How we have leveraged Google services to jumpstart RIABiz
Thinking of building a website? We might advise a closer look at the search giant
5 min read- RIABiz leverages Google services, including App Engine and Custom Search, to power its platform.
- Custom-built websites offer RIABiz greater control over design, functionality, and advertising.
- Google Analytics provides RIABiz with detailed reader insights, informing content and strategy.
We often receive requests to add features to RIABiz, and the most common one by far has been a search field for old stories. Now that I’ve finished building the RIABiz Directory, I am getting to many of those requests, and am happy to announce that the search feature is now live! You’ll see a search box on the right side of the top navigation bar, where you can search for stories, directory listings, and any other pages the same as you would on Google.com.
In fact, the resemblance to Google is no coincidence; we are using Google under the covers to power this search feature. But the search is just the beginning; we actually rely on seven Google products to power RIABiz:
- Google App Engine — Where RIABiz is actually hosted
- Google FeedBurner — How we deliver our stories via Email and RSS
- Google Analytics — How we track who comes to our site
- Google News — To share our news with the world [See graphic below]
- Google Chrome — Our browser of choice
- Google Apps/Gmail — How we access our @riabiz.com email accounts
- Google Custom Search — The brains behind our new search feature
Setting up a website like RIABiz
We faced an interesting decision when we decided to build RIABiz — you might be facing this decision too if you are thinking of building a new website: Is it better to use an open-source content management system (CMS), or to build the site from scratch to be completely custom? The obvious choices for a news/blog type site are CMSs like WordPress, Drupal, and Radiant which already do the bulk of what we do here at RIABiz.
RIABiz launches its directory today for financial advisors
For RIAs looking to build a website with news updates, these systems are perfect; they can be easily visually customized, and can have you publishing content in a very short time. You’ll just need to find a web host (I would recommend Slice Host for savvy developers with reasonable budgets and Blue Host for amateurs with more modest funding) and a domain name (I use Who.is to search for and buy them).
But customizability was too important for what we wanted to create, so we decided to build the site from the ground up on Google App Engine. App Engine offers certain functionality to get a site going quickly such as sending email, manipulating images, and authenticating users, so I was able to build everything we needed on a modest time budget over the course of a couple of months. The result is a website that works in a similar way to the CMSs mentioned above, but has a few advantages:
- The administration system is designed specifically for RIABiz, so each story is formatted just how we like it
- We can extend our system to accommodate any new functionality we dream up (such as the RIABiz Directory)
- If something goes wrong I immediately know where to look, since I wrote every line of code myself (this one may be more important than it gets credit for)
- We have a custom advertisement delivery system that we can extend to function however we want in the future
- Until our traffic goes way out of control, it is free to host on App Engine
Story Timeline
Of course the initial time investment was much larger, but we try to make a habit of being picky and taking the long way, and we have heard time and again from readers who appreciate that approach.
Directory Week One: The launch, the tweaks and what directory listers say about its future
What we know about our readers
We typically check Google Analytics many times a day to track who is coming to our site. It’s truly amazing how much this (also free) Google service shows us; we know where in the world our readers are, how long they stay on the site, how many articles they read each time, how many times they’ve been to the site before, and even what they typed into a search engine to find us. For RIAs looking to get a sense of who is coming to their website, we highly recommend this service, with one caveat: it can lead to borderline-obsessive statistics tracking behavior.
Our page views per month went up 39% from December to January. Here are some more interesting bits about the last two weeks:
- 45% of visitors were new readers
- 14% of our readers clicked from our daily email alert
- Traffic to our directory is increasing
- About 13% of readers came to our site by typing some variation of “RIABiz” into Google, rather than navigating directly to riabiz.com
What’s next under the hood at RIABiz
Other commonly requested features are a button for emailing stories to friends and colleagues with a single click and a printable version of every page, both of which I will release before we move on to the next big project. Two topics of discussion internally have been how to encourage and enable our readership to interact on the site, and alternative ways to deliver our content. Do you have an idea for an alternative format you would like to receive our content in? Are you interested in asking your peer readers on the web about which software or services they use? Let me know in the comments section below!
GoogleNews is a major source of
web traffic for RIABiz
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