Website Tech

• Overview

• Automate

• Resources

• Data Security

• Components

• Summary

  STEU

 Overview

October,  2024

One significant benefits you receive, as a website owner, is the potential to use your website to automate data tasks.

Automate Tasks

Many website owners simple use their website as a showcase.

Let’s talk about what else you can accomplish with your website.

Connecting is the first tool that comes to my mind. With your website you can easily connect with people who want more information about your products, as well as, you can make it easy for past customers to connect you with a question or maybe reorder.

By the way, those two ideas are both accomplished with no new labor by you or your employees.

It’s easy to put a form on your web page to collect email addresses and names of subscribers. Those two pieces of data are automatically collected in a database. When you have your newsletter ready to go, just add these new subscribers into your mail list. These new folks have “opted in” on your subscribing form thus meeting the privacy standard to receive your news.

When a past customer uses a form on your site you automatically receive an email with the info they submitted. They also receive an email automatically letting them know that you will contact them very soon with your response. This gives you, and your staff, time to sort out the questions and respond by email or phone.

Those are two easy examples of automating workflow with your website.

To customize a workflow you can use resources that we all cover below. The design of your workflow automation depends on your tech savvy skills and what fees you want to pay to services providing resources. Or, just hire me and I will do that and provide documentation for you to review.

 Resources

Before I get started naming names, keep in mind that every name i mention probably has at least five decent competitors over similar services and varying prices, or maybe a fee starter plan. My goal here is to present ideas for your benefit and education. I am not endorsing any one service.

Workflow Automation Software

When you search on that three word phrase you will come across Zapier. They were the first to present a set of services, most being independent businesses, that can connect though Zapier to your website for the purpose of collecting or displaying data in now method or another.

The deeper you go into this “automating workflow software” the more services you will find that revolve around collecting, sharing, storing, and sharing data from your website.

Stitch, recently acquired by Qlik, is a cloud-based platform that simplifies the process of replicating data from various sources to a centralized data warehouse. Like Zapier, it offers a library of 100+ pre-built data connectors.

Lets break down the “data connecter” idea. When you have a gmail account, you can use Zapier to send a customized email in color with your logo and anything else, even a file, to the website visitor who completed your form.

There are many database tools out there. One is Airtable. You can use this as a stand alone connected to your website, or use it in conjunction with Zapier.

But this data flow works in reverse too. Let’s say you have an inventory you want to display on your web page but it updates rather frequently so it needs to be a “no brainer” to update the content. Two tools are Google Spreadsheets and Airtable.

The free way is using Google Spreadsheets.

This is the W3 world of websites which has evolved. The ability to quickly and easily manipulate data in any form. We have been talking about words so far, but we you can also use pictures or videos.

To get started exploring data in new ways do a search on “”data automation tools”.

 Data Security 

Not a lot of headaches with this security on the ideas we are discussing for data security.

You are not sharing financial info, plus the connection in what we have discussed are encrypted but also only going to an account you setup at the vendor: Zapier, Stich. Airtable or whoever.

On financial transaction you are going to use a payment processor. For example, you have an online store. There are to ways to accomplish this successfully. You can use a platform for your store or you use an independent service with a vendor. Some exhale vendors are payhub, PayPal, or Squareup.

If you are using a platform you pay a subscription fee to the platform and a processing fee for each sale. If you are using an independent then you are paying the processing fee.

In the case of using the independent method you have setup an account at the vendor so that makes the connect secure. You present to product information - tests, pictures, and maybe video - on your website with a “buy” button. When that button is clicked a new window displays showing the buyer a form yo input their credit card info.

In those scenarios there is no data security issue that should concern you or your potential buyers.

 Components

There is the front-end and back-end technology to any website.

The front-end is what your website visitors see and interact with. It’s comprised of HTML and CSS and architecture that provides functionality.

HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are visible since they are the page layout. The architecture is behind the scenes.

A website can be built using many different frameworks or architecture. For example, this website was built using Blocs this is built with bootstrap.

Bootstrap is the most popular CSS Framework for developing responsive and mobile-first websites.


The back-end of the website are the web servers, databases, and programming.

The web server is the website hosting service you purchased to publish your website to the internet.

This website uses PHP programming, which is seen as the extension, the ending, of every file name of each web page.

If you didn’t already know, I am here for you as an excellent website hosting service.

 Summary

My intention is that you learned something to benefit your business website operations and marketing. If this content was not helpful to you,  send me an email and tell me.

Steu Mann