And the world will be better for this,
That one man, scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove with his last ounce of courage,
To reach the unreachable star.Joe Darios, “The Impossible Dream” Man of La Mancha, 1965
By now I hope that you’ve read my previous articles—Before there was a beginning, Before the dawn of the beginning, The dawn of the beginning and Prelude to the beginning—and you have some understanding of the sequence of events that led to my decision to create a website to draw attention to some of the problems that I see with the Joomla! project. It wasn’t for lack of trying to show that I’ve spent months thinking about this and it wasn’t an impulsive decision but, by sharing a record of my deliberations, I hope my notes may help other people if they’re intending to follow in my footsteps.
You may be wondering why someone hasn’t tried this before? If someone has then I would be pleased to know because I haven’t seen something like this before.
Creating a website is fairly easy. Getting other people on-board with is not your “field of dreams”. There’s a lot of planning that goes into building a website. This article covers some of the behind-the-scenes activities that went into this website.
First things first: the mission
There's no point in building a website if you don’t know why you’re doing it. You have to have a goal; the goal must be realistic. Your website must want to “do” something. That's why I set about writing my manifesto. Lastly—perhaps most importantly—believe in yourself.
If someone asked me to describe the mission for this website in 10 words or less, I would say:
“To build an online community … to dream the impossible dream.”
The website name
A website name should be easy to remember; it should have a “catchy” title. The domain name should relate to the website name. If the business is just starting off and you’re not sure whether it will take off with the wider public, don’t spend too much time (or money) in worrying about the domain name or what the site will eventually look like. Just focus on the basics: the website name should reflect the mission; the little things can make a big differenceThe Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell, 2000 Abacus books, . You can spend all the time (and money) in the world later once your ideas have become contagious.
The financials
Obviously, if you’re going to create a website that will take in money, you need to have an electronic funds transfer processing system. You’re also going to want to keep any income from the website separate from any of your other, personal finances. In my case I created a Paypal account because it’s efficient, effective, trustworthy and in widespread usage. It doesn’t matter if your customers don’t have Paypal: people can pay with their credit cards; Paypal simplifies the process.
During the Paypal account creation process, you will be asked to provide information they can use to verify you as a real person. For Australian users of Paypal we have an Australian Business Register and I have an ABN that I used to verify my credentials. Paypal uses other credential-checking process for people who live in other countries.
So you can write-off an hour or two of your time just going through the mechanics of setting up the EFT backend.
Lastly, you’ll need to research the software that you’ll require to execute transactions; you’ll need to consider if you want a “subscriptions” scheme or a “pay-per-product” approach. In my case, because I don’t have a product catalogue, I felt that paying for a lifetime membership by subscription was the best approach. Only you can decide what’s best for you.
You can probably spend a day or two doing the research, reading a few hundred pages of implementation guides, experimenting with some test payments and seeing the results. If you’ve never done it before it can be quite “exciting”!
The legals
Every website should have policies relating to privacy and the site’s terms and conditions of use. If you don’t have these policies in place then you need to write them (or use someone else’s policy as a template for writing your own). This usually takes half a day to prepare those documents.
Constructing the website: keep it simple
You have your mission statement, your financials are established and your legal policy documents have been written and now you can begin the site installation processSee my video tutorial about how to build a Joomla! website in less than 10 minutes: https://vimeo.com/260010684.
You need to think about how your website will complement your business and how you want to engage with your customers and vice-versa. Because our mission is fairly simpe, we just need a means of broadcasting our message to the public and a means for registered members to provide their feedback. Communicating outwards (from the site, that is) is straightforward: use Joomla! articles. Two-way communication is a little more difficult: I prefer to use a discussion forum. You may also feel a need to limit what is going to appear on the website and who should be able to access it. That’s the reason why there’s a site login form: allow the general public to see public notices, etc., but keep some information private and accessible only to registered usersIn the case of this website, registered members have to pay a subscription fee in order to use some features not available to the general public..
So, while the process of creating a skeleton website only a few minutes, putting flesh onto the bones can take you several days before you’re in a position to publicly announce its presence on the internet.
Marketing: entering the marketplace
Now that your skeleton website exists, you need to plan for getting your product to market. “But wait, ” you may say, “I don’t have a finished product, yet!” The problem in today’s supercharged business scene is that, by the time people have finished their product to the point that it can stand up to critical scrutiny, you may have been outmanoeuvred by your competition. So, the earlier you get into the market—even with a not-fully-completed product—the sooner you’ve attracted interest in your product. The key, however, is to maintain that interest and not keep your customers waiting too long.
So, where do people go first when they’re looking for information? Search engines, right? And Google has the lion’s share of the search engine marketMarket share analyses show Google at 92% or 72% depending on your source. so that’s where you should be putting your energy into. Fortunately, once you have even one page of your website submitted to a search engine, getting the rest of the website automatically indexed is achieved if you have a sitemapsee https://www.ccmarketingonline.com/what-is-a-sitemap/ and also https://extensions.joomla.org/category/structure-a-navigation/site-map/ file. Creating the sitemap should be your first task.
OK, so you’ve signed up to Google Search Console and you’ve spent a few hours working your way through the documentation, you’ve added the site property and you’ve verified the site, and you think you’re now ready to add some content to site, right? Wrong! Read on …
Implementing site analytics
As the famous Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” So, hand in hand with Google Search Console, you will want to invest your time integrating Google Analytics with your website. Allow yourself several more hours to set things up, add the Google Analytics scriptlet to your website, and test one or two URLs to make sure that you’re getting data. Now you’re ready to add some meat to the website skeleton.
A little bit of preparation goes a long way
The most essential ingredient in building a new website is to make sure that you have a backup and recovery plan for when things go south. It’s almost de rigeur, these days, to install Akeeba Backup and I also recommend Akeeba Admin Tools and to test these things thoroughly. One of the benefits in using Akeeba Admin Tools is to properly setup the database tables to use UTF8 multibyte collation and character-encoding, particularly if you’re planning to use multibyte data in your articles (and I do!). I suggest that you look at the image on the right side of the page (click to enlarge it) and run the features I’ve circled.
Designing the website: keep it simple
I don’t think any article on a website can possibly teach anyone about how to design a website. These are matters that are covered in more depth if you choose to read any number of the dozens of books on the subject. The most important tools you need in designing your website are a pencil and paper to sketch the outline of your site’s features and how they’re drawn together under the one roof.
In general, your site must be responsive and accessible; site responsiveness and accessibility features are usually incorporated—to varying degrees—with most modern website templates. The Protostar template is a reasonably good—responsive and accessible—template to use with Joomla!
The key elements in any website are:
- the “landing page” (or website “home” page);
- the navigation menu;
- a member sign-up page;
- “featured” content (perhaps a blog, discussion forum, location map, contact details, etc.);
- site policies (e.g. “terms and conditions of use”, etc.)
The site home page
The “home” page is probably the most important page on your website. It’s usually the first page that people will see and, if you’re careful, it may be the thing that people will remember about your site after they’ve disappeared, never to return again. So you need to keep things really simple: the site home page should have just enough information to explain what the website is all about—no more than a few words or a few graphics; the site navigation must be easy to follow; the choice of font should be consistent, easy to read and nicely contrasted against the background.
Things to avoid: animations; “angry” colours (i.e. reds); placing red elements against green elements (colour-blind people won't see the difference); clutter; “razzle dazzle”; spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.
Things to encourage: white space; physical dimensions (the whole page should fit within a standard desktop monitor screen size); speed (the page needs to load in one second or less); get a second opinion.
Do a bit of background research into the psychology of online marketinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG8-KOghKrk. Remember, the typical visitor to a new website only spends between 1-2 seconds before deciding whether deciding if they’re staying around for longer. Therefore, your home page needs to pack a powerful punch within those few seconds or it’s “bye-bye forever”.
Google Analytics provides some a couple of key insights about how visitors engage with your website: bounce rate and session length.
A high bounce rate (approaching 100%) means that your users are leaving your website after visiting the page they “land” on and then exit without visiting other pages on the website. Obviously, search engine crawler bots will induce a higher bounce rate that regular human beings would, unless the bot is performing a deep crawl such as in the case where it’s processing a sitemap.
Short session durations (particularly less than a few seconds) mean that visitors are not spending time looking at what your site has to offer for them. Obviously, search engine crawler bots spend very little time and you may want to filter out bot activity when you’re analysing Google’s “insights”.
The navigation menu
The menu must be intuitive-to-use, not too “busy” with a range of choices, prominently positioned. The main site menu is the second-most important part of your website. You make it too “fancy” and you'll lose your visitors. If the menu dominates the website—particularly if it dominates the home page—people will think that your menu is the only thing that your website has to offer … and it's “bye-bye forever” on that basis, also.
Member sign-up page
Yes, you want people to become members of your community. That’s not the main purpose but it’s important. People will usually find the sign-up page after a few seconds so there’s no great need to plaster a huge “login form” all over the site home page. If people want to join they’ll find it—probably as a link on the main menu—and if they don’t want to join then don’t waste your time deciding how a sign-up page should look.
The rest of the content
That’s your decision! Keep in mind a few simple guidelines: avoid clutter and “razzle dazzle”; avoid spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Play to your audience: if your website is intended for the general population then write like a professional; if you use l33tsp33k then enjoy your time in that crowd. It doesn’t have to be perfect but the site content shouldn’t look like it was created by two year-old who was left unsupervised with a box of crayons.
Site policy documents
Yeah, you need those!
Starting off: tell the story
Everybody loves a good story. In the days of vaudeville, the comedian would typically start of their routine with, “A funny thing happened on the way to the theatre”, as a way of building rapport with their audience and then, of course, they’d go on to tell their funny story—because that’s just what comedians do. When you’re introducing yourself to a new audience, a good way of breaking the ice is to tell a story that the audience can relate to. A good ice-breaker is to tell them a story about what happened on the way to “the theatre” and then weave that story into the message you want the audience to take home.
In my case, my story was three months or more in the making.
Therefore, before you publicly launch your new website, tell your story: the story about your business, company, the people in the company, what the business is about, etc. This puts you in a better position in selling your new ideas to your visitors.
Marketing your website
Every website is a business. It doesn’t matter whether your business is just a fun hobby, a not-for-profit or as an income-producing investment. If you don’t promote your business—advertise it, market it—you’ll be out of business—just another speck of dust amongst the billions of other failed businesses littering a forgotten void somewhere.
So a very important part in creating your new website is to consider where, how, how much—time and money—you will have to spend doing these promotional activities, not only to increase your existing customer base but also to retain your existing customers. Social media seems to work pretty well: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest. Pick a couple or as many as you can manage with your available time. Make sure that you “brand” your social media presence consistently with what you use on your website.
I think we’re nearly ready for the public launch … just as soon as I add the forum component.
