Archive for Web Design
Website SEO – They Told Me I Needed A £5000 Website But I Get No Visitors
Posted by: | CommentsLack of traffic and visitors to their website is the number one complaint of 99% of small business owners when it comes to doing business online. What most people don’t understand is that just having a website is not enough if you are planning to grow your business online or get any ROI from your website.
Unfortunately, most business owners and web designers do not consult with an SEO expert before the design process begins. They create lovely websites that have no chance of success online and the designer gets paid handsomely for the work they do.
Do not get me wrong, they earn their money. It takes great skill to create the kinds of sites they make and they are not overcharging for the amount of work that goes into the site. The trouble is, their main emphasis is on leading-edge design because that is what they do. Little or no thought is given to what happens once the design process is completed.
Web designers will also tell you they have done the site SEO. All this means is that they have thrown a bunch of generic, non-effective keywords into the META tags of the website. True SEO is not in their skill set because they have not studied search engines. Business owners are left wondering why their costly website is not getting any visitors because they believe they have done everything necessary for online success.
The truth is that having a website built is only the first step necessary for growing your business online. The second step, although I believe it should be the other way around, is to have an SEO expert take over and optimize the site so it will perform well in search engines. Once that is done, another key piece is needed to complete the process.
That key piece is off-page SEO. Social media and link popularity is the third step that will take a dormant website and breathe new life into it. Even an ugly website can dominate a market if it is properly socialised. So before you hand over your hard earned pounds for a website, set up a consultation with an SEO expert. They will advise you during the design process to make sure that your completed website will not lay dormant but will instead earn you money.
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WordPress 3 Multisite – Why You May Want To Skip On This Feature
Posted by: | CommentsThe newest version of WordPress 3 has made it possible for you to host multiple domains within one installation of WordPress. While, in theory, this sounds like a plus, I can think of many disadvantages and you should seriously consider them before jumping in to hosting multiple domains on your single WordPress installation.
Disadvantages of WordPress 3 Multi-site Feature:
- Lack of versatility. Unless you want to use the same theme for all of your websites, you will need to purchase a theme such as the Builder theme that will allow you to have different layouts for your sites. You must also run all of the same plugins on all of your sites which may not be to your advantage.
- Lack of security. For whatever reasons, hackers love to find back doors into WordPress. If all of your websites are hosted within one application, it makes them all equally vulnerable.
- Domino effect. If there is a technical problem within one site, all of your sites could be down at the same time. This effectively puts you out of business until the glitch is worked out. Having your sites on separate installations would allow you to have sites that are still operational if there is a problem with one of them.
- Database backups. Creating backups for several smaller databases is easier than doing one huge backup file.
- Changing web hosts. If you ever want to switch web hosts, having separate installations makes the process easier. You may have an instance where one of the domains has become very popular and is using up a great deal of your hosting resources. In this case you would want to move that domain to it’s own account. If it is all wrapped up with all of your other domains within one WordPress installation it would be very difficult to separate it after the fact.
- Selling your site. You may decide sometime down the road that you would like to sell one of your websites. This would be almost impossible if it were sharing a database with other domain names.
I am sure I could think of a many more potential problems if I gave it more thought but the ones I have listed above are pretty substantial reasons why you should not just jump into hosting several domain names on one WordPress installation.
Advantages of using the WordPress 3 Multi-site Feature:
As hard as I have tried, I simply cannot come up with a list of really good advantages. You should use the multi-domain application under the following circumstances:
- You need the minimal time savings of installation and limiting the number of MySQL databases you use.
- You will always want the same theme and plugins for all of your websites.
- You never want to switch web hosts.
- You will never sell any of the websites you build.
- It is not critical to your business if all of your websites go down at the same time.
- You do not plan on ever making your sites large enough to become a problem with backing them all up at once.
As you can tell, I am not a big fan of this new feature. If you can think of more advantages please let me know. Maybe I am missing something here. Share your thoughts on the WordPress 3 Mutlisite features.
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The faster your website loads, the better the visitor’s experience will be. In Google’s efforts to improve their customer’s experience (surfers), they recently implemented a change that added the page load time as a factor of where your site will be positioned in their search engines.
While this does not carry a huge amount of sway, according to Google itself who stated that “if two sites are vying for the same position in the SERP, the site with the faster load time will be placed higher”. That being said, although your site cannot get to the number one position on page load time alone, it can give you the edge over your competition if there is a tight race for that coveted position.
Search engines aside, a fast loading page is just plain good for business. I am sure you have run into the site that takes forever to completely load and realize just how frustrating it is. You either hit the back button and search for an alternative or you sit and curse while you wait. Either way, it does not leave a good first impression on your site visitors. It is even more frustrating if every single page of the site takes equally as long to load.
Here are a few tips to optimise your site and make a web page load faster:
- CSS stylesheets. Use a single stylesheet rather than multiples. One large stylesheet will load faster than 2 or 3 smaller ones. Use CSS for site-wide styling of your website rather than HTML.
- Keep graphics to a minimal. Images and graphics are much larger files than text and take much longer to load. If you must use graphics, make sure you specify the height and width in your image code. This will allow the browser to use those dimensions as place holders and allow the rest of the page to load at the same time as the images. If you do not specify the dimensions, the browser will have to wait for the image to fully load before going on to load the rest of the page contents.
- Re-size and optimise all images and graphics. Do not use code to shrink images down to the size you want to display. By editing the images in an image editor to the proper size you need, you will decrease the file size of the image and decrease the load time. Whenever possible, use .gif or .png rather than jpeg. Jpegs have a larger colour pallet and therefore are larger files. You should only use jpgs for photos where true colour is necessary.
- Keep videos and the bulk of your images to the bottom of the page. This will allow the majority of your page to load quickly and keep the larger, slower loading files to be loaded last. This improves your visitor experience because they have info and text to read while they are waiting for other items to load.
- Avoid the “bells and whistles”. While scripts, flash and plugins are cool and sometimes do have a certain function, they can also drastically slow down your page load time. Only use scripts or plugins that are absolutely necessary to the function of your site. Although you may think all of the popups, floating ads, Tweetme buttons and special effects are super-cool, your visitors will not be as impressed as you are. The truth is that most visitors absolutely hate these things and often will leave pages that use them just because they find them annoying.
- Use CSS/HTML navigation. You should avoid flash and javascript navigation bars and buttons. Those are like small bits of software, are not search engine friendly and take a longer time to load. Since most navigation is located at the top of the page, these items can severely hamper the load speed of your site.
- Use hex codes for colour blocks and backgrounds rather than images. If you are using coloured backgrounds for your website, tables or CSS blocks, hex colour codes load very quickly while images take much longer to load. This is particularly good for solid coloured headers, sidebars, etc.
- Always upload images to your own web host. You should avoid hot-linking to any image on a third party server. Always upload the image to your own server first. Images hosted outside your own domain name will take much longer to load than images hosted within your own domain.
What I have found from experience is that often the simplest sites are the sites that perform the best. They convert visitors into buyers and they keep your visitors coming back for more. Forget about the need to make your site fancy. That is only your own ego talking and not the needs of your customers and clients. Truth be told, your customers appreciate a well planned and well laid out site more than a flashy, cutting edge piece of design. Remember, they are there to buy, not to be in awe of the decor.
If you have found this information helpful, I would really appreciate a Tweet or a Like on your Facebook. Please feel free to leave me some feedback in the comments below.
Why You Should Insist Your Web Designer Use WordPress To Build Your Website
Posted by: | CommentsFor many business who want to go online, building your website is a costly investment that continues to draw on your resources on an ongoing basis. This does not have to be the case if you insist that your web designer use WordPress as your CMS (content management system) when they are designing your website.
WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform, but it has since evolved into so much more. No longer are you limited to just blogging with this software. With the increase in popularity of this Open Source (free) software, developers began to build plugins or add-ons to enhance the functions and performance. Software developers have expanded the power of the software to include the ability to do just about anything you could ever want with this system.
Through the use of custom themes and plugins, it is now possible to create an entire website with multiple features using WordPress. You can use it to build membership sites, shopping carts and article directories as well as photo galleries, classified ad sites and just about any other type of site you can imagine; and yes, even a blog.
What Makes WordPress Better For Web Design?
In my opinion there are two key reasons why WordPress is the best possible choice for your website.
- User friendly. Even the most technologically challenge person can maintain their website updates with this software. If you can type an email or use Microsoft Word, you can create pages and posts with WordPress. This is important because in today’s online world, a totally static website (one that rarely changes) will sit at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to search engine placement. Search engines today value fresh content very highly and you should strive to be continually adding new information to your website. Without the ability to do this yourself, you are going to incur a pretty hefty bill every month from your web designer.
Using WordPress will keep the monthly operating costs of your website down and improve your return on investment. You will still need your designer to freshen up the look of your site now and again but that will only be on a periodic basis as needed.
- Search engine friendly. For whatever reasons, search engines love the WordPress platform. Time and time again they outperform any other CMS or static HTML websites in the search engines. I suspect this is because of the nature of the software, with the likelihood of new content added regularly, as well as the fact that SEO is both built in and added through plugins. With WordPress it is possible to very easily include advanced SEO for every single page and post within the site without having to know any HTML.
These two reasons alone should make your decision a no-brainer. A site that is easily maintained and search engine friendly will ensure your business website will have the best possible advantages. All you have to do is add content.
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Questions To Ask Your Web Designer Before You Commit To Hiring Them
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are planning to hire a web designer to create your business website, it is important that you are educated enough about the process to know the right questions to ask to protect your own best interests. While many designers are very skilled at creating web pages, the majority do not include the whole package and you will then need to spend additional funds to cover the services that your web designer does not include in their design package.
Let’s face it. Technical skills do not come cheaply, and rightly so. Therefore a website can cost upwards of thousands of pounds depending on the complexity of the site you would like to build. However, you must make sure that you are getting the biggest bang for your buck in hiring a site designer who also understands the process of building a site that is fully optimised for search engines and traffic generation.
Neglecting this step will end up costing you more in the long run as you will end up with a website that is not going to be seen by your customers without having to hire an SEO expert to do the on page optimisation for you.
Here are some key questions you can ask that will tell you if this designer is right for you.
- Do you do keyword research for my market to SEO my website? If they tell you they will do SEO for your website, do not assume they will do any kind of research. Chances are, your keywords will consist of a series one or two word keyword phrases that have a gazillion other sites all competing for the same words. This is not good. You want to make sure you are targeting a keyword that has some potential of allowing you to succeed.
- Will they help you choose the best domain name for your website? Chances are, your business name is not the best domain name for your business website. Again, this will rely on the keyword research. Many sites can hit the first page of Google just by having the right domain name. So be sure the person you hire to create your site knows about market research and keyword research to best advise you.
- Will I be able to manage my website once it is complete? This is important. Unless you plan to budget in updates and small changes to your website, you will need to be able to be in control. There are several CMS (content management systems) available that are free. They have user-friendly dashboards that will allow you to edit the text content of your site, add new content and updates and input new products. Unless your designer uses these CMS to design your site, you will need to pay for every little change you need on your site. You will also have to wait for those changes to be done.
- Do you offer any off page SEO services? Once your site is completed, many designers leave you on your own to promote your site and get traffic to your pages. If you hire a designer who is also an SEO marketing expert, you can rely on them to put a plan of action together for you that will make your site successful. You can then opt to do the work yourself or pay a monthly fee to have it done for you.
No matter what designer you choose, these are important questions to ask. It will determine whether you will need to set aside additional funds to have an SEO company work on the site when the design stage is done or if your designer can be a one-stop shop.