github.com/cykod/Webiva
P. 617.398.0513
Webiva
319 A Street, 3rd Floor
Boston MA 02110
Boston MA 02110
I’ve been blogging, on and off, for about 10 years now. It all began back in the early paid-account days of LiveJournal, then on to Myspace blogs (what was I thinking?), then back to LiveJournal before a short stint on Blogger, an even shorter stint on Tumblr, and then my most recent landing place, Wordpress.
Wordpress never felt like “home” to me, though. I’d still admire other sites where people had created landing pages, linked to their portfolios, and even sold handmade goodies on the same site as their blog. While Wordpress allows you to do most of that, my limited programming knowledge certainly did not. Sure, I could easily update a post, but I hated the way the backend looked so I didn’t want to spend any more time necessary struggling with code to add more functionality. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back for my experience with Wordpress, though, was the lack of free -- and attractive-- themes that didn’t feel like cookie cutter templates.
And then, Webiva came into my life (cue dramatic lighting and chorus of angels). I had my doubts at first: not about its functionality, but about whether or not I would be able to figure out out. Those doubts were assuaged one Friday evening, though, when I was tasked with making changes to our website. Yes, our company website. That’s a big deal for someone like me, who not only has no programming chops, but also has a huge (and somewhat irrational) fear of “breaking” the site. I hesitantly changed some text before realizing that I needed to actually add a new content paragraph to the page. Taking a deep breath, a selected the paragraph, added it to the main content section and... voila! It worked!
It took me a minute to realize that I had successfully altered the website without rendering it totally unusable for the next 5 days, but once I came to that realization, it was like I’d had an epiphany. For once, I could --and did-- successfully change and update a website! Exploring the system some more, I discovered that not only could I easily update pages, create new landing pages, and add content, but that I could also use the substantial analytics tab to track incoming and outgoing traffic, optimize my site for search engines, implement my own storefront (if I decided to sell my crafty wares), and even more importantly, create and customize my own pixel-perfect themes.
Using Webiva is truly a boon for any blogger with the desire to control their blog themselves. Want to add a new header image? No problem. Time to change your TypeKit font and track your traffic? Done and Done. And updating your blog? It's as easy as it gets.
This blogger? Converted.
For examples of Webiva-made blogs, check out Cykod or my (in progress) blog, BirdsiViews!
According to Wikipedia, metadata is “loosely defined as data about data.” So why, you might ask, is metadata important in the world of websites? Websites use meta descriptions and meta keyword tags, found in the <head> of the site’s HTML, to describe or summarize their content. More specifically, meta descriptions are brief and concise summaries of a site’s content, while meta keyword tags provide a list of the site’s keywords. These bits of meta information are then picked up by search engines and used to index your site accordingly.
Currently, none of the major search engines support meta keyword tags any longer. You can thank spammers in the 90’s for this, who abused the algorithms valuing keywords by stuffing their keyword tags to the brim with related-- and also totally unrelated-- keywords for the sake of their search engine rankings.
In the case of meta descriptions, they are the first item shown below the hyperlink to your site in search results, if your description contains some of the keywords someone searched for. There is no limit to how long meta descriptions can be, but Google only displays about 150-200 characters, so that’s a good number to keep in mind. While search engines won’t always display your specified meta description, you can increase the odds of them doing so by including some of the key terms you hope will lead people to your site. Although they don't improve your search result rankings, meta descriptions, when written correctly, can help persuade searchers to click through to your site. It’s also important to write unique meta descriptions for each of your pages. Visitors to your site won’t always come straight through your home page, and because each of your pages is unique (we hope), you should provide unique meta descriptions for each page to bring in additional viewers.
A quick example of "good" meta tag descriptions versus "bad" meta tag descriptions can be seen in our search for "Boston baseball camp" below:
This screenshot of our Google search displays the first result with a coherent and informative description, which will entice searchers to click through. The second result, however, simply pulled related content from the website, rather than displaying an intentionally specific and keyword-driven description tag.
As with any SEO technique, crafting your meta tags and meta descriptions aren’t magic bullets to get your site showing up at the top of Google’s search results. The best suggestion? Add this information to your arsenal of SEO techniques, and keep creating great content!
You’ve seen it happen (or, if you’re particularly unlucky, it’s happened to you): a client goes to a designer/developer and says I want my site to look like X, Y, and Z, with these pictures, these colors, and these fonts. Fast forward a few weeks later, and the client receives their pretty coded website.... except it’s filled with a bunch of strange-looking Latin mumbo-jumbo.
You see where this is headed, don’t you?
The client is (hopefully) satisfied with the design and knows that all they need to do is add in their own content. With this best-case scenario, however, the issue comes once the client adds in their painstakingly-written copy, expecting the website to look the same as it did filled with lorem ipsum... prepare to be disappointed.
The problem with designing without any notion of content is that more often than not, even the roughest version of a site’s copy would give the client a better idea of what their site will actually look like. If the designer has no idea of the length/scope of said content, they’re stuck picking an arbitrary chunk of lorem ipsum text which may or may not be anywhere close to the length of the actual content. Ultimately, this disconnect can result in some major design issues if the client tries to add, say, 50 rows of text in a box designed for 15.
This isn’t to say that lorem ipsum is evil. There’s a reason it’s stuck around for so long. However, including actual copy —no matter how rough it may be— can help to streamline the process, from designer to client, and prevents that moment of content replacement “sticker shock” for the clients.
Switching your blog to a new CMS can be pretty intimidating. You have to learn how to use a new editor and move over all of your existing content, all while trying to keep some semblance of the look of your old blog (unless you're redesigning, and that's a whole other undertaking!) Thanks to Webiva’s blog importer, though, switching your blog from Wordpress to Webiva has never been easier!
Note: If you don’t have a Wordpress blog, at step 5, simply import your RSS feed by pasting in the address of your feed, rather than using the Wordpress import feature.
Chances are, you’ll want/need to mess with some of the formatting and styling, especially if you have a new theme that you’re applying to your blog. Don’t worry, this process won’t erase your old Wordpress blog, although you might want to put one final post redirecting everyone to your brand new blog on Webiva!
Often, designing your website can be quite the intimidating step (one that drives many people to hire professional designers). If you’re more of the do-it-yourself type, however, there are many great themes available online that you can import into Webiva and tweak to your desired specifications. You can also use one of our Webiva themes and customize it as well! Below, we’ve listed some good online resources to get you on the path of building and designing a great looking (and functioning) website!
Once you find a design you like, you'll have to import it into Webiva by using the Webiva theme builder. Watch our video of how to do this below (using the excellent GPL'd Koi Wordpress Theme from Themify):
(Take a look at the full size video on YouTube)
Making great landing pages is important for two key reasons: one, your landing page is the first thing someone sees when they go to your site, so you’ll want it to be visually engaging, and two, an easily navigable and attractive page (with quality content, of course), will compel people to stay on your site.
As with any type of web design, you’ll want to follow some basic guidelines for making sure your website has the ever-elusive “sticking power” and that it serves to both engage and convert viewers. Here are some best practices from across the web:
All in all, focus on simplicity, directness, and quality of user experience. If you want to check out some real-life success stories of landing page redesigns, take a look at this Copyblogger post. And as a last result, remember to "Keep It Simple, Stupid!"
Generally, your page titles are more than one word apiece. That being the case, you run into an interesting conundrum every time you write a title: what do you do with the spaces? Spaces are fine within your content, but just try (I dare you) to type in a URL using spaces. Doesn’t quite work as planned, now does it?
That leaves you, dear reader, to figure out what the heck to put in between your words in lieu of spaces. Periods aren’t so functional when you’re dealing with URL’s, and comma’s have no place in URL’s. While ampersands are attractive and interrobangs (a combination of an exclamation point and a question mark) are fun to say, neither is particularly useful in this situation. This pretty much leaves you with dashes/hyphens (-) or underscores ( _ ).
What’s the difference between the two? Not only do dashes and underscores look different, they also function differently in the context of search engines. As Matt Cutts, a Google programmer said, “With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing.” This means that when a title contains underscores, Google treats it as a single word, as many different code elements are distinguished by the presence or absence of underscores in their names. If you have underscores in your title, such as dashes_versus_underscores, Google won't match your url for searches for “dashes_versus_underscores,” written in that exact way. However, if you use dashes in place of underscores (dashes-versus-underscores), Google will pull your treat your url as valid text for searches like “dashes,” “underscores,” “dashes versus underscores,” etc. Therefore, using dashes, rather than underscores, is a much better way to create long titles while keeping them relevant to search engines!
Using dashes is a good practice to keep in mind, but doing so -- or failing to do so--won't catapult your blog into overnight success or doom it to immediate failure. It's still imperative to have good content, new content, descriptive headers, alt tags, and all of those fun SEO tips and tricks we wrote about here.
If you’d like to know more about dashes versus underscores, take a look at this YouTube Video from a Google Engineer:
SEO (search engine optimization) is one of those popular buzzwords that’s often thrown around across the net, but its usually accompanied by all sorts of confusing jargon or sales pitches to "make your SEO better!!" You don't --I repeat, don't-- need to know everything about SEO, but we've compiled a list of the most important essentials to help you get on your way! The goal of SEO is to make your site easier for people to find with search engines by getting your page higher on the results pages when people run a search for specific keywords.
The are thousands of different things people will recommend to improve your site, ranging from well-tested techniques to cargo cult Voodoo, but to get started with optimizing your site for Search Engines, you can follow a few relatively simple steps to maximize the value of the content of your site.
Here are some of the SEO basics that you can start to implement yourself:
For more explanations about how SEO works and how to best use it for your own site, check out these great SEO resources:
As members of Boston's Lean Startup Circle and enthusiastic practitioners of Agile development methodologies, we're firm believers in the value of the repeated, incremental "Do over." In agile software development this is usually referred to as an Iteration, while in the Lean Startup world it is hailed as a Pivot.
Both disciplines have learned the value of customer development: if you're not building something your customer wants, then every minute spent building it is a waste of time. Fallen out of favor is the idea of the "Waterfall" philosophy, where a massive amount of planning and specification is done ahead of time and then, like a canoe falling off a cliff, your product shoots through the steps of development, testing, and release full speed in a straight path. The agile alternative, using smaller feedback loops, gives more opportunity for the product to be refined under real use situations. When we developed Webiva we followed the latter methodology, often pushing one or two features per day as needed to move development forward.
On CMS integration projects where we're primarily brought on as technical advisors, it's a different story. The standard website development process still feels very much like a waterfall:
1. Discuss Client Requirements and RFP
2. Consultants Bid on Project
3. Consultant Determine Project Specifications
4. Design of the Website is Completed
5. Implementation of the Design Occurs
6. Content is Created
7. User Testing Occurs
8. Site Goes Live
9. *Client Hates Website
*Optional Step
The clients who want to build their new websites are often not particularly versed in the area of Web development. Rather, they have looked around and know some of the features that they would like their big, new, shiny website to have. They've assembled a mishmash of various features into a Request for Proposal and then farmed out that proposal to a number of different parties for bids (See: Why quotes are a bad idea). The various design consultancies will review the RFP and come back with a price based on their understanding of the project. The client chooses and that consultancy will then write up detailed specifications.
At this point, the document created in Step 3 -- the master blueprint for the project -- progresses like the children's game "Telephone." The client has created a set of features out of a limited understanding of their problem domain and a consultancy has taken that limited understanding, interpreted it themselves, and created one document to rule them all for the duration of the project.
Is it any wonder many website revamps end up at step 9 (or fail completely)?
Website development needs to take a chapter out of the Lean movement handbook. As an industry, we desperately need a "Lean Website" methodology. Get rid of the linear flow down the waterfall towards the jagged rapids at the bottom. As a consultancy, yes you have a client, but the actual customer of the website you are building is your client's customer.
Making your client happy during the web development process doesn't necessarily translate into making your clients customer's happy after the fact. If your client knew exactly what they needed to build and how to best build it, they probably wouldn't need you after all. Creating a massive, linear 8-step process that leaves the actual customer out of the loop until the very end is a set up for failure.
Webiva (surprise, surprise) is very much built around the concept of being able to build and reimagine your website incrementally, getting both qualitative and quantitative feedback from both the client and end customer as you develop your site.
We'll be talking a lot more in this blog about how to follow a "Lean Website" philosophy. The web gives you an incredible ability to do metric-driven customer development with your Online presence, and if the Web Design and Development industry takes advantage of this, the end result will be happier clients and better websites.
We will be hosting a 1 hour "Introducing Webiva" Seminar on 10/12 and 10/13, with the goal introducing some of the basic features and showing off some of the new stuff in the system. Check out More Details and Signup
