20 Things to Know About Your Site Before Choosing a Digital Partner

Ally DelGuidice-Bove — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 20:30:31 +0000

This post is a part of our Marketer's Guide to Drupal 8 series. We created this guide to walk you through considerations for choosing an open source CMS, plus case studies and CMO advice to bring your site to the next level.

Before you engage with a new agency to build, redesign, or migrate your site, there are some key data points you should know about your existing site.

In this part of the series, we’ll cover what you need to know about your website traffic, site speed, SEO and hosting and highlight some helpful tools. Knowing these baseline metrics prior to engagement with an agency will help you establish a benchmark with which to evaluate your new site and will help save time during agency evaluations and discovery.

Traffic Behavior points to know

1. What are your users’ geographic locations?

Determining where your traffic comes from is a very important point that your agency will want to know. Why is this important? One reason is that if you are currently hosting your website on a web server in the basement of your facility and serving web pages globally, you may want to consider employing a CDN to speed up the page load time. From a digital strategy perspective, creating a location specific, personalized user experience can help maximize ROI on your website redesign.

2. Which devices do your visitors use?

Google gives the cold shoulder to non-mobile-friendly sites, so it’s important to know if your site performance measures up to mobile standards. ( Mobile UX optimization is a separate story.) You’ll want to know what percentage of visitors are using mobile, tablets, and desktops to view your content.

3. Are your readers engaged?

What percentage of your visitors are Returning versus New Visitors? Do your readers have multiple page views per visit or do you have a high bounce rate? What is the average time spent on a page?

4. What are your goal metrics?

Are website actions and goals tracked and measured? If so, what actionable items (Sales Inquiries, Newsletter Subscriptions, etc.) are monitored and measured?

5. What are your traffic sources?

Traffic sources are categorized by these terms:

Direct traffic can be explained as traffic that goes directly to a page on your site from either a bookmark, typing in the URL directly or by clicking on a link from an email.
Organic search is traffic coming to your website from a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.
Referral traffic is traffic to your site from other sites that aren’t search engines.

6. Anonymous and Authenticated Users.

Who is using your site? Typically users can be organized into two main categories:

Anonymous users are users who have no login credentials and typically have little interactivity with the website.

Authenticated users typically do have login credentials and have permissions to create other users, create blog posts or perhaps even generate a report on website activity. Are your authenticated users logging into the website with a single sign-on service like OpenID or OAuth? Your future vendor will need to know this to ensure that your new site can work with such a service.

7. Does your website currently have a publication workflow?

Depending on the purpose of your site, you may have a workflow to create and publish content. For example, if you are a marketing content strategist, you might write blog posts about your widget but require peer editing or a marketing director to approve your post.

Site Speed points to know

8. How fast does your website load currently?

There are many factors that can impact page load times such as page size, web server geographic location, web server capabilities and internet connection speeds. When testing the speed of your site, it is important to consider the initial page load time in addition to the page load time for returning visitors.

There are several site speed tools available to establish these benchmarks such as:

SEO points to know

9. Top Keywords.

What are the current top keywords being used to find your site? Google Analytics reporting provides an easy way to monitor your SEO keywords.

10. Meta Descriptions and Page Titles.

Do your pages currently have unique and appropriate titles and meaningful meta descriptions? Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a great tool to analyze your page titles and metadata. Google Search Console also has a report to help you sort out duplicate page titles.

11. Sitemap.

Does your website currently have a sitemap that both users and bots can use to crawl your website?

12. 404 Page not found and 403 Forbidden.

Are there pages on your current site that have broken links or lead to protected pages? Moz or SEM Rush can help scan your site and find any 400 errors.

13. W3C Validation and W3C CSS Validation.

Does your current site pass the W3C Validation tests? Building features into a project from the start is almost always cleaner, easier, faster, and less expensive than retrofitting after the fact. It's no different for building accessibility into a website.

Hosting

14. Where is the site hosted currently?

You’ll want to create a list of protocols and credentials that are used in accessing the current host, like FTP or SSH. If you’re not sure where your site is hosted you can determine this by using a tool like Who is Hosting This.

15. Who is the domain registrar?

You’ll also want to know what company your domain name is registered with. If you’re not sure what registrar you are using, you can determine this by using a tool like ICANN Whois.

16. Who handles DNS changes?

If you end up moving your website to a different host, you’ll need to know who to ask to make these changes and where DNS changes need to occur.

17. Do you have all the login credentials for the site, server, code repository, DNS, domain services, analytics, third-party services, etc.?

You’ll want to compile a list of all the login credentials that you currently have and obtain the ones you are missing prior to working with an agency.

18. Are you currently using a CDN?

Many websites use a Content Delivery Network or CDN to serve content efficiently. Usually, this is static content like images, documents and script files. You’ll want to know if you are currently using a CDN and if not will the agency be providing you with such a service.

19. What type of disk space requirements do you currently have/need?

Before contacting an agency, you’ll want to assess what disk space your current site is using and whether or not that meets your business needs. If you are hosting many large files like video or audio files, you’ll have much greater disk space needs and you’ll want to evaluate that with the agency.

20. What software do you require to run your existing site? (Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.)

Most modern websites require software such as a database, a web server, and a programming language that the site is built with. You’ll want to profile what software is used to run your website.

Conclusion

Arm yourself with these key data points to get the most from your agency partnership and achieve a successful web project. Take ownership and the necessary steps to gain insight into your website property. In the process, you may discover additional opportunities for growth. Know your website traffic, site speed, SEO and hosting information prior to engagement to make the best decisions for your website.

Ally DelGuidice-Bove Thu, 08/30/2018 - 16:30

Moving from Wordpress to Drupal

Jay Callicott — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 13:25:25 +0000

Moving from Wordpress to Drupal

In the battle for CMS dominance, there are three main players in the Open Source space: Drupal, Wordpress & Joomla. This blog isn’t a comparsion of the three, though there are plenty out there. What I want to focus on is all of you who have a Wordpress site and want to transition it to Drupal—easily.

We have found that there is a lot of user crossover between these platforms, Wordpress in particular. The maintainer of the Migrate module, Mike Ryan, has done great work on the Wordpress Migrate module which leverages the Migrate module to import Wordpress content into Drupal. While this module is great, it still requires Drupal users to execute several steps to be able to download and install Wordpress Migrate.

Moving Content from Wordpress to Drupal

We wanted to streamline the process to make migrating to Drupal as easy as possible in as few steps as possible. What we came up with is a small kickstart Drupal distribution that is easy to install, and includes step-by-step instructions on the homepage. The inspiration came from the Commerce Kickstart project, which attempts to make it easy for new users to get setup with e-commerce in Drupal.

The name of the Drupal distribution is Wordpress Kickstart. What we did was simply extend the functionality of the Wordpress Migrate module and added some additional modules to streamline moving all of your content over to Drupal.

The scope of this project is simple, we are not trying to create a Wordpress clone, built with Drupal (although that would be very interesting), rather a way for people to evaluate Drupal for themselves with their actual Wordpress content. This distribution could also be used as a base profile for users who are happy with Drupal and decide to stick with it.

The Wordpress Kickstart

Theme

After talking with several developers at Drupalcamp Atlanta we thought it would be neat to use a Wordpress-ported theme TwentyEleven (which is still in development). I would place emphasis on the fact that we want this distribution to have some familiarity with Wordpress, albeit not a clone in any respect. The TwentyEleven theme is a cool theme and is also responsive, so we thought that would be a good theme to bundle with the distribution.

Modules & Pre-configuration

The heart of this small distribution is the Wordpress Migrate module coupled with detailed instructions on the homepage. This step-by-step guide includes shortcuts and images to guide new users through the migration. If you can install Drupal, then you can follow this guide to import your Wordpress content into Drupal.

The next thing we added was a WYSIWYG, pre-configured with image uploading enabled. WYSIWYG is something almost any user is going to need, so it was important to us to provide a WYSIWYG out of the box.

Next, we added the popular Media module because of Wordpress’s emphasis on media. Like I have mentioned, we want to make this distribution look familiar to crossover users and so we include a Media link as a shortcut in the main toolbar.

In addition, we have several modules included for the purpose of storing the front page default content, but otherwise only have made relatively small configuration changes.

Instructions for Migrating Content to Drupal

In my next blog, I will present the instructions for migrating content from Wordpress to Drupal, most of which reside in the distribution itself. Feedback is welcome! My hope is that this will be instructive for those considering trying out this distribution to see exactly what you need to do to move content from a Wordpress site into Drupal, using this install profile.

Have feedback? Share your comments below or contact me at twitter.com/drupalninja.

*A few good Wordpress vs. Drupal blogs I found dated 2012:
1. Wordpress vs. Drupal: The Prize Fight!, 2. WordPress vs Drupal, 3. WordPress or Drupal: Which One to Use for Small Business Websites?

Jay Callicott Tue, 11/06/2012 - 08:25

content migration

20 Things to Know About Your Site Before Choosing a Digital Partner

Traffic Behavior points to know

1. What are your users’ geographic locations?

2. Which devices do your visitors use?

3. Are your readers engaged?

4. What are your goal metrics?

5. What are your traffic sources?

6. Anonymous and Authenticated Users.

7. Does your website currently have a publication workflow?

Site Speed points to know

8. How fast does your website load currently?

SEO points to know

9. Top Keywords.

10. Meta Descriptions and Page Titles.

11. Sitemap.

12. 404 Page not found and 403 Forbidden.

13. W3C Validation and W3C CSS Validation.

Hosting

14. Where is the site hosted currently?

15. Who is the domain registrar?

16. Who handles DNS changes?

17. Do you have all the login credentials for the site, server, code repository, DNS, domain services, analytics, third-party services, etc.?

18. Are you currently using a CDN?

19. What type of disk space requirements do you currently have/need?

20. What software do you require to run your existing site? (Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.)

Conclusion

Moving from Wordpress to Drupal

Moving Content from Wordpress to Drupal

The Wordpress Kickstart

Theme

Modules & Pre-configuration

Instructions for Migrating Content to Drupal