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I may be biased – after all, I’m immersed in everything “online” – but when you consider the volume of people who search for businesses and research products and services online, it starts to seem completely nuts not to have a website. If you don’t have one – or if you do but don’t see the value in it and you let it sit there gathering dust – here are some good reasons to reconsider.
It may be time to say goodbye to the traditional home page design. Instead of the usual content boxes (a bit “about us”, a testimonial, a newsletter signup…), how about capitalizing on the funnel effect? Drive visitors toward your desired goal by segmenting your home page into sections that appeal to your customers’ needs, interests, budgets and more. Want to know how to do it? Read on!
If you paid $5,000 for your website… you may have paid too much. If you paid $500 for your website… you still may have paid too much. This isn’t a post about how much a website **should** cost (I wrote one of those already!) but about whether or not you’re paying too much for yours. And the cost is not just about a number at the end of a proposal. Read more to find out what you should be thinking about the next time you evaluate a cost.
Hiring a good developer is no small task. You may not know what questions to ask or what answers you’re looking for. There’s plenty of jargon to go around and to make matters worse, you can be quoted some pretty wildly different prices from different people. But you want a great website, so you’re going to need a great developer… the question is, how do you find one? Here are a few tips that you can use to vet the next team you interview, to see if they’re the right one for the job. Hint: it has nothing to do with whether they “know HTML” and everything to do with how they approach your business.
Having a great website is a lot of work and can be a pretty significant investment of both time and money. Now with platforms like Facebook making it easy for us to open up a page, event set up a storefront, it may make you wonder: why invest all that in a website when I can set up shop quickly, easily (and free) on Facebook? Well, here’s why… ten reasons why, in fact, so read on to find out all the cons (no pros here) and let me know if you agree or disagree.
Whether you’ve just opened up shop online or have been in business for years, how much have you really paid attention to how your website is affecting your sales? You may think that making sales has to do with the quality of your products or your prices… but what if I told you that even if you have the greatest products and lowest prices in town, you could still be driving away sales with something as simple as a misplaced icon or a poor choice of colors? Here are 12 actions you can take to improve the trustworthiness of your site and give shoppers the reassurance they need to check out confidently.
Mobile web browsing is expected to surpass desktop web browsing this year. We’re using our mobile devices, especially our smartphones, on the way to work, in stores, and during meetings, conversations and meals. That’s why we as businesses need to make sure our mobile content is mobile-friendly – easy to find, easy to view, and easy to share. Here are four ways to make that happen.
Someone probably told you to test your site before launch. If you’re like most people, clicking around on a few pages and not seeing anything glaringly broken means testing. But there are some things you should be looking for if you want to be sure your website is really ready to go. Here’s a simple list you can use as you test for launch, and that you can also use periodically to be sure things are still looking and working as they should be.
Whether you run a business website or a blog, chances are you’re going to use photos. And in today’s visual world, we know that photos are a great way to capture interest, increase engagement and – let’s face it – sell stuff. So why are so many sites so dismally bad at using photos? Here are some of the more egregious photo mistakes I’ve seen, so if any of these sound like you, fix them now!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a number of conversations and listened to several podcasts where people have opined on how content should be assembled for a company mobile website vs. a desktop website. There was a recurring theme that went something like this: When creating your website, start by writing/creating the content for your mobile site first. Chances are when you come up with the important content you need for your mobile site, you’ll realize you don’t need any more content for your desktop site. Here’s what’s right about that, and what’s not.
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