Imagine: Your business’s website just isn’t working for some reason. The graphics are great, the content is all there, everything seems to function. But the site you spent thousands on just isn’t delivering ROI. Why?
The answer: while there is no shortage of people who’ll build your business website to look good in a boardroom demo, fewer will pay attention to its back-end – its foundation, structure and organisation.
Far more than the branding and graphic design, your site’s back-end governs how it survives and thrives in the ‘WWW’ wilderness.
Instead of asking a designer to make your site look right, ask a developer if your site works right. Better yet, ask a digital manager how your new site matches your overall business strategy.
Under the hood of a good website
Mash Media does web design, but we’re not a web design agency. We’re a full service digital marketing and management agency. Our clients get the digital services they need, not just a specialised set of digital services we happen to have.
It’s why we often say we don’t build our clients’ websites ( … or ads … or campaigns), we build their businesses. Across all we do, your ROI is our touchstone.
With web, much of maximising ROI comes through the fiddly back-end work. After your site gets an update, you might look for your new logo and latest offers, but you won’t see we’ve:
- Fixed your broken links and images
- Retained your site history
- Inserted your missing missing meta tags, schema and social functions.“When people ask us to update a website, they often don’t think about all the little things that nobody really sees,” says Mash web developer Ben Payne. “Google sees it. Google cares.”
For example, Ben will look at whether your favicons up to date.
Favicon? What’s that?
“A favicon is the little icon that sits in the top of the browser in the tab,” Ben says.
He explains its function is to help you tell apart different sites at a glance.
“Google’s software is built to prefer sites which offer users a good experience. Google likes it when you have the favicon there and so pushes you up the search results page.”
There are scores of tweaks like this that can make your site more appealing in Google’s search rankings. Many of these are changes to the HTML code itself and have little apparent effect on the site. This mean you’ll never know the quality you’re not getting. It’ll mean your business’s website just isn’t working for some reason.
“When I take my car to the mechanic they’ll see parts of my car I never will,” Ben says.
“But if my mechanic is topping up the oil and notices I need a new air filter, they will replace that for me. Just because I didn’t ask for it doesn’t mean that I don’t need it fixed.”
