A systematic approach to improving the efficiency of a working web project
There are many different materials on the Internet on how to make new Internet projects correctly, how to promote them later, how to improve an existing interface, etc. But what is not, is a systematic view of the problem of supporting and developing existing projects. Many people think that this is like buying a good new car: you bought it and sometimes you change the oil, you can buy a new rug for a couple of years. In fact, this is the wrong approach: it is not enough to pay for hosting and domain once a year. Even sometimes making improvements is not enough. The site is a tool and it should work as efficiently as possible. Over all successful sites work is ongoing and continuous.
In this article I will try to systematically look at the problems of already working sites, and also give recommendations on how to constantly increase their effectiveness. The material will be useful to the owners of existing projects, will allow a comprehensive look at the issues of support and development with reference to economic efficiency, and for some, perhaps, will breathe new life into the old project.
The entrepreneur conceives some new Internet project, it is created by the forces of the contracting company or a full-time team, and its promotion begins. Further, if the idea and implementation of the project is of high quality, it begins to receive the first users and bring in the first money. With a good scenario, at some point he overcomes the break-even point, and the project often becomes a cash cow. This is especially true for projects in the field of e-commerce. It is at this point that the support and refinement of the site often rolls into a sluggish editing of bugs and, perhaps, a design update every 5 years.
The effectiveness of the site often no one watches. It’s good if an internet marketer is working with the project and at least occasionally watching Google Analytics or Yandex.Metrica. Some even have marketing reports showing the number of visitors. Need more sales? Let's increase the budget for contextual advertising or expand the semantic core for SEO. Such a banal tool, as the goals of the site and tracking conversion, do not many. I generally keep quiet about calculating the cost of a visitor and analyzing efficiency through channels. And this happens because there are very few good marketers in our country, because everyone “writes code” on outsourcing and does not know how to work with products, and entrepreneurs themselves do not really understand what to do with their sites.
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No one is following the site interface either. It would be very interesting to look at the statistics on the use of a map of clicks by the site owners themselves. I think more than half of it has never used it at all, but this is a basic tool that allows you to track the effectiveness of the interface. Most often, the interface has been made and forgotten, at least until the complete redesign of the site. Few people remember the big projects that are constantly conducting A / B testing to analyze the effectiveness of the interface and improve it. It depends on the interface conversion, and hence the effectiveness of all marketing efforts. You can achieve sales growth in several ways: for example, by increasing the marketing budget, which will lead to more traffic to the site, or by improving the interface, which, with an equal number of site users, will give more sales. The second option is more correct and should go on the to-do list earlier. That is, we must first achieve maximum conversion, and then invest in advertising so that every dollar is spent with maximum return. Or, as a last resort, do it in parallel.
By technology, too, everything is difficult. Gradually, the technology on which the site is made, is becoming obsolete. New versions of the language, framework or CMS are released. Nobody wants to be updated to the new version without seeing much difference for business. What for? After all, the site works! Gradually, the project accumulates a lot of old code, since its refactoring also does not have enough money and time during the revision. No one wrote unit tests right away, errors accumulate. The cost of support begins to grow continuously. The technology sometimes grows old so that even official documentation is difficult to find, and the abundance of outdated code severely slows the programmer. And programmers often have time to change on the project, and the old ones after themselves rarely leave documentation. But no one notices, because the tasks are finally solved, the project makes money, no one appreciates the cost of support ...
Outwardly, everything works, but in fact there is a constant and inefficient waste of the budget. And the worst thing is that objectively assessing it is quite problematic, and the current developers will never admit this. A week ago, I generally met a case where the current contractor of a new client did not specifically update the framework version in order to do longer and get more payment for the hours spent.
Common situation? Do you recognize yourself or your friends?
First you need to make sure that we have all the necessary documents and access for further work.
We bring in the current state or create from scratch:
The larger the project, the more it changes over time. Any good specialist, whether he is a marketer or developer, will start with questions relating to the past site and the current situation, and only then will he develop recommendations.
I like to plan everything - it allows us to understand where we are and where we are going. Website development is also a strategy in which there should be clear goals and clear KPIs. This is the only way to achieve efficiency. Moreover, the strategy should disclose plans for the development of the site itself, and for its promotion to the market.
First, we should listen to the users themselves. This can be done by studying their behavior on the site using Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrics or other tools. You can directly ask for feedback through feedback forms or interviews. You can use the method of "reasonable borrowing" from competitors. And hundreds of different ways. Again, a lot depends on the project. If it is more or less standard, and there are many analogues on the market, then the best practice should be known, you just need to apply them. If it is unique, then it is more difficult, you will have to experiment.
There are many different approaches to the development of strategies, this material is not about them. Everyone’s resources are always limited, so it’s hardly possible to do everything at once. I believe that you need to start with the most important, that is, with what directly affects the profit. In particular, the development of the business component itself (everything related to the development of customers), optimization of marketing costs (this is not about cutting, but about improving efficiency), interface (conversion and usability) and quality of the technical solution (it should work stably, cost of support should be optimal). On all these fronts, you need to make a cut, and then think out a plan of action.
The algorithm of the system work on the project is as follows:
With all of these actions should be considered ROI. There are things that are beneficial to do right now. As, for example, updating a technical platform can significantly reduce the cost of support, and although this update will require money, it will pay for itself quite quickly, that is, ROI will be high. And there are improvements that do not bring much benefit to the project.
Big companies are planning several years ahead. When it comes to an Internet project, even a small one, you need to plan at least for a year, and preferably for 3-5 years. And then, constantly listening to customers, this strategy can be adjusted. Of course, everything is constantly changing on the Internet, but whoever doesn’t have a goal will definitely not get to it.
The fact that few people can do, but on what the whole business depends. This is a product development around the customer and his problems. The methodology aims to carefully and continuously analyze customer needs and improve the product. That is, work on those things that bring money to the project. And this methodology applies to all projects. The main thing is to answer the question: “What else does the client need?”.
Imagine that we have a project that provides a service or sells a product. How do we increase sales? There are always a thousand ways: you can give something as a gift for free, you can improve the service (speed, quality, service), you can even come up with a new product within an existing project. Or another example, closer to our realities: so far many online stores do not have the opportunity to buy on credit. But in offline more than 50% of goods sold on credit! That is, many online stores lose a very large share of customers, although perhaps they are quite successful and can sell really a lot of goods and do not even suspect that they are losing tens of percent of lost profits. And there are a lot of such examples, they are in every online project.
Are you really doing everything to grow your customers? Or maybe they can buy more and more? Few people ask these questions to themselves, and often there is a huge lost profit.
The most important thing to understand here is that a beautiful picture does not mean a user-friendly interface. Every site and every page has a goal (s). And the effectiveness of an interface can only be measured by whether it reaches its goals or not. This is not necessarily the sale of something, it can be registration, the number of pages viewed, writing a comment, etc. All these goals are measurable, and we need to work on improving each of them. The problem with old projects is that such goals are most often not even set. Many think in very broad categories: “We have a product, we need to sell it”.
First you need to determine the main KPI site and the most important sections of it. This is best done with a UX / UI designer who is well versed in the design and design of the project. Then you need to analyze Google Analytics and Yandex. Metric, to study user behavior. Then collect feedback from users and think about Product Development. And after that, begin to improve the interface, having on hand all the necessary materials.
Changes can be implemented in two ways:
There is no ideal option. In the first case, we have a high risk of the human factor. Even the most experienced designer can make mistakes (we are all human). However, there are usually a lot of obvious things, the effectiveness of which has long been proven. In the second case, you can incorrectly conduct the test itself. And it's not about the knowledge of the group of specialists who will conduct it. Maybe a small site was chosen for the test, perhaps a large number of new visitors came to the test days, maybe users got used to the old interface, and the new one, despite the fact that it is better, simply confuses them. There may be a lot of options here, so you need to be careful with the implementation, but still changing the results is better than not.
The old interface can be constantly reworked and improved. But there are always new ideas, the development of what is. It should be a continuous process, continuous improvement. As a rule, the initial vision of a project, when its MVP is being developed, changes fairly quickly over time. This happens several times: first, when it is just beginning to be developed, and then, when the project is already working, and the first feedback from users begins to go. Sometimes projects change not only externally, but also change their basic idea. This is another reason why users should be listened to, and based on their feedback, implement improvements.
In October, worldwide, the number of mobile users in the world exceeded the number of desktop users. But at the same time, many projects have problems with adaptability for different devices. Not only that many old sites are not adaptive initially, so even adaptive ones usually have a lot of problems and flaws. After all, there are a lot of types of devices now, and everything is not easy to consider. Adaptability can always be completed or improved already existing, but, unfortunately, not everyone is thinking about this.
In addition to designing the interface, you can and should work with the layout and graphics. It can be optimized to make the site load faster. This will give more satisfaction for both users and the search engines will show the site higher in the search results. You can check the site’s download speed here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=en . Check the correctness of the display in different browsers here: http://browsershots.org/ . Check the SEO parameters of the site here: https://a.pr-cy.ru/ . Check for layout errors here: https://validator.w3.org/ - Google, which, by the way, not so long ago began to consider the errors of validity and the more of them, the lower the site.
So, page by page you can improve the project and its main indicators. Marketing efforts will become more and more effective, users will be more and more satisfied, and there will be more money. As practice shows, it is the improvement of the interface that often gives a good return on investment.
Invisible to the end user, but a very important part for the project owner. In our world, technology is quickly becoming obsolete. Every 2-3 years new versions of languages ​​and frameworks come out, and CMS is generally updated constantly. And often new versions are very different from the past, give much more opportunities. On the other hand, the old versions are no longer supported, and it becomes problematic to work with them. That is, the question is not about the possibilities of the new version, here the question is about the loss of efficiency and speed of development.
The technical platform of any Internet project needs to be constantly updated and kept up to date. To do this, follow a few important rules. First, develop it right away in the light of future updates — in particular, in CMS, do not touch the kernel during development, otherwise it will not be updated. Secondly, writing code is clean and clear, taking into account existing quality standards (for example, one of the standards for PHP ). Thirdly, it is important to comment on the code so that the programmer who will update the system, even if he did not do it, could understand it without any problems. Fourth, it is important to create and maintain up-to-date project documentation, where the system will be fully described from a technical point of view.
Observe cleanliness is necessary not only in the code, but in the very set of technologies. The larger the project, the more technology can be used there, but it is important to choose technologies carefully and not by what the programmer knows, but by what is really effective for solving a particular task. Part of the project with an increase in the number of visitors may need to be rewritten, not everything can be scaled, especially if the wrong architecture was laid out and the possibility of scaling was not foreseen, which is quite common. Sometimes you need to rewrite the entire site if it was immediately written, say, to a CMS, and its attendance increased, and the site began to slow down or even fall. In any case, good technical analysis is needed before making decisions on technologies. We wrote about technologies in more detail in the article: " Choosing technologies for a large and not very project " - but this article is more about new projects, and not about old ones.
In the modern world there are many different third-party services, which are often quite profitable to connect. For example, product advisory services for online stores, payment aggregators, login services through social networks, sending SMS, various CRM, etc. That is, the site owner often has a choice: write his own unique system or use a third-party service. Both options are quite the place to be. It is important to understand that the use of a third-party service is cheap, but all the data is at this service, and we are limited by its functionality. Therefore, similar services are mainly used by smaller sites, and large ones are developing their own unique systems. As a rule, projects are launched with a minimum number of services, and in the course of the life of the site they become more and more. Many for some reason believe that connecting such services is problematic. In fact, this is often a fairly simple task. Such services have their own API and good documentation, which makes connecting them easy.
It all depends on the growth rate of the project and its attendance. If the site was made on a boxed CMS, and its attendance begins to grow rapidly, then only servers adding or moving the site to the cloud (such as AWS) will help to avoid the site falling. This, by the way, is one of the most common problems when saving money on technologies and developing on a boxed solution, and then spending a lot on servers so that this solution works at least somehow.
With large sites (on frameworks or a pure language) everything is much simpler. In advance, you can do load testing and find out how many visitors will withstand the current server. Usually two indicators are measured: standard and peak loads. Then make a load calculation, which will allow you to understand when, how and how much to add servers so that the solution works without problems. Often they start with one server, then a separate server for the database appears, then there are several of them, and so on.
If we do not have mass service and do not anticipate large loads, then almost nothing needs to be done with the servers. Once set up the site itself and automatic backup, and then sometimes glance, so that everything works correctly. However, this is the lot of small sites, professional server administrators are constantly working with large ones (they monitor security, loads, disk space and their performance so that they do not break, etc.)
I would like to remember that in our country it is better to keep the server abroad or at least have automatic backup in another country. More than once there were stories when servers were taken out by law enforcement agencies, and entire sites died. I somehow ran into an interesting history in Ukraine, when the local SBU took out all the servers of one of the largest thematic sites, but somehow there was no backup. The bodies then killed the whole business.
With him, too, you need to constantly work: improve the old content and add new. This is especially true of information sites, shops, large portals, etc. Many again make a mistake here: instead of developing the content of the site, they filled it once and collected clients from it. This is wrong, over time such a site will receive fewer visitors, and, consequently, money.
There should be a content strategy, as part of an overall resource development strategy, which will indicate what content, how, where and when you need to publish.
We must remember about the uniqueness of the content. Both users and search engines love unique content. In addition, the content must meet the requirements of SEO, so that it is quoted in the search engines and gives an influx of visitors from them.
In sites where users completely or partially generate content, you need to constantly motivate them to do this, think over and develop special tools. For example, if a person bought something in an online store, you can send him an email after 1-2 weeks and ask to leave feedback about the product.
At first glance, it seems that everything is very simple: you need more sales, just buy more traffic, and the trick is done! In fact, as with the site itself, there is a lot to work on and something to improve. There is a wonderful quote from John Vanameuker: “I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted. The trouble is that I don’t know exactly which half. ” This is a rather old idea - in the modern world there are many tools for measuring efficiency. Moreover, we are talking about Internet projects, where everything can be measured and improved, and this should be used.
First you need to prepare the site itself. First of all, check how optimized it is for search engines. There is a lot of information on SEO, for example, 20 rules of SEO-optimization of eCommerce projects . Then check the site content: it should not only be optimized for search engines, but also motivate users to perform some actions. We should also check the interface separately: it should also encourage users to take some useful action for the project. For contextual advertising, you need to create special landing pages to increase the conversion, etc. There are quite a few steps involved in preparing the site, and almost all of them affect conversion, average bill, etc. In other words, it needs to be done in order to get the maximum effect from the visitors who hit the site.
When the site is ready, you can do the optimization of the communication channels themselves, through which potential customers enter the site. They can almost always be made more efficient. First you need to calculate the economic efficiency of each of the channels, identify existing problems and opportunities to increase efficiency, and then do optimizations and reallocate the budget from less efficient to more efficient. There is no less work than with the site itself, but this is the topic of a separate article.
And so, when we did a huge amount of work on all fronts, our old site should heal a new life, become much more efficient, often even at times, especially if no one had systematically worked on it. However, this is still not enough. With such significant changes, you need to constantly monitor the effectiveness of all actions. Not all assumptions will be effective, this is normal. The task of the site team is to find out what worked and how much (in terms of profit). And already on the basis of these results to make adjustments to the strategy.
An Internet project is like a living organism, you need to constantly work with it and improve it. Immediately after creation, it becomes clear whether the project will become a business or not. And, if it is clear that the idea “shot”, and the site is already making money, or will bring it in the future, you need to start working on its development.
How exactly to start depends on the specific project. Many sites are so outdated that they have to completely redo. Large sites are constantly updated, small ones are transformed significantly every 3-5 years, the main thing is not to stand still. And this process should be systematic, comprehensive. You can not work on the site, but forget about marketing, or vice versa. It is impossible to improve only one of the spheres, because the others will lag behind, and there will be no synergy effect. If you have not yet begun to actively improve the efficiency of your project or this process is very slow for some reason, then it’s time to do it, because the New Year is coming and it should be a new stage in the development of the project.
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Author:
Nikita Semenov
CEO
SECL Group Company
In this article I will try to systematically look at the problems of already working sites, and also give recommendations on how to constantly increase their effectiveness. The material will be useful to the owners of existing projects, will allow a comprehensive look at the issues of support and development with reference to economic efficiency, and for some, perhaps, will breathe new life into the old project.
How does it usually happen?
The entrepreneur conceives some new Internet project, it is created by the forces of the contracting company or a full-time team, and its promotion begins. Further, if the idea and implementation of the project is of high quality, it begins to receive the first users and bring in the first money. With a good scenario, at some point he overcomes the break-even point, and the project often becomes a cash cow. This is especially true for projects in the field of e-commerce. It is at this point that the support and refinement of the site often rolls into a sluggish editing of bugs and, perhaps, a design update every 5 years.
The effectiveness of the site often no one watches. It’s good if an internet marketer is working with the project and at least occasionally watching Google Analytics or Yandex.Metrica. Some even have marketing reports showing the number of visitors. Need more sales? Let's increase the budget for contextual advertising or expand the semantic core for SEO. Such a banal tool, as the goals of the site and tracking conversion, do not many. I generally keep quiet about calculating the cost of a visitor and analyzing efficiency through channels. And this happens because there are very few good marketers in our country, because everyone “writes code” on outsourcing and does not know how to work with products, and entrepreneurs themselves do not really understand what to do with their sites.
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No one is following the site interface either. It would be very interesting to look at the statistics on the use of a map of clicks by the site owners themselves. I think more than half of it has never used it at all, but this is a basic tool that allows you to track the effectiveness of the interface. Most often, the interface has been made and forgotten, at least until the complete redesign of the site. Few people remember the big projects that are constantly conducting A / B testing to analyze the effectiveness of the interface and improve it. It depends on the interface conversion, and hence the effectiveness of all marketing efforts. You can achieve sales growth in several ways: for example, by increasing the marketing budget, which will lead to more traffic to the site, or by improving the interface, which, with an equal number of site users, will give more sales. The second option is more correct and should go on the to-do list earlier. That is, we must first achieve maximum conversion, and then invest in advertising so that every dollar is spent with maximum return. Or, as a last resort, do it in parallel.
By technology, too, everything is difficult. Gradually, the technology on which the site is made, is becoming obsolete. New versions of the language, framework or CMS are released. Nobody wants to be updated to the new version without seeing much difference for business. What for? After all, the site works! Gradually, the project accumulates a lot of old code, since its refactoring also does not have enough money and time during the revision. No one wrote unit tests right away, errors accumulate. The cost of support begins to grow continuously. The technology sometimes grows old so that even official documentation is difficult to find, and the abundance of outdated code severely slows the programmer. And programmers often have time to change on the project, and the old ones after themselves rarely leave documentation. But no one notices, because the tasks are finally solved, the project makes money, no one appreciates the cost of support ...
Outwardly, everything works, but in fact there is a constant and inefficient waste of the budget. And the worst thing is that objectively assessing it is quite problematic, and the current developers will never admit this. A week ago, I generally met a case where the current contractor of a new client did not specifically update the framework version in order to do longer and get more payment for the hours spent.
Common situation? Do you recognize yourself or your friends?
Primary documents and information
First you need to make sure that we have all the necessary documents and access for further work.
We bring in the current state or create from scratch:
- Access to the site. First of all, via FTP and SSH, it is necessary for its further development. In the second place - to the site management system.
- Documentation. Each developer must maintain documentation: what he writes, where he is stored, how it works, etc. The larger the project, the more documentation on it should be. Usually this item is neglected, and it is very difficult for a new developer to understand the old code. According to my feeling, less than 10% of projects have documentation. And if you don’t have it now, then it's time to do it, and then give it to a third-party company for review.
- Third-party services. Access to Google Analytics and Google Search Console, Yandex.Metrics and Yandex.Webmaster, some resources also have a number of specific integrations, they must also be accessed.
- Marketing statistics. If you have previously conducted advertising campaigns, they should be statistics. SEO? - by what words, how positions changed, were there filters, etc. PPC? - what words, what rates, what ads, etc. SMM? - access to fan pages, brand references, traffic statistics, etc. The more old the statistics, the more effective further marketing activities can be made.
- Audits. If any audits were previously conducted - the same thing: there must be reports and results.
- Description of the project. Well, when we have something clear and standard, such as an online store. But there are often huge systems, a complete understanding of which must be contained in a special structured document. For example, take at least some rating calculation system. Any new developer will have a lot of questions: “What formula is calculated?”, “What is the reason for?”, “What is it for?”, Etc. And this is a usual function, which in the interface can be expressed by only one number, but be connected with everything on the site.
The larger the project, the more it changes over time. Any good specialist, whether he is a marketer or developer, will start with questions relating to the past site and the current situation, and only then will he develop recommendations.
Development strategy
I like to plan everything - it allows us to understand where we are and where we are going. Website development is also a strategy in which there should be clear goals and clear KPIs. This is the only way to achieve efficiency. Moreover, the strategy should disclose plans for the development of the site itself, and for its promotion to the market.
First, we should listen to the users themselves. This can be done by studying their behavior on the site using Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrics or other tools. You can directly ask for feedback through feedback forms or interviews. You can use the method of "reasonable borrowing" from competitors. And hundreds of different ways. Again, a lot depends on the project. If it is more or less standard, and there are many analogues on the market, then the best practice should be known, you just need to apply them. If it is unique, then it is more difficult, you will have to experiment.
There are many different approaches to the development of strategies, this material is not about them. Everyone’s resources are always limited, so it’s hardly possible to do everything at once. I believe that you need to start with the most important, that is, with what directly affects the profit. In particular, the development of the business component itself (everything related to the development of customers), optimization of marketing costs (this is not about cutting, but about improving efficiency), interface (conversion and usability) and quality of the technical solution (it should work stably, cost of support should be optimal). On all these fronts, you need to make a cut, and then think out a plan of action.
The algorithm of the system work on the project is as follows:
- Conduct a comprehensive project audit
- Request user feedback
- Analyze direct and indirect competitors
- Identify the most anticipated and profitable functions for the project.
- Prioritize implementation
- Work through each item and implement
- Monitor implementation effectiveness
With all of these actions should be considered ROI. There are things that are beneficial to do right now. As, for example, updating a technical platform can significantly reduce the cost of support, and although this update will require money, it will pay for itself quite quickly, that is, ROI will be high. And there are improvements that do not bring much benefit to the project.
Big companies are planning several years ahead. When it comes to an Internet project, even a small one, you need to plan at least for a year, and preferably for 3-5 years. And then, constantly listening to customers, this strategy can be adjusted. Of course, everything is constantly changing on the Internet, but whoever doesn’t have a goal will definitely not get to it.
Product development
The fact that few people can do, but on what the whole business depends. This is a product development around the customer and his problems. The methodology aims to carefully and continuously analyze customer needs and improve the product. That is, work on those things that bring money to the project. And this methodology applies to all projects. The main thing is to answer the question: “What else does the client need?”.
Imagine that we have a project that provides a service or sells a product. How do we increase sales? There are always a thousand ways: you can give something as a gift for free, you can improve the service (speed, quality, service), you can even come up with a new product within an existing project. Or another example, closer to our realities: so far many online stores do not have the opportunity to buy on credit. But in offline more than 50% of goods sold on credit! That is, many online stores lose a very large share of customers, although perhaps they are quite successful and can sell really a lot of goods and do not even suspect that they are losing tens of percent of lost profits. And there are a lot of such examples, they are in every online project.
Are you really doing everything to grow your customers? Or maybe they can buy more and more? Few people ask these questions to themselves, and often there is a huge lost profit.
Interface and Design
The most important thing to understand here is that a beautiful picture does not mean a user-friendly interface. Every site and every page has a goal (s). And the effectiveness of an interface can only be measured by whether it reaches its goals or not. This is not necessarily the sale of something, it can be registration, the number of pages viewed, writing a comment, etc. All these goals are measurable, and we need to work on improving each of them. The problem with old projects is that such goals are most often not even set. Many think in very broad categories: “We have a product, we need to sell it”.
First you need to determine the main KPI site and the most important sections of it. This is best done with a UX / UI designer who is well versed in the design and design of the project. Then you need to analyze Google Analytics and Yandex. Metric, to study user behavior. Then collect feedback from users and think about Product Development. And after that, begin to improve the interface, having on hand all the necessary materials.
Changes can be implemented in two ways:
- Blindly when we build on the experience of the designer.
- Through A / B testing, when the effectiveness of each experiment is measured.
There is no ideal option. In the first case, we have a high risk of the human factor. Even the most experienced designer can make mistakes (we are all human). However, there are usually a lot of obvious things, the effectiveness of which has long been proven. In the second case, you can incorrectly conduct the test itself. And it's not about the knowledge of the group of specialists who will conduct it. Maybe a small site was chosen for the test, perhaps a large number of new visitors came to the test days, maybe users got used to the old interface, and the new one, despite the fact that it is better, simply confuses them. There may be a lot of options here, so you need to be careful with the implementation, but still changing the results is better than not.
The old interface can be constantly reworked and improved. But there are always new ideas, the development of what is. It should be a continuous process, continuous improvement. As a rule, the initial vision of a project, when its MVP is being developed, changes fairly quickly over time. This happens several times: first, when it is just beginning to be developed, and then, when the project is already working, and the first feedback from users begins to go. Sometimes projects change not only externally, but also change their basic idea. This is another reason why users should be listened to, and based on their feedback, implement improvements.
In October, worldwide, the number of mobile users in the world exceeded the number of desktop users. But at the same time, many projects have problems with adaptability for different devices. Not only that many old sites are not adaptive initially, so even adaptive ones usually have a lot of problems and flaws. After all, there are a lot of types of devices now, and everything is not easy to consider. Adaptability can always be completed or improved already existing, but, unfortunately, not everyone is thinking about this.
In addition to designing the interface, you can and should work with the layout and graphics. It can be optimized to make the site load faster. This will give more satisfaction for both users and the search engines will show the site higher in the search results. You can check the site’s download speed here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=en . Check the correctness of the display in different browsers here: http://browsershots.org/ . Check the SEO parameters of the site here: https://a.pr-cy.ru/ . Check for layout errors here: https://validator.w3.org/ - Google, which, by the way, not so long ago began to consider the errors of validity and the more of them, the lower the site.
So, page by page you can improve the project and its main indicators. Marketing efforts will become more and more effective, users will be more and more satisfied, and there will be more money. As practice shows, it is the improvement of the interface that often gives a good return on investment.
Technology
Invisible to the end user, but a very important part for the project owner. In our world, technology is quickly becoming obsolete. Every 2-3 years new versions of languages ​​and frameworks come out, and CMS is generally updated constantly. And often new versions are very different from the past, give much more opportunities. On the other hand, the old versions are no longer supported, and it becomes problematic to work with them. That is, the question is not about the possibilities of the new version, here the question is about the loss of efficiency and speed of development.
The technical platform of any Internet project needs to be constantly updated and kept up to date. To do this, follow a few important rules. First, develop it right away in the light of future updates — in particular, in CMS, do not touch the kernel during development, otherwise it will not be updated. Secondly, writing code is clean and clear, taking into account existing quality standards (for example, one of the standards for PHP ). Thirdly, it is important to comment on the code so that the programmer who will update the system, even if he did not do it, could understand it without any problems. Fourth, it is important to create and maintain up-to-date project documentation, where the system will be fully described from a technical point of view.
Observe cleanliness is necessary not only in the code, but in the very set of technologies. The larger the project, the more technology can be used there, but it is important to choose technologies carefully and not by what the programmer knows, but by what is really effective for solving a particular task. Part of the project with an increase in the number of visitors may need to be rewritten, not everything can be scaled, especially if the wrong architecture was laid out and the possibility of scaling was not foreseen, which is quite common. Sometimes you need to rewrite the entire site if it was immediately written, say, to a CMS, and its attendance increased, and the site began to slow down or even fall. In any case, good technical analysis is needed before making decisions on technologies. We wrote about technologies in more detail in the article: " Choosing technologies for a large and not very project " - but this article is more about new projects, and not about old ones.
In the modern world there are many different third-party services, which are often quite profitable to connect. For example, product advisory services for online stores, payment aggregators, login services through social networks, sending SMS, various CRM, etc. That is, the site owner often has a choice: write his own unique system or use a third-party service. Both options are quite the place to be. It is important to understand that the use of a third-party service is cheap, but all the data is at this service, and we are limited by its functionality. Therefore, similar services are mainly used by smaller sites, and large ones are developing their own unique systems. As a rule, projects are launched with a minimum number of services, and in the course of the life of the site they become more and more. Many for some reason believe that connecting such services is problematic. In fact, this is often a fairly simple task. Such services have their own API and good documentation, which makes connecting them easy.
Server and infrastructure
It all depends on the growth rate of the project and its attendance. If the site was made on a boxed CMS, and its attendance begins to grow rapidly, then only servers adding or moving the site to the cloud (such as AWS) will help to avoid the site falling. This, by the way, is one of the most common problems when saving money on technologies and developing on a boxed solution, and then spending a lot on servers so that this solution works at least somehow.
With large sites (on frameworks or a pure language) everything is much simpler. In advance, you can do load testing and find out how many visitors will withstand the current server. Usually two indicators are measured: standard and peak loads. Then make a load calculation, which will allow you to understand when, how and how much to add servers so that the solution works without problems. Often they start with one server, then a separate server for the database appears, then there are several of them, and so on.
If we do not have mass service and do not anticipate large loads, then almost nothing needs to be done with the servers. Once set up the site itself and automatic backup, and then sometimes glance, so that everything works correctly. However, this is the lot of small sites, professional server administrators are constantly working with large ones (they monitor security, loads, disk space and their performance so that they do not break, etc.)
I would like to remember that in our country it is better to keep the server abroad or at least have automatic backup in another country. More than once there were stories when servers were taken out by law enforcement agencies, and entire sites died. I somehow ran into an interesting history in Ukraine, when the local SBU took out all the servers of one of the largest thematic sites, but somehow there was no backup. The bodies then killed the whole business.
Content
With him, too, you need to constantly work: improve the old content and add new. This is especially true of information sites, shops, large portals, etc. Many again make a mistake here: instead of developing the content of the site, they filled it once and collected clients from it. This is wrong, over time such a site will receive fewer visitors, and, consequently, money.
There should be a content strategy, as part of an overall resource development strategy, which will indicate what content, how, where and when you need to publish.
We must remember about the uniqueness of the content. Both users and search engines love unique content. In addition, the content must meet the requirements of SEO, so that it is quoted in the search engines and gives an influx of visitors from them.
In sites where users completely or partially generate content, you need to constantly motivate them to do this, think over and develop special tools. For example, if a person bought something in an online store, you can send him an email after 1-2 weeks and ask to leave feedback about the product.
Marketing and promotion
At first glance, it seems that everything is very simple: you need more sales, just buy more traffic, and the trick is done! In fact, as with the site itself, there is a lot to work on and something to improve. There is a wonderful quote from John Vanameuker: “I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted. The trouble is that I don’t know exactly which half. ” This is a rather old idea - in the modern world there are many tools for measuring efficiency. Moreover, we are talking about Internet projects, where everything can be measured and improved, and this should be used.
First you need to prepare the site itself. First of all, check how optimized it is for search engines. There is a lot of information on SEO, for example, 20 rules of SEO-optimization of eCommerce projects . Then check the site content: it should not only be optimized for search engines, but also motivate users to perform some actions. We should also check the interface separately: it should also encourage users to take some useful action for the project. For contextual advertising, you need to create special landing pages to increase the conversion, etc. There are quite a few steps involved in preparing the site, and almost all of them affect conversion, average bill, etc. In other words, it needs to be done in order to get the maximum effect from the visitors who hit the site.
When the site is ready, you can do the optimization of the communication channels themselves, through which potential customers enter the site. They can almost always be made more efficient. First you need to calculate the economic efficiency of each of the channels, identify existing problems and opportunities to increase efficiency, and then do optimizations and reallocate the budget from less efficient to more efficient. There is no less work than with the site itself, but this is the topic of a separate article.
Efficiency analysis and strategy adjustment
And so, when we did a huge amount of work on all fronts, our old site should heal a new life, become much more efficient, often even at times, especially if no one had systematically worked on it. However, this is still not enough. With such significant changes, you need to constantly monitor the effectiveness of all actions. Not all assumptions will be effective, this is normal. The task of the site team is to find out what worked and how much (in terms of profit). And already on the basis of these results to make adjustments to the strategy.
So what to do with a working site?
An Internet project is like a living organism, you need to constantly work with it and improve it. Immediately after creation, it becomes clear whether the project will become a business or not. And, if it is clear that the idea “shot”, and the site is already making money, or will bring it in the future, you need to start working on its development.
How exactly to start depends on the specific project. Many sites are so outdated that they have to completely redo. Large sites are constantly updated, small ones are transformed significantly every 3-5 years, the main thing is not to stand still. And this process should be systematic, comprehensive. You can not work on the site, but forget about marketing, or vice versa. It is impossible to improve only one of the spheres, because the others will lag behind, and there will be no synergy effect. If you have not yet begun to actively improve the efficiency of your project or this process is very slow for some reason, then it’s time to do it, because the New Year is coming and it should be a new stage in the development of the project.
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Author:
Nikita Semenov
CEO
SECL Group Company
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/318038/
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