Website technology has come along way in recent years. Previously, to get a total website solution, you needed to find a host for your website and then install a range of applications. You would either purchase or aquire a Content Management System, a Shopping Cart and perhaps an Email Broadcaster, Affiliate Manager and Blog Manager. You then put them all together to make your site appear seamless to the end-user, but unfortunately not seamless to you. Or worse, you had to pay someone to do this for you and you now rely on them for any small change or upgrade. Or perhaps your website doesn't have some of these features.
1. One Console, One Database for Everything
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Keep it simple
Demand intuitive controls that make managing a complex web site easy. Avoid the need to jump from one application to another - everything you need should be accessed from your browser anytime, anywhere. |
Use one application
Insist on one look-and-feel throughout. This will make training new users quicker and easier. |
Avoid double-ups and out-of-date data
Avoid duplication, clumsy importing and synchronisation. Every piece of information you need to manage a top class website should be stored in one central database. |
Get a better understanding of what goes on
One database will enable you to identify relationships between your email marketing, member browsing history and sales. By understanding these relationships you can fine tune your marketing ... you know what works and what doesn't. |
2. Stable, Secure and Responsive Hosting
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Keep your website live 24x7
Be sure your host server has not only a spare hard disk and power supply for an instantaneous recovery, but a dedicated back-up server that is ready to take-over in the event of a complete failure. |
Protect your site from vandals
Ensure your next solution has been designed right from concept to resist even the most aggressive hacker attacks. Does it resist PHP injection that can enable hackers to break into your site and vandalise it? |
Host your site in Australia
Insist on Australian hosting. While overseas hosting might be cheaper, the speed and performance can not compare to a server located within Australia. |
3. WYSIWYG Content & Style Management
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What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get
Your editor should display your content inside the website or email template so you can see how text flows on the page for more control. This eliminates the need for guessing or using imagination. |
Make simple system wide changes
Editing your template(s) should be easy so you can change the overall appearance of your website or emails without fuss? |
Keep your html source code looking good
Insist on a source editor that doesn't delete all the white space and change your good looking source to out-of-control gobbledygook. |
4. Member Management and Access Control
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Create highly qualified groups for micro-marketing
Ensure you can join members to a group or any number of groups that you create based on their website activity. Use these groups to send highly targeted offers by email. Your emails can be written to a more defined audience, so they will be easier to write and more effective. |
Create exclusive and premium content
Create a new dimension to your web site by controlling access to exclusive or premium content. Allow members to access controlled content if they belong to a certain group or a number of groups that you specify. This feature should be easy to setup and manage. |
Grow your membership like crazy
Insist on a range of membership growth tools like name squeeze, email piping, refer-a-friend, web forms, along with an easy to use import tool to build your website community fast. Ensure that all new member email addresses are checked for integrity. |
5. Versatile Email Marketing
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Send targeted and customised emails
Send your email to one or more groups of members and increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Your email solution should compile a sending list free of duplicates even if a member belongs to more than one group. Ensure you can automatically customise each email with the member's first name, full name or a range of other personalised information to attract attention and make your message more compelling. |
Detect SPAM content before you send
Test your emails to see if servers will think they are SPAM before you send. Get a report listing what elements are causing concern, so you can modify where necessary and increase your email readership and effectiveness. |
| Automatically handle invalid email addresses |
6. Advanced Online Sales
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| Accept Credit Cards and Paypal |
Protect your sales and selected pages with 256 bit encryption
All sales on your website and selected pages should be protected with a rock solid 256 bit encryption to ensure your website member's privacy. There should be no need for you to purchase or configure your own expensive and difficult to install SSL certificate. |
| Get Affiliates to promote your site |
7. Live Monitoring & Statistics
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See who is online right now and what they are doing?
To feel like you have any control of your website you should know who is online, doing what. Display a list of members who are either currently viewing your website or one of your emails along with their recent activity. This ability to monitor live activity will help you get a better feel for what marketing works and how well it works. |
Analyse email reads, clicks, bounces and unsubscribe statistics
View your email results and get quality feedback from your members. Contextual click statistics are preferred, which means you view the statistics displayed over the top of the original email, rather than view a hard to understand table or graph. You want to see where on your email the users are clicking and how many times. You should be able to add members who click on a certain link to a group so you can send highly qualified followup emails. |
Watch your membership grow
View membership growth graphs and compare with your online and offline marketing to learn what works and what doesn't. |
8. Search Engine Optimized
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Be visible to search engines
It is surprising to discover that some content management systems hide important keywords from search engines. Avoid using i-frame technology to display content, as it blinds search engines to key words. You want to reveal the total page content to search engines to increase your chance of higher rankings. Synergy 8 even reports when a search engine is in the process of spidering your site. |
Increase your order of display in Google
Search engines, including Google, place a high importance on the keywords found in your URLs. Use clean URLs containing important keywords and avoid URLs using special symbols, numbers and other confusing or irrelevant code. |
| Optimise the page title, keywords and description for each page |
| Disable spidering to magnify more important pages |
