Best Practice
11 November 2021
"A procedure that has been shown by research and experience to produce optimal results and that is established or proposed as a standard suitable for widespread adoption." - merriam-webster.com
"Creating the right conditions for your garden from the beginning to give your plants the best chance to grow." - TrikeWeb.com
Your website is a big deal, so you want to get the build right. It needs to look good, have great content and be easy for your customers to find and navigate. What is happening behind the scenes is equally essential; security, mobile performance, accessibility and SEO. Doing this from the beginning takes your web website from an average one to a high-performance machine!
Hidden under the hood of many websites today are extraordinary inconsistencies in performance. These may arise from varying knowledge of the parties involved as they adapt to the grey areas of the fast-evolving web landscape.
"Best Practice" when building a website means considering everything from the beginning. I use the analogy of preparing a garden to grow the vegetables that will feed you next year.
You decide what to plant and consider the local climate and what predators or problems might blight their growth.
Are you going to grow your garden organically, encouraging biodiversity and soil nutrients? Or will you rely on chemical inputs to speed initial growth? What are the benefits and pitfalls of either approach?
By making informed decisions from the start, you get a healthy garden and a better harvest.
Like our garden, your website also requires planning and knowledge of the online ecosystem. It is a competitive environment with few rules or regulations.
Google makes recommendations while SEO sages feverishly adapt when they can. Aside from these two drivers, the ecosystem is open to interpretation.
TrikeWeb's Best Practice focus sets up your business website to grow as an organic public-facing machine. Ongoing metrics provide a cornerstone for informed decision making. With a data package, TrikeWeb can keep monitoring page views and clicks, with an eye on oiling your machine when necessary.
TrikeWeb is your partner in growth. By building in best practices across desktop and mobile performance, accessibility, content strategies and SEO, you limit the need for costly future redesigns.
TrikeWeb's Key BPs
Content Strategy
Content Strategy is knowing what to put on your website and where. Great information, eye-catching images and clear Calls to Action turn page visits into transactions. TrikeWeb can help point you in the right direction of how these are structured to make your website stand out from the crowd.
Desktop and Mobile Performance
Best practice for performance is website interaction speed followed by website adaption to user behaviours.
What works for a desktop is not necessarily acceptable for customers on mobile. See my Mobile Performance blog for more detail, but mobile platforms are increasingly how New Zealanders view your website.
Accessibility
Despite a general lack of regulations across web development, there are comprehensive standards in place around accessibility. Unfortunately, many developers don't pay much attention to them.
TrikeWeb follows international accessibility guidelines to ensure accessibility from the start of website construction. You can read about that in my Accessibility blog. But, in a nutshell, these standards are there to ensure your website works for all audiences.
If it doesn't, you may be missing out on potential market segments.
Security
A big area where it is vital to have strong Best Practice guidelines is security.
Web security is a hot topic, but numerous entry-level website developments gloss over it.
Many off-the-shelf products and third-party tools contain security vulnerabilities. Essentially these can create a back-door into your website.
TrikeWeb's Best Practice, as monitored by Google Lighthouse, means not allowing the web's more nefarious denizens access through third-party scripts. These can be harmless-seeming font packages or other bits of code linked to the developer's server. You may not be the target, but the company which provides them might.
Another, quite common, pitfall of these is when the owner removes support for that script or puts it behind a paywall. You are stuck with a dead link or a broken page and must either pay or develop a new solution.
TrikeWeb avoids these scripts unless the client specifically wants it. I always ensure my clients are making informed decisions.
SEO
And finally, Search Engine Optimisation. You may be surprised it's not at the top of my list, but that isn't because I think it's unimportant.
SEO has come a long way since the early days of the internet when keywords could get you a top Google ranking by being liberally peppered through the content. Keywords remain important - but how you use them is too. TrikeWeb will help you ensure you have the right mix.
But SEO is increasingly about everything we have looked at above. It is great content, excellent mobile performance, broad accessibility and website security.
In other words, having a website built on sound best practices is becoming essential for getting noticed.
If you're interested in finding out more, take a look at my Search Engines blog. Or get in touch if you want to find out more about how TrikeWeb can get Best Practice working for you, right off the shelf.
TrikeWeb's custom-built websites create the right environment to grow your garden of customers. Then I can help you maintain and water for a bumper crop.
Allow TrikeWeb to build the website properly from the beginning.
