Having interacted with hundreds of client project teams on new websites, we’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly. If you’ve ever been through a website construction project, you probably know just how frustrating the process can be. To minimize your frustration, and more importantly maximize results, here are key things to keep in mind.

• Make sure Sales is well represented. Top-level executives, IT personnel and even marketing people can be detached from the sales process. Sales personnel understand what prospects are looking for and how to put across a persuasive message.

• Make the website’s purpose crystal clear. Various company departments lobby for their message to be included in the new website — messages that dilute the site’s effectiveness in generating sales or leads. If lead generation or sales leads is the purpose of your new site, put that fact front and center for your project team. A team with a unified purpose will prevent “content creep.”

• Be realistic about your internal capabilities. One common way project teams try to cut corners is to write their own website copy. However, it is only when the time comes to put pencil to paper that companies realize copywriting is harder than it looks. Result: lengthy delays and mediocre content. It’s less expensive, faster and easier to rely on your agency’s expert staff than trying to save money on writing, design or development tasks your team is neither experienced in nor has adequate time for.

  

• Set high standards, but don’t demand perfection. Another common cause of delays and budget overruns is the project team's demand for perfection before launching the new site. Perfection never happens in web development. In fact, your website plans should include ongoing testing, no matter what condition it’s in upon launch. Fight the urge to agonize over every color selection, every font and every image. All this will do is mire your team in exhausting conversations.

• Put the right person in charge. To make a project team effective, its leader must be competent, decisive, articulate and empowered. If you’re a company leader, don’t try to pull strings behind the scenes; it will only undercut the nominal team leader and cause communication gaffes among internal team members and with your web design agency. Worse yet is to empower a team leader who lacks the necessary skills. Choose wisely for a winning website.

Want to discuss your upcoming website project? Contact us now to discuss your objectives!

Take a Look at Our Latest Client Website

Our web design team just completed a new website for Enviro Tech International, Inc., a supplier of industrial solvents headquartered in the Chicago area. A few things are definitely worth checking out in the desktop design. (Note to readers: The design is responsive and looks different in mobile view.)

Fast. The first thing you’ll notice if you click on the website link is lightning-fast page loading. As website visitors get more and more impatient, page loading speed becomes more and more important. Also, if you’re doing SEO, Google puts a lot of emphasis on page loading speed.

Action. The header navigation is user-friendly and encourages visitors to do something.

• You can’t miss the phone number.
• Reviews, which visitors usually find very helpful (and are coming to expect), are prominent, as well as three invitations with broad appeal — write a review, request a sample, request a quote. Simple.
• Lots of white space in the header, even with all the calls to action.

Snappy Photos. When you’re in a non-sexy business like industrial solvents, coming up with engaging photographs is always a challenge. But good choice of camera angle and color gets the job done on this shot of nPB solvent:

Sidebar Navigation. On a technical website, there is, by necessity, a lot of complicated terminology and page hierarchies, so having crisp sidebar navigation is critical.

On this page, Products By Application & Industry, visitors have a very strong visual cue to remind them what page they are on, and where they are in the overall scheme of the website’s content. This same, simple sidebar navigation is used in all sections.

If you’re in the market for an “industrial strength” lead generation website, please contact us — we’re eager to learn more about your project and give you a proposal.

For today’s web developers, it is important to continually stay on top of an ever-changing landscape that is seemingly evolving faster than a speeding bullet. Because of this, it is vitally important to set aside time each week to study and stay abreast of all of the new technologies, libraries and languages out there. Doing this will:

• Allow you to continually update your skills.
• Ensure that the work you’re producing is always following modern standards.
• Ensure that you will always be employing the latest techniques and trends.

Having several solid resources for new learning material is crucial to staying on top of this constantly changing ecosystem.

Below are a few sites that we here at Straight North either are using or have used in the past. These sites all are great resources of knowledge for all things web development and are just a small but representative sampling. From sites such as these, you’ll be able to learn a wide variety of new skills via online videos, code exercises and tests:

Treehouse

This site has courses on everything from coding to web design to business management. It covers nearly every major language through comprehensive online courses.

Codeacademy

Codeacademy is a little less robust than Treehouse, but you can get started with an account here totally free of charge, which is always a plus. It still covers most major languages here, such as HTML, CSS, JS and PHP.

Code School

Much like Codeacademy, this site is also slightly less robust than Treehouse, but still covers a good amount, and has many courses that can be accessed with a free account.

Laracasts

This is a site we use quite a bit here. This service is inexpensive and really is a must-have for anyone who spends a lot of time working with the PHP framework Laravel. It is mostly catered to the Laravel developer, but there are videos in there that are related to testing and JavaScript that many other developers will find helpful.

Drupalize.Me

Another framework we use a lot here is Drupal. Drupalize.Me is one of the premier online Drupal tutorials out there, containing hundreds of video tutorials on everything from site setup and configuration to theme development to module development.

Lynda.com

Last but not least is Lynda.com. This may be one of the most popular online tutorial libraries today. Like Treehouse, this one contains much more than web development courses. Design, business processes and photography are just a few of the many courses available.

The sites we’ve just discussed above are great for when you’re looking to sit down and dig into something new. But what about when you’re knee-deep in a project and are stuck on a bug or just not sure how to proceed? Well, those sites won’t offer too much help in most cases, as more specific knowledge will be needed.

What are some of the best sites to help you find answers for development-related issues you’re running into? Some of the ones we use the most are listed below:

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is an amazing resource for developers to post issues they are having and then get answers from others in the community who have either tackled a similar issue or have an idea about a solution. The community here has helped us quite a few times when we’ve hit roadblocks. The posts on this site from other developers can be invaluable and incredible time savers.

Mozilla Developer Network (MDN)

The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is one of the most comprehensive developer resources on the Internet today, specifically when it comes to common front-end technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. From this site, you can learn web development from the ground up. Or you can come here for quick reference to all things CSS, JavaScript, HTML, etc. The CSS reference page linked here will give you a good idea of the scope of information available on the site.

Google (Is this link really necessary?)

When in doubt, just Google it. This is seriously the best option for finding the answer to whatever question you have. Chances are good that you’re not the first person to run into whatever issue you’re currently stuck on. A quick Google search will almost always bring you to what you’re looking for — most likely a link to a specific post on Stack Overflow.

Lastly, I wanted to mention one other good way to get a steady stream of new info, tips and tricks coming your way without having to do any heaving lifting — email newsletters. If you can find a few relevant newsletters to sign up for, a steady stream of info will begin flowing directly into your inbox each week. This allows you to quickly check out an article here and there as you have downtime between other tasks. Email newsletters can be a nice way to stay in the loop on several topics without having to devote a lot of time and energy to it.

Three solid front-end newsletters that I’ve signed up for and would recommend are:

• Smashing Magazine
• Responsive Design Weekly
• 5 Minutes of JavaScript

These are some of the sites and resources that we rely on here at Straight North to stay on top of current trends, new technologies and changes in the industry. We hope you find some helpful resources in this list, and we’d love to hear about what you’re using!

Reporting is the fun part of each new month — the time-consuming, but very necessary, task that is part of any marketing company’s existence.

How these reports come to life and the processes used to produce them differ with every company. For most, this is a very manual process.

In the past, we extracted and aggregated data from many sources and then manually imported this data into spreadsheets. Once that was all complete, adding a summary-and-analysis piece was the final touch before the report went off to the client.

When you’ve got a small client base, this process works fine and isn’t too much of a hindrance to getting other work done. However, when you’ve got several hundred clients, this process quickly changes from taking only a few hours to taking days. Before you know it, your company shuts down for the first seven days of each month as everyone works on getting reports created, analyzed and out the door.

We found ourselves at a crossroads as we came to the realization that we needed to find a better way. We knew that many services existed to automate reporting, and we spent time looking into quite a few of these, but soon realized that the one-size-fits-all models were not going to work for us. We have a highly customized process here, and we also have a proprietary tracking code with data that needs to be integrated into each report. These, along with other factors, pushed us in the direction of building our own application to bring our reporting online.

We knew this would be a very large undertaking, but we are lucky enough to have the resources in-house to take on a project like this. We also are lucky enough to have a management team that sees the value in investing time and money into building software to improve business processes and automation.

We set off on the process of documenting the functionality that would be needed and the various APIs we would need to integrate with — and which APIs would need to be built to support this project.

Over the course of the next year, using an agile development process, we broke the project down into manageable chunks, built out the backlog, and then started working through the many necessary iterations; continually testing and improving things along the way.

We ended with a setup that includes the Laravel 5 framework, a highly scalable cloud-based Mongo database, and integrations with seven (and counting) web services.

There were many challenges along the way, and this project ended up becoming one of the most complicated tasks we’ve ever undertaken here. But the reward has been well worth all the effort. The result has been a game-changer for our company. Our clients now have access to real-time analytics involving their marketing campaigns. Clients no longer have to wait until the end of each month to see their results. They can log into their dashboard anytime, from any device, to see stats on their traffic for the month, view their form submissions, listen to phone calls, check out e-commerce revenue and transactions, and much more.

Also, our internal staff no longer has to log into five different dashboards to view data on how our clients are performing. This quick access to real-time analytics helps us more easily analyze data, spot trends, modify campaigns based on what is (and isn’t) working, and quickly adapt to changes in the marketing landscape.

In the end, it was incredibly rewarding to work on this project, and we learned a lot during the process. We already are seeing it pay huge dividends in terms of speeding up internal processes and the amount of time spent each month on reporting. The time saved by this application now can go back into campaign and client management, which is where it belongs, and this is really the biggest benefit for all parties involved. The feedback we’ve gotten from our clients so far has been outstanding. We hope that this application continues to provide them with easy access to all of the important data necessary to keep on top of their marketing campaigns for years to come as we continue to add new features and make additional data available.]]> Reporting is the fun part of each new month — the time-consuming, but very necessary, task that is part of any marketing company’s existence. How these reports come to life and the processes used to produce them differ with every company. For most, this is a very manual process. In the past, we extracted and aggregated data from many sources and then manually imported this data into…

Source

• Need a website up quickly?

• On a budget?

• Don’t want to worry about any of the following?

• Picking the right hosting provider
• Setting up a hosting account
• Maintaining that hosting account
• Maintaining your website
• Paying someone to make changes to your website

• Want someone else to handle all of this work for you?

• Website design
• Copywriting
• Website development
• Hosting
• Maintenance
• Backups
• Support

If you answered yes to any of the above, a licensed website may be the right choice. Much like leasing a car, licensing a website has a much lower upfront and monthly cost while taking away the headaches that come with ownership.

To continue on the car theme, most people don’t realize that owning a website requires ongoing maintenance — not just to the website itself but to the server where it resides. There is also the hassle of selecting the right hosting account, selecting the right company to build your website, finding a copywriter to write content for all of the pages of your website, selecting the right company to maintain your website and server moving forward, and more. If you then want to market your website, you’ll most likely need to find another company to do that.

Save Time and Money

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could turn to one company that would handle all of this for you for a low monthly fee?

This is where a licensed website really helps busy professionals who don’t have tens of thousands of dollars budgeted and months of time to wait for the new site to be live.

A licensed site typically goes live in a quarter of the time of a custom website project — think 30 days as opposed to four months.

A licensed site also is a fraction of the cost. You usually are looking at a few thousand dollars for the initial setup and then a low monthly fee, which covers support, hosting and all of the maintenance necessary.

You might wonder what the trade-off is here. If a licensed website is less expensive, low maintenance and can be live in a few weeks, why would anyone want a custom website? First, a licensed website has limitations that are acceptable to most businesses, but not all. With any provider of a hosted website solution, it is important to learn about the limitations of the platform so that you understand what can and cannot be done so that you are able to make an informed decision about which direction you want to go for your new website.

Second, some businesses prefer to own rather than rent. Again, just like a leased car, you do not own a licensed website; when you stop paying for it, it goes away.

We have seen many clients take advantage of this option in order to get a site up quickly and inexpensively with great success. This option is especially useful for small- to medium-sized businesses with no current website or an old, outdated website.

In terms of lead generation, the reduced timeframe for getting the site up and running provides an important fringe benefit: enabling an online marketing campaign to kick off months earlier than what is possible with a custom website build.

Hiring an Internet marketing company to build your new website is wise if the goal of your new site is to increase both traffic and leads. If you want to grow your business, don’t hire a firm that just builds websites: While the firm might give you a great-looking website, the site it builds for you will lack key components that make an effective website.

Advantages of an Internet marketing company include:

• The entire team working on your website will have years of marketing experience — copywriters, designers, developers, project managers, etc. — trained in creating web content, designs and functionality that attract and convert website visitors.
• Your website will be designed and written with conversion goals and a conversion funnel in mind from the earliest stages.
• Your website will feature multiple calls to action applicable to any stage of the buying cycle. These calls to action will be planned, refined and implemented throughout all phases of content and design production. (Because a marketing company is judged on the amount of leads it is driving, you can be sure strong conversion elements will be a robust component of your website.)
• Best practices will be implemented for call-to-action text and design. The placement, colors, design and content of each call to action play an important role in how well it works. Marketing companies with years of experience in perfecting these CTAs will be able to get the strongest results.
• Best practices for user interface will be implemented — your site will always be easy to navigate. Companies solely focusing on website design sometimes get “carried away” and design for design’s sake; an Internet marketing company will make sure your website is easy for visitors to use and obtain information.
• Your website will be built with a strong base for SEO, rather than a slipshod base or none at all. For instance:

• Your site map will be developed around supporting keyword research done at the beginning of the project, to ensure you have all the necessary pages on your site to drive the greatest amount of relevant traffic possible.
• Site speed improvements will be implemented at all possible places. (Page loading speed is critical for SEO.)
• Content will be written for targeted keywords so it is optimized from the start and does not have to be redone down the road.
• Your site will launch with all necessary optimized content and correct title tags and meta descriptions.
• You won’t have to make scores of costly updates to your new website when it’s time to start your monthly SEO campaign.

With an Internet marketing company, every detail of your new site will have been designed, written and developed with the goal of getting as many people to the site as possible and converting them into sales leads when they get there.

Since the marketing team is involved in your site from the beginning, once the site is live and the real marketing campaign starts, your account manager is ready to hit the ground running and has had time to provide plenty of input beforehand. This accelerates your campaign’s performance and puts more leads in the pipeline more quickly.

Whether you are in the market for a new website or in the process of evaluating different content management systems, you’ve most likely heard the name Drupal at one point or another. In case you haven’t, Drupal is a robust open-source content management system (CMS) that can be used for creating websites and website applications.

I will tell you why Drupal is the right choice for your lead generation website, as outlined in the sections below.

Cost

How much does your copy of Drupal cost? Zero dollars. It is a free, open-source project — and your copy can be obtained in minutes by visiting the Drupal website (https://www.drupal.org/). All of the necessary contributed modules are free as well. The cost of a Drupal site comes with the setup, configuration and theme creation of the site, but there is no cost for the software itself. This is drastically different from many other enterprise-level CMS solutions that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing and support over the lifespan of the website.

Large Developer Community

Drupal has a very large community of developers (numbering in the millions) that is growing every year. This means you won't have trouble finding a developer who can work on your site several years down the road. It also means just about any functionality you want to add to your website has probably been built by someone else previously, and there is a strong possibility a module exists that can be installed on your website to give you that same functionality — or, at the very least, a good base for adding it.

Complex Functionality Made Easy

Using Drupal allows us to build very complex pieces of functionality in a fraction of the time and with far less effort than it would take to build from scratch. As noted above, a large community of Drupal developers has made this possible by continually contributing code (in the form of modules) that allows you to extend the base functionality of Drupal. As a result, you are able to get an enterprise-level site without the enterprise-level price tag. As of April 2015, there were more than 31,000 contributed modules available for Drupal.

Speed

Everyone knows that in today’s day and age website speed is a critical factor in the search engine rankings and user experience of your website. This is one area where Drupal is heads and tails above other content management systems. The built-in caching functionality available in Drupal is second to none, and it allows for easy caching of just about everything on your site. This really helps speed up your page load time and allows users to access your content quickly and easily. To further increase page load times on sites built at Straight North, we host all our Drupal sites at Acquia, where we have access to a very powerful reverse-proxy caching layer called Varnish, which makes website pages load lightning-fast.

Security

In terms of security, Drupal is one of the top content management systems available. If you’ve ever been the owner or maintainer of WordPress sites, you know all too well just how easy it is to hack them and just how often they get hacked. This is not something anyone wants to deal with, and it is often a very expensive problem to remedy. Drupal core and all its contributed modules have been strengthened over time — from peer review and from the dedicated Drupal security team — to ensure that Drupal is one of the most secure CMS solutions for enterprise-level websites.

Easy Form Creation

Another great feature of Drupal is the ability to create lead forms on your website with just a few mouse clicks. This makes it easy to add new lead-capture forms to your website at any time. It also makes editing of existing forms very easy, in case changes are needed after launch. This ensures that future changes can be mostly done by your in-house marketing team, without incurring additional website development costs.

Integration With Third-Party Services

Most marketing departments these days rely on third-party marketing automation software or CRM systems to help automate repeatable process and help streamline communication. All of these systems, however, need to integrate with your website in order to work exactly how you need them. This is another area where Drupal shines. With so many Drupal developers in the community working on so many different projects, most common software integrations have already been done and turned into modules. This allows for complex integration projects to be completed in a few hours rather than a few days.

In closing, these are just a handful of reasons why Drupal is our primary CMS of choice when building a new lead generation website for a client. These are the same reasons we would highlight when a client is on the fence between Drupal and another CMS.

Using Drupal allows for building complicated websites and website applications in the fraction of the time it would take to build from scratch — and you can rest easy knowing that your site is secure and built on a solid, proven foundation that many developers will be able to work on for years to come.

Many Web development companies use a waterfall process to build their websites. This is typically a five-step process as follows:

1. Plan everything
2. Build everything
3. Test everything
4. Review everything
5. Launch

At Straight North, we have adopted an agile methodology to development, which means a more iterative approach is taken when planning and building each website here. This is typically a four-step process that is repeated as follows:

1. Plan
2. Build
3. Test
4. Review

These four steps are repeated for each main piece of the project until the entire site is complete, at which point a final review of everything is done — followed by the site launch.

What exactly is an iterative process?

An iterative process simply means that you are breaking down your project into multiple, smaller pieces — then completing those pieces one at a time, along with plenty of review and input from internal and external teams along the way. This process (correctly) assumes that you don’t know everything at the beginning of the project, and working under that assumption, you don’t try to build the entire application at once.

Multiple, smaller iterations on the project are necessary to slowly build toward the finished product while continually improving existing functionality along the way.

Working in iterations is a common practice in software development, as large-scale development projects are often very complex and require a lot of trial and error. You most likely know the functionality that needs to be built at the start of the project, but you don’t know exactly how you are going to build it and exactly how it is going to function.

The details on how things will function and look come to light as you dig in and start developing and designing portions of your website or application. Because of this, iterative development has become the standard for developing websites and Web applications. The goal is to create smaller pieces of the application quickly, review them (internally and with the client) and improve upon them in the next iteration. Each layer keeps building on the last one with continual enhancement and improvement.

The reason this process works so well is because it allows for continual feedback from the project manager and the client, rather than having your development team sit in a room for four months building the entire application prior to showing it to the client for the first time — and asking for feedback on the whole thing.

What happens if your client hates it at that point? What if the client wants you to change a piece of core functionality that the entire application relies on? What happens if the developers missed a key piece of info at the beginning of the project that caused them to miss the mark completely?

How can this process improve user experience on my website?

A Web design/development firm that employs an iterative process for building websites is going to hit the mark on your project more often than not. It will break up the website into many smaller pieces that are quickly knocked out and shown to the client for input and changes.

These frequent touch points allow the client and internal project managers to make sure the goals of the project are always being met, the layout of the site is the best it can be, and that the user experience is fully vetted for ease of use and driving conversions.

With each step, the client and project manager are in constant communication to ensure all the project goals are being met — and if they aren’t, what needs to be done to ensure they will be met. All these changes are documented and rolled into the next iteration, which is then knocked out and shown to the client. As each step is approved, work on the next set of functionality or set of pages is started.

By continually fine tuning each portion of the website and continually getting client feedback on each step of the project, we ensure all goals are being met and the user experience of the site is as good as it can be. This translates to a better end product and an improved experience for users of the new website. All of this should lead to higher conversion rate and more conversions from your new website, which should be the overall goal of any new website project.

In 2010, Google released a statement saying website speed would be one of the factors it uses when determining how to rank a site.

As a result, your website speed is now directly tied to the amount of leads your site can drive, whether you like it or not.

If your site is bloated and slow, it won’t rank as well as it could, which means it will be harder for users to find when they are doing non-branded searches. If users can’t find your site when looking for the service(s) you provide, they won’t be able to contact you — and may end up filling out the contact form of one of your competitors.

Not only can slow page speed hurt search rankings, it also — and more importantly — produces a bad user experience. Studies have shown that most users will not wait longer than three seconds for a page to load. If it hasn’t loaded by then, they will take off — and may never come back.

If a website responds slowly, users will have a hard time finding that site in the search results. Once they get to the site, they will spend less time there, greatly decreasing the chance of them converting to a sales lead.

How Can I Tell if My Site is Slow?

The first thing you need to do is check your site speed by using one of many online tools. These tools are very easy to use and take only a few seconds to scan your site (and show you the issues that need to be corrected). A few of the tools we use most often:

• Google PageSpeed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
• YSlow: http://yslow.org/
• Pingdom Website Speed Test: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

After each of these scans completes, a list of issues will be presented to you with recommendations and directions on how to fix them. Your Web team can then implement the items you decide to be most beneficial.

What Can Be Done to Decrease Page Load Time?

Here are nine ways to improve page load times on your website:

1. Get a better hosting account

When it comes to hosting, you really do get what you pay for — so don’t cheap out on this. It’s critically important to have a reliable, fast, well-maintained server to host your website. Going the $5/month hosting account route is not the right path to take when deciding where to host your company website.

2. Use a CDN to deliver images and files

Using a CDN to host static files such as images, documents, tracking codes, etc., is a great way to increase your site’s load time — as it allows files to be downloaded faster and more files to be downloaded simultaneously since they are coming from a different domain.

3. Leverage browser caching wherever possible

Browser caching is a great way to speed up page load times after a user has visited your site one time. When a Web page is accessed, all the resources for that page are downloaded and then rendered in your browser. If that page is visited again (or if another page on the website is visited), browser cache can be manipulated to prevent these resources from needing to be downloaded again. This is implemented by setting HTTP headers in your .htaccess file that will set expiration dates on specific file types frequently accessed (such as images, scripts, CSS files, etc.). You can configure the expiration dates per file type so files that are updated more often can have a shorter expiration date as opposed to files that rarely change.

4. Install Varnish

Varnish is an open-source Web application that is amazing at reducing server load and providing cached pages to users super-quickly. Varnish is installed in front of your Web server, and accepts all of the Web requests and serves up pages directly from its cache rather than from the Web server. If it doesn’t have a page in its cache, it goes to the Web server at that point to download and display the page, but after that it will deliver the page from the cache. This allows your server to deliver pages very quickly while placing a minimal load on the Web server.

5. Make sure you have a fast server

See “Get a better hosting account” above. You may have the right hosting company, just not the right level of service.

6. Minify CSS, JS and HTML

Minifying the code used to render your website is always a good idea as it can make your scripts smaller, which will result in a faster download time. Minifying your code consists of removing all of the formatting, comments, unused code and excess white space from the file — all of which can significantly reduce the end file size. Minification can be done with any front-end CSS, JavaScript or HTML file that needs to be downloaded.

7. Decrease the amount of HTTP requests needed to load your page

Merge multiple CSS and JS files into one file to reduce the amount of render-blocking files that need to be downloaded. Make sure to tag CSS files correctly so the browser knows whether or not to load them prior to rendering your site. This is done by adding a media attribute to the link element in your HTML when linking to various CSS files.

8. Reduce the number of images on your site

This is simply good practice in general, but do as much as you can via CSS. CSS3, the latest version of CSS, makes it possible to do things in code that you used to need images for (e.g., rounded corners, drop shadows, gradients and animation), so take advantage of that. If you can do it via CSS, go that route — and it will mean fewer images need to be downloaded when loading a page.

9. Optimizing your images

Using the right image types and image sizes on your website is key to speeding up download time. Some quick tips to help you optimize images:

• Scale your images prior to them being downloaded. This means making sure that you aren’t scaling a 4,000px image down to 500px in the browser. This way, the user won’t have to wait for that massive image to download, which undoubtedly will take some time.
• Select the best image format for the type of image you are displaying. Use vector images whenever possible.
• Strip unneeded image meta data. Doing this can greatly reduce the file size of your images. While it’s a little time-consuming, it’s fairly easy to do — either in your operating system or with third-party software.

An XML sitemap is an XML file (or set of files) hosted on your Web server that contains a list of all pages on your website. Along with a list of URLs, other information about each page can be found within this file — such as the last modified date of the page, the change frequency of the page, and the priority of the page (relative to other URLs on the site).

Having an XML sitemap on your site that is regularly updated is a key piece of any successful SEO campaign. The XML sitemap is a very important tool that tells search engines about every page on your site, and informs them about new pages that have been added along with any pages that have been updated. This can help ensure that new and updated content gets indexed quickly, and can help search engines identify the originating source of content if your content gets syndicated to other websites.

If you don’t have an XML sitemap, it’s a fairly easy process to get one created and uploaded to your server. There are many different ways to go about this, and we’ll discuss some of the more common methods below.

Drupal and WordPress Plugins

Drupal and WordPress are the two most common content management systems (CMS) out there today; they combine to make up approximately 25 percent of all websites. If that is the case, you are in luck — as there are many good plugins/modules that will allow you to get an XML sitemap added to your site with little to no hassle.

For Drupal, this is the standard module we’ve been using at Straight North for many years: https://www.drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap

WordPress has many XML sitemap plugins available, but this is the one that we’ve been installing and using with good success: https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

For both, you can install the plugin to generate an XML sitemap by simply clicking a button. However, there are many more configuration settings available that will allow you to customize items such as change frequency, priority and which pages are included/excluded from the sitemap. As a result, it is very important to spend the time to update the configuration until you get a sitemap that suits your needs.

Other Tools

If you have a CMS other than Drupal or WordPress, most likely there are similar plugins available. A simple Google (or Bing, if that’s what you’re into) search should turn up what you are looking for.

Some CMS platforms, such as Evoq, have a built-in XML sitemap generator. If you have a static website or if you are unable to find a suitable plugin for your CMS, you will need to use a program that will crawl your site and create the file(s) for you to upload to your server.

You could manually create an XML sitemap file, but that is going to be very time consuming; using a third-party tool will be the most efficient method. If you want to create one by hand, all of the information can be found here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

If creating a sitemap by hand isn’t something you want to do, Screaming Frog is a nice desktop program we use at Straight North. This handy little spider tool does all kinds of neat stuff, and generating XML sitemaps is one of the things for which we frequently use it. In case you are interested, instructions can be found here: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/xml-sitemap-generator/

Online Sitemap Generators

A bevy of online sitemap generators can be found with a quick Google search, and most are equally as simple to use. Just enter your Web address into the form field —within a few minutes, an XML sitemap will download to your computer (which you will need to upload to your Web server). A few we’ve used successfully are:

• https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
• http://www.web-site-map.com/
• https://xmlsitemapgenerator.org/

Whatever method you use for creating an XML sitemap, there are a few things you will want to do after you’ve got it uploaded to your server. They are:

1. Link it up from your robots.txt file
2. Submit it to both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools
3. Keep it updated!

It is a good practice to edit your robots.txt file and place the path to your XML sitemap file in there. This helps to make sure search engine spiders can easily find your sitemap file. There is no downside to doing this; it will take only a minute, so it’s definitely worth it. It’s as simple as adding the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml (domain.com is your actual website domain; sitemap.xml is the actual name of the file you’ve uploaded to the server)

Next, you will want to make sure you have submitted your sitemap to both Google and Bing. You will want to do this from inside of both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools accounts.

Lastly, make sure to keep your sitemap updated. If you are using a CMS plugin, chances are this is happening automatically as content is updated and added/removed from the site. However, if you have a manually created sitemap, or if you’ve used third-party software or service to create the sitemap, you will need to make sure you keep a fresh copy of your latest sitemap on your server at all times.

Having been in the business of developing/redeveloping websites for about a decade, I have come across some forms that are done perfectly and others that make me scratch my head. It makes me wonder what the form creator was thinking and how many leads that company lost because of its website forms. Not everyone puts a lot of thought into forms — so if you are one of these people, I recommend changing that habit ASAP.

Entire books — spanning hundreds of pages — have been written about Web forms and how best to design and develop them. Entire websites are also devoted to Web forms, and they will give you a feel for just how angry forms can make users. Our team is not here to delve deeply into all of that, but we’d like to share some of the most common issues we see on forms every day — so that you can avoid making the same mistakes on your website.

Poor User Interface

Poorly designed forms are killers. They make people think about how to complete your forms, and for someone who might be on the fence about contacting you, this could be a deal breaker. If a user gets frustrated filling out your form, he will bail, costing you a lead. This isn’t the place to get artistic or to try new techniques — stick with a simple, clean form with a good call to action and a “submit” button that stands out. Also, put some text on the page, prior to the form submission. This lets the user know what he can expect.

Some good UI choices to make when laying out a form are:

• Place the form labels above each form field, rather than to the side. Studies show this is the most effective way for the human eye to scan the form, and it is the easiest layout to understand.
• Put your form fields in a logical order. For instance, you always see city, state and ZIP together — in that order. No need to re-arrange them, as your users should already be familiar with entering data in that structure.
• Use conditional form fields to hide and show fields, as necessary. This will keep the form from appearing longer than it needs to be, making it easier for users to fill out.

Too Many Form Fields

This one isn’t rocket science. Keep form fields to a minimum. I understand that you might want to get more information from the user at this point, but now is not the time. Get his name, email address and phone number before you lose him. After obtaining that, your sales team can get the rest of his information via phone or email. The most important objective at this point is to capture the main contact info before he changes his mind. No one likes completing long forms — the higher the barrier to entry, the fewer form submissions you will get.

Multistep Forms

Yikes. See the statement above regarding too many form fields. I’d rather stick a pencil in my eye than fill out one of these. Stay away from these at all costs on a lead generation form.

Poorly Marked Required Fields

A lot of forms have no indication of what fields are required, or they use a nonstandard method of denoting this. The red required asterisk (*) has been a Web standard for many years, and it should stay that way. Users who see this are able to quickly and easily identify which fields are required without having to think about it. This is key.

There is nothing more frustrating than getting a form error for a required field that wasn’t marked as required, or that you didn’t know was required. I’ve left forms unsubmitted as a result. Your users will, too, if your forms are designed this way.

Syntax Checking

Another common problem with forms is failure to indicate required syntax (phone numbers, zip code, etc.) on a specific form field. When you have form fields that require data to be entered in a specific format, you need to show the users an example of this format. Phone numbers are a perfect example. There are many ways to enter a phone number, and if you don’t show the user how you want it, he will likely struggle to input the information correctly. Ex: 123-456-7890, (123) 456-7890 or 1234567890. If you are going to require specific phone syntax, display it above or below the form field in a format like this: XXX-XXX-XXXX. Users will quickly understand that is the format you want them to follow.

However, my suggestion (and one that we’ve implemented on our website) is to remove syntax checking from phone number fields altogether. Just because syntax checking is in place doesn’t mean someone won’t enter 55-555-5555 into the field. If the user is genuinely interested in the service you are offering or the product you are selling, he will make sure to enter his phone number into the form field correctly.

Unclear Error Messages

Even though I could write a book about this, I won’t spend a lot of time on this topic. Simply use common sense. It is very important that users easily understand error messages. If they did not fill out a required field, make sure they know which field needs to be completed. If they did not input something in the proper format, make sure they know what field has the issue and the proper format required. Making error messages as clear as possible will eliminate user frustration. It will also increase the number of users that are able to successfully contact you.

By avoiding these common form design pitfalls, you will ensure that your forms are built for success, which will help to increase your conversion rate and gain more sales leads.