Collaborations for websites? Do you have a website or are you planning to open one for your business and cannot follow it personally?
Well, it's time to find someone who can help you.
Professional and trained people able to effectively manage your electronic business card. Yeah, because a website today is first of all this. Your electronic business card.
Collaborations for websites: what you absolutely must know
You have a site. Or you're thinking of opening one. The professional figures that revolve around a website are different:
- The web developer
- The web designer
- The web master
- The content manager
- The social media manager
Which collaborators should you look for in your web project? It depends on what you intend to accomplish. An institutional site? A blog? Only content: articles, stories, and graphics?
Some of the professionals for the web, especially in freelance , can be overlapped, in the sense that you can find a professional able to do more than one specialty.
First of all, we specify that manager is understood in his English meaning as manager, that is, of the person who manages it. Certainly not in the Italian sense of business manager!
So to make or to manage your website you can also use an external professional, a collaboration for websites! If yours is a complex project or already well started you can also think of a real assumption. In short, one does not annul the other in any case.
We said that freelance professionals often have more than one competence: there are web masters who are also good at content management ( content management ); web developers who can also do web masters or web designers and the latter who are also doing well to create a website and fill it with interesting and optimized content for their client. Even the content manager can easily overlap with the social media manager, meaning only one figure can perform both tasks.
What exactly are you looking for? This is the right question to start with to identify the professional that can do for you.
Two sure-fire ways to find the best web collaborations
We promised it, is the title of this post. There are basically two ways to find a contributor for your website:
- Communication agencies
- Portals for freelancers
The first road is valid but can be a bit expensive. Certainly more expensive than the second, always valid, to look for a freelance professional with verified skills, with whom to collaborate on the project. Naturally, in order to choose, one must know what to look for. So let's start from this point.
- Option one: your site does not exist yet. You will certainly need a web developer / web master who is able to make it happen. To buy the domain and the hosting space, to interconnect them, to realize a theme from scratch or to buy and install one already ready, to install a CMS for the publication and management of the contents. It must be able to carry out an e-commerce too, if that is what you want and so on.
- Option two: your site is already online and needs a restyle. Maybe because the contents are not updated for a long time. Or because you deal with commerce and you have not even made a sale. In these cases you can use a web designer if you have in mind (or need) a graphic restructuring and a content manager who is also good at marketing, with Landing Page and with SEO, search engine optimization. Otherwise, if you are not visible, nobody will know that you exist and you will not be able to sell anything.
Knowing exactly what you intend to do and where you want to go, you can search for collaborations for websites in an optimized way and minimize loss of time and money.
Knowing the difference between web developer and content manager is important, as well as knowing what SEO is, what a Landing Page is, what a WordPress theme.
Becoming familiar with these terms and with the professionalism that "handle" them is essential to obtain an excellent result with the right use of time and money.
Why in fact pay a complete package if it is not necessary for the realization of your website?
Here are explained the terms you need to choose
We have used many terms in this post that may not be clear or even overlap with those who are unfamiliar with the industry.
Let's do a little 'clarity, a kind of small dictionary to help you better choose your employees.
- The web developer is a programmer. It deals with the development of the source code, to realize and optimize the databases and markup languages. Collaborate with both the web designer and the web master, and possibly also with the content manager, to create a website.
- The web designer is the one who designs the visual communication and the user experience of the website. He is not only an esthete but also gives a clinical eye to the functionality, to the interactivity of the site.
- The web master: technically manages and administers (also and above all from a technical point of view) an internet site after its publication. Very often, for the mix of which we spoke before, a web master is able to design, build and publish a site, also taking care of the positioning.
- The content manager manages the contents of the website. Posts, articles, polls, social media, comments and so on. It is supported and often superimposed on the web master in more "technical" things such as positioning and SEO, the installation of additional plug-ins, the change of theme (graphic) but not its realization from scratch.
- The domain and the ' hosting. The domain is the name of the site you choose. Hosting is the space on which the site is hosted plus possibly the email infrastructure. Hosting and domain are purchased, usually with an annual fee. The webmaster or web developer will take care of it for you if you cannot do it yourself.
- The CMS is the Content Management System, which is the system for managing site content. It is a software loaded in the web space, through which to create and publish the contents that will be visible online. There are pre-set (and they are often the most used) like WordPress and Joomla! Or you can ask the web developer to create an ad hoc one. It is not however the practice, in most cases there is a CMS already ready, also because you can customize it.
- The SEO is optimizing for search engines, or all the assets in the site and the web (on-site and off-site) that improve the visibility of a web site, primarily in Google results. The optimal would always appear in the first 10 results on Google, through a strategic use of well-studied keywords.
- The Landing Page, literally landing page. In marketing language it is a web page specifically designed to accommodate users in a sales path. There are more types of landing pages, depending on the route you want visitors to take. For example we talk about Opt-in Page or Squeeze page when in exchange for some free information, the user who lands it must leave their data. In other words, a targeted offer (a pdf, a video, an infographic) is offered in exchange for a form to be completed. This allows the site owner to gather relevant contacts that can then turn into customers.
- The e-commerce site is actually an online store. It is supported by CMS or specific plugins like Magento, VirtueMart, or WordPress with WooCommerce or others like Open Cart or Presta Shop.
- The themes for WordPress are a set of graphic styles and functions capable of "dressing" the site. They are installed precisely on the WordPress CMS and can be free or paid. It is usually easier to find a higher level of professionalism among the paid ones and a period of technical support is usually provided by the company that produced it.
