002 How to Build a Website, Part 1, with Ryan Cleland of W Street Design

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Welcome to web and beyond cast were small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host re Sydney Smith.

Ray Sidney-Smith 0:11
Hello there small business owners, entrepreneurs and economic development agents. Welcome to weapons beyond cast, we have an exciting show for you in store to. So I hope you enjoy the time we’ll be spending together a little bit about what you can expect from this podcast Show. I’m presuming you’re an active small business entrepreneur or owner or you’re one of the economic development agents throughout the United States or Canada. Welcome. I know that as small business owners and entrepreneurs, you have limited time and resources to spend on paying attention to all that you need to to market and manage your business. And that’s why I’ve started this podcast. I already pay close attention to the news and notices coming out of big business, small business and technology including email newsletters, YouTube channels, Facebook, live videos, webinars, blog posts, magazines, ebooks, books more from the top business and tech media experts and technologists. With this show, I hope to bring you the most important as well as the latest news and perennial resources that affect your ventures and provide applied commentary from the community. It’s going to be great. And I’m looking forward to having you along on this journey. This podcast is also the first podcast in the small business Podcast Network, a podcast network for small business by small business and you’ll be hearing more about the SP pn soon. To start off the show. We are beginning with a series how to build a website, we’re going to start on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart and business, the website we’re going to go over the principles of good small business website design and development. Because I think it’s so important. We’re going to talk about how to choose a great domain name. We’re going to talk about selecting web hosting accounts and services for your website, and our blog, how to prepare your content for your website, and our blog and editorial calendar to match. If you don’t know what an editorial calendar is, don’t worry, we’ll provide resources for that as well how to test or what we do is create a tweak maintenance, Plan A TMP for your website or blog and how to set up the analytics social mobile components. And finally, what is really a timeline for being able to get your small business launched. So for this first episode, I have reached out to my network to find the folks and experts who I believe are going to be able to provide those answers along with me in conversation. And so for this show, let me bring on to the show Kenneth Ryan Cleveland. Ryan Cleveland is a website designer and developer operating his design agency w street design in Washington, DC. He’s a graduate from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and has been creating design materials professionally since 2005. Welcome to the show, Ryan. Hey, Ray. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So what’s something that I didn’t talk about in my introduction, that other folks, people who are small business founders and entrepreneurs should know about you?

Ryan Cleland 3:02
Well, I’m quite the versatile, creative, I also do sculpture work in my free time, as well as building a small clothing brand. That’s great.

Ray Sidney-Smith 3:11
And I know you through my work with the SP DC, the Small Business Development Centers based in Virginia, and you do a lot of work with WordPress and small business science. And so that’s how I know Ryan. And so we’re going to, we’re going to get right into it and start talking about these principles of good small business website design and development. And, and so you know, we have five episodes in this series. So some of these topics, we really won’t be getting into detail in this episode. We’ll talk about those in upcoming episodes. And I’ll let you know hopefully, which episodes and what resources you can do to gain access to those as we make our way along. But we start at the top and the top is a great domain name for your business. So some people call this a website address, some call it your URL Uniform Resource Locator. So I wanted to talk about how important it is to have a great domain for your business what are the things that you talk to business owners about when when they come to you and they don’t have a domain name yet and or they’ve chosen a really poor name for their business that happens a lot to clients come to me and you know, you have to give feedback so that they can have a successful business, what are the things that you really pay attention to? What are those principles that you really want people to pay attention to when they’re choosing a domain name?

Ryan Cleland 4:29
Well, typically, I try to keep everything short and simple. So if the brand name is not satisfactory, we might consider renaming and in that same process searching for the dot com as well. Ideally, we we select the dot com and the branding is solid. That way, if the dot com is not available, there are other TL DS top level domains that can be used that are more available than the dot com, I usually find that dot coms are taken, which can be a frustrating process, there’s a number of ways to get around that if your dot com or in my instance I use design for for my business, you can use things like a memorable phrase, it could be part of your tagline something witty, but typically, I tried to keep it short. And I I avoid using dashes and double characters for the sake of the visual word or words that are used.

Ray Sidney-Smith 5:29
Yeah, and there and there are some requirements that I can which is the organization that sort of standards crisis standards for web domains. And so you know, you can only use so many different characters for creating your domain name. And I actually I talked about this in my in my book so almost success about the idea that you know, you can only have so many characters in a website domain name, you really won’t come up against it, it’s a really long number, you know, string of numbers and letters and characters but the reality is, is that you know, it should really be either your business name which I’m hoping is what I call brand enabled something that is that supports your brand that really puts your best you know name and business forward but it’s also keyword rich so really think about the keywords that people are searching and that might end up being the best domain possible and I think that it’s important for your domain name to be short and there are lots of top level domains and CCT LDS that’s country code top level domains so look at the, the wide array of those, you know, I run a book club and I chose to use dot club for the book clubs so that people you know, it was taking another word out of the domain name, which made it shorter and it allowed us to have doc club so I think that you have a lot of new options. I think you’re absolutely right with your own domain w st dot design. You know, I think I think also people are and that’s my question for you are people becoming more comfortable with those kinds of dot coms that are not dot com. I think

Ryan Cleland 7:06
it’s something that’s, that’s becoming more widely accepted. But it’s, it’s still in its infancy, I would say

Ray Sidney-Smith 7:13
I would agree. I think it’s still in its infancy. But if you put http colon slash, slash, or www dot, that’s a pretty good indicator to people that it’s a web domain address. And that also means that if you if you do choose something that’s not a dot com, dot net dot biz or dot org, if you are an organization, okay, fine. That’s, that’s something that you have to think about. But also remember, just to make sure that you add www dot or HTTP, colon slash slash to the, to the beginning of those URLs, wherever you might place them. That might include business cards and brochures, you know, other printed material and then email signature and other places, you might end up putting your web domain online that might be static text and not a link. So just taking those into account, you can still have a great domain name that’s not dot com. Because really, you know, websites have been around long enough domain name registration has been around long enough now that people are starting to take up all of the good comms so to speak. And so now we have these new top level domains, but they run everything from dot attorney to dot club to duck designed to dot yoga, all kinds of different top level domains and many domain registrar’s are now allowing all of these variety of them to take place. So think about how that happens. And then, as I noted earlier, CCT. LDS country code top level domains include the ability for you to be able to create words using those so for example, Facebook has a short URL called shares sh A r dot s dot yes is the top level the CCT LD for Spain so Espana and he s is used as part of the word shares because Facebook uses their shares URL for sharing material so you can actually create these fun words and sort of wordplay with your domain name. If you if it works, you know, don’t don’t try and shove a square peg into a round hole here, but you can really do well by yourselves and reduce the number of words and the length of your domain with CCT LDS if, if it works into your well to do generally these new kinds of LDS as well as CCT LD, so I think that’s all really great. The next big step in being able to get your website up and running is really your web hosting account and or service. And this includes your website, and or blog. And there are so many options out there, Ryan, how do people approach this when they come to you in terms of choosing web hosting and or web hosting service for a website or blog or podcast that they might be launching,

Ryan Cleland 9:50
the majority of my clients are small business and they’re just starting out. So traffic will be like, I don’t need a lot of space to the site is small search. Typically, I just set them up with the registrar and hosts that I use and I the I the best way to approach this is to keep everything in one place. So typically register my domain or domain for a client in either my business account or their own, which I suggest they maintain their own hosting account and registration register domain name in one space, I just find that to be easier, there’s no transferring, it saves a lot of time in the long run.

Ray Sidney-Smith 10:31
Yeah, when they’re connected to one another. That means they don’t have to worry about logging into two separate accounts to make things happen. And typically a web host, who is also the domain registrar can redirect traffic very easily. And quickly. If those changes are being made internally in their own system. Some of the big things that are are things that affect you, as a small business owner entrepreneur is really thinking about the cost of the web hosting, what is it really going to cost you for the amount of space you need for the website you’re going to run and the amount of traffic the bandwidth as they call it, that you’ll need for inbound website visitors, you need enough for the number of visitors you’re going to be receiving. And that’s just something that you have to guess you really aren’t going to know that out the gate generally, as Ryan said, you’re not going to have, you know, huge amounts of people showing up to your website, I had a customer several years ago who was was going to be was going to have the product on TV. So it was going to be showing up on nationally broadcast television show. And so we had to go and up the bandwidth on that particular customers account. So that they would be able to withstand the traffic that would be coming to, to to the business website. So know that you can adjust those things, it’s not something that static so you can actually adjust those based on, you know, say, okay, for this month, we’re going to get a heck of a lot more traffic than we were going to before, we need to be able to withstand that. So think about that. And also think about the services the features that the software needs to run. So say, if you’re going to work run a WordPress installation, which is a content management system. And we’re going to be talking about that in just a couple of episodes. If you’re gonna if you’re going to run WordPress, there are some requirements, you know, it has to be able to run a my SQL database and run PHP and all these other web coding language things. Just be aware that you might have these requirements. And once you make some of these decisions, make sure that your web host can satisfy them. Okay. And so just making sure that they can do that. One of the other things people frequently don’t recognize, and I’d be curious about your thoughts on this, Ryan our SSL certificates. So Google is now you know, using SSL certificates, which is the security certificate that is, you know, pairs your website so that when someone comes to your website, they get an HTTPS as opposed to HTTP, you know, website URLs that will show up. And that that secures the information transfer between the web server the web hosting server that’s rendering the websites and the website visitor their browser. So that actually is something that Google is now saying, Okay, if you have an SSL certificate, you’re going to get a more secure transaction, which means less, you know, potential for malware and other things. And we’re going to provide those websites with SSL certificates with greater levels of traffic, we’re going to send more traffic to those websites. So So making sure that your web host whether the domain registrar or your web host is capable of having that is also pretty important.

Ryan Cleland 13:35
Well, one thing I would like to add, I just set up a site using an SSL certificate. And I found something called Let’s Encrypt, it has to do with more Google supports it more than than other browsers. But if something where you are able to self sign an SSL certificate, it’s actually free. So it’s a good way to start with an SSL certificate. Without Dr. spending any money even though they are inexpensive, isn’t easy setup. So I would suggest looking at that fantastic. And

Ray Sidney-Smith 14:06
like I said, you know, as we make our way through the podcast, in this episode, and further episodes, you’ll see that the links to all of the things that we talked about are at web and beyond cast calm forward slash, the episode number two will be able to find that Let’s Encrypt linked there. Alright, let’s move along now to preparing content for your blog. And the editorial calendar. I’m going to just quickly some of those items, which we’re doing an entire episode on creating and preparing your content for your website and blog. I’m going to have some content marketing specialists on the show. And I’ve actually done an entire webinar for the Virginia SPC network on developing an editorial calendar using a wide variety of tools. So I will put a link to that webinar, the regular webinars that I present for the Virginia SPC network, and so I’ll link to that episode in the show notes. And I’ll embed that the video there if you’d like to watch it as well. So that takes us a long to now the the next step, which is once we’ve gotten over preparing content, and really looking at the site map and all this other stuff, the sort of ministerial details, we get to this later part in launching a website, which is really the idea of testing it, and then tweaking and maintaining the website. So where do we go with that? Ryan? What How should clients approach the idea of testing their website before it goes live? And then what should they do? Or what’s your experience with people as they get their websites launched? And what should they look out for?

Ryan Cleland 15:38
Well, recently, I’ve been building WordPress sites solely. And I find that the transfer from one domain to another can be can be complicated. So typically developing on your domain and utilizing a maintenance page, let’s say is a easier way to launch There are also staging plugins that you can use to help make these launches easier.

Ray Sidney-Smith 16:02
I think it’s really important for, as you said, Ryan, to sort of pay attention to how your web hosting accounts are sort of dealing with those things. That’s something that you’re dealing with as sort of a developer. But if you as a small business owner are doing this yourself, if this is a DIY project inside of a WordPress hosting account, be very cautious of that reality that you might run into this hiccup. So you if you have a launch that’s coming up, you know, you if you plan to launch on x date, just know that you should give yourself a little bit of buffer time for that you could take several days to a week for you to sort of figure out the technical components of making sure that your site transfers from the temporary staging site to your full domain, public domain and public hosting site. Great, great point there. A couple of other things that I think people should pay attention to, when it comes to testing is that you need to go ahead and rigorously visit the pages of your of your website. In that testing phase, before the goes launch goes live, you need to really think about visiting every page on your website. And I and I know for some websites, that might not be possible, because you might have thousands of pages if you have thousands of products. But if you can, you should really just visit every page and make sure that it loads properly. And try it on different computers, you know, so you might try it on a computer at home, you might try it on the computer at your office or retail shop, you might also try it on your phone to make sure that it’s mobile ready. And we’ll talk about that in a little bit. And we’ll also want to try that on maybe the library computer, you know, someone’s visiting town, they come to a library to quickly login and maybe, you know, check their check out something or they visited from some public network, you should really see what that looks like when somebody visit visits your website from a potentially limited internet access place, right? If this is a good idea, just think about that. The other side is that you should really talk to your web designer or developer about what I call a tweet maintenance plan or TMP. The idea with a TMP is to say, okay, as a part of the budget for launching our website, whether how much money you know, it costs to get the website to developed and launched this extra money is so that if we have problems A day later, a week later, maybe a month later, this is this is that money set aside or given to the designer developer to make sure that things are sort of taken care of, if you aren’t already signing a maintenance plan long term with that designer developer for updates to the website. So having something you don’t want to have a website launched, and then the day later a plugin or some other code or something goes wrong, you log into the website and make a change, and the whole website comes down. And now you go back to your designer developer, and you say, Hey, I have a problem. And they say, Sorry, I gave you the keys that’s on you. And I don’t, I don’t troubleshoot. So the reality is, is you need to be able to lean on your web host, your domain registrar, the designer and developer who’s who’s working on your site, which means you need to really have those things planned upfront, but you make sure that you have a tweak, maintenance plan of some kind, so that you can go ahead and be prepared for the inevitable it’s not if but when something will go wrong with your website. That’s just the nature of the web today, software changes and things happen, you make changes to your website, things go down, be prepared for it, it’s good insurance. The next step that I or the next set of principles that I think are really important for people to think about are really analytics, security, social media, and mobile. And these really come into the components of really making sure that your site is giving you the information, having the functionality that it needs and is capable of syndicating that content as necessary to the appropriate places like Google or to social media or otherwise. Okay, and these tend to be bundled into functionalities that are either built into the platform you’re using or their extensions You know, they’re there are additional features you need to add to that particular website in order for them to work. Do you have any good ideas for people about how they should approach these areas? Ryan

Ryan Cleland 20:13
well for WordPress, there is a plugin called Yoast SEO and they help you connect with analytics Google Search Console you can upload all your social media links and it makes you know optimizing your site and being aware of metrics very simple

Ray Sidney-Smith 20:31
right so so Yost is is great Yoast SEO is a plugin for WordPress. So if you are on the WordPress platform it does Yeah, it does all of this thing’s a sitemap it gets your it produces a sitemap which WordPress doesn’t do natively. And then you can go ahead and submit that sitemap through the Google Search Console using Yost, it does analytics for every page and post on your website. So it tells you whether or not that that page or post is optimized for Google and the others search engines. And it does a whole host of other things. You know, if you’re not using WordPress, it’s still important for you to think about getting a Google Analytics account, which means going to google dot com forward slash analytics and creating account and all again, that link will be in the show notes. And going ahead and making sure that you have all of your social media accounts created that you’re going to be doing and and connecting to your website. So that means going out there and creating your Twitter account, creating Facebook, creating Pinterest, creating Instagram, and so and so forth. So that you have all of those LinkedIn and so on so forth. So as you have them available to you. And they’re created an established when you’re connecting them to your website. And and that really just makes it more efficient when you’re working with your developer and designer. Because you don’t want to get to that point where you’re going to do all of that stuff. And then the designer developer has to wait on you while you create all of these variety of accounts. The The other thing you want to make sure as you’re developing your website is that it’s mobile ready. Okay. And we are now in a mobile first or what I call think mobile first, first modality in small business, you need to be thinking about how your website and how your brand is viewed as experienced from a mobile first perspective, you should think mobile first, whenever you’re doing anything with regard to marketing and managing your business today, it’s just so important, you know, people are on their mobile phones, they’re experiencing your your brand, usually first on a mobile phone. Now, all the statistics tell us that most searches happening upwards of 80% of search on Google is happening on a mobile phone. So we really need to think about how your website is optimized for that, as a Google Small Business advisor to the Google Small Business team in Mountain View, they have developed a tool called the test my site. So if you go to test my site dot think with Google dot com. And again, that link is in the show notes, you’ll be able to run your website through it. And it will tell you your mobile readiness, the speed of your website, and some other important factors so that you can correct them if they are, they fall into sort of the, the orange or red zone, right. So the the amber or the red zone of things that you need to correct to make sure that your, your site is optimized for basically desktop and mobile readiness. Okay, so so Google’s built you this really great tool for doing that. And if not, then there are there are again, there are ways in which you can get around them with your WordPress website, there is what’s called WP touch a really great mobile plugin. I’m not sure if you’ve used this yet, Ryan. But it’s a very flexible plugin that allows you to be able to turn your your desktop ready website into a mobile ready website. And it does a bunch of sophisticated stuff behind the scenes to make that happen. So make sure that you’re doing that look at the various social media plugins and other extensions that are available within your content management system. And if they if they don’t exist, then you need to get them you know, to do that. And this is probably about that time when we talk about two things that I think people frequently forget. One is email, make sure that you’re connecting your website to email in some way, shape, or form. Okay, so that means getting your email newsletter account created and making sure that you put your email newsletter signup in someplace conspicuous on your website. So people are signing up for your email, we will have a whole series on this topic coming up in I think about 1010 or 15 episodes. So but the other is backup and security. Make sure that your website has some backup or security functionality built in so that when something goes wrong, right, it’s not if but when something goes wrong, you are prepared with a good backup strategy in place and making sure that you have the security components in place to what we call harden, which is stopping people from doing bad things to your website. You’re basically using the appropriate hardening mechanisms for doing that. And we’ll have some discussion about that in the WordPress episode as it relates to WordPress, but you really want to make sure that you do that with any website that you have that you have the appropriate security fail safes in place.

Ryan Cleland 25:02
There is another tool that I’m using now it’s called mas local, it helps synchronize all your business listings across search engines. They also offer a mas pro suite of tools that helps with search engine optimization seems to be very helpful. I haven’t signed up for that yet. You know,

Ray Sidney-Smith 25:21
Maz is a great organization and they do a lot of lot of good stuff. And there are lots of ways in which you can manage your local listings. And that obviously creates citations, what they call citations, which are business directory listings around the internet, which then can refer local traffic to you. So very, very powerful stuff. So great nod to Ma’s local, they’re finally is really the timeline. And I think a lot of people are tentative about starting a small business website because they think it’s going to take a lot of time, you know, there are different designers and developers and different projects and so timelines definitely very Ryan, how long does it typically take with a client for you to go from inception statement of work and the signing a project agreement to launching the website projects ranged anywhere from a week with clients that are very organized and know exactly what they want to a month and two months, that also depends on the scope of the work what they need the site to do. I typically work in WordPress, so there are there’s definitely different strategies that can be taken. It’s just comes down to planning from the beginning. Absolutely, I think I think timeline to launch really is a matter of how well prepared you are, how well prepared the designer, the developer that you’re working with, and the platform that you choose. And I did a I did a webinar on this topic again, in the webinar archives. And I’ll put a link to it in the show notes that covers how to launch a website in 24 hours. And so this is not 24 hours from today to tomorrow, but literally 24 hours of work. So it typically takes a small business owner about 24 hours of your own individual work working with the designer developer to be able to get that website launched. Okay. So just think about it being about 20 hours of your time to be able to get the site launched, and that can be meted out over several weeks, or a month or more than that, okay. It just depends on how much you want to commit to making it happen sooner rather than later. Okay, so 24 hours is three, eight hour days, or it can be, you know, six weeks, broken up into four hour into into four hours each week. So you really just need to think about did I do that math, right.

Either way, you get my point. You know, it can be broken up if it’s four hours time, six weeks. Yeah, that’s 24 hours, right. So the choice is really yours. But that’s just about what it is. So I’ll make sure to put that link to the webinar for the sort of checklist for getting your website launched. And that will do it in terms of the principles of web good website design and development. And Ryan, any final thoughts you have for listeners regarding good principles of website design and development? I know we really didn’t talk about the thematic development and themes and front end design. I’m curious about your thoughts there in terms of how how the site should really look, you know, what, what should what should the form versus function do, I know that for me, I tend to avoid the topics of design because they tend to be so subjective, but there is a lot that goes into making sure a website looks a particular way. And that usually comes down to what the website needs to do, what its functions are, that really inform its form. Typically, I

Ryan Cleland 28:42
prefer to work with clients that are organized from the beginning that they do have an idea, but they don’t know exactly what they want, they may have websites that they like, or the competition that they’re working against, which is a helpful way to start, a lot of a lot of problems can be solved just by looking at other sites that are doing similar or performing similar services.

Ray Sidney-Smith 29:07
I know that’s something that people tend to not think about is color psychology or color theory, when it comes to design, you should really have a discussion with your designer developer about the colors that you’re choosing that are either connected to your brand already or that need to be developed. So sometimes when it comes to design, it comes down to the fact that your business has not yet decided on what’s called a color palette, right, a series of colors that work together and will be used consistently for the rest of your brand’s life span. Okay, and, and I’m sure Ryan, you deal with this all the time with clients who have come and they’ve used maybe two different colors on this business card, and then maybe these three other colors on their Facebook page, and then these other colors on maybe a temporary website, or on a brochure, or something else like that they’ve not decided on the series of colors that should really be collected together and only used as one cohesive team in the scope of things. And colors printed and colors on a digital screen are very different. And we need to be able to work with those sets of colors to be able to make that brand consistency happen. So we really do need to think about color, we need to think about consistency of typeface, meaning the fonts you’re using, both on digital and print, and then what your website really needs to do. Because if your website needs to do certain things, that means that it needs to have a functional design approach versus whether it just needs to be a brochure website that just needs to look pretty, right. And so many times people come at a website design project with a, I want this to look pretty the aesthetics and they they lose sight of the fact that your website needs to be functional first, and then needs to be aesthetically pleasing to the user, meaning getting them to do the action you want them to do, right. So so we want to look at this from a functional design perspective, which is what what design elements Do we need in order to make sure that this is appealing, as opposed to repelling the user to do what we want them to do.

Ryan Cleland 31:13
When I run into these kinds of scenarios, I always suggest we begin the planning stage with the brand and and redesign potentially the logo, we work out the colors, the tagline necessary and and start the planning process from the very beginning, which is the core your brand, I think it’s really important for people to think about the brand as the hub and your website, and your email and your printed marketing materials, and all of these other things as spokes of that wheel. And you really need to make sure that they connect the the spokes connect to your hub and the spokes connect to your audience, which let’s say that’s the wheel you know, on the diameter of the wheel. So so you know, it all sort of comes together. And as as one cohesive piece, definitely talking to your designer developer upfront about your website design is going to be really important.

Ray Sidney-Smith 31:59
And, as Ryan said, discussing the brand components, color theory and color palette, making sure that you have all of the name tagline and all of his other components really determined before you approach the website. And that way it creates that cascading effect of positive benefits as you make your way through because those design choices will then be conditioned precedent on you making sure that the brand is in place that closes up our time together. Ryan, I really wanted to thank you for being on the show here on web and beyond cast. Thank you. All right, folks. That leads us to the end of this first show of web beyond cast. And I am really, really pleased that I got through this episode. You know, it’s a lot of work to start a podcast, but those of you who have your own podcasts, you know what it’s like, but I’m really excited to continue on this journey with you all with that. Thanks for listening to web and beyond cast were small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. Until next time, here’s your small business success on the web and beyond.