Unless you work in the field, it’s hard to know exactly what you might need in a website, or what constitutes a “standard” website today.

While every website is going to be different, here are 3 things that you are absolutely going to want:

 

1. The ability to update/edit your website yourself.
   • If you’ve ever used Facebook or Twitter, you’ve used a “Content Management System”, or CMS, without knowing it. A CMS is a framework, that automatically formats and styles the information you enter into it. 
   • Modern (good) websites function in the same way. Your web designer/developer will build you a framework that you will be free to scale and update as you see fit.
   • The most widely used CMS for websites today is WordPress. I could go into why WordPress is freaking amaze-balls, but I should probably save that for a post all its own.
2. The ability to easily integrate with your social media accounts and email clients.
   • Your website is a tool! Connecting with and growing your audience/target market should be at the forefront of every good website!
   • This means different things to different people:
     • For some it will mean a compelling blog that automatically updates on all of their social platforms.
     • For others this might mean utilizing Facebook ads and Google Analytics to understand where their leads are coming from.
     • There are literally entire careers surrounding the vast range of digital marketing, but all that matter in this context is that you have a website that can handle whatever you choose to throw at it (once again, I cannot say enough for WordPress).
3. The ability to backup your information.
   • Whether your site is built on WordPress, or one of the other CMS platforms, a solid backup system is essential. A good backup system will automatically store a copy of the most recent version of your website, so if something goes wrong with a server or an update, you can just “restore” your website with the backup version.
   • This is actually pretty simple to do, and no decent web developer would create a site without a backup system in place… but I’ve seen some crazy things in my time and I always feel better mentioning it.
   • For WordPress, I prefer Backup WordPress. It’s an easy-to-use plugin that automatically backs up your site at whatever interval you (or your developer) sees fit. It can also integrate with Dropbox, and automatically upload a copy of each backup to your Dropbox account (which is good).

 

Like I said before… there are like a billion other things I could list in this post, but that sounds like it would be freaking awful to read.

In the next few months I’ll be releasing a Content Guide to help people gather/organize the content needed to build a killer website! Subscribe to my list to get first dibs (and other freebies/shockingly helpful advice)! Woo!

 

-sp