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The process of creating a website is very much like any other project you have worked on: gather your resources, build it out, wait for feedback, and then release the final version. You can follow these four steps to help you get started:
Step 1: Initiate the request, gather an understanding of the purpose, objective, content and user experience requirements.
Step 2: Finalize content and prepare web friendly formats.
Step 3: Design and build the site and work with your team to review.
Step 4: Responsive QC, proofreading, brand/design QC, team review and go-live.
Site structure strategy
Before you begin building, it’s important to map out the flow of your website to help you visualize how you want users to experience the site and how you should build it. Whether you do that with a wireframing program, an illustration tool, a word document, or even with pen and paper, you should use whatever method is easiest for you. Ask yourself these questions:
One page or multi-page?
Does it make sense to put everything on one page, or should you break it up into different pages?Single page websites to allow for easy scrolling, are mobile friendly, and are better for low content. Multi page websites allow you to clearly divide information, provide better tracking, and contain more information without overwhelming the user.
What kind of navigation?
There are multiple ways your users can get around your site. What makes most sense for the purpose of your site and the persona of the user who will visit? Should it be:
- Standard top of the page navigation
- Persistent left bar
- Hamburger/mobile menu for all screen sizes
- No navigation
- Something different?
Will your site have a lot of content?
You don’t want to overwhelm the user with a lot of content. Think of what can be “hidden” initially and then show when a user clicks or hovers over an element. You can use accordions, pop-ups, carousels, and other interactions to condense content on your page and let users choose what they want to see.
Do you have your content ready?
Have you collected all the branding, fonts, images, colors, and copy needed for the site? Designing with real content gives you a better representation of how the website will look and function and gives you the opportunity to make changes earlier in the design process. Everything doesn’t have to be finalized before you begin building, but at least knowing what the header sections are, a rough idea of how much copy goes into each section, and where images and videos need to go will help tremendously.
SEO
TIME Sites is committed to maintaining and improving your brands Search Engine performance. Our platform is built for SEO success, including granular page settings and analytics integrations.
Here are where you can find the relevant SEO fields and settings in TIME Sites.
Website settings
You can access website settings by opening your website and going to Studio > Website Settings. Here you can change the following:
- Website name (SEO website title)
- Custom domain
- Website description (SEO default meta description)
- Favicon
- Social image
- Allow search engines to index/follow (adjust robots.txt file for site)
- Site language
- Google Tag Manager
Pro tip
TIME Sites appends the website name (title) to the page name (title) with a hyphen. So it would look like “page name - website name” in your browser tab. Keep this in mind when naming your website and pages.
Page settings
You can access page settings by opening your page and going to Studio > Page Settings, or by selecting the page thumbnail in the site map and clicking on the pencil icon in the upper right. Here you can change the following:
- Page name (SEO page title)
- Page slug (end part of the url)
- Page description (SEO meta description)
- Social image
- Allow search engines to index/follow (adjust robots.txt file per page)
- Page language
- Canonical URL
Redirects
To add a redirect to your website, open your website and go to Studio > Redirect Manager.
Click on Add New. In the first field, redirect from, type in the address of the page you want people to not land on or select it from the drop down menu. Don’t add in the beginning part of your url, just everything that comes after the .com or whatever top-level domain you’re using. Also, this field can only be used for pages on your site, not on external sites.
Next, enter in the url of where you want the first one to redirect to. This can either be an internal or external link. If it’s an external link, make sure to include the full url.
Finally, select the redirect type. A 301 redirect means that the page has permanently moved to a new location. A 302 redirect means that the move is only temporary. Search engines need to figure out whether to keep the old page, or replace it with the one found at the new location.
Press Add Redirect and publish your site for the redirect to take effect. You can always go back into the redirect manager to edit and delete existing redirects.
Other SEO areas:
Pro tip
While there is a lot you can do for SEO in TIME Sites, the research and auditing that goes into building your SEO strategy is something that needs to be done outside of our platform.
Custom domain
Every site you create on TIME Sites can immediately be published to a TIME Sites subdomain. But if you want your site to appear at a custom domain (for example, www.mywebsite.com) there are a few additional steps you'll have to take:
- Register the custom domain, if you don't already own it
- Enter your Custom Domain Name in Website Settings in Design Studio.
- Reach out to your TIME Sites support team member to let them know you want to add a custom domain. You will be asked to add an entry to your DNS settings to validate ownership of your domain and create your auto-renewing SSL certificate.
- Once you have completed this step (you have 72 hours to do so), let your TIME Sites contact know. They will provide you a Cloudfront URL, to which you will configure your domains DNS A record, ANAME, Alias, or CNAME, depending on your DNS' capability. You may or may not also need to set up domain forwarding.
TIME Sites no longer provides IP addresses for A records as we are on an industry-leading serverless web hosting platform. We now use Cloudfront, which is the world’s leading CDN that uses a global network of 216 Points of Presence (205 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in 84 cities across 42 countries. This enables delivering content to end users with lower latency—i.e., lightning-fast websites. Added benefits include: Auto-renewing SSL certificates (for guaranteed website encryption), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection, and high security and availability.
In order to point a website to all the servers in the global network, Cloudfront provides us with a unique url, not a static IP address. You would need to point to 200+ IPs (that could change and become obsolete at any given time) to achieve the same result as using the 1 url.
We strongly recommend you use a modern DNS like Google Domains, AWS, EasyDNS, or Cloudflare for your domains to take full advantage of our platform. If you choose to use a legacy app like GoDaddy or Network Solutions, some variations of your domain will not work.
Go-live checklist
Built out your website and ready to take it live? Look over this checklist to make sure everything is ready to go.
- Add favicon
- Add website/page social images
- Add website/page descriptions
- Set site language
- Add tracking
- Set password protect
- Check for responsiveness in app, on different sized devices, or on Chrome’s device toolbar
- No more placeholder images/text left on site
- All links are linked and working properly
- Any buggy behavior on the live site has been resolved
- Set up any necessary redirects
- Purchase/know what custom domain you're going to use
- Do a final runthrough of all content to make sure it's good to go live
Embedding Integrations
TIME Sites is technology agnostic, allowing you to integrate any other platform you work with seamlessly into your site.
You can use the embed element to embed third party functionality or custom code snippets onto your TIME Sites pages. Common examples of functionality that you may want to embed include:
- Data collection forms
- Tracking or analytics
- Interactive location finders
- E-commerce "Buy It" buttons
- Virtual walkthroughs
- Social aggregation widgets
- Interactive maps
- Tables, graphs, and charts
Our users have embedded dozens of third party apps into their websites to increase functionality and push the boundaries of what a TIME Sites site can be.
The embed element can also be used if you have a developer that needs to develop an element that requires more interaction than the TIME Sites Design Studio allows. Read this article to learn more about the embed element and how to use it.