From nice-to-have to mission-critical, websites have come a long way over the past couple of decades. Now, no matter what sector you operate in a compelling web presence is likely to be non-negotiable. But what does this actually entail? What are the elements you need to prioritise in order to ensure your website supports and empowers your organisation, rather than acting as a drain on resources or simply an under-optimised asset?
The aesthetics of your website – how it looks and feels to its visitors – are obviously paramount. However, too many organisations spend a great deal of time and money on those initial aesthetics, and fail to consider what happens after that website has gone live. The key point to remember is that today’s websites can often be enormously dynamic. But this in turn, this means that ongoing website management and support is far more complex – and involves far more stakeholders – than ever before.
Here are four key areas to consider in order to truly take control of your digital presence.
User-friendliness across your organisation
Where once only a team of technicians would ever ‘touch’ your site, now there are far more stakeholders to think about. Marketing and communications teams need to add content. Sales teams need to access online requests from potential customers. HR teams need to manage the careers section. And of course, the head of the organisation may want to be able to modify areas of the site themselves.
This means that you need to consider both the ability of your website to support a large number of users, with different accessibility levels, and its administration user-friendliness once they have that access. Ultimately, this comes down to choosing a suitable web content management system (WCMS) – one that is flexible and intuitive enough for your entire organisation, not just your technical teams. A range of factors contribute to a CMS’s usability – from its maturity to the available user documentation – it’s important to consider all of these when making a decision.
Ease of content management
You don’t need to be running an online commerce store in order to be under pressure to continually refresh your website’s content. The vast majority of websites today, across multiple industries, operate like online magazines. They incorporate blogs and articles, photography, diagrams and videos. They add new content continually, and advertise it across social media platforms. In short, most websites today are online publishing platforms, and many are being used to drive self-services models of business, whereby users can simply access the website and find the information they need without human intervention.
This means that ease of content management in particular is an absolutely critical decision when choosing the framework that underpins your website. It is unsustainable to expect highly skilled digital technicians to handle all of the content management your site demands so look for functions like drag-and-drop image uploads, and don’t forget to consider how easily content management can be carried out on mobile devices. Above all, look for the ability to customise and manipulate content without complicated coding. It’s always easier to press a button than to type a string of HTML tags.
These actions are far easier in certain CMSs than others. It’s important, too, to consider the balance between the most basic CMSs, which are easiest to use from day one but lack flexibility and power, and those that have a slightly steeper learning curve at the beginning but provide your organisation with a system that can be developed and adapted to meet changing needs over a number of years. Choosing an open source CMS, such as Drupal for example, can be beneficial here, with a range of additional modules already in existence that can be incorporated at a later date to improve functionality.
Clean and comprehensive data management
Modern websites pull in data from a huge variety of different sources. Firstly there’s information related to platforms where users login, such as customer portals and data generated from online forms. Analytics packages also collect information on your website’s search performance and the traffic that reaches it. For many organisations this data will be mission-critical – which means you need to be able to organise and access it in real-time, via easy-to-understand tools and dashboards.
Additionally, many organisations have a highly complex back-end infrastructure, sometimes as a result of running multiple legacy platforms and third party systems, and these need to be unified and consolidated if ease of management and smooth scalability are to be achieved.
Once you start imagining your website at the heart of a complex web of data generation and manipulation, it’s easy to appreciate that your platform needs to offer a highly intuitive back-end, which is powerful enough to make sense of the vast amount of information collected. This may mean adding specific data management plugins or modules to your CMS, depending on the data that is of most use to your organisation.
Reliable hosting
Any website is only as reliable as its hosting provider – after all, if your hosting platform goes down, so too does your digital presence. It is vital to choose a hosting partner that can handle the specific demands of your site – and that builds those demands into its service level agreement, so you have absolute peace of mind.
It’s worth remembering that many managed services providers will happily take on the responsibility for organising your hosting and liaising with your provider, so if you choose a partner to look after the ongoing patching, upgrading, monitoring and maintenance of your website – which can certainly be invaluable – then you may be able to arrange hosting organised as part of your contract.
Your digital presence is not a part of your organisation that can afford to be compromised on. Managing its disparate parts can seem like a daunting prospect, but technology is available to draw them together, to bring simplicity and unity to your website and to ensure you can fully harness the data you didn’t know you had.
Article by By Mike Carter, Director at Ixis
