Author: Ross
Has your website been in development for too long?
So many people start to have a website built and then get too bogged down with the details and end up having it in development for years. This not only means that by the time it goes live it will probably look a little dated but also the code used on the site may not be secure anymore.
This will probably mean that you end up having to pay additional costs which you wouldn’t of had it of gone live when it should.
If the delays in your website development are the fault of the web agency or programmer then you should sit down with them and go through a timeline. You need to establish what is needed from you and when in order to get the site up and running. Set a new deadline that you both agree on and that is realistic. You need to ensure that targets are met, so ideally break down the remained of the project into smaller chunks so that you have goals to aim towards. This could be for example, completing all the home page elements by a set date then having all products uploaded by the next date that you set.
The importance of planning out your website
If you are going to be having a new website then it is very important to ensure that it is planned out properly and in detail. It can be tempting to just show the developer a few websites you like and ket them get on with it, but there needs to be communication both ways in order to ensure you get the end product you want but also more importantly, need.
Each company has their own unique selling points and ways of working. A website should reflect the personality of the business and match the rest of your marketing whether that be social media or sign writing on a vehicle.
You should spend some time with the designer and developer, talking about what your business does and why you need a website. You will need to convey what you want the website to do and then how you would like it to look. If you are stuck for ideas, have a good look around before you meet with them at other sites to find some that you like. If you can then show these to the designer, they will be able to start to get a feeling for the type of thing you are looking for.
Is your website development and marketing business booming?
As the UK slowly starts to come out of lockdown more and more businesses are investing in marketing to increase their sales. When shops and premises had to shut, a lot of businesses could only continue trading through their website or through social media sites. Lots of the general public, who had never before bought things online had to turn to the internet to make their purchases so online sales boomed in many industries. For this reason, lots of developers and online marketing companies saw an increase in demand for their services abs this has yet to slow down. Even many of the businesses that had to shut, used that time to evaluate what they were doing and how to push their business to the next level.
Companies that have continued to market their way through the pandemic should come out in a stronger position the other side of all this and may well of overtaken competitors that maybe paused everything for a while.
As a freelance web developer / marketeer or when working for a web agency it is vital that you manage your time effectively and customers’ expectations to ensure that no one is disappointed. This is crucial especially during busy periods.
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Should you sell advertising space on your website?
If you have an established website that receives a fair amount of traffic each day then you may considering adding advertising space to your site as another way of making money. Many website owners think that they already have the site up and running so it wouldn’t be a massive amount of work to add in some advertising space.
For some businesses this can work really well but there are many important factors to consider. You need to ensure that by adding the advertising space, you are not going to put people off from using your site. If your site becomes over cluttered with adverts or pop ups you will often find that your visitor levels go down and bounce rate soars. This can mean you make money on advertisements but lose money due to lack of sales or enquiries through your site. As the traffic decreases to the site due to the adverts, you may find that your advertisers start to pull the plug too.
You may want to start off small when it comes to advertising and just have one or tow spots where you will place adverts. You can then monitor the effect this have on the traffic to your site and visitor behaviour and see whether it is worth pursuing.
How can you increase the number of visitors to your blog?
A blog can be created for a number of reasons. You may have a blog to publish your own personal journey somewhere or on a specific subject such as travel or fashion. You may have a stand-alone blog site or you may have it attached to your website. Often marketing companies create blogs for their clients as a way of getting fresh, relevant content on to the site without cluttering up the main pages of the site. These blog posts should be unique and relevant to the business. Although you may of h=created the blog mostly for SEO purposes, it is important to remember that people may well read these posts so they need to be accurate and informative.
With a standalone blog you may need to work a little hard to get traffic to it as you cannot rely on traffic from a website. This can be done in several ways, but more and more people are using social media to promote their blog posts. Finding relevant groups on social media sites such as Facebook and then promoting your blog posts or page can help drive traffic through, always check what the rules of the group are in case you are not allowed to share links.
If your blog is part of a website then make sure you have a place on your home page which shows your latest blog posts as this will allow people to easily click through on to articles that are of interest to them.
Having video calls with your marketing and web design team
During these strange times it is easy to get distracted with day to day tasks and forget to put time in to your marketing. If your business is still able to trade then you still need to be investing money, possibly even more than before, during this time. It may be that you have had to start to run your business differently, in which case you may need to tell your customers how they can still access your products or services.
Just because you cannot easily meet face to face with your web agency or marketing personnel, doesn’t mean that you cannot still have meetings with them. Often meetings are better this way anyway as it means no one has to factor in travel time and you usually find that the meeting stays on topic so doesn’t last longer than it needs to. There are a number of different platforms you can use for video meetings such as Zoom and Microsoft teams. Try and arrange a short meeting once a week or once every couple of weeks just to have a quick catch up on where you are with everything and what you are planning going forward.
How to pick up on errors with your website quickly
It is important to keep a close eye on your website and be sure to have system in place that allow you to find out quickly if there is a problem. There are a number of different tools you can use which will help you notice errors before they cause too much of a problem. If your site is regularly indexed then you can set it up to get notifications from Google about crawling issues. This will usually be done through emails to the people who manage the Webmaster Tools account.
Within the Webmaster tools software, you can also see which pages are returning error codes, have elements that are not working correctly (I.e. mobile elements too close together) or hat are not indexed in the search engine results.
Looking at analytics, you can see what your traffic is doing. It may be that you notice a sudden drop in traffic which needs investigating quickly. IT may be that your website server has gone down and so your whole website is offline or possibly that a certain page has been corrupted and therefore not loading. Once spotted many of these issues are often easy to fix.
Online marketing for the new start up business
As you embark on the adventure that is running your own business one of your main fears will be whether you can promote your business in such a way that it will grow your target client base and maximise the profit that you hope to achieve. An online marketing strategy will be essential to your business if you want to achieve growth and develop your company’s potential but what are the main issues to consider and how do you decide where best to spend your marketing finance?
Creating a successful business website is probably the most effective marketing tool for most new companies as once it is effectively optimised a website should attract clients to your business and convert visits to sales. Employing a web designer and developer to ensure your site is successful at promoting your business is a worthwhile way to start your marketing journey.
It is important to remember that social media marketing is a fast-growing platform that can be used to boost your marketing potential and links should be built into your social media business page so that visitors are directed to your website for more detailed business information and links should also be on your website to your social media page.
Learn how to program for beginners
Many people think when they hear the phrase “computer programming”, that it is a complicated process that can only be undertaken by professionals but coding is not difficult to learn and with determination anyone can learn the coding necessary to write simple programmes. Some programming languages are easier to learn than others, so it is a good idea to start off with one of these.
Firstly, the programme that you want to write will determine the complexity of the computer programming language that you will need to learn. HTML is a simple coding language which is a good one to begin with and is widely used in web design. JavaScript is also a contender for ease of use and is relatively easy to learn.
If you want to get involved in web development, content management systems or ecommerce applications then learning PHP would be an essential programming language to get to grips with as it is used widely in many popular applications.
It may be that your interest is in game programming as this is becoming an immensely popular and lucrative career choice for graduates. If this is the case, then a solid knowledge of C++ or equivalent is important and will ensure you have a good chance of employment in this field.