Here are a few things to consider before you sign a contract:

1. How strong is their portfolio?  Do they do custom work or just use templates?
2. What platforms do they use? Does they use a CMS platform that allows you to easily make updates? (text, photos, videos, products, create coupons, sale prices, etc)
3. Is their CMS proprietary or open-source?
4. Do they charge per hour or by the project? Many companies will give you an estimated total, but in the fine print they charge hourly. This means you could be stuck paying a surprise invoice in the end.
5. Do they have both designers and developers on staff?  Do you get to communicate directly with the designers and developers working on your project or only with a project manager?
6. What processes and tools do they have in place for project management?
7. When the project is complete, do you own the site outright, or do you have to keep the site with the developer?
8. Do they have hosting requirements or require a maintenance contract?

Here are some of the things you should hope to hear in response:

1. They should have a diverse portfolio that shows originality but maintains many of the elements of some of the best websites you use on a regular basis.  Top companies design their sites a certain way for a certain reason–it works!  Be sure to investigate the functionality of these sites as well as the look, flow and intuitive navigation.What you don’t need to see are websites that are exactly like the site you want to build or in the same industry.  A complete skill set can translate from one application or industry to another.
2. Although we’ve used several of the leading CMS platforms (including Drupal and Joomla) in the past, we’ve chosen to use WordPress CMS and Magento e-commerce.  We can do anything you want on these platforms and our clients like them better, so why spread our knowledge base around several platforms?
3. Proprietary platforms are bad news.  What happens if they go out of business? What happens if their service drops off? What happens if they decide to start charging new fees?  Unfortunately there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide if you elect to use proprietary platforms. You are either stuck in a bad situation or stuck paying for your website all over again.
4. We believe you deserve to have a firm that takes the time to get to know your project before throwing out a number that may or may not stick.  This is why we believe that all clients should insist on a fixed-price guarantee.  Quoting by the hour promotes laziness amongst development firms both during the quoting process and during the design and development of your project and puts you at risk of paying far more than you had bargained for.
5. What does their team look like? We have 12 designers and developers on staff to make sure we have a full range of capabilities at hand.  If you are dealing with a one man shop, typically this person is either a designer or a developer, but not both.  You’ll likely end up with a pretty site with low functionality and poor coding or an ugly site that works great.
6. We employ a project management site called ActiveCollab and a content development site called Jumpchart.  Both of these tools provide our team a central location for communication and file sharing and gives our clients the ability to communicate directly with the designers and developers working on your project.  In addition, we have 2 project managers involved in every project.
7. All the work we do will be owned by you.  You can host with us or take it elsewhere.  Its all up to you.
8. We do not have hosting requirements or maintenance contracts. We charge a fixed hourly rate for maintenance projects, but our goal is to make sure your company can do most of the updates yourself.

Hopefully, you’ll find this to be helpful while you evaluate potential providers.  For another perspective, check out Xemion.com’s article on the same subject.

Follow the 80%:

1) 80% of search traffic flows through Google’s search engine.  Whether it be through Google.com or web browsers such as Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari, Google dominates the web.

2) 80% of users bypass the paid advertisements (aka pay-per-click or PPC) to click on the “natural” or “organic” search results.

There are two main parts to and effective SEO campaign: on-page and off-page SEO.

Step 1: On-page SEO

The most obvious part of of on-page SEO is the copy on each page.  From your home page to your contact page, you should have a naturally occurring insertion of your desired keyword phrases.  Too many keywords and Google starts getting suspicious.  Too few keywords and Google won’t recognize your relevance for the keywords you are attempting to win for.  This is where art and science meet and it might help to have a professional SEO Copywriter. We’ve partnered with The Denver Copywriter for over two years now and they do an amazing job.

The second part of on-page SEO is a bit more discreet.  This where page titles, descriptions, alt tags, picture titles and meta tags are added to the code of your website.  As Google crawls your site, these act as indicators for them to recognize your site as relevant for certain keyword phrases.  This is where research and some knowledge of Google’s expectations come into play. For instance, you want to set your page titles on a page-by-page basis so they reflect the content on that page specifically.

Step 2: Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is the fuel for your website’s optimization program. While on-page SEO is absolutely foundational, it won’t get you anywhere without a solid, ethical (“white-hat”) SEO strategy.  The key component to off-page SEO is strategic back linking.  Back linking is simply the process of creating hyperlinks throughout the internet that link back to your website.  For example, above we linked to The Denver Copywriter using the phrase “professional SEO Copywriter.” When Google sees this, they recognize this as a “vote” for The Denver Copywriter as a relevant search result for the phrase “professional SEO Copywriter.” From there it is a game of numbers and authority.  In general, if you have more quality back links than your competitor, you stand a good chance of being ranked ahead of them.  In addition, if you have an authoritative site such as any site ending in .edu or .gov, linking back to your website, this gives you a lot of credibility with Google, just like it would with searchers.

While there have been books and books and blogs upon blogs written about this subject, hopefully this post helps you understand the basics of what’s behind and effective SEO strategy.  If being found on Google is important to you take some of these tips and do some research.  Though it can be very time consuming, the WordPress CMS dashboard makes it fairly simple to insert the appropriate keywords, titles, descriptions and meta tags.  Web Loft Designs offers both on-page SEO and off-page SEO services with great results.

Wordpress

In the previous post we discussed the development capabilities of the three leading CMS platforms: Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. We also discussed the availability and reliability of plugins.  You can read part 1 here.

This post focuses on the usability of the leading CMS platforms. Each CMS has 2 customers: Developers and users.  Developers are of course the technical, dare I say nerdy, bunch that like things to appeal to their technical savvy.  They often prefer things that speak HTML/CSS rather than plain English.  For this reason, many developers actually prefer using Joomla or Drupal. In fact, for a couple of years, Web Loft Designs used all three of the major CMS platforms for development.  Our developers prefer Joomla and Drupal over WordPress, simply because it is more fun for them to work in.

However, as I mentioned in part 1, regardless of the platform, a developer who is an expert at writing and manipulating code, should be able to end up with the same final product, regardless of which CMS he is using.

The major difference in platforms is not the end result on the front end, but the administrative dashboard on the backend. As the site owner, the dashboard is what you’ll interact with when adding a blog post, page or editing an existing page. So why, if our developers loved Drupal and Joomla so much did we switch to working almost exclusively with WordPress?

You.

Each and every time we roll out new sites, we provide training on how to use the dashboard. We found over and over that our average user struggled to use Drupal and Joomla, but understood WordPress intuitively.  Let’s take a look at why.

Secondly, let’s consider the challenges of developing on multiple platforms. Each CMS has its subtle differences and provides a unique set of challenges. Focusing on just one CMS allows developers to become expertly proficient within the platform, learn to overcome those challenges and stay up-to-date on the various plugins that improve your site’s functionality and keep your cost down.

As I stated in the previous post, when it comes down to it, there are a lot of excellent CMS platforms and, depending on your level of expertise and experience, you may find one to be preferable over another.  However, in our experience, WordPress has become so popular because, simply put, it is the easiest CMS to use for the average person.

A CMS or Content Management System is the best way to address these demands and save you money.  Because a CMS can give the average person the ability to update content such as text, photos, video and even product categories, a CMS is ideal.  But which CMS is best?

Drupal

This is a difficult question to answer because there are sooooo many choices.  There are many good platforms and everybody has their opinion.  Here’s the truth: The leading CMS platforms are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.  While there are many other decent platforms, these are generally proprietary, have limited plug-in options and, if the web developer you choose is not available down the road, or doesn’t deliver, you’ll have a lot of trouble finding someone who is truly comfortable working on these platforms.  Having said that, from here we’ll assume you’ll choose one of the big three CMS platforms.

Joomla

First of all, there is the question of potential.  Some developers will tell you that “WordPress can do things that Joomla cannot” or “Drupal is more robust than WordPress.” These claims are simply false.  All three platforms are written in .php (a highly clean & efficient script specifically designed for the web).  All three platforms cater to HTML/CSS language.  The capabilities and limitations of each platform and determined by the developer himself.

Think of it this way, there are a lot of people who can speak English, but not everyone communicates well.  When it comes down to it, being able to write and manipulate code, regardless of the platform, is the determining factor for the potential of any CMS platform.

Plugins: Plugins are to CMS what APPS are to Smart Phones. They allow your site to do things it couldn’t do before, without requiring each individual developer to spend hours creating the code from scratch.  The questions are:

Which platform has the most plug-ins?

Which platform has the most reliable plug-ins?

Wordpress

Sticking with our analogy above, WordPress CMS is iPhone of the CMS industry.  First of all, there are more users on the WordPress platform than any other…a lot more.  Gauging from the top 1,000,000 sites, Drupal holds 8.84% of this sites.  Joomla touts over 23 Million downloads since 2007, but only powers 11.92% of the top million sites.  Where does WordPress stand in all this? According to BuiltWith.com, WordPress is the foundation for of 61% of the top million sites–that’s 616,100 websites!

Along with this user base, comes the highest number and most reliable plug-ins.  There are currently 16,831 WordPress plugins. What does this mean for you as the user?

1) You have access to nearly 17,000 upgrades to the basic WordPress platform.  Some of these are easy to install, some of them are “plug & play” and others take some of them are more complicated to install and take some tweaking to make them interact properly with your site.  Working with a professional WordPress developer, you’ll have access to their knowledge of the WordPress plugin directory, which plugins work best and their ability to fine tune the plugins to remove any issues.

2) Another advantage of WordPress plugins is the largest test group on the planet.  With so many websites and users out there, issues with any given plugin rise to the surface faster, get reported and fixed or, get poorly rated so you know to stay away from them.

So, here’s the highlights:

1. The most popular CMS platforms are Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.
2. WordPress powers about 3x the number of websites compared to Joomla and Drupal combined.
3. Because of the number of users, WordPress features the most plugins with the most thorough testing

In our next post, we’ll discuss usability and give you a quick tour of the WordPress dashboard.