SharePoint for Public Websites: Top 6 Things to Consider

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Joel C

In only 10 years, websites have greatly evolved from their beginnings as simple sites. ‘Gone are the days of static text, flat images, and broken links’, as Eric Riz wrote in his article “SharePoint: Should you use it for your public website?” . And as the landscape continues to change and people do more and more business over the Internet, today’s Internet visitor demands more from their website experience. They not only want a website to be informative and look good, but they also want it to provide real-time information, dynamic content, social interaction, and an immersive interface. In other words, today’s site are interactively pleasing, not just aesthetically pleasing.

So what about SharePoint 2010? Just like any technology platform, there are pros and cons and debates over whether SharePoint is always a good fit. But with its extensibility, audio and video integration, and social capabilities, it can be a very powerful and strategic option. In fact, if you have SharePoint already within your organization, another benefit you can realize is that there is little or no duplicated staff training necessary, no separate systems for Intranet vs. your external-facing website.

But before we go further, let do some foundational work. Many are unaware of SharePoint’s public website capabilities although many already use SharePoint. So, if this idea is new to you, stop over at a site called WSSDemo. This site lists many public-facing SharePoint sites, and even categorizes them by industry.

In addition, many of Microsoft’s sites are built on SharePoint and serve as good examples. (Tip for spotting SharePoint sites: When looking at the URL, if it has /Pages/ and the webpage ends in .aspx, than it’s likely a SharePoint site.)

So, is your business considering SharePoint for your public website? In this post, we will review 6 key things to consider when planning a SharePoint public website project.

1. Licensing and Support

In order to use the full SharePoint Server product for your Internet website, the server licensing will comes in 2 flavors, Standard and Enterprise. However, there’s no client access licensing. Only the “for Internet Sites” server licenses are required, but within your production environment you will need licenses for each running server instance.

Another nice thing to note is SharePoint’s support community. Beyond Microsoft and its partners, there are many third-party developers of management tools, web parts, and templates. In addition, there is a thriving SharePoint developer community on CodePlex with many downloadable open-source tools.

2. Planning

It’s essential to have a well-developed game plan for your new SharePoint site. As with any website project, you will likely also plan a website face-lift. Thus, you will want to take time to define and approve your brand strategy and the look and layout of your site. Do you plan to stay closer to the “out-of-the-box” look, or do you want to significantly customize? In SharePoint, the key to remember is the more Master Pages and Page Layouts you have, the more time is involved in design and the building of the site.

In addition, SharePoint website projects often require planning and strategy regarding development. In a well planned development process, you have separate environments for development and testing. While Microsoft licensing often allows for these additional environments, hardware resource requirement still need to be planned and allocated.

3. Staging

Publishing information on a public website should always involve a staged process, that includes SharePoint. This is an important consideration regardless of whether you’re a small business or a large organization. SharePoint includes powerful publishing features from simple approval workflows to multi-farm content deployment paths. So be sure to plan out your content approval process and then utilize SharePoint to complement, or even enforce, your plan and process.

4. Web Standards and Accessibility

These two items are important to consider for any public website and SharePoint 2010 comes a long way from it predecessors in being compliant and flexible around ASP, CSS, and JavaScript. As you plan to customize, check out the many resources online to help you better work with, for example, SharePoint’s CSS classes and IDs.

SharePoint 2010 is WCAG 1.0 and 2.0 compliant out-of-the-box and Microsoft put a lot of work into interface enhancements such as in-browser dialogs, keyboard support, and tab access. In addition, attributes such as labels, descriptions, and tooltips, are built into SharePoint. So, as you customize and brand your SharePoint site, think about accessibility standards and ensure that added content and pictures maintain the same standards.

5. Custom Development

As you plan your project, you will likely customize your site’s branding and layout and will probably look at extending functionality to include powerful e-commerce functionality such as customer order entry, order status, etc. Happily, there are some great resources to help you with SharePoint enhancements and development.

To start, check out the “Patterns & Practices SharePoint Guidance” project on CodePlex. It includes a hands-on lab and good reference material. Next, there’s a great SharePoint Dev Wiki at Nothingbutsharepoint.com. And finally, this is an area where an experienced consultant company such as Pinnacle, can be most valuable.

6. Security and User Logins

As with any website project, security is a key item to address early in your site’s architecture discussions. For most public websites, many visitors will simply browse. Thus, anonymous access is all that’s needed. However, if you are looking into an online store with checkout, a vendor or dealer portal, etc., the major benefits come from interactions after login.

SharePoint can use domain logins through your Active Directory, but most companies don’t want to be limited or exposed and choose to configure Forms Based Authentication or use a third-party authenticator such as Live ID or Facebook. SharePoint offer significantly better support of these options compared to its predecessors, so it’s important to think about which authentication method you want to use, how you want visitors to login, and how you want to manage user accounts.

Summary

Planning and strategy is key. As a platform, SharePoint has truly grown since its first release. Today’s latest SharePoint 2010 sites work well on Firefox, Safari, Chrome, iPads, and more. So while the features are there, the strategy must support your online and business goals. The result of that combination is a site your visitors can easily use and navigate to find your content.

5 Reasons Why We Switched to the WordPress Blogging Platform

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Joel Wolfgang

Maybe you’ve noticed, but things on this blog look a little differently than they used to. Recently we decided to switch to using the WordPress blogging platform here on our website. I wanted to take a couple of moments and outline five reasons why we switched and hopefully give you some insight into your own blogging platform. While I consider myself a huge WordPress fan my goal isn’t to get you to switch, but to show you the mental process we used which might cause you to think you through your’s as well. Continue reading →

5 Ways To Increase the Quality of Your Email Marketing

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Joel Wolfgang

In a Pew Research study performed in December of 2010, adults were asked what activities they participated in while online. An overwhelming 92% said that they send and read email. More than social networking, more than researching and conversing about a hobby, more than checking the weather – Email. In fact in 2010 107 trillion emails were sent. That’s 33,900,000 emails per second. Email is such a part of my life that even though my phone automatically checks for new email every minute I still navigate to Outlook and Gmail every time I log into my computer.

The greatest question any business can ask itself is, “how can I best leverage email for marketing?” which is a fantastic question, but one that also causes a great deal more questions. What about SPAM? How often do I send email? Who do I send them to?

Email Marketing can be the most frustrating form of Internet Marketing, but if done right, the most rewarding. So here are five ways you can boost your Email Marketing efforts:

Make it easy to sign-up: Put a single sign-up form or link to your sign-up form on every page of your website. At Pinnacle we put the entire form in the footer of our website so it’s on every page. For better results place your form or link in the top 750 pixels of your page.
Give them something to look forward to: Save some of your best content for your newsletter. Remember, the reason they are on your email list is because they requested to receive updates from you. Give them something worth reading.
Ask people to read: Use other channels of influence to increase your subscribers. Also, post links to your newsletter on Twitter and Facebook.
Send often, but not annoyingly often: The average person cleans out their inbox every 12-15 days. Sending two newsletters per month is often ideal. Test your list to see how often you should send messages to your followers.
Design a beautiful email: Use an HTML design for your email template. A newsletter that is all text is boring and hard to read. You need to grab the reader’s eyes immediately when they look at your message.

These are just some basic steps, but if you follow them it will increase the quality of your email marketing efforts.

Look for .whatever coming Your Way Soon

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Joel Wolfgang

Today in Singapore ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) voted to approve the creation of custom Top Level Domains (TLDs), current examples of TLDs are .com, .net, and .org. Now if you have the resources, time and infustructure you’ll be able to bid on TLDs starting starting January 12, 2012. Bidding will start at $185,000 and there will be a renewal fee of $25,000/year, but starting a year from now you’ll be able to surf to websites like http://office.microsoft, or http://diet.coke. Today’s vote has fundementally changed how you and I experience the internet.

“ICANN has opened the Internet’s addressing system to the limitless possibilities of the human imagination,” said Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of ICANN. “No one can predict where this historic decision will take us.”

If your interested in purchasing a custom TLD bidding starts on January 12, 2012 and ends on April 12, 2012 and you’ll start seeing the new websites cropping within a year.

Google Updates its Search Algorithm Twice Per Working Day

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Joel Wolfgang

A couple of weeks ago Google posted an article that is quite interesting. In it it describes the results of a company that’s strongest desire is to produce a search algorithm that produces quality search results for its users. When Google first came out their promise was to give users search results faster than its competitors (namely Yahoo! at that point) clean white front page with just a search bar, no crazy number of links across the page. For most of us with slower internet connections it was perfect for searching the web. That was the mid 90s, this is today; the search engine wars seem to be in full swing, and users are just infatuated with fast search results but looking for a search experience.

Earlier this week several websites analyzed search statistics showing that Bing is slowly gaining ground and trending to out pace Google in the near future. This makes Search Engine Optimization (SEO) all the more important. In the Google article above the author talks about how making changes to their algorithm is extremely commonplace, in fact in 2010, 500 changes were made, often two official changes to the algorithm were made in a single working day. This is astounding news for those who are interested in SEO; for that matter this should be interesting to anyone who has a website.

In order to fight web spam search engines are constantly looking for ways to give their users the best possible search results. Which makes keeping up with SEO trends a must if you are going to remain competitive.

How to Generate Web Traffic – How your websites traffic should work

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Joel Wolfgang

If you were able to take all of your website traffic and chart it on a graph you generally get three types of traffic sources. Direct traffic is website traffic from individual who type in your web address, came directly from a bookmark, or that your website is that particular user’s homepage. Referral traffic is traffic you get from links to your site from across the web. Search traffic is visitors to your site that come from the search engines.

In my line of work I hear a lot of people ask about SEO and how to get more traffic to their site, and I fire back a question immediately, ‘what are you going to do with them once they get to your site?’ Most people don’t think about that. They just want more visitors and to be found in more search results.

The ideal situation is charted below, an even 1/3^rd of traffic for each of the three traffic sources – referral, search, and direct, but what do you do if your site doesn’t have this distribution of traffic?

Below is a graph of website traffic sources percentage from a site we at Pinnacle are working hard to get realigned.

You can see that the direct traffic clearly our weighs the search and the referral traffic. Most site struggle to gain referral traffic it can be difficult to get other sites from around the internet to link back to you. Even though the search traffic is almost ideal most of that traffic comes from people typing the name of the company in the search bar – these should be easily captured as direct traffic in the future. Are recommendations for this site are to increase their search traffic and referral traffic by doing several things.

First creating quality content, this is first and foremost because on the internet quality content is king! No one wants to like to poor content, and likewise the search engines aren’t going to treat poor content well either. Create content that people want to connect to.

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