prototype the journey, linking pages together to see how the journey flows, not just how it appears.

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Using the research from the planning and discovery phase of the process, we put together a detailed design of your new website.

The design is then fully evaluated before our developers write a single line of code.

So how do we do this…

A wireframe is produced to provide a representation of your website, focusing on the layout of content to maximise visitor interaction and journey progress. A wireframe is purposefully simplified so as to focus on the user experience rather than the completed design.

This identifies the content required for your website and feedback at the early stages. The wireframe is used for us to understand what we are to construct with the blueprint in mind. This can ease communication and avoid misunderstanding, leading to a nice smooth design phase.

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The Front-End Development bitOnce the design and content is agreed, we can start coding your unique website. Content can either be created for you or provided by you. Other than providing content, this phase is in our hands. The agreed design is converted into nippy and efficient code. Our experienced developers are fluent in the many coding languages including HTML, CSS and PHP, enabling us to create code compliant, well optimised and interactive websites. Building your website from the code up keeps your website efficient and fast to load.

The Back-End Development bitOnce we have your design converted into HTML, we will code it into the content management system so you’re able to add, edit and delete content. The CMS we have a lot of time for is MODX. This is a very flexible system with a good security record and is used by many large, professional companies.

MODX has built-in caching framework for lightning fast loading speeds and easy content management. This CMS is used by technology giants and financial institutions alike, so you’re in good company with a website built with MODX.

Setting up the server comes next. Choosing the right hosting affects SEO aspects like site speed; any old hosting service won’t do. We’re well placed to be able to provide you with sound advice on finding the perfect hosting partner for your website.

The hosting you choose needs to be able to handle the traffic you throw at it as you grow your website. This gives us the flexibility to move forwards with your long-term plans for expansion. Nobody likes

unnecessary bloat, and we are no different.

We will develop your website without any.

Cross browser and device compatibility is tested at this stage. The mobile first approach to responsive design is always our first port of call. Design for smaller screens first of all, then add more features and content for bigger and bigger screens.

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Improve and update on MigrationWhen we switch everything from an old site to a new one, we want to be absolutely sure that we have somewhere to send visitors if they accidentally wander off to your old site. All new and existing content is migrated into the website using the content management system. We copy content over either manually or by creating export/import algorithms to automate the process.

We’re able to create import and export APIs with MODX so your data is always accessible and transferable, yet secure.

We filter the content to improve it and update as we go, ensuring all content is optimised and works with AMP framework.

We take care to ensure all pages that have been transferred will be set up with a 301 redirect. Blindly creating 301 redirects for every page is not best practice. If there is no real replacement page, a 410 deleted code is used to remove the indexed page gracefully. Search engines will be clear how to re-index the site content when it goes live.

All content will be fully optimised for both search rankings and user experience, and laid out to meet branding guidelines.

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While usability testing can be pretty broad, there are a few vital aspects that are at the top of our list for this step:

• Is it readable?

• Does it work on latest versions of

Chrome, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Edge

and Safari?

• Is it mobile first?

• Does it also work on Tablet, PC and MAC?

• Will users know what to do?

When we answer “yes” to these questions, we know we are on the right track.

If any answers are “no”, we keep polishing and tracking until we turn them into “yeses”.

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The finish line is now in sight.

The final review of the website and testing now takes place to ensure contact forms work correctly, and all links go to the right places.

During review and testing, a snagging list is created with final adjustments to be made to the website within the original project scope.

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Once your website is completed and ready to go live it just takes a few moments to have it launched.

If the website is to be hosted on a new server, migration may take up to 72 hours to appear. There are ways we can mitigate this however, with forethought and planning.

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Now it’s time to set up SSL, run yet more tests, and your brand new and improved, shiny, website is tested post launch. We submit your new website’s sitemap to the main search engines so they can be indexed and start rank-ing, along with setting up Google Analytics and other analytical software.

Even if you were tracking data on your old website, we’ll need to set up analytics on your new website. Analytics can give you amazing insights about your website visitors.

We provide a 14 day period to fix any issues found during this time. We monitor for minor bugs, and any problems with links, and fix these.

After the 14 days, you can move onto our optional Management Support package, for peace of mind that your website is well looked after.

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Everyone gets a bit stuck sometimes.

We are here to support you along the way, and offer Management Support Packages. Have a chat with your account manager to discuss the best option for you.

Many things will change and update - browsers, services, and your visitor expectations. With this in mind, we provide support to update these.

Your website will be kept in tip top condition, up to date and secure. We pro-actively manage your new site, check analytics, fix bugs, and provide basic support and advice to help you update content when the need arises. We are also on hand in case something goes wrong.

We are always adding to and improving our online guides and tutorials to help you manage your website and content.

Expert Optimisation

Within the website industry things change randomly which means your page could go up or down in the rankings without warning.

This means you should look at website optimisation as a long term and ongoing process. We aim to stay ahead of the curve of all the search engines. When search engines adapt the way they look at things, it can have an effect on your business, but we can act quickly to reduce these effects for you.

SEO is just one part of website optimisation.

We cover all other, just as important areas: Including…..

• Developing new elements

A website, once up, will not stay current all

by itself. The more up-to-date your content is,

the more quickly it will go out-of-date. Design

elements will change if your organisation changes

its image. And website technology will continually

raise the expectations of your target market,

demanding that you stay current as well.

• Analysis of your website

Using tools such as Google Analytics gives us an

in-depth understanding of how long visitors stay

on pages, where they have come from and where

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• Monitoring KPIs

With our experience working in a corporate

arena where KPIs are key for monitoring

marketing results, we work with you to

build achievable KPIs in different areas of

optimisation. We use the latest monitoring

software to test for Performance,

Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO.

• Advising of new content and keywords

This process will include more of an

in-depth plan for keyword research,

content length, strategic keywords and

phrasing placement. Our goal is to combine

the practice of developing engaging

content with the technical aspect of

keyword optimisation.

• Target Featured Snippets

In-depth focus discussions with you, targeting

the correct phrases and finding awesome answer

content to try and secure your elusive Featured

Snippet.

• Only White Hat method SEO

(never grey or black)

Not saying we print out and laminate the Google

Webmaster Guidelines, hang it on the wall and

worship it, but we do advocate developing a quality

site that Google will definitely approve of.

Black Hat SEO tactics can get you penalised from

Google and other search engines.

Though there may be some short-term success

through increased traffic to your site, Google

penalties are getting more and more sophisticated

and can have devastating effects on your rankings

and traffic. With hundreds of millions of users

searching on Google per day, can you really afford to

be de-indexed?

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• Writing relevant articles for you

Existing copy that is not written with search

engines in mind is likely to limit search

engine rankings. Optimising existing copy in

line with recent keyword research can help

to improve rankings, as can adding new

pages of relevant content to a site. Writing

effective copy is crucial to the effectiveness

of a website optimisation campaign.

• Building links for you

Link building, simply put, is the process of

getting other websites to link back to your

website. All marketers and business owners

should be interested in building links to

drive referral traffic and increase their site’s

authority.

However, not all links are created equal.

Google rewards high-quality links, actively

aims to ignore lower-quality links and will

still penalise real-time spamming activity

using manual actions.

• Research into keywords

A comprehensive keyword analysis is performed,

which shows us which regularly used search terms

on Google are relevant to your business.

This data will

subsequently be

reported, and the

ranking value for

every one of these

keyphrases so that

you’re able to see

their relative

importance.

When the keyphrases have been picked, we will

then generate content for both your website and

entry to third party websites, the latter again to

enhance your internet authority. Both of these help

Google to categorise your website appropriately.

• Conversion Rate Optimisation

We analyse how visitors use your website and make

it better.

We hone the content on your site to ensure it is in

line with Conversion Rate Optimisation. Making sure

all content is working especially hard for you.

Let’s start your new project

together.

We will book a meeting and create a personalised proposal detailing exactly

how we will re-develop your website to the pinnacle of optimisation.

Contact us

Tel: +44 (0)203 8293528or +44 (0)1536 218 710

Email: theteam@unumbox.com

1 (B) HeadlandsKettering

NorthamptonshireNN15 7ER

United Kingdom

Company No. 09840976

Or visit our websiteunumbox.com