Is this the world’s best security installer website?
Hi there, and thanks for taking the time to read our blog. This is my first ever blog post and I’m writing it on the verge of launching our new website so I’ve not had loads of time to research the dos and don’ts of good blog writing; however, having been born into the security industry (I’m part of the family) and having been CIA’s Webmaster for the past 6 or so years, I do know a little about security and websites – not the most riveting of subjects – but I’ll try make this as interesting as possible.
Understandably, over recent years I’ve looked at a lot of electronic and physical security company websites and know what’s out there so I can’t help believing that this new website of ours could be the best security installer website in the world. What do you think?
It is, I know, quite a bold assertion, so what makes me so confident that I’m right? For that, I’ll have to go into what we wanted to achieve and how we went about it, but don’t worry – I’ll do my best not to bore you with too much jargon or technical detail about the backend – the bits you can’t see – which is, of course, what interests me the most!
It’s always been our website ethos to be helpful and useful to anyone researching to improve a property’s security, so we have worked especially hard with this new website to make sure that our readers understand the ins and outs of access control, CCTV, fire and intruder alarms, lock-smithery and physical security whilst reading about CIA’s products and services.
Content is King
We’ve also mentioned all of the important governing bodies and and industry standards that a reputable company will work to and that apply to property security. We believe we’ve done this in an organised and appealing way and have tried very hard not to repeat ourselves and waste the reader’s time but the standards do need repeating because you never know where a visitor will enter your site. Talking of which brings us onto the site’s architecture.
A Good Website Needs Good Information Architecture
We wanted to put user experience above search engine ranking in our list of priorities when designing this website so we’ve put our faith in the ever-improving search engine algorithms, believing that this honest approach will pay dividends in the future. On top of that, we like helping people even if they’re outside our coverage area.
So, in short, the information architecture of a website is both the page architecture (where different elements sit on a webpage) and the phrases used for the link text or buttons, and the hierarchical design of the information, based around how many clicks a page is from the homepage and an inferred back-end folder structure by the page’s address path: the URL (Uniform Resource Locator).
Drupal: The Most Powerful CMS in the World
I promised to try not to bore you at the beginning of this blog post, so I’m having to tread carefully here: The single biggest factor in claiming our website could be the world’s best in it’s field is down to the fact our website is built on Drupal. Drupal is an open-source (free) computer management system which allows anyone to add content without needing to understand HTML, the basic language for writing web pages. This means that casual web visitors can leave comments and authorised users can make more complex changes to the website via their normal Internet browser (e.g. Firefox or Internet Explorer).
In these next few paragraphs, I talk a little about Drupal’s power so skip these if this doesn’t interest you. Drupal is built on a LAMP stack; four open-source technologies starting with an LINUX operating system followed by an Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP. No licences needed here and the advantage that the technologies have been developed by huge communities. Drupal itself has an enormous, passionate and dedicated community developing and maintaining its core installation and many additional modules.
The White House website is built on Drupal which should demonstrate just how powerful and scalable the platform is. Drupal makes our website a living thing; both because many of the maintenance operations are automated (the submitting of the XML sitemap to the search engines every time a page is added or removed, 301 redirects, etc) and because it’s not been built just to slowly fester and go out of date; it can be edited by anyone with an Internet connection. Drupal is one of the biggest contributing factor to making ours so much better than many, many other websites.
However there are Drupal websites and there are Drupal websites… Straight out of the box Drupal sites are powerful, scalable and robust, but the backend of CIA’s Drupal website has been so well designed, developed and implemented that this website really is a diamond among gems.
I Feel the Need, the Need for Speed
Also, a good website is a fast website. To further improve the user experience, we’ve optimised both the site and the platform in many different ways from aggregating the code and style, limiting the amount of requests getting passed, through compression and caching within Drupal, to the fast cloud hosting platform we’re using, and the optimised LAMP stack with Varnish, Memcache and APC we’ve installed and configured.
User Experience: the Ultimate Goal of Any Website
Our aim with this website is to give a good user experience by combining all of these technicalities with an attractive and straightforward visual design. It has been designed with care and attention so that it can grow in an organised and controlled fashion but remember that the website is a work in progress. Please use our website to research your security needs – we hope you’ll enjoy the experience. It also features pictures and videos of our own staff, all shot and edited by me (including the burglar turning into CIA’s logo special effect). These were our guys’ first efforts and I think they all did a good job but I know they’ll be better next time!
Do let us know whether you agree or disagree that this is the best security installer websites out there by adding your comments below.
Until next time,
Antony Christie
The Group’s Webmaster
