Yes! Finally Clear Well Written about Building a Professional Website with Drupal
Following a link from http://drupal.org/planet I came across the excellent series by IBM developers about developing a profession website using open source technology. In fact, the series focuses on using Drupal as the core.
The professionalism in the process used to redesign the website and the detail with which these articles are written make this series a must read for anyone interested in community websites.
Some items to highlight include:
I just came across this great post from back in April by Dean over at Heal Your Church Web Site about Software as a Service for Church Websites .
It is worth a read and your consideration if you are involved with any Christian Website for an organization. Here is a small snippet to entice you over to read the post:
...SaaS helps keep this highly mobile, suburbanly sprawled congregation together by facilitating both paid and lay staff in terms of communications, sharing materials and schedule management. In other words, the problems solved by FBCF’s use of the CCM go well past that of simple website content ‘manglement.’
Everyday we hear that another company goes out of business.
When and why does a dot-com become a dot-bomb?
After checking few dozen defunct companies, I think
the main reasons a dot-com goes bust are:
* Poor business plan.
In the last years, a lot of investment capital was spent on poorly planned companies that clearly couldn't reach profitability.
Introduction
Keep it short and simple
Investing in domain names.
Summarising
Ok, so you have found your name and decided that you wish to build a world wide empire. You have chosen www.zack-saysevry1has2visitm... ....what's wrong with this? Sure, it's descriptive, it challenges and it's generic. But it's also a mixture of numbers, letters, abbreviations, hyphens and horribly long. A domain name should be easy to remember, easy to relay to someone over the telephone and where possible, the first letter should be as close to the letter "a" as possible. A number of search engines and indices categorise alphabetically. Domain names should also be as brief as possible. As far as I am aware, all 3 and 4 letter names for .com and .net are taken at this time. Unfortunately, when I began "Taming the Beast" in the mid-90's I didn't consider some of these issues.
The Internet is exploding and a lot of companies are thinking about placing a "home page" on the World Wide Web. For maximum impact and user friendliness, keep the following guidelines in mind when designing your web presence.
Users will not wait. You have about 10-seconds to catch and keep a visitor. Your home page should load quickly. Ensure this by keeping graphics small and backgrounds simple and by using height and width tags with every graphic. The height/width tags will force the text to load first giving the user something to read while the graphics load. It is also a good idea to use ALT tags with the graphic tag so that the graphic is identified to the user while it loads.
Creating a web site without developing a web site marketing plan is the same as planning for failure. A web site marketing plan is essential not only just to survive but to continue to thrive and expand your business. You should spend 80% of your time marketing your web site. It's the life blood of your online business.
Most of us probably create a web site first before we plan to market it. However just like a business plan, you should prepare your marketing strategy ahead of time. What's the benefit of doing this? The further you plan ahead the easier will all the pieces of your web site fall into place.
Introduction
WEBSITE DESIGN TIPS
MARKETING IDEAS (ATTRACTING VISITORS)
KEEPING VISITORS
We have found the following to be very effective in building and sustaining traffic to our website. I hope it goes without saying that website sales are directly proportional to traffic!
Get listed with the major search engines. Don't do it yourself - it is very time consuming and there are plenty of inexpensive ways to get it done. I like the folks at 1-step(http://www.1step.com).
Here is some advice regarding the Web site that supports your company:
* Do the right thing when you prepare the Web site.
Hire reputable professionals to build and promote your cyber adventure. If you already have a Web site, remember that a Web site can easily be redesigned and properly resubmitted to search tools.
Introduction
Banning spiders and agents
Search engine spider identification
Further learning resources:
The following is a basic listing of search engine spider names and their "owners". This is by no means complete, as there are many thousands of search engines on the Internet, but it covers the more common beneficial spiders. Look for these in your traffic reports or search for the names through your server logs to discover which pages they have been spidering. You'll find that many of the entries will also have accompanying numbers or letters e.g Googlebot/2.1 or Slurp.so/1.0
Introduction
Keep it short and simple
Investing in domain names.
Summarising
If all this seems pretty confusing, it may be wise to engage the services of a consultant. It will cost you anything from US$25 upwards for
the service, but the fee of a good consultant is money well spent. Your domain name is a very important part of your online business, and there are many traps set for the unwary.