Re-designing your manufacturing website or upgrading your
company's web presence? Remember the key lean web principle -
continually add value for your customers. Here are 5 best
practices that a lot of small and mid-market companies
participating in the manufacturing value chain forget that hurt
their customers experience on their website:
Site Map and Sitemap - Create an html Site Map
page in your website to help people navigate your website (it may
help the search engines too). Typically the Site Map link is
in the footer of the website so it is available on each page.
For a lot of links in your site map, you can organize the links
into sections to make it easy to read for people. See our
site map page at www.twinengines.com/sitemap.
Also create an xml sitemap file and upload to the web server to
specifically help the search robots.
301 Redirects - When you launch the new
website, the web page names may change (eg. from
www.yourdomain.com/oldpage.php to
www.yourdomain.com/newpage.aspx). This confuses search
engines spiders and bots, and can temporarily cause lower rankings
and lost visitors. To avoid any confusion, set up a 301 redirect
for each old page of your website to a new page.
Custom 404 Page - A 404 error page is an 'ugly'
error page that visitors see when they go to a non-existent web
page or enter an incorrect url. Create a custom 404 page that
provides an easy way for all those lost visitors to get back into
your website. At TwinEngines, we use our Site Map page as our
custom 404 page so people can see an organized listing of all the
links to information in our website.
Web Analytics - Make sure you have your web
analytics software setup in the master template and all other
templates so it is on every page created in your content
management system. We recommend Google Analytics for small
and mid-market companies participating in the manufacturing value
chain, since it is free and easy to use. Configure Google Analytics
goal funnels to monitor your website conversions (eCommerce
checkout, Request Quote, etc).
Google Webmaster Tools - Google shows how
it views your website and alerts you to any problems, so this is a
great way to troubleshoot issues in your website. Once your site is
registered with Webmaster Tools, leave a comment on Sidewiki
These 5 tips are important features of your manufacturing
website that will keep you from losing visitors just because you
upgraded your web presence. They also give you free web
analytics and reporting to help you create a lean web presence that
adds value to your customers.