Yesterday I made the following generalized statement:

Like any aspect of site design, the addition of whizz, bang, and pow should be carefully considered from the user’s perspective. It’s also important to remember that your perspective will always be slanted. *You* know all about the services you offer, the content on your site, and the navigation/layout. But your visitors don’t.

It got me thinking about how well I know the sites I’m a part of. And before too long… I realized that I didn’t know all of them as well as I probably should.

Just as the captain of any ship knows every single nook and cranny of his or her vessel, so too should website owners know every little in and out of their sites. The reasoning behind both is pretty much the same.

If something goes wrong on a ship, lives could be at sake. If the captain - who is in charge of safeguarding those lives - doesn’t know everything he or she possibly can about their ship, it may be impossible to discover what’s gone wrong… and the ship will sink.

If something goes wrong on a website, livelihoods could be at sake. If the website owner - who is in charge of safeguarding those livelihoods - doesn’t know everything he or she possibly can about their site, it may be impossible to discover what’s gone wrong… and the site will sink.

Get to Know the Inside of Your Site

Do you know the directory structure of your site? If the server returns an error, could you easily locate the offending file? If I were to randomly select a heading, title, or other noteworthy piece of text from your site, would you know where to find it? Or how to find it? If you got an email from a user reporting a problem with the site, would you be able to take care of it… or would you know who to notify to take care of it for you?

When I say the “inside” of your site, I’m talking about a lot of things:

• Directory structure
• Navigation structure
• Server specifics (versions of server software, hardware capacities, etc)
• Content management system usage
• Scripting/code usage (where, what, and why of each script)
• User access permissions (who has access to what parts of your site)

There are probably a dozen other internal specifics that every site owner should be aware of. Some of this knowledge will just come naturally as you work on the site. Some of if you may have research. Unless you set up the server your site is running on personally, you may not know what is installed on it (or what version it is). If you’re not doing all of the coding yourself, you may not know about scripts, HTML, CSS and other code-related issues that might pop up. Make yourself aware!

You should also always know who has access to your site and to what degree they can modify it. If something gets changed, you should be able to figure who made the change. Was your site modified from within? Was it compromised from outside? These are the questions that a website owner should be able to answer!

But What Does the Outside Look Like?

It’s probably a safe bet to assume that most site owners know more about the “inside” of their site than they do about the outside. I’m not talking about what the site looks like, physically, either. The outside of your site has to do with anything that relates to your site that isn’t on your site.

• Search engine rankings
• Brand identity across blogs, social sites, etc
• External advertising
• Incoming linkage
• Reviews, ratings, commentary about your site elsewhere
• Perceptions of the company or individual behind the site

Again, these are some broad-reaching categories of information. But in many cases, they’re just as - if not more - important than the internal workings of your site.

What are others saying about your site? Who’s linking to you? How often is your service being used by others? Where is your advertising showing up? How is your site being depicted at review sites or in meta searches?

In many cases, these outside aspects of your site are the first (and sometimes only) impressions that potential users or customers are getting. Being oblivious to the outside components can quickly lead to major issues… and can lead to a site sinking.

A good first step to getting better acquainted with the outside of your site is to start monitoring your outside “image”.  A few ways to do that include:

• Monitor the blogosphere using Google Blogsearch or Technorati
• Set up Google or Yahoo! Alerts to notify you when your site, name, or company is mentioned
• Use tools like the newly released Google Multiple Datacenter Keyword Rank Check to check your search engine ranking for site-specific keywords (Thanks DazzlinDonna!)
• Create your own blog, respond to comments on other blogs, and address issues/concerns publicly on yours
• Create accounts on popular social sites like MySpace, Facebook, Digg, etc to gain access to what folks there are saying about your site

What other ways can you think of to research your outside image?  There are literally thousands!
So now… I’ll ask again: how well do you know your site?

If you’re like me… you may suddenly realize you have some work to do.