How does the average person use your website?

Let’s consider how the average person uses the internet:

1. You search for the service you need using a search engine.
2. Presented with thousands of results, you choose a selection from the first page of results.
3. You look through each of these, making snap judgements about the quality and credibility of the business based on your first-impressions of the site.
4. If the website reflects quality, you look for a means to get in touch, either calling directly or by filling out a web-form.

At each interaction, the user’s thought process can be boiled-down to: Does this particular interaction give me confidence that this supplier can be trusted, and that the product/service on offer will meet my expectations?

Let’s explore some of the benefits of a new website

There are many benefits to revamping your website, below I have touched on just a few. Whilst looking through, keep in mind what your current website is like, and whether you are offering a poor user experience to your visitors.

New business

Your primary touch-point with new and existing customers is your website. Whether reached through social media or search engines, a new customer visiting your site will dedicate a very short amount of time to looking to see if you offer what they need. If you don’t peak their interest straight away, you’ve lost them.

Having clear, well-written and well-presented content is vital. Structuring this in a logical way, with clear navigation and a complementary colour scheme is equally important. Get this wrong and you will fall at the first hurdle. Get this right and you will maximise the number of people that visit your site and the number of people who contact you off the back of this.

Brand credibility

In the competitive world of the internet, credibility is everything. From Google reviews to Facebook likes, having a strong and consistent online presence is vital. We see your website as the main player in your digital portfolio; it plays the decisive role in giving your brand credibility. A poor user experience, confusing navigation, or even something as simple as large bodies of text in an unattractive font can damage your brand credibility.

If you need convincing, think about how many times you have avoided using a company because its website doesn’t work well on mobile, or because you can’t find the information you need. If you aren’t confident your site is as good as it could be, it’s likely people have experienced this on your site.

Search Engines and Social Media

A new website, built with search engines and social media in mind, is a fantastic way to super-charge your online presence. Ranking highly on search engines drives new business, and does wonders for brand credibility. Making your business easy to find should be at the forefront of your digital strategy; if your current website ranks poorly, or offers a poor user experience, then a new website optimised for search engines is a must have.

A well designed website is a fantastic touch point for new and existing customers, one obvious area to help enhance this is social media. Here at NetMaxRes, we are specialists in social media strategy and therefore know the benefits of targeting audiences through social media and driving them to your website. We equally know that a poor website can substantially reduce the impact of this type of marketing. Fancy getting the most out of vast social media audiences? Start with a website that does your brand justice.

A new website adds value to your business; it gets you noticed in a highly competitive world, and enforces your credibility as suppliers of a high-quality service. Having a scalable online presence is vital – a well-designed and developed website gives you the perfect launch pad to deploy your digital strategy.

From keeping your current clients confident, to reaching out to new areas, make sure your primary touch point doesn’t let you down. To learn more about the different website packages we offer, and how we can help your online presence, contact: [email protected]

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Developing Locally

Developing live on the web is a great place to start, however you will soon find its limitations. Before I discovered the wonders of developing locally I, one, had to have an internet connection to work, and two, was reliant on creating subdomains to test out changes to sites. Creating a local environment is quick and easy to do, and completely changes the way you work. Having an independent, offline copy of the sites gives you the freedom to test out changes before uploading them to the web. I recommend WAMP (Windows) and MAMP (Mac), these allow you to create a development environment on your local machine for free. Building on this, there are other tools in the pipeline that will make the world of local development even easier. Top-tip, keep your eyes peeled for ‘Local’ from Flywheel (currently in beta).

Plugins

Plugins are your friend, but use them sparsely. During development there are a few I install straight away, use to get the project running, and uninstall on the live site. Keeping your site clean of unnecessary code should always be in the forefront of your mind. Here are a few plugins I always install.

1. For working on sites that aren’t your own, or the ones with more complex themes, ‘What The File’ is a must have. This gives you a toolbar showing the file and template-part being used on the page you are viewing; a great time-saver for those more intricate customisations.
2. There will be times when you need to work on live sites, sometimes even taking them offline for a short period of time. Adding a styled holding page is a useful option here. ‘Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode by SeedProd’ gives you a flexible and easy to use holding page that can be instantly switch on or off.
3. Another plugin I use with almost all sites is ‘All in One Migration’. You can use this to create a copy of your site that you can install on your local environment. It’s quick, easy to use, and flexible. Just watch out on larger sites for the 512mb upload limit!

With these few plugins you can massively improve your development process and knowledge of WordPress.

Images

Optimise your images, it’s essential. There’s nothing worse than going to a site, only to find you’re being brought back to the dark ages with images loading at snail’s pace, down the page, row by row. While there is no magic number for the maximum size of web images, there are ways to keep your images as small as possible.

For example, one trick is to look at the maximum size an image will be displayed on your site and work from there; if you have a 1200px container on your page, uploading a 3000px wide image is wasteful.

You will find that you can typically reduce jpegs of 2 -3mb down to <200kb, with an almost unnoticeable drop in quality. Similarly, using tools like Optimizilla and tinyPNG you can reduce pretty much all images to a tiny size. With each image that you optimise for web, the quicker your page will load, the better your SEO, and the better your UX.

DNS

DNS is complicated, and granted is on a slightly different skew than the rest of this article, however when understood adds a valuable tool to your arsenal. There is nothing more intimidating than finding out you need to make DNS changes, and not having a clue where to start. I’ll include the standard caveat here that messing around with DNS can have disastrous consequences. The best piece of advice I can offer is to use your hosting provider, they will have the knowledge to help. A five minute call, or an instant chat session, can save hours of trawling through videos and outdated articles. Personally, I’ve found the staff at Vidahost extremely knowledgeable and helpful.

Another trick I found useful when learning about DNS is having two domains independent of any live projects. You can play around with the DNS settings on these to get an idea of what does what. This is a great way of simulating the live DNS changes you might need to make on a production site, without the risk of breaking anything.

Some final thoughts

You can be sure that every WordPress developer has a unique way of working, and looking for the perfect method for yourself and your clients does take time. I’ve found that when I step back and get out of my bubble, when I start looking into how other people work and what’s coming up in the future, that it’s then that great little time-savers emerge.

The post WordPress Development – Tips for those just starting out appeared first on NetMaxRes Digital Marketing in Guildford.

1. Maintenance.
There’s only one thing that looks as sloppy as a lack of internet presence and that’s an out of date, underutilised internet presence.
An unkempt social media profile is a bit like bad dental hygiene, it needs looking after, otherwise people will literally stay away from you. If a Google search were to show two similar business and one was fully up to date – and the other hadn’t posted since 2012, some may well assume the business no longer exists. Frequent posting also keeps your business in the forefront of people’s minds so next time they need the services you provide – you’ll often be the first they come to. So, like brushing your teeth, social media has to be maintained daily – and no, not just the once.

2. You get out what you put in.
What happens when you eat junk food? You may put on weight. What happens when you post spam? You will lose credibility and your potential customers will lose interest. Finding meaningful, relevant content that will keep your customer engaged can seem like an ongoing slog, but it’s worth it.

3. Stay connected.
It may seem obvious to some, but so many small businesses still fail to have a cohesive set of social media profiles. By not linking your website to your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram you make it harder for customers to keep up to date with your business developments and conversely by not making your website accessible from social media you may lose out on real business.

4. Engage.
The clue is in the name. ‘SOCIAL’. The beauty of social media is that it gives an informal platform to listen to your customers’ needs, solve their issues and answer any queries; failure to respond to your online customers will simply be viewed as bad customer service.

There are many ways in which your social media profiles may not be selling to their maximum potential, and for most people even the four things listed may be a lot to juggle on top of running a company. For more advice and information on how NetMaxRes can help you and your business call 01483 789 434 or email [email protected]

The post This Year, Keep Your Social Media Healthy. appeared first on NetMaxRes Digital Marketing in Guildford.