Results2Match

Since about a year an old friend of mine is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Europa Fietsers (European Cycle Route Foundation). His largest asset, and problem child, is their website. Recently he asked my opinion on how to improve it.

Introduction

As business process improvement architect, and also an enterprise architect, there is never a dull moment. In this blog I want to share with you my advice to him.

Earlier I wrote about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Content Management Systems (CMS'es). I will summarize my findings here.

SEO Considerations

Marketing guru Philip Kotler tells us that 3 things are important, also in Internet marketing:

1. Define your target audience, including their wants and needs.
2. Define your company image.
3. Define your products and services that fulfill the needs and wants of your target public.

Your website is a communication channel that should be suited to present your company image on the Internet.

Website Implementation Best Practices

SEO gurus find that the information architecture of most websites is unclear. As a consequence new (untrained) website visitors cannot find the information they are looking for. And as a 2nd consequence Search Engines cannot determine what information is relevant, and what is not.

Industry watcher Forrester has defined a best practices for successful website implementations. Among other things they see as part of a successful approach:

1. Keep stakeholders involved.
2. Use a pilot strategically.
3. Simplify the functionality.

They mention as critical success factors:

1. Launch sooner (avoid 'paralysis by analysis'.
2. Use a pilot strategically (give people choice between 2 -two!- options).
3. Measure satisfaction (create an actionable dashboard).

The Current Status of the Europa Fietsers Website

The website exists for some 10 years. It has been engineered and maintained by a number of webmasters. Since about 5 years they have been discussing a new design. A number attempts have been made to perform this. Since about 1 year they consider transitioning to Drupal.

My Findings

Let me present you some of my findings:

• No HTML standard (web-pages bad maintainable!).
• No CSS style-guide standard (also web-pages bad maintainable!).
• No .htaccess file (security issues!) and no robots.txt file (search engine directions!)
• The menu is Java-script only, so visual handicapped people as well Search Engines cannot find their way (unnecessary prohibits free sharing of your information).
• Many orphan files and photo's, no longer integrated with website (perhaps valuable information lost, perhaps irrelevant information still present).
• Many bad links, links no longer pointing somewhere (leads to unnecessary confusion with users and search engines).
• No SEO best practices, like unique page titles or unique web-page descriptions (unnecessarily prohibits dissemination of information to search engines).

My Advice: My Approach

My approach would be:

1. Clean up the current pages.
2. Define a Drupal look and feel for the website.
3. Define standards like information architecture and transform the current content to Drupal.

Transition to Drupal should consist of 2 stages:

1. The technical transformation: Extract all relevant information from a web-page, and migrate that to Drupal.
2. The functional transformation: Edit the new page in Drupal, and give it your intended reference format.

The 1st technical stage can quite simply be largely automated, the 2nd functional step is to be done manually.

It has been some time that I was involved in a rather technical job. It was fun to look into this sort of work again. And the most surprising part for me was that the similarity between this website migration and the migration of information systems. The steps are the same whether you migrate customer information a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system (My KPN CKR project in 1991), information from some old insurance systems to the new product/market combination system (My UWV project in 1998), or information on production maintenance from a geographic information system to SAP (My Essent project in 2006).

We like to hear from you. How are your websites doing? Are they an integral part of your communication policy? What is your Return On Investment (ROI) on your website?

Let me know! Contact Hans Lodder now!