According to Wikipedia, web engineering “focuses on the methodologies, techniques, and tools that are the foundation of web application development and which support their design, development, evolution, and evaluation.” It is all about using excellent “plumbing” to move visitors to the poignant areas of your website, resulting in your business being successful. However, there are many layers that pave the road to the top, and each layer must be as flawless as possible to run an effective marketing campaign on the web.
How do you know if your site is working optimally?
Google Analytics has developed four powerful methods to discern strong/weak points of your website.
Page Timings
The relationship of how long a page on your website takes to load and user fulfillment/conversion rate is direct. Page Timings show you the average loading speed of each page on your site. This is good information because if your page takes a long time to load, users will become impatient and move away to someone else’s website.
In-Page Analytics
As you are aware, with the rapid rise in the use of small screens (iPhones, Androids, iPads, and so forth), your carefully crafted content may not be seen. In-Page Analytics allow you to see what percentage of visitors can see various sections of your website.
Network Report
This report allows you to not only see the IP address of your website visitors and but also learn who is researching you.
Motion Charts
Motion Charts help you visualize trends by giving you the tools to watch traffic and average page views as they change over time. The combination of these techniques enables you to tailor your content to match your visitors’ interests.
But how do you make this data work for you?
You need a web-engineering firm that understands the plumbing beneath successful websites and it is this very plumbing – if well engineered – that brings repeat visits by the end user. Therefore “optimizing” for the web is more concerned with web engineering first and SEO second.
Blink Tech has had clients that initially had great products and great ideas, but their website pages were much too large and long. By retooling the web engineering, that is, by performing “concept and content defragmentation,” these websites ran much more quickly and cleanly. So understand that there are many layers paving the road to the top and missing one of the layers can, over time, lead your path to an abrupt stop.
