Managing Your Website
Gold Coast Business Websites – Managing Your Website; Video 4 of 4.
Ask your website designer about managing your website,BEFORE the website gets built. WordPress websites are simple enough to manage; if you can use MS Word, then you can update your own blog / website. However, the website design industry has a vested interest in you having to pay for simple updates you could do yourself.
We build small business websites for clients worldwide, but Australian web design accounts for most of our small business web design work. Either way, we provide customer support and training to help you do the basics to save you money.
In this fourth small business website video, one of my clients actually demonstrates updating a website himself – quick, simple, easy. We can do your website updates for you, but many clients prefer saving the money.
We design our Gold Coast Business Websites from the ground up to be user-friendly, so that you can handle changes easily yourself. This might be as simple as changing a phone number, to adding a new product or service. Many Gold Coast web design companies charge up to $85 per hour for site changes, and it is usually in the small print – so check this out BEFORE you sign up. Training can be one hour of one-on-one personal training at my office or over the phone, usually by Skype. Knowing how to make small changes is very helpful if business is slow and you want to put up a Special Offer until things improve – we show you how to do this.
Normally, we host your Gold Coast business websites for you, so that we can handle the more technical aspects, leaving you to save money by doing the simple stuff yourself.
My thanks to Keith of www.promotionalvideosbrisbane.com for his camera work, post production, and patience (and not necessarily in that order)! If you are into motorcycle touring, the blog he demonstrates is . Keith’s website is actually a hobby blog that makes a little income from advertising; if you want a hobby website, knowing how to update it yourself is vital, along with how to interact with vistors. Business Websites Gold Coast teaches you both.
Here is another example of a website we built:
Top Small Business Website Design Tips for 2018
If you are a small business owner, it is paramount to have a well-designed website. With a well-designed site, you will attract more traffic and enjoy better rankings on major search results. It is the uniqueness of your site design that allows you to gain an edge over your competitors. This is why it is important to invest your resources in terms of time and money to ensure that you have a website design that stands out from the others. To assist you in this process, here are some Top Small Business Website Design Tips you should follow in 2018.
Ensure your website is easy to navigate
If your visitors find it hard to navigate through your website, they will simply go to your competitors’ sites. You have to make sure that your site design is friendly to all users. The best way to do this is to ensure that users do not waste time or have difficulties when looking for information they need. Your small business website should have a solid navigation that also assists the search engines to index your content and improve your visitors’ experience. You can make your site easy to navigate by linking back to the homepage from all pages, keeping vital information on top and improving your site footer.
Design For a Mobile-Friendly website
A large percentage of people are now using mobile devices to access the web. This means that if your website is not mobile friendly, it will not offer good value to visitors. You simply must have a mobile responsive website because it is through mobile devices that most traffic is expected to come in 2018. Make sure that your website is responsive to all mobile devices in order to take advantage of the high number of people using such devices.
Make your Home Page clutter free
It is important to note that visitors rarely read all the information on your website. They usually scan the pages, noting keywords and important sentences. With this in mind, it is necessary to have a web design that appeals to the emotion of your visitors instead of focusing on the word count. Your site home page should have less information for your visitors to read, remember or click. Only have information that your visitors can process and evaluate easily, understand what your site is all about, and what you expect them to do. This increases their chances of them taking the desired action. Use icons and images as another way of communicating your point to your target audience. One of our most important Top Small Business Website Design Tips is to design for your visitor’s convenience.
Application of colourful and strong fonts
The font used in a website determines its success to a significant extent. In 2018, it is advisable you use strong and colourful fonts. Such fonts give your site a strong visual emphasis that makes it not only attractive to visitors, but also makes them spend more time on it. This is more important owing to the fact that mobile devices have already taken control of the digital world. To enhance success, you need to have the key phrases and keywords emphasized using bright colours and bold fonts.
Integrate social interaction elements
Social networking sites have gained high-level popularity and it is expected that they will reach a new high in 2018. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that your website integrates social interaction elements. This will encourage social interactions on your website, leading to more business. You can do this by using social media buttons that encourage your visitors to share your content, like your page, or post comments. It is also possible to have social media apps that connect to your website to allow instant interaction and sharing.
Apply site animation
Animation can have a great impact on making your website interface and ideas easy to understand. This is necessary because most visitors are in a hurry, so your site should convey important information fast. Animation also helps to convey complex ideas in an engaging manner. You can use storytelling, appealing images and other forms of animations to make your site information more understandable and make it friendly to users.
Bottom line
The most important thing to make your small business website a success is having all elements that make it user-friendly. This is a great way to attract more traffic and high referral rates. We hope you have enjoyed these Top Small Business Website Design Tips!
Gold Coast Business Website Design Tip 1
Ensure you give priority to your user’s needs. It is not about what you want to sell, it is about what they want to buy. If you are focused on meeting your user’s needs, then your product or service sells itself. Ensure they have a first-class user experience by providing good navigation that enables them to find what they need quickly. Try to see things from your visitor’s perspective when you creating your Gold Coast business website design.
Gold Coast Business Web Design Tip 2
A newsletter is pretty much essential. When people first visit your website, they may not be ready to buy. Capturing their e-mail and sending them useful, helpful, information over the next 2 to 3 months will help you to sell at the time they are ready to buy. Remember to include an unsubscribe link in your newsletter; Spam is a serious problem and you do not want to be accused of spamming your visitors.
Gold Coast Small Business Web Design Tip 3
It is important to design any website for viewing across a range of devices. Your visitor may be watching on a wide computer screen, a laptop, a tablet, a large mobile phone, were very small mobile phone. These days I design in a manner that gives a consistent view across all computers and phones. One of the biggest problems we websites these days is that many of them were built when the computer was still dominant. During June 2013 views on a mobile phone exceeded those for views on a computer for most industries. If you already have a website, you need to check that it looks good across a range of viewing devices.
Gold Coast Business Website Design Tip 4
Sometimes multiple websites are a good idea. It is important to keep your website focused on one thing so that both Google and your visitors understand clearly what your website is about. So for example, if you have a sewing business and also a bed-and-breakfast business, both run from your home, you should have a website for each.
It may be important to have more than one website for geographic locations too. If you are running a business that is operating in different cities, two websites – one for each city – will help you to stay geographically focused.
When creating a strategic direction for your business, make a decision as to a single website or multiple websites. At this stage, if you design multiple websites, make sure that you buy the domain names for all the websites so that you can implement your strategy knowing that all the domain names you want are under your control.
Gold Coast Business Website Design Tip 5
Make sure you include video in your Gold Coast business website design. If a picture is worth 1000 words, then it’s equally true that a video is worth 1000 pictures. Google actually owns YouTube, so it helps in getting your website ranked, and your video will get ranked as well in its own right.
Gold Coast Business Web Design Tip 6
Be cute, but not too cute. Avoid trying to add every new gadget to your website. It can be tempting to make your site looks cutting edge by including every new web design option out there but it can end up turning people off. Simple will generally get the job done even better than a flashy layout.
Gold Coast Small Business Website Design Tip 7
Talking of flashy, try to avoid using Flash on your website. It simply does not work well on some mobile devices, particularly Apple.
Gold Coast Business Web Design Tip 8
When designing your website, it is a good idea not to stray too far from popular conventions. For example, most users expect that when they click on the website logo at the top of a webpage, they will be taken to the home page of the website. If your Gold Coast business website behaves differently, it may confuse your visitor.
Gold Coast Business Web Design Tip 9
Try to make your site entertaining by putting plenty of graphics on your site. You want to wrap your text around images so that your site looks interesting. With content that catches the eye, visitors are interested in whats on your site. When you have content that is one massive block of text, people click off.
Gold Coast Business Website Design Tip 10
If you want a pro look, go with the Pros. We work with you to ensure that our web design expertise is blended with the expertise you have in your business. We do several things that other web designers do not do. For example, we will provide training and show you how to make small changes to your website; many web designers will not show you this because they want to charge you large sums of money for changes you could quite easily make yourself.
We also provide a custom look that incorporates graphics relevant to your business. Many web designers use free templates; you want to look that is unique to your business.
We also manage your website for you. Web design is constantly evolving, and we make sure you stay current. An important part of this is website security, which many web designers fail miserably on.
We also have YouTube channels that are highly-ranking, and you can see samples of our videos here.
For samples of our Gold Coast business website design, please click here.
