The Evening Project - Part 3, A website with 0 visitors
My wife and I ventured into the unknown and started an evening project together, this is Part 3 of the story that unfolds pretty much in real time.
Not many people know that I used to build websites. Starting when I was in my late teens (think mid-1990's), it was obviously back in the days when few people had even heard about internet - or the world wide web. What makes this even odder is of course that building websites, was light-years away from my actual profession at that time, being a professional ballet dancer (I know, also light-years away from selling Tesla's :)).
This, at the time, odd hobby of mine, started even before any type of html-editors existed and you had to use the Windows Notepad for coding. I can't exactly say that I made a fortune out of my self-taught knowledge, but I did put together quite a few websites and learned a lot by doing so over the years. Everything from domain registering, to setting up FTP's, graphics, Photoshop, Java, HTML and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) etc. Remember, this was all pretty new stuff at that time and hardly any of the tech companies we take for granted was even founded.
Fast forward to today and the tools you have at your disposal to set up a website, are just a few clicks away and vastly improved. It's mind-blowing how far this development has come and how much easier it is to make a professional looking website today. But as easy as the basic tools may be, to make a website look like a million dollar and attract plenty of high ranking leads, you still need a designers touch and some basic knowledge on how things work.
Since we are aiming to reach all EU (megalomania - we know) with our evening project, we pretty early came to the conclusion that we will use Internet as our main channel of communication. Our project is about re-inventing and redefining a commonly known product, meaning we need to get people to understand what it's all about in the best possible way. Thus our website will be very important and our we need to focus on two things to start:
- It need to look amazing
- It need to be built for high quality traffic
Thankfully I know a little bit about the technical part and Sarah normally corrects me when it's not pleasing for the eye :).
But as anyone who built traffic to a website knows, you need to understand how Google ranks and picks up search results if you want high quality visits and don't want to spend a fortune on advertising. The algorithms being used to get high hits when searching on Google is a well guarded secret, but there are certain important basic SEO tricks that I thankfully know from back in the days.
- Website address - If people search for "cheap books", the address www.cheapbooks.com is more likely to get high hits than something like www.andyspaperstore.com . Thankfully though, the name of our products and project name was strangely still available on the dot com domain, so that was a great start for the project! (..and no, it's not the above :))
- Age - Age is a good thing on Internet, and the simple reason why we decided to get the site up and running asap. Even with limited content, age is a good thing and even if a bit unlikely, we could already now start collecting leads by setting up a form.
- Links - The more who links to the website, the better. For better or worse, this could be a bit more challenging until we launch, as we are keeping our project officially a secret for now. Need to work on this one.
There are obviously many more things about building a great website and we are finding them out as we go. Language and currency-support to different countries is one subject that popped up as we discussed, how important is that if you are reaching for a European wide audience? Will English be enough or how many languages do we need to add? What conversion rate could we expect from incoming traffic? Will Google and FB ads still be a necessity? Is a standard web shop solution enough for a start-up?
Feel free to write "yes" in the comment field below if you know anything about building websites and online marketing, we maaaay need some input and feedback down the line :).
Best,
Andy & Sarah