The title is borrowed from the traditional proclamation – ‘The King is dead. Long Live the King’. What is basically meant (and I am taking this from Wikipedia) is that in certain monarchies of France and England, the transfer of sovereignty occurred instantaneously upon the moment of death of the previous monarch. In this blog post, I am using it to highlight that how a stand alone non interactive website (basically 1.0) is dead and without fail, its time for websites powered by social media (Websites 2.0) to take over!!

It is very common to see companies scrambling to get their website up. In few cases, some basic essentials of website are missing, but in most the marketers have no clear agenda on why they are building one. It’s not too surprising to see websites being made because it is a standard launch activity to do. It is more like a job in the task list at the time of product launch. The brand manager gets it executed because it was expected out of him or her.

This is the concluding post of the series on essentials of a website. Do read the first, second and third segments of it.

We continue with our learnings:

1. Analytics for your website

Analytics is HTML code that you enter in your website scripts that records the number of visitors on your site. Along with that it gives out other data points like amount of time they spent on the site, which pages did they visit, the bounce rate, how many of them were unique visitors etc.

There are expensive tracking tools available that you could use or do with free ones like google analytics. This is completely dependent on your need. We felt that google analytics did the job pretty well.

This third blog post on the essentials of a website continues to share with you our learnings of developing our website. Do read the first and second post

1.    Website Designers

We are assuming here that while you will provide the content, you will ultimately hire a designer to put all that up for you. Do a profile check before getting any designer on board. Luckily in this case the work of the designer would be up already as part of somebody else’s website. Understand who will be working on your site. You could also share the sitemap with them and tell them that you are looking at them to pitch for your website. This works best if you are corporate client.

Before signing, understand and record the terms and conditions. Ensure that you have written down all that is part of the package as you will surprised how your costs have escalated from where you had started. It would be a good idea to surf several your work related sites. That will give you idea on what different features are available as part of HTML language. You could also give out reference screen shots for specific features that you have liked.

This is the second in series post on essential of a website. We have learnt several lessons while creating ours and are sharing it here. Do read our first post.

1.  Content of your website

Having got your sitemap in place, the next step is to pen down content for all your pages. In terms of time, we would place this as the most time consuming activity. It is essential that one person or a particular set of people only write the content as the tone and manner has to be consistent.

The language of the content has to be in line with the subject matter. After you have finished writing everything, keep it aside for 2 days before re-reading it again. Get it read by a third person neutral to your business to check if he or she is able to understand it completely.

There are many people who have played the role of guardian angels in our journey towards turning entrepreneurs and starting Windchimes. One person especially stands out – Aparna!

A self confessed coffeholic, travel addict and cinema lover, Aparna was our colleague, best buddy and coffee mate from our previous organization. We all quit at the same time, Nimesh and I to pursue our startup dreams, Aparna to pursue her travel dreams and travel to Latin America for six months.