The Mono Team | 06/11/2018
10 Lessons From 1 Billion Page Views
Recently at the Yext ONWARD18 conference our CTO, David Højelsen, and Yext’s Design Director, Erin Pfiffner, guided attendees through 10 lessons that they’ve learned from working with enterprise and small business websites.
With a perfect combination of technical and design expertise, David and Erin gave their best tips and tricks for building performance-based websites in today’s era of voice search and need for branded online experiences. Overall, their message focused on ‘Technology Endurance’ and ensuring that your website from both a design and tech perspective could withstand technological shifts over time as we transition to adopting more artificial intelligence, and need to focus our efforts on data ownership and control of our online data.
Here’s a summary to help you employ best practices on your website:
Lesson 1: Balance business expectations with search engine tactics
Keep in mind that search engine optimization (SEO) is a long-tail investment, and remember that all the small things, from W3C compliance to image optimization to adhering to privacy standards, contribute to overall SEO performance.
Lesson 2: Your website is a data hub
Your website is your proprietary data hub within the digital landscape. Make sure that you curate relevant content (data) for your website, so that it can easily be found online, and even more so - leverage your website to collect valuable data-based insights about your visitors.
Lesson 3: Well organized content is a game-changer
Ensure that content/data on your website is structured and marked up according to common standards, such as Schema.org and JSON-LD. This makes it easier for search engines to make sense of content on your website, and deliver richer results to the user. To put it simply, if humans can’t understand it, then robots can’t either.
Lesson 4: Content gets users to your site
Ensure that website copy is optimized for your target audience’s search keywords and that they appear in important fields, such as H-tags. A pro tip: Don’t style important promotions or information into images, as it can’t be crawled by search engines.
Lesson 5: Design drives conversions
Design is an experience, and people buy into the look-and-feel of your brand. According to Stanford, 46.1% say look-and-feel influences trust of website, and 38% will leave if it’s unattractive.
Lesson 6: It pays to stay on top of regulations
Make sure that you separate the design of your website from the content. This is important so that your website content OR website design can easily be independently adjusted in preparation for new regulations, such as e-privacy (content focused) and accessibility (design focused).
Lesson 7: Don’t overlook the powers of conditioned behaviors
To say it short and sweet, respect the user’s time and experience. Don’t customize your website with unintuitive functionality (Jacob’s Law), make it easy for users to find what they are looking for (Hick’s Law) and limit your content to a maximum of 5-7 takeaways that you want users to remember (Miller’s Law).
Lesson 8: Think twice before adding third-party widgets
While there's certainly no shortage of excellent third-party widgets available, it's important for website owners to consider the potential challenges they may introduce, such as e-privacy compliance issues, inconsistent design, and slower website load times.
What sets the Mono white label platform apart is our deliberate decision not to incorporate an app store or plugins. Instead, Mono Websites offers a comprehensive suite of features necessary for building professional websites for SMBs. This includes essential elements like an SEO-friendly blog, a built-in customer database, and our dynamic personalization feature, Mono On-Site Engagements. We've seamlessly integrated third-party functionality directly into our white label solution, ensuring that resellers can provide their clients with robust websites without the drawbacks commonly associated with third-party widgets. With Mono, resellers can confidently deliver top-notch websites that meet the highest standards of performance, design consistency, and compliance.
Lesson 9: There is power in a collaborative mindset
Combine the best from design and tech to create a stronger website in terms of performance, tools and processes - and remember to keep this collaborative approach in mind when hiring for your website team.
Lesson 10: Trends to ditch and adopt
Last but not least - David and Erin share their trends to ditch and adopt, and the advice was:
- Ditch (tech): Off domain images: It’s cheaper but less secure!
- Ditch (design): Carousels
- Adopt (tech): Local content delivery networks (CDN) for faster delivery
- Adopt (design): Authentic imagery on your website
Download their full checklist for tips, tricks, and tools on how to improve your website!
About Mono Solutions
Here at Mono Solutions, we empower digital agencies, telcos, SaaS, WaaS, and other resellers by providing them with our white label website platform, offering a comprehensive solution for website creation and multi-site management. Our platform is designed to streamline and optimize every aspect of the process, from sales to development and ongoing management of client websites. Focused solely on the B2B2B sector, we deeply understand the unique challenges and opportunities that digital resellers face, recognizing them not just as customers but as indispensable partners in the journey. Keen to discover more about our white label website platform? Take the first step and start your free trial today.