Healthy Voices - Session Six - Designing your site - Course Notes

Healthy Voices is an initiative of Bayside Medicare Local

Course Notes

Session Six: Building your site

HEALTHY VOICES

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Healthy Voices is an initiative of Bayside Medicare Local

Healthy Voices is an initiative of Bayside Medicare Local

Introduction

This workshop explores the process of setting up a website; from design to reaching an

audience.

Designing Your site:

Choosing a name:

Every site or blog needs a name, and a name is important. People will form an opinion

of your site based on its name, they may even chose whether or not to bother reading

your content based on the name you use. Your name is part of your brand and your

online identity. Spend some time on this aspect of your project as you don’t want to be

stuck with something you aren’t happy with. Think about where people will first see

your site’s name. Will it attract people as they browse a list of search results? Or glance

at the blog roll of the blog they are reading? This issue is considered more fully in the

Session 3 WIKI.

Things to consider when designing your site:

Understanding how visitors interact with your site:

Understanding how visitors interact with your site will help you make decisions

about layout and contents. If most of your visitors access your site for the blog

then don’t bury it somewhere in a drop down menu. Make the stuff most people

come to find the things that are easiest to find.

Have a look at the website: http://www.sustainabletable.org.au/. (Nice descriptive

name) They have a home page filled with; lots of the things people would access

their site for and some things they want to promote. The big pictured link to

their film is prominent but so is information about the organisation, the snappy

headlines of their blog posts, their shop and menus for lots of different food

politics related resources.

The sites look and feel:

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Subject appropriate – Is the design appropriate for

your subject matter? Consider www.sustainabletable.org.au and how they

have used colours and pictures in a way that will be attractive and relevant

to their desired audience. Compare this with a Gen Y oriented site like:

http://hellogiggles.com/ or this for the computer game Halo:

https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-au. This page shows a number of

interesting websites designs that may give you inspiration for your own:

http://coolhomepages.com/ Or here:

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34006/15-Examples-of-

Brilliant-Homepage-Design.aspx for some more examples and design tips.

Consistency – Similar fonts, not suddenly introducing loud graphics,

putting everything in menu formats and ensuring uniform colour schemes.

These all form a part of ensuring consistency across your site.

Clean and clear - People need to be able to easily find what they are

looking for on your site. You only have a remarkably short window to

grab their attention and keep it. Think about how long you linger on a

web page when you are looking for something. It isn’t long is it? Clean

and clear design will help your audience find what they are looking for

and stay on your site for longer.

Accessibility – Ensure you have the widest audience possible by

considering accessibility when designing your site. Some fonts are easier

to read which is important especially if a proportion of your audience is

vision impaired. Some colour combinations won’t work for the colour

blind. There are a range of considerations. This article explains quite a

few: http://webaim.org/intro/

Technical considerations:

Mobile device appropriate – When designing your site think about

ensuring it is suitable for viewing on a mobile device. You want to create

a site that is ‘responsive’. This basically means that it will be easy to read

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on a mobile phone. When choosing a theme look for

responsive in the details. Most are but some aren’t and it could be the

difference between your target audiences accessing your site regularly or

just occasionally when on a PC.

Graphic designers – If you are setting up a professional site or have the

money to spend on creating a site with a unique look and feel consider

employing a graphic designer to create some images, logos and bits and

pieces for your site.

Resources: Check out Seth Godin’s guide to setting up a blog

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/files/whos_there.pdf

If this link doesn’t work it can be found on his website: http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/

You will find it under Free stuff. The article is called Who’s There.

Using Tags and Categories:

If you are writing a blog tags and categories are a useful tool that will allow your

readers to navigate your site and explore areas other than the page they landed on.

They make sites far more user friendly for readers, particularly new readers ,as they allow

easy access points to your material. Tags and Categories are like indexes, they are topic

headings which when clicked will provide a list of all the posts with that Tags attached or

has been filed in a given category. If you want to use the tag or categories function on

your blog then it is a good idea to think about the Tags and Categories you might use

during the set up stage. This will allow you to attach a tag or category to every post

you publish. If you try and implement it later on you will need to go back through you

posts and manual attach them to each post.

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Tags:

When you click on a tag it displays a list of the posts with that tag.

These are the various tags

attached to posts on this kitchen

gardening blog. The size of the

word indicates how many posts

have that tag. For example you

can tell that there are more Recipe

posts that posts about seeds

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Categories:

Categories work much like tags but tend to be broader groupings. For example this

blog has individual tags for posts about eggplant, capsicums and chillies but groups

them together as a single category. When you select a category it displays a list of all

the posts which have been filed under that category.

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Writing for the web

Considering the consumer:

As we have explored throughout this series of workshops; when you write, unless you are

writing purely for yourself, you need to consider your audience. This doesn’t mean you

should spend hours anticipating what they might think or like you to write but it does

mean making your work easy for them to access.

• The importance of title – When writing blog posts for the web your title is

important. In the same way a newspaper headline can draw people in, so can the title of

a blog post. Like headlines titles need to both describe the article and entice the reader

to read on. They are a key part of a sites branding.

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Task: Have a look at the following sites:

1. http://hellogiggles.com/

2. http://www.express.co.uk/

3. http://www.theguardian.com/au

4. http://thedesignfiles.net/

5. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

6. http://www.blogtyrant.com/blog/

How have they used headlines or post titles? What sort of audience do you think

they are seeking to attract?

All these sites have used quite different tactics when writing their titles. Some are

descriptive, some speak to an in crowd, some intrigue, some target a raw nerve,

some create a feeling of needing to know and others seek to inform.

• Using headings and sub headings – If you are writing long format articles, ie

posts over 1500 words and even some shorter pieces scattering headings and sub

headings through your articles will help your reader navigate it. Imagine you had

searched the web for information on Blogging tips you may have come across this

article: http://www.blogtyrant.com/blogging-tips/. Imagine this article without the sub

headings, without the visual clues where to find the information. Would you stay and

read it all to find the info you wanted? Or consider this article on auto-immune disease

by Sarah Wilson: http://www.sarahwilson.com/2014/05/how-to-heal-autoimmune-disease-

6-clever-tricks-from-mickey-at-autoimmune-paleo-com/#more-7278. It is easy to

imagine it written essay style without the sub headings but would you bother to read it?

By structuring your work to include headings and sub-headings you make your writing

easier for the reader to digests.

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• Using images – Like headings and sub-headings images can

help to break your work into smaller chunks. They can also increase learning as people

learn from both the image and the words. This is most obvious in works like this:

http://www.tie-a-tie.net/fourinhand.html but is also true of this post:

http://thegardendeli.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/what-if-getting-more-hives-isnt-the-

solution/ where the images tell a similar story to the text.

• Using bold, italics, and underlining – Using bold and italics in your writing is

another way to emphasis the you want people to find. They can also help ensure your

meaning is clear. Underlining is a different thing. On the web an underline points to a

link so if you don’t have something to link to it is best to avoid using underlines to

create emphasis.

• The impact of length - How long is too long? There are different schools of

thought regarding the best length for a blog post (or facebook status update) and in

some ways length is dictated by intent. If your intent is purely to get picked up by

search engines then lots of words may help in that process. Google’s top results for

many keywords are long form articles. If your intent is anything other than search

ranking then the simplest rule of thumb is probably to write for as long as it takes to

make your point. That might be one sentence, it might be 300. It will depend on your

subject matter and writing style. The important thing though is: Once you have made

your point stop! Long form articles may help your credibility within the field and they

may help you get picked up by other forms of social media but only if they are well

written and well researched. For everything else short is often better, particularly if the

majority of your audience accesses your site via a hand held device – who wants to read

an essay on a phone?

Building your audience

Gaining readers:

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There are a number of different ways readers may find your blog,

website, facebook page, twitter account and so on.

• Search engines – Search engines are the best known method via which people

search for content on line. We will look at them in more detail later in the session when

we consider SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

• Likes: When someone likes or follows your site it means they will receive updates

whenever you publish new content. Followers (or even non followers) may ‘like’, ‘pin’or

‘tweet’your content. When that happens your content may appear in their status

updates or on their page/feed. This in turn gets read by other social media users who

may share your material further via repins, retweets or ‘likes’ and so on. When this

happens on a large scale it is called ‘going viral’ – when exponential sharing means huge

volumes of people see your work. Although this is a much discussed phenomenon it

happens comparatively rarely and when it does happen it tends to be video or image

content. GetUps It’s Time clip for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TBd-

UCwVAY

• Repurposing content to increase audience access points: – Even without ‘going

viral’ having your material accessible on a number of platforms allows access from a

wider group of people than solely appearing on one, as very few individuals use all the

social media platforms. Thinking about how you can repurpose content is an important

part of this. It may mean including an image in your work so your posts can bit ‘pinned’

on PINTEREST. It may include using a title which works well as a Tweet. It may mean

setting up a Facebook page to repost your blog content to. Or basing a blog post

around an instagram photo: http://instagram.com/p/jD2IOGibly/#, for this blog story:

http://www.theminimalists.com/crash/

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Task – Look at this site: http://www.greeningofgavin.com/ and

explore how Gavin creates and repurposes content to ensure he is visible on a wide

range of social media platforms.

Note: Whilst repurposing content is a really useful concept it doesn’t win you readers by

itself. If you don’t have time to work on a range of platforms you are far better

concentrating on doing one well than spreading yourself thinly across a number.

• Links: One of the best ways to increase your readership is via links, particularly in

your sites infancy. While your site is new getting any readers at all is a battle and

requires a bit of work. Links can be really helpful in that respect.

Leaving comments on with similar subject is a way to generate interest.

When you leave a comment there is an opportunity to include a site

address. The author of that blog will probably follow your link and so

might some of their readers.

Linking to previous posts: When you write your posts include references

to material in previous posts and link to it. This will allow your audience

access to more of your material. They are more likely to stay on your site

longer, follow it and potentially recommend it to others.

Linking to others – Link to other people’s sites in your material and they

might just return the favour.

Joining Meme’s – Meme’s are when a blog hosts a particular theme and

asks other blogs to write about it. For instance Her Library adventures

hosted the Flea Market Finds meme:

http://herlibraryadventures.blogspot.com.au/search/label/Flea%20Market%2

0Finds. She and other bloggers would write on the about their flea

market finds each way and put links to their posts on the bottom of hers.

Contributors to memes tend to read the other contributions the meme so

it can be a great way to get you material noticed by others. There are lots

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of memes out there you just need to find ones with

topics you are interested in writing about.

• Give aways – Everyone loves a giveaway. Giveaways attract readers and they

focus those readers attention. People will be more likely to read your while article if

there is an opportunity for a give away at the end. It is also a great way to generate

comments. ‘Ányone who leaves a comment will go into the draw to win X’. Giveaways

aren’t suitable for all sites but if they are appropriate for yours they can be a easy way to

raise your profile a little.

• Time – The best read blogs are often those that have been around a while. Be

patient, keep putting your message out there and you will eventually get noticed. The

more you do the higher up the search engine rankings you will creep which in turn will

lead to more readers and so on.

SEO:

• Search Engines - How do they work? –Search engines work by indexing all the

material on your site via a web crawler or spider. A spider is an automated program that

goes into a web page and looks at its contents. It then decides how the contents should

be indexed. When you do a search the search engine looks through all its indexed

content and you get a results page showing web pages whose contents include your

search term.

• What is Robot text – Robot text is code you can write on your site to tell the

robots what not to look at. Most software comes with Robot text which allows most if

not all of your site to be indexed. If you don’t want parts of your site indexed for one

reason or another (ie it is only for subscribers or members) then you can stop spiders

from crawling those parts of your site using Robot text.

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• Optimising your content: This article is a great guide to

getting yourself noticed by search engines and Google in particular:

http://cuckoocreative.com.au/wordpress/an-idiots-guide-to-improving-search-results/.

The article runs through the importance of:

Links – particularly those from high ranking sites within your specialism.

Well written content – Google checks grammar, it awards points for

keywords and it cross check those keywords against other pages on your

site.

Google likes sites that are updated frequently – no problem if you have a

blog, but something to watch if you have a website

Think about your key words – which words might your audience search

on? Use them in your writing.

Google likes long form articles – many of the top search results for key

words are long form articles.

Robots index text so; caption images and don’t turn all your text into

pictures, diagrams or PDFs

Make sure your site is search engine optimized. This may involve a plugin

or it may come as standard with the software.

For more on optimising your content this is a useful resource:

http://www.blogtyrant.com/beginner-blogging-seo/

• Keywords – A big part of getting good search engine results is ensuring you are

using the right key words. Or to put it another way you need to include the phrases

people might search on in your writing. Think about our restaurant blogger. They want

people to find their site to read restaurant reviews. A reader might search on the web

for reviews of restaurants in Coburg, or they might search for reviews of specific

restaurants. Either way they may well include the word review in that search – its what

they are looking for – a restaurant review. Yet how easy is it to write a review and

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publish it without ever having used the word review. Check out the

Zaatar review – would it get picked up on a search for Zaatar review?

http://coburgfood.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/lunch-for-two-for-2-00/ Try it and see.

Think about the type of words and phrases your potential audience may search on and

use them in your content. There is a proviso here – you don’t want to use keywords so

often in your content that it sounds stilted or affects the overall quality of your writing.

Simply making sure the right word combinations appear at some point in your piece is

usually enough.

Visitor information

There are a number of ways to track visitor information. Most sites give you basic

information and some give you more involved information. Googling analysing your

sites visitors should give you a wealth of links to enable you to explore this topic in

more detail. Some things you might consider exploring include:

Where your visitors are referred from – it will show you which memes are good

sources of traffic, and who it is good to keep up a relationship with.

Which posts attract the most attention – some posts are always going to be more

popular than others. Often for new blogs it’s not necessarily the same ones as

for older blogs. New blogs can get lots of readers for niche topics that few

others write about. The overall audience may not be big but if few others are

covering it you are more likely to be higher of search results and more accessible

as a result.

Whether your traffic is from repeat or new visitors. You want a combination of

both. Not getting repeat visitors is a sign your content isn’t strong enough for

people to bother to return. No new visitors means you need to work on gaining

an audience if that is the aim of your site.

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Resources: If you are really keen to generate traffic there are loads

of articles on the web offering hints and tips, and some that explain the stats. Here are

a few of them:

http://www.dearblogger.org/what-is-google-plus

http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/04/04/11-things-i-wish-i-knew-before-i-started-my-

first-blog/

http://weblogs.about.com/od/addonsandplugins/p/BlogTrafficStat.htm

http://www.blog-growth.com/how-to-increase-blog-traffic-in-3-easy-ways/

Developing loyal followers:

Developing an audience isn’t all about numbers. In many cases a smaller loyal following

is far preferable to a larger number of itinerant visitors. Interacting on social media isn’t

just about collecting likes (as fun as this can be) it’s about getting people to love

interacting with you/your site. This is true whether you are posting to a blog, to other

social media or creating a website. The aim is to get people to engage with your

content or regard it as an indispensable source of information. So how do you move

from getting likes to generating love? There are a range of ways that this can be

achieved:

• Creating a community of insiders – In jokes, familiar concepts, pop culture

references, offering giveaways, special hints, great tips, - creating a community of

insiders is about making the audience feel like they belong to a special group by visiting

your site. Or to put it another way - you need to give people a reason to follow you

rather than just visit occasionally. That reason may be as diverse as not wanting to miss

out on a funny tweet to ensuring they know about the latest research into heart disease.

It doesn’t matter what it is, but that thing is what will move your site/ account/page

from being visited to being followed.

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Task: Think about your site what would make people ‘Follow’ you

rather than occasionally visit when you happen to pop up on a search result or appear

as a link on their Facebook page?

• Generating Comments – There is nothing quite like the first (non spam)

comment you get on a new social media venture. It shows that someone is reading,

someone is taking notice and some one likes what they see enough to respond.

Sometimes it can take a while before comments start trickling in. People might be

reading but not necessarily writing in response. Getting people to respond is often as

simple as asking them to. What do you think? How has this worked for you? Do you

have another perspective? Or more specific questions; Does anyone know how to XXX?

And so on. Your audience will feel valued and you will have that much needed sign that

someone (or hopefully lots of people) is reading.

• Replying to comments – Social media is exactly that – social. It is supposed to

be a conversation, a dialogue - so when you get comments, reply to them. Replying to

comments will make your readers feel valued and valued readers are more likely to

return. They are also more likely to recommend you to friends. The more you reply to

comments the more likely people are to leave them and comments are an invaluable

source of motivation and information. Comments mean someone other than your

mother is reading your work. Comments can provide inspiration for future articles.

Comments can add to the body of knowledge on an issue. And comments can come up

in search results. Consider how the many comments after each Blog Tyrant post become

part of the article and add to your understanding of the issues he raises:

http://www.blogtyrant.com/search-engine-ranking-positions-display/

.• Regular predictable posting pattern – It helps your readers if you establish a

regular posting pattern. If people get to know you post every Sunday then they might

just get into the habit of logging on to check. If you post in a haphazard way your

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audience may log in to find you haven’t added any new material.

Once they do that a couple of times they may not bother coming back.

• Interacting yourself – Social media often works in an exponential fashion. The

more you put into it the more you get back out of it and then some. Just generating

content isn’t usually enough. You have to advertise that content. Not necessarily in an

overt way but advertise it nonetheless. Leave comments on other peoples sites with

links to your own. Reference your own material in the comments you leave when

appropriate. Pin some of your posts to your pinterest page. Leave comments on other

people’s pins. Comment on some tweets and so on. The more energy you put into

your social media presence the more people are likely to click the button and look at

your blog in the first instance but also continue to follow you after that initial contact.

Social media friendships are that different from any other. If you don’t put work into

maintaining them you lose contact and the friendship withers and all but the strongest

die.

Resources:

http://www.problogger.net/

http://www.blogtyrant.com

TASKS:

• Refine your site and posts to meet the needs of your audience.

• Comment on some blogs/facebook pages/tweets etc in your field.