I have great clients because they’re always teaching me. I don’t know if all of these ideas came from clients but I felt they’d be helpful to a lot of other WordPress bloggers. Here are a few WordPress blogging mistakes to avoid, that I’d like to share with you: Read More →
Getting your business up and running online with a nice, professional website is certainly rather exciting. There is nothing more rewarding than to take a tour through the clever digital design behind what makes your website truly stunning to view. Yet, despite all the bells, whistles, and dazzling graphical displays, it has been a month and you’re still waiting to make a sale.
Sure, your site has had a few hits. But, for some reason, the traffic visiting your site is not signing up for an account, not placing items in the cart, or not proceeding to the checkout. This scenario can be frustrating to a business owner that has spent large sums of money to develop a website that doesn’t generate much revenue. To make matters worse, when you visit other lesser sites, it seems like their business is booming. What on earth is going on? Probably a lot more than you realize. Here are some ways you can tweak your website to start turning more site visitors into customers, the paying kind, of course!
Reading Time: 2 minutes
We get questions about stock photos from our clients quite often. When it comes to photos for your website – especially content marketing, blogging and social media – you need that extra visual punch. But stock photo services are expensive for start-ups and small businesses. I regularly advise my customers to use free stock photo websites to keep these costs down, whenever possible.
But turning to Google Image Search for photos won’t cut it. The search engine doesn’t allow you to view user agreements and can trip you up if you go this route. Copyright and license infringement is no joke and can bring hefty fines.
You might think, “It’s just a photo!” However, digital products are big business today. Photo supplier, Getty Images has, “an archive of 80 million still images and illustrations” according to Wikipedia and they are known for their feverish pursuit to enforce their licenses. To avoid legal headaches, here are some simple steps to ensure your business is protected.
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Okay, a website cannot hate you. It’s not artificially intelligent or biological, it can’t THINK about hating you. So, hate may be too strong a word but, the feeling may still persist.
How do you make it better? The website, I mean. Here are some things that I see organizations doing wrong, time and time again. Most of these will only cost you some of your time, some will cost very little money. Some of these are able to raise the confidence and comfort level of your visitors. While others increase the visibility and popularity of your company’s website!
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Google recently announced that beginning July 2018, the loading speed of your website on mobile will affect how Google will rank it.
Basically, if your website takes too long to load on a mobile device, Google will ignore it and bring up the website — which loads faster — that matches the searcher’s query.
The good thing is that you have till July to fix your website. So, you ask…
How fast should my website load?
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Here is a list of the best WordPress plugins that we use on many sites that we build and support. An ailing website has a difficult time at best to become useful and productive. We have had good experiences with all of these and recommend them for the purposes outlined here.
- If you are not paying for WordPress maintenance on your website, then you sorely need these plugins to keep your site healthy and safe.
- If you are building or supporting a small number of websites these are a great way to gain a more professional reputation. If you are trying to maintain more than say 10 websites, you should seek tools (online or offline) that require less intensive labor on your part.
WordPress Plugins That We Use and Recommend
One caveat! Please don’t install a bunch of recommended WordPress plugins from anyone’s list without first learning what each one does and how to use each one. You will only frustrate yourself and have a really ugly time wrestling with your website.