Navigating a new web design can be as unfamiliar as travelling to a new country. Without knowing the coded language, you are left to understand the pictures, symbols, sign language you can grasp. If you jump onto the wrong train, and end up at the wrong place- There's a good chance you might not realize it until afterwards- Which is why this post is the ?rst best thing to read. It will ensure you don't end-up wishing you had done things differently or encounter any costly errors.
Taking a bypass means reading through the basics of CMS systems and how they can hinder or hold-back your website's potential or growth. What is a CMS system?? A CMS, in short, is a website platform such as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal that is used for building a website. The issue for these self-made or admin-assisted website builders is that they offer a lower standard of accommodation than a custom-built web design can.
CMS systems started out in the 90's and were originally used for pretty much everybody during the dotcom boom (even Microsoft!) Back then, CMS systems could only really be used by professional website builders. In the 00's they were focused on becoming functional enough for people with no formal technical expertise to use them, as other more expert websites moved onto professional level codes. Today they are still catching up or trying to be on-par with a custom-built website- Here are the ways in which to avoid them.
The best way to read this post in conjunction with our other SEO post: 7 Bulletproof ways to enhance your SEO.
Meta Tags are apart of the HTML descriptions that describe your website to search engines. Ensuring that your meta-tags show-up and make your search terms most appealing to the Google Bot- You need to ensure that your web-developer really knows their way around the backstreets of web design meta-data code.
Squarespace showcases beautiful images but can be risky when it comes to building a website and getting picked-up in the search engines. In his Squarespace review, Fishkin of Moz, back-end authority, said: "the inability to customize the title and meta descriptions is a dealbreaker by itself.'' Developer or not, if you insert an image onto your page? The ability to program with vital meta-data is often removed.
That said, customizing a Squarespace template can be di?cult and also dependant on the type of template that you choose.
Wordpress is notorious for being di?cult with templates- It's generally the ?rst reason people start to look for additional assistance with their web design. Even though you can install a template, it's generally di?cult to modify with code. It can be done, and at a lesser cost than custom-built sites; But its attractive features aren't able to accommodate users as bene?cially as the custom-built option.
Too many plug-ins can slow down a website- And since the era of technical adaptation during the 00's, many of the plug-in features have been stitched onto the already completed framework as opposed to knitted into the very fabrication. This makes for extra work, extra cost and in general? Extra maintenance after the completion of building a website.
Sitemaps are another element. These are essential so both real-life users and search-engine spiders can crawl over your website- For Wordpress sites? They still need to be added in by a web-developer for the best SEO results.
WIX was once an avoided area of the internet for many web-developers due to its lack of search engine visibility. Amongst web-developers, it is said that code was made to advertise 'Wix' across the search engines, so that every web design is going to promote Wix and make it di?cult to grow the individual business amongst the advertising code.
Recent claims on the internet say that Wix has improved their search-bot visibility, but that it still lags behind in comparison to other options and especially custom-code.
Another function that's di?cult for Wix is the personalization. People who mock something up themselves might ?nd it enough to decide on the shapes and sizes of images and fonts. But beyond the in-built features, adding any additional code to the web design is limited even for those with advanced expertise.
Wix is still adding advanced marketing features available on other platforms to its belt. Adding pixels, retargeting tools, custom share buttons and custom email management tools are all either di?cult or unavailable- The basic export of data and integration (like Wordpress plug-ins,) are mostly beyond its functionality.
Drupal has actually been given good reviews online for generating SEO- The question is why use it in the ?rst place? When it comes to building a website, Drupal gained a bad reputation within its ?rst few versions for being unable to generate good internet tra?c. Now that it's been updated to perform better in the search engines, it can work well; But you still have to go the extra mile.
Perhaps using Drupal is like lining up for a ticket, when you could have avoided the line by purchasing one online beforehand. You don't need to. Drupal has its own special way of doing things, that can make for easy errors for non-experienced web-developers. And, in short, it's easier than Wordpress, but not very worthwhile compared to custom-coding.
The thing that makes Drupal appealing is that it's structure makes it easy to take-out elements that could harm your SEO; like unwanted advertising.
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