“I have a Facebook Page..Why do I need a business website?”
We get asked this a lot. And we get it. Especially when you’re a small business owner, and every penny counts, the option of having a totally free online presence via a Facebook Business Page is appealing. After all, why should I pay for a website? A designer? Hosting? Domain name? Maintenance plan, etc.? I could get my name out there for free! The truth is it’s just not the same. I have put together 7 reasons why you shouldn’t replace having a business website with simply a Facebook Business Page:
If you’re anything like me, you get distracted on any kind of social media platform. Lets take the best case scenario: you brought the customer onto your Facebook Business Page. You’ve posted all of this great content, trying to nurture your target audience, and low and behold! Your potential customer gets a ding! Notification! That little red badge is so small but so appealing to click on! And there goes your guy/gal. And believe me, they are not going to remember to return back to your page once they found out that cousin Samantha finally got engaged. Its a long and drawn out spiral from there.
Your biggest wealth is your following. Let me specify..Your biggest wealth is YOUR following. That’s right, on Facebook, they may have liked your page, but you don’t own that lead. You don’t have a consensually opted in email address in hand, through which you can nurture your customers until they are ready to purchase your product/service. Not to mention the loads of benefits of email marketing such as tagging leads into different groups to nurture them based on classifications, which is totally unavailable with Facebook posts on your page. It’s a shot in the dark, hoping that something sticks to someone.
Facebook has many of its own advantages, and you can create a business presence on the platform, but unfortunately, every business is going to do so and therefore it is much harder to stand out. There are only so many options for customizing the look and feel of your business page on Facebook. While yes, they allow for uploading photos, link, cover photos, profile photo, about section, etc., there is only so much you can do with the cards dealt to you. When I build websites for our clients, I integrate a look and feel into their site that will leave their consumer with a memorable impression. The ability to design and craft the user experience is much more available on a business website, the options are limitless.
While yes, most people have facebook nowadays, you have to still consider your target market very carefully ot figure out where you have your highest, most dense amount of them. If you are trying to cater to a much younger crowd, well then, in mid 2020 many have already shifted their focus to other platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. A recent poll shows that in 2020 only about 68% of U.S. adults are on facebook. That’s 32% of business that you could be leaving on the table! Say you make $100k/year…well now you made $68k. While social media marketing is very important to the growth and success of your business, having a business website that is catered towards your ideal customers is vital. It can help you offset that constant search for the latest platform that hosts most of your customers.
Imagine this: you need a plumber to install a new bathtub in your bathroom after your old one broke. What’s the first thing you do? That’s right, you go to your good friend Google and perform a quick search. I don’t believe most people would perform that search on Facebook, am I right? While yes, Facebook pages do rank in Google, you don’t have the ability to implement an SEO strategy that is filled with target specific industry keywords and backlinks to your content. Generally the only way people will go to your page on Facebook is mostly if they know of your brand already.
I’ll let you in on a small secret most people don’t really know about: Everything you do online leaves a trail behind you. Facebook is FULL of business just like yours. One feature that Facebook has is marketing to ‘look alike crowds’. Meaning, your customers will be marketed to by other similar companies on Facebook merely because they entered your business page. And now it is know in the Facebook algorithm that they are ‘interested’ in services like yours. Suddenly you can find yourself in a pool of 50 other sharks trying to bait your customers with shinier and brighter offers than what you currently have.
I know you’ve probably heard this before, but it is still very much applicable and let me explain with a personal example. What if facebook shuts down tomorrow? Or If Facebook decides to close your account? Or Facebook changes it policies that directly affect you?, etc. The list goes on. When you don’t have your own business website, you are dependent on many factors that are no longer in your control. I have personally experienced this now. One of my biggest marketing channels is TikTok. As some of you may have heard already, in mid 2020 Tiktok keeps threatening to get banned in the U.S. and has already been banned in several big countries due to various data management issues. Of course, I am left scratching my head thinking, “Why did I put in all this effort to cultivate such a large following on TikTok? Luckily I have been also cultivating my brand through my website, and gathering smart business owners like yourself to follow my company. I think I have proved my point.
Should you stop giving so much love and attention to your Facebook page? Absolutely not! Facebook is an amazing place to grow your audience and cultivate your following. However it won’t give optimal results if used on its own. You should be using your Facebook page as more of a tool to bring people to your website, where you have much more control over guiding your customers to your desired outcome. One where you can build up a lead-list that you own. You don’t need a heavily designed, stunning website. But at least one that is user-friendly, clear, and optimized for search-engines.
Here at 1Bar Design, one of our pillars is crafting sites that are not only beautiful and strategic, but also ones that Google will most definitely not frown upon. Contact us to get the ball rolling on building your website to grow your business.
Here’s a classic conversation I’ll have with my clients about 1-2 months after we launched their website. Generally, as a result of their checking out new upgrades on their competitor’s sites:
Client: “Hey Solomon, I see [competitor company] has a blog on their website. Do you think I should have one too?”
Me: “I say an emphatic yes. But it depends on how committed you’ll be to writing and posting articles to that blog consistently.”
Client scratches their head thinking to themselves whether it’s worth the effort.
In order to give you some clarity, here’s WHY it is absolutely worth it for every business owner to invest some of their efforts into having a blog on their business website:
In order to show yourself and your business as an authoritative entity to search engines, you need to be able to show that you know the answer to any question asked in your field of business.
A great strategy to do that is to publish consistent articles that address specific questions that pertain to your business.
In essence, you’re not only clarifying ambiguities, but you are doing so by using long tail keywords.
For example: If you sell travel insurance.
You would likely be tempted to settle for a general keyword that all insurance companies use: “travel insurance”.
But imagine you wrote an article on “Things to keep in mind when buying travel insurance” – you can include a plethora of combinations that will form long tail keywords such as “Compare travel insurance plans online for coverage” and “best ways to maximize your coverage is to buy travel insurance that…”.
You hit the subject from multiple different angles, search engines would prioritize showing your site over other competitors who haven’t shown their expertise like you.
According to Hubspot, websites that have consistent blog posts see a whopping 55% increase in traffic!
Often times, when visitors land on your website, it is their first impression of your company.
They know nothing about you, so the first impression is key.
Amongst other strategies, one of the best would be to display your expertise up front.
This can be achieved by showing a few sample articles from your blog on your homepage.
Generally these articles should be covering your target markets most frequently asked questions.
If you can immediately answer them, you are now seen as the expert and your company has now gotten a step closer to building that know-like-trust factor customers need to do business with you.
Prospecting is never easy.
But, one thing that will definitely make it easier is coming to the battle prepared.
Have your arsenal fully loaded with the resources you need when cold reaching out to prospects.
Specifically, I’m talking about blog articles that are geared directly at answering your potential clients questions before they even ask them.
Figure out exactly what your ideal client is struggling with.
Make a list of about 5 – 10 struggles.
Write knockout articles to solve these struggles, providing them with free advice.
Now that you have these heavy cannons, go out there and talk to people. Network. The second the pain points surface themselves, either from you unearthing them, or your prospect sharing their own struggles, you drop an article bomb on them.
Now step away and watch them come back for more.
Once you write articles that answer all aspects of your leads’ questions, you now have the perfect opportunity to drop a call to action. A call to action is what transfers a potential client from passively interested into actively pursuing.
If someone reads your articles all the way through this means one of 3 things:
In the event that we are not dealing with #3, it would be a really good idea to place a call to action in your blog articles somewhere towards the end, to nudge them in the right direction. They’ve gotten this far already, give them a button to click. You will only see more business for it.
And by the way:
You know you want to click it…
In order to connect to your audience, you need to have the ability to interact with them.
It may be tempting to expect to be able to interact with your tribe via social media, and while that may be the case at times, it’s not the quality of conversation that you’d like to have.
Oftentimes, when someone comments on your post on Facebook, it’s not because they intentionally went to your business page, read your post and then interacted.
Rather Facebook’s algorithm served your post to their newsfeed at that moment in time, and they happen to see it and leave a comment in passing.
Commenting in passing with 101 other distractions cannot be compared to blog article readers interacting with your post via the comments section.
Firstly, they are there intentionally.
They are ready to read, and learn more about the headline subject which will yield ultimately to a much higher level of feedback.
You can gain insight on who your tribe is through these sorts of correspondences, and adjust your offering accordingly.
When describing your services and products throughout your website, there is a fine line to strike between too much detail and just enough. Often it’s tempting to share everything at once, but at that point you are taking away real estate from showing the benefits to the customer. Feature-stuffing is an easy rabbit hole to fall into, but it is inevitable that at times, you just gotta do it. For those moments, when you need to go feature-deep, blog articles are your savior. You can go as deep as you need, and the search engines will only reward you for the product-specific keywords you use. In the same vain, you can also use blog articles to discuss things like processes, timelines, sop’s, etc. Show how the gears turn within your company. Give some context to what you do. Search engines as well as people love this sort of content.
What is important to remember when it comes to leading a successful blog is that consistency is king.
Whether you’re writing for search engines to pick up on your content, or for people to learn more about your company, consistency is your holy grail.
Releasing a blog article once in 6 months won’t bring you much benefit.
There is no need to shell out 10,000 word articles, but any sort of valuable ideas you can contribute over 300 words are worth publishing into an article on your website.
If you are struggling with finding topics to write about I suggest reaching out to your clients, perhaps past clients you’ve worked with and see what they are struggling with.
This will give you a solid starting point, and believe me, ideas inspire each other as you’re writing.
Ready to build a purposeful website with a blog functionality you can use to grow your business? Click below to view our website design + strategy packages and start a conversation about your project today.
If you are ready to build a beautiful website with a blog to grow your business, reach out to us to start your project today.
It’s a scary time for everyone. We are in the midst of a coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the world is expected to continue to function somehow from within the isolation of everyone’s homes. Regardless if you are a bakery, a medical clinic, or a law practice, every brick and mortar location has had to unexpectedly close their doors for an indefinite amount of time, until further notice.
First thing’s first: relax. This is only temporary. While the coronavirus may have put a pause on your office hours, this doesn’t mean that you sit home and pass time with worry and nothing else.
Sure the coronavirus has had a negative impact on the world, but it is our responsibility to find the silver lining, and believe it or not, there are plenty.
This is a perfect time to clean up your marketing strategy, and there are plenty of things you can do from the comforts of your own homes.
Don’t forget, you are not the only ones camped out at home, scrolling through your social media feed, reading blog posts, you found this one after all. Everyone is! The demographic you are targeting is out there almost guaranteed to be online and this is your chance to get yourself in front of them!
You must use this time wisely and clean up your marketing strategy.
Ready?
Use this chance to do an audit on your content. Are your articles driving your message through to your target audience? By the way do you even know who your target audience really is? Are you emails guiding the user towards conversion and are they timed correctly? There is really a lot to think about here. I recommend starting small. Set one content objective and tackle it. At the very least, produce new, fresh content and get it posted. If you’ve done that already, create some new posts, and schedule them to post in the future. This will free you up to get good work done when this coronavirus crisis is over with.
Along the same lines as above, make sure that your website is truly telling your brand’s story. Check your web analytics to make sure that performance is on par with where it should be. (If you’re scratching your head about that last analytics part…guess what – set up analytics! If you’re wondering how to do that, get in touch with me, I can help you out.) This may even be the golden opportunity to give a fresh feel to your online presence and fully modernize and redesign your website. If these seem like overly daunting tasks, you can at the very least audit your homepage or your landing page to make sure it is delivering customer conversions to your door.
If you would like a free video audit of your website, let me know, and I will gladly review your website in a short 5 minute video.
Email marketing has proven time and time again to be an unbelievably effective marketing method. With a well thought out email sequence, you can convert a countless number of viewers. If you are wondering where to start with your email strategy, here is a great article from Hubspot that covers most of what you need to know.
Speaking of email marketing, revisit your lead magnets to make sure they are effectively building your email lists. If you are wondering what a lead magnet is, that is a sure sign that its time to include one on your Landing page and your Homepage. A lead magnet is something that incentivizes your viewer to give you their contact information in exchange for something of value that you provide them with. This may be a free ebook that may help them, access to a webinar that solves a challenge they may be facing, or anything else that will capture your market. Figure out what your customer’s common challenge is that you can solve and capitalize on that.
We live in the golden era of screens. If no one can find you on any screens yet, you are not reaching as many people as you could be. It is no secret that video marketing is one of the most effective types of marketing nowadays. Especially during this unexpected coronavirus outbreak, you need to be able to stand out in your audience’s already crowded feed. The best way to do that is through use of video.
Ideas of video marketing may include:
– Youtube channel videos
– Webinars
– Customer testimonial videos
– Social Media Video Ads
– Recorded Interviews with other industry experts
There are hundreds of other ways that you can create content through video. If you are still looking for ideas for video marketing, here is a great list of ideas to get inspired.
It is easy to sit back and mope about how much revenue we’re loosing, but the smart business owners are using this time wisely. They are searching for marketing guidelines such as this one and dominating their marketing game. Be proactive about your business. These are only four out of hundreds of other things you can do while in isolation in your home.
Many businesses are tempted to suddenly take the desperation method and slash prices and offer blowout deals, but this is actually not the right approach. Don’t set yourself up for having to recover from this coronavirus crisis. Instead, position yourself to hit the ground running when we all get back to our pre-virus grind. Come in proud that you didn’t waste your #CoronaBreak and that you kept your digital game stronger than ever.
Often times, business owners will hear the words ‘domain’ and ‘hosting’ and wonder what in the world the difference is. Here’s small comparison I once heard somewhere to clarify the confusion:
A domain, i.e. youwebsite.com, is similar to the address of you house, i.e. 123 Your-Address Lane, Miami Florida. The domain is what gives people the ‘direction’ to find your location. Hosting on the other hand is the property of land on which your house is located. Say you are building yourself a new house (website). You want to choose a property that is in a good location, that’s not prone to flooding, on flat land, in a secure neighborhood, etc. So too with hosting, you want to choose a plan that can properly suit the needs of your business, in terms of security, speed, scalability, support, etc.
Most websites in this world are hosted on Shared Hosting services. Shared Hosting, as it sounds, is when other websites are on the same server splitting resources of that server. These are generally the cheapest plans, but also less reliable.
This kind of hosting plan is usually extremely reliable as the server on which your website lives is not shared with other websites. Meaning there are no other websites bringing in threats to the server, and your website uses all of the resources available to the server.
This is a newer version of hosting and has a very promising future ahead. This type of hosting is when your website is hosted on a virtual server made of many physical servers in different locations. This type of hosting can almost guarantee no downtime on your website. If one server goes down, another one will pick up the slack. Cloud Hosting is also more reliable for scaling website traffic.
A good hosting plan is vital to the success of your digital presence. With a poorly chosen service, it can cost your website lower Google rankings, a slow website, security issues, and a poor web performance all around.
A website that is slow automatically seems unprofessional and much less likely to convert. Viewers are subconsciously begging for a reason to bounce from your site, and a slow site is one of the biggest reasons for viewers hitting that back button before purchasing. The generally accepted statistic is that there is a 1% loss for every 100ms delay in page load time.
When it comes to search engine optimization, which means increasing your visibility in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., having a faster loading time = a better ranking. Google and other search engines put a high value on faster loading websites, and tend to give them higher spots in the results page.
Whether its your own website or a website you are trying to find, if you’ve ever come across this screen, you know how frustrating it can be:
One thing is for sure, it is most definitely not a good reflection on whoever is the owner of the site, and can lead to a big drop in trusting audience. Make sure that your company promises at least 99.9% uptime. That is the industry standard. With an uptime of 99.9% this still means that your website will see about 8-9 hours of downtime per year, but unfortunately there is not perfect hosting anywhere. Our job at least is to try and mitigate that number. Especially as your website gets more traffic, you will start to see real statistics in which downtime can affect business.
For me personally, security is one of the biggest deal breakers with hosting. There are certain hosting companies, who’s names we won’t name here, which are socially known to have absolutely terrible security. The horror stories that I hear from colleagues and clients about their past security experiences are absolutely horrifying.
Something else you want to ensure is that your hosting offers an SSL service. An SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is essentially a lock on your website which make sensitive information secure. SSL’s ensure that hackers will not get any information that you input into the website such as contact information or worse, credit card details. Not having an SSL certificate on your website is considered bad SEO practice as well.
It is important to be able to rely on the hosting company when things go wrong, and believe me, they do. Whether your site is down, or your site has been hacked, you need to be able to depend on a hosting company to lend a hand, and maybe even fix things themselves.
Something I personally always look for in a hosting company is if they provide backups included in the plan, and how often. I always have my own backup generator, but its always good to have a last resort when all else fails. I have personally seen sad cases of external backup systems failing, and the hosting company not providing their own, which of course resulted in half the site being wiped…Leading to this reaction:
The last point we will cover in this article, albeit there are many more, is scalability. If you play your hand right, and stay consistent with your marketing efforts, your traffic will hopefully grow. This means that you need a web host that can accommodate a spike in traffic. This is important to think about especially if you chose to go with a shared hosting service. The host should be able to allocate more resource towards your website so your website doesn’t collapse with more viewers.
As mentioned earlier, you should figure out what needs your website has. Are you on a tight budget? Are you selling products on your website? How much traffic do you have passing by on average per month? Do you need a higher level of support? Are you using WordPress and therefore might prefer a Managed WordPress Host who specialize in WordPress support such as Flywheel?
There are many questions to consider when it comes to picking the right host, and how much you should be paying them. The price majorly depends on what kind of hosting service you are getting. Shared Hosting services, which are the cheapest options, range from $3 – ~$20 per month. Dedicated Hosting averages at around $100 per month and Cloud Hosting can cost between $5-80 per month although if you are buying a more enterprise level package, than can run up $300 per month.
For those of you who are starting out or have a smaller budget, we recommend our personal Shared Hosting favorite, Siteground. For what they are, and for the unbelievably cheap prices that they charge, they have amazing support, great speed, and are a very reliable hosting company. I send clients there way all the time knowing confidently that they are a great budget option.
And finally for those of you who have a little bit more breathing room in their budget, specifically those of you with WordPress Sites, as I build here at 1Bar Design, I recommend Flywheel. This company is magic when it comes to hosting WordPress websites. They have a dedicated support staff that are all experience in WordPress support, so not only do they have excellent hosting, but they take it a step further and support your WordPress questions as well.
Dear business owners, do you research, figure out what your site needs. If you’re seeing a slow site, it could be time to upgrade your hosting. If you are seeing lots of downtime, look into your hosting. Your hosting can make or break your business, literally.
If you have good hosting already, and everything lines up with your website needs, then It could be an indicator that its time to redesign your website, and make it more modern. Your website might need speed optimization, better code structure, image compression, etc. Make sure though that hosting is not the issue first.
If you enjoyed this article, I’d love if you would leave a comment below. Even if you have any questions, let me know what to clarify! And please subscribe for the newsletter to find out when the next awesome, level-up article comes out. I write these articles strictly for your benefit!
Most run-of-the-mill small business web designers that you will meet have either no or very little expertise in Web Strategy. Unfortunately, there is not enough attention given to it, but strategy is the difference between your website converting leads and simply looking pretty, albeit attracting no one to buying your product or services.
Web strategy involves a properly weighed out plan of both how to get incoming traffic to your website, as well as within the website to guide the viewers towards your desired outcome.
Web Strategy is a long term game, a plan you implement in the beginning and consistently tweak to keep seeing better results. Unfortunately, many web designers are aware of the fact that this is a long term game. They are also aware of the fact that they will not be around anymore once your are scratching your head wondering why your website is not converting. What is most important to them is that they design your site, get paid, and move on with their lives to their next clients.
I’ll cross that bridge when I get there…
Sure, you can wait it out. That’s completely fine. But don’t forget that if you choose to go down that route, you will not only spend an exorbitant amount of time and money, but you are also loosing out on all of the potential customers you could have had. The opportunity cost is simply not worth doing it halfway the first time.
Your website has the potential to be the engine of your entire business, but simply a decoration to make you look good. Unfortunately, the good old mantra of “Build and they shall come” doesn’t work when it comes to websites. A strategy is needed to cut your way through the ‘cyber-noise’.
Did you know…
380 new websites are created every minute! That 547,200 new websites EVERY DAY!
Glad you asked! We will go over an actionable list for you to keep track of next time you work with a web designer. As a business owner, it is important for you to be informed and aware of proper web strategy.
Why are you making a new webiste? Is your website simply outdated? Are you trying to appeal to a new type of consumer? Trying to build certain functionalities on your website to increase the efficiency of your business?
It’s all too common that business owners will dive into a new website plan, without having a clear goal as to why it is they’re doing it. This means that they are likely to overstuff it with distracting, non-essential information which is non-conducive to good web design leading to a poor user experience, and ultimately low conversion rates.
Setting goals and priorites from the beginning is absolutely essential to the success of your website. These goals will serve as a roadmap and pave the digital path to a clearer structure to the website. They will also dictate which information is essential, and what content to nix from the beginning.
It is crucial to know your public. That is the first thing talk in speech classes, and a website is essentially a “digital-speech”. Your website is one of the first avenues of your brand that your customers will encounter, and just like a speech attempts to persuade the audience of a thesis, your website is selling your brand, your products or your services.
Learning who your audience are, what they value, what their age group is, what moods they connect to.
This doesn’t only pertain to the mood of the website, of course you won’t make a candy colored website with bubble letters if your an Estate Attorney. Go deeper than the color and fonts of the website. For example, if you’re a painter, what do you think your potential customers would want to see on your website. They want to see that your are a trustworthy person first and foremost, before even know how well you do your job. After all, they wouldn’t want a stranger who isn’t trustworthy lurking for hours, maybe days in their house. Of course this means that on the homepage, even towards the beginning of the page, you want to start showing that credibility. Start with social proof, such as testimonials that other have appreciated your honest and hard work. Perhaps list business accreditations you may have, etc.
Your website needs to follow the format that your customers will connect with immediately, even on a subconscious level.
While a website itself can do a lot for your business, it will not propel traffic on its own, otherwise I’d be a millionaire by now. Content strategy is by far one of the most important things for search engines such as google to keep ranking your website high. All marketers love the buzzword “content”, but its for a reason, it can’t be overlooked.
Many business opena website, or a blog without a plan of future content creation and this results in either no material publication on their website, or a very inconsistent, and unorganized triage of material.
Constantly updating your material, and publishing new relevant content will not only build your authority to your potential customers, but also will show Google, and other big search engines that you’re a force to be reckoned with, not simply one of the millions of new websites published weekly.
There is no easy way, content marketing is tough. It is a long game, and consistency of quality information is key. If you are a painter, it is nice to have your phone number in the top right corner of your website, but that won’t bring anyone new through the door. Your want to have some sort of blog or page where you can truly show off your expertise. Perhaps topics such as differnt qualities of paints – what to buy and what to avoid. Maybe instructions on DIY projects that are a little bit too tough for your classic home owners to handle, so they will call you in as the professional regardless. After all, there are a client base known for trying and failing, and coming to the professional in the end anyways. If you want more traffic, you must invest in your content game.
Personally, I love SEO (search engines optimization). It is a very fair way to be found, and puts all business on an even playing field. SEO is a direct result of how much effort a business puts into its website. SEO is a result of many things works together such as the quality of the content your produce, the pageload speeds, the cleanliness of the code, etc. just to name a few.
When I need to get my house painted, I immediately go to Google and I can either search a specific search term such as “House painter Los Angeles”, which may of course be very competitive, or something more vague such as “Which wall paint brands to avoid” which is a search term that you can easily show up for if you have written a brand comparison article. Of course you will get that call as the expert of your trade, having proven it in an article with your knowledge.
SEO can be done in two ways. Either you can go down the Pay Per Click route, and pay to show up for certain key word searches, such as “House painter Los Angeles” which will mostly likely be pricey, and hard for smaller business to achieve. Or you can play the long game, and make sure you are consistently producing good content with proper keywords usage to make sure you get ranked for the proper terms. The second method will of course take longer, but will be more rewards in the long run.
Marketing your website after it is built is crucial to the success of your launch. You need to get engagement from visitors on differenet social media platforms. Google needs to see that there is activity coming to your website from third party sources such as Facebook, Youtube, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Most social media platforms are OK to use to spread the word about your business and its information, but there is always an optimal way of doing so.
Remember when we spoke about knowing your audience earlier? Well this applies to social media marketing as well. You need to figure out who your target market is, and based on that market on platforms those demographics live on specifically. For example, back to our loyal painter, most of his demographic are home-owners which include generally males and females between the ages of 30-50. Most likely TikTok is not a good platform to go to since that attract mainly teens. In the painter’s case, a double punch of Facebook and Youtube would be the best option to stick to.
Social Media can seriously boost your business, especially if it is properly done, and you can get users to engage with your brand.
Most web designers will make your website mobile responsive nowadays. But the issue is that they will build a desktop website that looks ok, and then convert EXACTLY that to a mobile website. This is not great because not all elements that work with a desktop website are okay with a mobile website. For instance sometimes a background image will get cutt off on the sides and then the context of the image simply doesn’t make sense anymore, making it a distraction as opposed to an enhancement. As you well know, your users’ subconscious is only looking for a reason to leave the website, and even the smallest red flag such as images out of context will send them straight to the Back button. A website needs to be designed almost specifically for a mobile screen as most users nowadays are viewing your website on the go.
More than half of your users will be seeing your website on a small screen and you need to account for that.
Here at 1Bar Design, we design backwards for that reason. What I mean is that we start with designing the website for mobile, make that look good, and then convert the mobile website to something that looks good on mobile as well.
It is so important that your website is lighting fast. Statistically, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load your viewer’s bounce rate increases at an exponential rate. 6 seconds and you’re looking at a 50% bounce rate!
It would be a real shame to loose valuable customers over one extra second to load your website.
For this reason we recommend at 1Bar Design to always check your website speed with tools like pingdom.com and gtmetrix.com and if your website seems to load slowly, use their recommendations for what to improve, they will report to you exactly what needs fixing. If you don’t know what to do, always reach out to whoever manages your website, and they will know what to do. If not, feel free to get in touch with us for a speed optimization consultation.
Additionally, you need to make sure your website is on a good hosting plan. There are plenty of hosting services out there, but you need to make sure you get one that can actually support your website with the speed your website needs.
Your website host is very important to invest into so we like to recommend Flywheel Hosting. For those that simply don’t have the funds to invest in expensive hosting, our very close but much cheaper #2 recommendation always goes to Siteground Hosting. These are both extremely reliable with excellent support, and speeds. Most of our clients use one of the two, and we have never had an issue with either.
You will need to make sure that you have thought through how you measure success. This will of course be closely tied to the goals you set for yourself when you first planned out your website. Make sure that Google Analytics is set up properly on your website. If you are trying to measure conversion, make sure you have the proper tags firing off with Google Tag Manager.
Being able to measure success is an essential part of growing and improving your website, without which, you are simply shooting in the dark with no guarantee for success.
Following this strategy checklist will get you most of the way there, but the most important part is to constantly produce quality content. There is no shortcut to it. Map out your plan, follow these guidelines, and produce, produce, produce. If you do so, people are guaranteed to find you on Google and your business will boom.
And of course, get a well designed, professional website to be the engine of your business, there is no avoiding that.
