Many people think creating a website is something for the pros. Well, you’ve just created your own application, so creating your own website will be a breeze! After all, how many websites do you visit each day? I think everyone should know the basics of how they work. The good news is that there are a ton of resources available for creating your own website. One thing to consider, if you prefer not to spend the time creating your own website, is finding a freelancer on Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org) or a similar website, or paying a friend who knows web design. This could get your product out to the market a bit faster than if you were to design it yourself.
Having an informative and well thought out website is key. It will be the storefront for any software application you create. When making your website design, you must take into consideration your audience’s level of internet experience, age, background, etc. Gone are the days where you can put up a simple image and HTML description. The public’s expectations for websites are continually increasing with the availability of broadband and rich media. To be competitive with other websites you have to consider it as digital entertainment. One way to appeal to your audience’s expectations is to create demo videos and put them on your website. Not only will they spruce up your website, they will show your potential customers how to use your product.
To get started on your website you will first need to get a URL, a place for your website to live. Getting a URL is easy; go to http://www.godaddy.com (there are other sites you can go to for domain purchases) and do a domain search for the URL you would want to have. New .com websites run about $9.99 per year and they give you a discount for purchasing multiple years up front. You can also purchase server space with Go Daddy and they make it really easy to set up your account.
Before you start designing your website, I suggest you get a simple step-by-step guide to help you. One that I really like is Creating Web Pages in Easy Steps by Nick Vandome (it’s a little out of date) but there are a ton of other guides. Go to your local discount book store and pick up any book on website design or look at the free eBook options.
Text and OrganizationSome things to keep in mind as you write the text for your website:
• Keep it brief. Most people find reading more difficult on the computer screen than on the page, so try not to be too wordy.
• Show, rather than tell, wherever possible. Most users prefer a more visual experience to text. If you do have a lot of text, break it up with headings and subheadings.
• Split up long passages by creating separate pages - it is not recommended to have one long page of text that the user has to scroll through.
As you decide what to put on your website you should sit down and write out a site map. Most websites have them and they are a great way to help you get organized. Here is a basic layout of a 1-product site map:
HOME PAGE- Product description (Sub-page)
- Demo video
- User quotes
- Store (Sub-page)
- Company or Developer Description (Sub-page)
- Privacy Policy
Make sure to have a link on your home page to download your application. If your potential user cannot figure out how to download and try out the app, they will never become a customer. Your application itself should also have a link back to your website, preferably in the Help menu. That way, if the user forgets where they got the application, they can easily find their way back to your site to purchase it.
Once you have your website up, you are not done with it! It’s your new baby, your storefront, and it will need constant nurturing and improvement. Keeping your content up-to-date does a lot of things for your company and your product. It tells your visitors that your content is current, thus increasing your credibility, and it tells the search engines that you are still around, which improves your visibility on searches.
Get Found: Search Engine OptimizationSearch engine optimization, or Search Marketing, is extremely important and you will need to consider it when building your website. Search engine optimization is the process by which you improve both the quantity and quality of your website traffic from search engines. There are two types of traffic you will get on your website from search engines - organic search results, which show up in the main part of the search results, and paid search results, which show up on the side as sponsored links. You will want to focus more on organic search results because those are the links internet users are more likely to click on.
How do you get to the top of organic searches? Search engine optimization is sort of like a “dark art;” there is no single magical way to get your website to the top of anyone’s search. We will never know the secret algorithm by which the search engines are fueled. There are companies out there for hire whose primary business endeavor is to help people improve their placement within searches. With some time invested, you can easily optimize your website for the search engines. Here are some things you can do on your own:
• Get your friends to link to your website from their sites or blogs and register yourself in any trade directories you can find. These “Inbound” links can really help the position of your website within search terms.
• Make sure your product name or company name stands out - you don’t want to get lost. For example, if your product name is “Apple Application X”, you might have a hard time getting through all of the other stuff out there about Apple (Notice 70.2 million search results).
• Publicize yourself - write articles or contribute content for other websites and include a link back to your site. Get other online publications to write about you and, subsequently, to link back to your site.
• If you own multiple websites, link them back to each other.
• Choose your keywords wisely. Make sure you pick keywords that are specific enough to get to the right people. You don’t want keywords that are really broad, like “software.”
• Include your keywords within the text of your pages. The search engines need to see the keywords on your website pages to know how to classify your site.
• Create a good title tag. Title tags carry weight (not much, though) in terms of search engine placement. Make sure you include your keywords in your title.
• Use headlines, image alt tags, meta tags, keywords in file names, and keywords in hyperlinks if it makes sense for your site.
Don’t expect immediate results. Search engine optimization is a process, an ongoing one at that. Be patient. If nothing happens, try tweaking your content or keywords to find the way it works best for you.
What Not to DoThere are, however, some things you can do wrong that will lower your page rank, or even possibly get you banned.
• Don’t duplicate too much content on multiple pages to increase your page views.
Search engines have a mechanism that can see this behavior.
• Do not link to “bad neighborhoods,” or spamming sites. That’s a sure way to lower
your page rank. If you aren’t sure if something is a “bad neighborhood,” check
their page rank.
• Don’t buy “Instant AdSense” websites; write your own content. Having a machine
write your content for you is just a bad idea anyway.
• Don’t hide keywords by making the background text the same color as your text,
which is called “keywords stuffing.”
• “Title stacking” is another no-no. Don’t add extra <title> tags for more keywords.
• Don’t include a lot of keywords that don’t relate to your content. There really is no
point in showing up in a search that doesn’t have anything to do with you.
• Lastly, don’t make it so search engines see one thing and the people who actually
visit your site see another thing. This is called “cloaking.” If people are searching
for a Lord of the Rings fan club, they will be very mad if they end up on a page about
your dolphin tracking software.
Now that you have your website up and running, you will want to implement some tracking capabilities so you can view your traffic sources, see how long people are spending on your site, determine if your traffic is returning or new, and many other important metrics. Google offers a website tracking system called Google Analytics. It’s free and has some great reporting capabilities. Further, it’s really simple to set up. All you have to do is go to www.google.com/analytics and create your free account. Once you enter your website URL and other information, Google will generate a small line of HTML code for you that you need to paste onto each page of your website. Once you do that, your website traffic will begin tracking immediately.
Creating a Demo VideoCreating a demo video can add pizzaz to your website and nicely showcase your application’s functionality. One way to create a demo video for your website is to get a video capture program - ScreenFlow (http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/
overview.htm) is one example of an application that will record your screen and give you a variety of outputs including one that is acceptable for YouTube. Also, on the Mac, iMovie is great for editing and including titles that can emphasize key points, as well as making the video feel more professional and
visually interesting. Camtasia Studio
(http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp)
is another tool that lets you highlight the
features of your product in a video demo on
Windows. Another option is Video Studio
X2 (http://www.corel.com/) from Corel for
Windows.
You will want to keep your demo relatively
short. YouTube has a maximum time limit of
10 minutes; also, you don’t want to lose your audience’s attention. If you have a lot of content to cover, you might try breaking the video up into several shorter videos and making them more like “chapters” about your product. Uploading your video to YouTube is very easy. Just go to their website, create an account and follow the steps for uploading content. Once it is uploaded, you can assign search terms to your video and people will find it through their many searches on YouTube.