Homepage 101 - If you can't be seen, you don't exist!

Homepage A-Z in brief

A website or a homepage is a collection of web pages and the related content identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. All publicly accessible websites together make up the World Wide Web. There are also private websites that can only be accessed on a private network, such as a company's internal website for its employees, also known as an intranet.

Each website is usually dedicated to a specific topic or purpose, for example:

• news
• education
• trade
• entertainment
• social networks
• care
• with more

Hyperlinking between web pages controls navigation on the website, which often starts with a home page. Users can access a website on a range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones. The app used on these devices is called a web browser and enables the user to access a website.

The World Wide Web (WWW) was created in 1990 by the British CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free for everyone to use, which would contribute to its enormous growth.

A website can be used in different ways, here are some examples:

• a personal website
• a corporate website for a company
• a state website
• an organisation's website
• etc.

Websites can be the work of an individual, a company or another organisation and are usually dedicated to a specific topic or purpose. Each website may contain a hyperlink to some other website, so the distinction between individual websites, as perceived by the user, may be blurred. In this post we will go through the most common aspects of a website, but the focus will be on a business website.

Website for companies

More or less every company in Sweden has its own website. The same situation exists all over the world. Why is the website so important and what purpose does it serve? First and foremost, the expansion of the Internet has shaped the role of the website in our daily lives. Secondly, it is about the focus on information and the possibilities that IT (Information Technology) offers for interaction between people.

A website is the main focal point for a company's communication with the market. That's why we develop websites that are relevant, impactful and highly user-friendly. Below we would like to share some advice on how to create a company website:

1. Get a good domain name
2. Invest in secure and scalable web hosting with good technical support
3. Clearly show a clear description of your company
4. Implement the best content management system (CMS)
5. Create an interesting, memorable and engaging user interface (UI) for the website
6. Optimize your business website for search engines (SEO)
7. Regularly create and publish quality content
8. Installing tools for webmasters
9. Implement a website maintenance plan

These steps are important in the process of creating a website, but do not give the whole picture, as the requirements list is good anymore. You don't realise how many details there are to consider about a business website until you dig into the work. Sometimes you do everything you think is important, but unfortunately the results are not there. That's why it's best to hire a development partner, such as Strativ, to develop a user-friendly and SEO-optimised website. If you would like to hear about our smart website solutions, please welcome to contact us and book a free meeting.

Website design & UI/UX

Designing for a website or web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include:

• web graphic design
• user interface design (UI design)
• creation, including standard code and proprietary software
• user experience design (UX design)
• search engine optimization

Often many individuals will work together in teams on a project covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. This depends entirely on the scope of the project, so on smaller projects, people usually work independently and take full responsibility for the design process. The term web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client-side) design of a website including type markup. Web design partially overlaps with web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and if their role involves creating markup they are also expected to be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.

Homepage in WordPress

WordPress, normally versalised WordPress, is among the most well-known blogging and content management systems (CMS). It is written in PHP and uses the database MySQL for data storage. It is deployed under a GNU General Public License (GPL) and can be downloaded and used free of charge. It is one of the most popular publishing systems on the market and can be found on hundreds of thousands of blogs and websites worldwide.

WordPress has evolved over the years from a blogging system to also being able to manage entire websites like a more advanced CMS system. Since the content of all pages is accessible via a login page, you don't need an FTP client to be able to edit and update your pages on the website. Access and use is seamless and offers many development possibilities for creating a value-added website.

WordPress can also be freely customised using various plugins and themes. Today, there are over ten-thousands of extensions on the market that you can use when working in WordPress. A large number of themes are available on the WordPress website, developed by its users and are usually free or almost with really affordable prices.

Search Engine Optimization - SEO website

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about optimising a website in relation to the search engines. We can call SEO the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic can come from different types of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines. The main elements of SEO are about considering keywords, analysing top-ranked content, and creating better content than this. Simple, isn't it!

SEO is a internet marketing strategy scan be applied to different degrees to different types of activities. Most often, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behaviour, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their target audience. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers, which is the only legitimate end goal of an SEO-optimized website.

How much does a website cost?

A website can cost anywhere from a few tens of thousands for a landing page with four to six sections. To upwards of hundreds of thousands for a more advanced website with accompanying mobile application, web portal, booking system or other type of system, as well as third-party integrations.

The larger the site, the higher the subsequent maintenance costs, which are justified in order to keep the site running smoothly. Further development of an existing website is an industry standard. This entails investment costs, which are natural as the business grows and thus becomes in need of more complex IT systems.

The great thing about running a business website is that you can always measure ROI (Return on Investment) through converted traffic on your site. This helps you to have a better idea of how important your website is in financial terms.

We work with SEO and Analytics tools to ensure that keep our website healthy and that the organic traffic we generate there is converted into real customers. If you would like to know more about how this works, and what we can do for your business, please feel free to book a free meeting with us for a business talk. We look forward to meeting you!

P.S. About e-commerce solutions, i.e. websites or better said e-commerce platforms, I will go into more detail in the next blog post. So stay tuned!