Since the New Year my “Big Idea” for Swanmode Software Consultants has been broken down into three big goals;
- Develop and Publish Training Material
- Re launch the three branded websites to cover;
- Technical solutions and product development
- Digital fixes, set up, configuration and video marketing for client websites
- Creative technology integration for customer engagement and lead capture
- List Building Mastery
With the Global Pandemic and still recovering from my stoke in 2017 I have put more enphasis into personal development through reading and listening to audio books.
“Five Elements of Effective Thinking” by Edward Burger, Michael Starbird was particularly inspiring when describing the first element, “Earth”, it highlights the benefits of understanding the basics really well. Can you really explain the dumb question on a particular subject well enough for someone else to “Get it!
The section covers the importance of refining your skills and knowledge back to the fundamental concepts. Revisiting fundamentals with curious mind will lead you to discover new insights on that skill.
As the best way of learning is to take action I decided to have a go at the following exercise from the book.:
“Consider a Skill you want to improve or a subject area you want to learn better; Spend 5 minutes writing down specific components of the skill or subject area that are basic to that theme. Pick one of the items on the list and spend 30 minutes actively improving your mastery of it.”
Even though I have been working in IT for over 30 years I was finding the task of re-writing my websites to be problematic so I decided to look at Website development as my theme. The components I listed were;
HTML Page Structure (Elements required to optimise a website for SEARCH);
– Keywords
– Meta Data
– Image Optimisation
– Schema
– Silos
Legal Requirements (Elements required to use digital assets on the internet);
– Terms of Use
– Privacy
– GDPR
– ADA functionality to make content more accessible to those with disabilities.
Content Strategy (Elements required for Marketing);
– Primary Promise
– Unique Mechanism
– Birds Eye View
– Benefits and Solving the Visitors Problem
– Lead Magnet
Customer Engagement (Elements requires to communicate and build relationships);
– Autoresponder sequences for Email Marketing
– Chatbots to communicate through FB Messenger
– Facebook Business Pages
– Google My Business [Digital Asset, Customer Reviews & Communication]
– Mobile Wallet Technology
– UpViral Competitions
– Surveys
By completing this exercise I overcame the sense of being overwhelmed which had made me reluctant to start development down the wrong path.
I realised that there were so many features and functions that are normally added to a website after a business owner has determined its content and decided to focus development with ONLY the functionality that is nearly always implemented at the end of the development cycle.
The new idea being to develop a skeleton website with no business content but configured with the legal requirements of the UK. ie website’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. For anyone wanting to complete this step, consider what information you are publishing, what data you are collecting along with the actions you want people to take on the website.
Another legal hurdle for business owner within the EEC is GDPR. I did ask myself, “how many business owners really understand the requirements for keeping appropriate records and allowing visitors to configure the use of cookies installed on the website?”
They say you can’t improve what you don’t measure, yet many websites either do not use tools like Google Analytics to monitor activity, or due to the products complexity, don’t gain the benefit from understanding the data from website visitor’s behaviour.
As previously mentioned I have incurred a number of health problems over the last few years which highlighted another overlooked legal feature Web Content Accessability. When creating my skeleton site it included functionality to improve accessibility for those with impairments that can be helped with larger fonts, a screen rule, text to audio etc
I intend to continue documenting this unorthodox methodology for web development both to improve my own deep learning of the concepts and requirements for building a website and to continue implementing the other elements of effective thinking.
