Not only is it important that you have a website, but the quality of your website plays a significant role as well. 85 percent of respondents agreed that the quality of a business’ website was an important factor in earning their trust, and 75 percent agreed that they were more likely to buy from “an unfamiliar business with a quality website,” than “a poor website from a known business.”

Every year the Internet becomes a more important part of doing business… being online isn’t enough anymore, you need an attractive, professional website.

Well, maybe… but perhaps you should put a bit more thought into why you are getting a website. Do you actually want to increase the amount of business you do? Or are you just getting a website because it’s the thing to do these days. If your motivations are the latter, then consider this: If the money spent is not going to deliver a website that will have a positive impact on your business, then it’s money wasted, regardless of the cost.

5 Reasons to Hire a Professional to Make Your Website

1. A website is an online extension of your business. A poorly designed website is the online equivalent of a dilapidated and messy storefront. Would you invite your clients and customers to visit you at a run down and unkempt storefront? Because that’s exactly what websites developed “on the cheap” often end up looking like.

2. A qualified web design company will have years of experience, giving them intimate knowledge of what does work and doesn’t work online. There are some “popular” conventions in web design that actually scare customers away from your website before they have a chance to find out anything about your company! A professional will be able to guide you away from inadvertently falling into these pitfalls.

3. Reliability: I was speaking to a client the other day, and they were telling me about the previous website they had made for their business. They hired a friend of the family who was a student and was offering what they needed at a lower, yet still significant price. The website was never fully completed to the client’s satisfaction, and the student upped and left the province… ending up half way across the continent. They left no source files, or any other information, so the client was basically left with a website that didn’t meet their needs and had no ability to have someone else come in and complete the website. The risk of having your own horror story like this is relatively non-existent when you hire an established company that’s been around for 5 – 10 years.

4. Do you have local competition? A recent study showed that up to 80% of business to business purchasers at least research their purchases online before making a decision. The numbers for regular consumers are even higher. That means many of your potential customers will be visiting your website and your competition’s website to help them make their buying decision. Still think a website is no big deal?

5. If you try getting your website designed cheaply and the end result is not satisfactory, not only have you lost your valuable time and money developing the unsatisfactory website, but you will have to go through the entire process again, costing you more time and money.

Stay tuned for the next post which will tell you how to pick the right web developer.

It seems like just about every business out there has a webpage, and you wonder if you’re the only one without. So do you really need a webpage for your business? The answer is probably yes, since a webpage can be a vital part of your marketing campaign. In a few cases, however, a business webpage is unnecessary. If your business is constantly busy and overbooked from your current marketing efforts, and you have no desire to grow or hire additional personnel, then a webpage would be a waste of resources for you. In short, if you’re happy with where your business is and aren’t interested in growth, then save your money.

Why do I need a webpage?

While a webpage can be more critical for different industries, even local businesses can benefit from a webpage. Don’t think of your website as a separate marketing tool apart from your other advertising endeavors, but think of it as part of your whole marketing strategy. Every time you talk about your business, or run an advertisement, include your webpage. That will provide your customers with 24-hour access to a wealth of information about your business for a very reasonable monthly fee. (Think of how much it would cost you to hire staff to man the phones 24 hours a day!) A website can help your customers find all sorts of information about your company: everything from providing offline contact information and directions to your brick and mortal location to actually convincing customers to try your product can be included on your site.

What does a webpage involve?

There are three main aspects to your online presence: your domain name, the webpage itself and the hosting company.

The Web Design: The first step is to actually get a web site designed, and this is the point where most people trip up. A whole article could be written about the process of finding a designer, but we’ll go into a few of the more important details here. First, don’t do it yourself, unless you know what you’re doing. Secondly, don’t go for the cheapest designer you can find. An attractive webpage is important. After all, what would your customers think if they came into your store and it looked horrible? The same principle applies to your webpage. Finally, make sure the design company you choose has an expansive portfolio and lots of references. Contact some of their previous clients and ask them about their experiences.

The Domain Name: Your domain name is how customers will visit your website. You shouldn’t pay more than $20 – $30 per year to register it (if you look around a bit, you will be able to find domain registration for even cheaper than that). Often times it’s easier to register your domain with the same company you choose to host your site (more on that later) – be careful though, make sure the company is established and not going anywhere. If they go under, it may be a huge hassle to get control of your domain name again. When picking a domain name, remember to keep it as short and as easy to remember as possible.

The Web Hosting: So now you’ve got a spectacular website and the perfect domain name. How do you get it up on the Internet? You need to find a web hosting company! There are literally thousands of web hosting companies on the net. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when choosing one.

1. Do not spend less than $10 a month (preferably more). If you are serious about your business, then your budget for hosting should be no lower than this.

2. Avoid hosts that promise “unlimited” or “un-metered” bandwidth. This just simply isn’t possible. It’s deceptive marketing at best, and outright lying at worst. You won’t need very much transfer anyway.

3. Make sure your host offers a 30 day money-back guarantee (read the fine print!). That way if things go south, you can always cut your losses and look somewhere else.

So, the answer is yes. Unless your main problem is that you have so many customers you don’t know what to do, a webpage can be a great marketing investment. On Wednesday, we’ll look into reasons for hiring a professional design company.

What is a domain name?

The Internet is actually a bunch of numbered addresses in the format of XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX (called IP addresses). Now, imagine how hard it would be to remember that many numbers every time you wanted to visit a website. Domain names are the solution! For example, if we didn’t have domain names, and you wanted to visit Bob’s Flower shop online, you’d have to type in 242.132.14.5 – but with domain names, all you have to do is type in www.bobsflowers.com. The domain name is simple and easy to remember, and in fact I bet you’ve memorized it already, but can you tell me what the IP address was without looking at it? Domain names provide memorable words and phrases that are much easier to memorize/type in than an IP address.

But domains are only half of the equation. To put your website online, you need to purchase a hosting account as well. The hosting account is the physical computer your website will be located on, and the domain name will provide an easy way for your visitors to access your page.

Why do I want a domain name?

You may be saying to yourself, “Do I really need the added expense of a domain name? Can’t I just get a web hosting account?” While it’s possible to host your webpage without a domain, you will run into the same problem we discussed before. Your website won’t have an IP address, but its address will still be long and difficult to remember. For the relatively inexpensive cost of domains, it just makes sense to get one along with your hosting account.

Where should I buy my domains?

Usually the best course of action is to get the domain at the same company you purchase your hosting from. That way, you only have to contact one company to get support for your webpage. Advanced users can save a bit of money by registering domains at the big domain companies online. If you take care of the registration yourself, remember that you have to keep your domain registered every year, otherwise it will become available for someone else to register.

The most common domain name scam…

As new beginner to domain name registration, the biggest scam you need to watch out for is the renewal/transfer scam. A company will send you an email or even a letter in the mail that will look like an invoice, and they will word the letter to sound like you are obligated to take action. This is a trick to get you to transfer your domain name to another registrar and have to pay an additional year of registration as a result of this. Unless the email or letter comes from the company you registered the domain with, just ignore it! When it doubt, contact the company you used to register your domain and ask them!

What makes a good domain name?

So if you’ve decided to take the plunge and register a domain, you’ll quickly realize that a lot of the premium domains are already registered, so how do you pick a good domain name? If you’re making a personal website, then the domain name won’t matter all that much. You should just pick a domain name that you like. However, if you’re picking a domain name for a business website, you should put some careful consideration into your choice. Obviously, “yourcompanyname.com” is probably going to be the ideal choice, unless your company has a very long name – in which case you should try to find an abbreviated form of your company name. For instance, if your company was called “Teledyne Technologies” you could go with “TeleTech”.

You want to keep your domain as short and easy to remember as possible, without losing the connection to your brand name. If your company’s name is already registered, do not try to use a domain with a hyphen. Often times, visitors will forget to type the hyphen in and you’ll lose potential customers to the other website. Instead, try to pick a domain name that incorporates your industry and the geographical area. If you were a painter from San Francisco, you could use “sanfranpainting.com” or “bayareapainting.com”. Your domain name is relatively significant, so don’t rush through it. Use your imagination and spend some time until you come up with a good domain name that is still available.

Which TLD should I use?

Right about now, you’re probably thinking “what’s a TLD?” Well, it’s not as complicated it as it sounds; a TLD is just the extension for a domain name (.com, .ca, .net etc.). Again, with personal sites, the TLD isn’t overly important. .com, .net and .org are the cheapest if you are trying to keep costs down. For a business, statistically .com domains are the first TLD the average user will type in, so that’s the ideal TLD. However, if you are running a national business and not global, you may want to go with your country’s TLD (.ca, .us, etc.)

So now that you know the basics of domain names, it’s time to go out and apply that knowledge and get your website up and running! Remember, take your time and don’t rush into anything and you’ll be fine.

What to avoid:

The most common mistake made (and almost everyone is guilty of it at some point in time) is choosing a password that is something from your everyday life: this includes anything from a child or loved one’s name to your birthday or address. You want to avoid that, because almost anyone can find out that sort of information about you and make an educated guess to get access to your personal files. You also want to avoid using any dictionary words (that includes other languages). Hackers have developed “brute force” programs that will repeatedly try combinations of letters and numbers to guess your password, and the first thing these programs will do is try every single word in all dictionaries. So by not using a dictionary word, you’ve made their job much more difficult.

Finally, do NOT share your password or write it down. The only situation where it is acceptable to share your password is when the individual needs it (i.e. as a business partner) or it is someone whom you trust implicitly (a spouse or someone you’ve know for decades) – these are the only situations I can think of where you can really trust someone, and even then you are still taking a small risk. Your password needs to be easy for you to remember so that you don’t have to write it down, if you absolutely must write down the password, memorize is as soon as possible and then destroy the paper when you’re done.

Good password practices:

For starters, your password should be at least six characters long, but having a password longer than that never hurts! Also, if the data your password protects is very sensitive, you should replace it with a new one every few months. Once you’ve got a good password, you should practice typing it in quickly, so that you’ll be too fast if someone is trying to peek over your shoulder.

One of the most effective ways to make sure your password is secure is to use both letters and numbers in it. A great way to get a good password that’s easy to remember is to substitute letters for numbers:

Number to Letter table:

1 = I or L
2 = Z
3 = E
4 = A
5 = S
6 = b
7 = Z
8 = B
9 = g

So for instance, if your regular password is “dogfood”, instead of using just letters you could start using “d0gf00d” for your password.

In conclusion:

Now you know how to ensure you’ve chosen a good password. Feel free to use this checklist to help you evaluate your passwords quickly.

BAD:

[ ] contains personal information (child/partner’s name, birthday, etc.)

[ ] is a dictionary word (foreign or otherwise)

[ ] has been shared with others

GOOD:

[ ] is at least 6 characters long

[ ] contains both letters and numbers

[ ] is changed every few months

[ ] easy to remember, so you don’t have to write it down

1. Splash Pages or Flash Intros

Why It’s Bad:
Today’s web browser wants the information they are looking for, as fast as possible. You have less than 10 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention before they’ll leave and surf off to the next site. A splash page or flash intro just delays a user from reaching the main page of your site (which should contain your most important marketing message that your customers need to know about). If you really want to implement a flash intro into your website, place it on the home page in addition to the text that conveys your marketing message, or on a page inside your website. This way your visitor isn’t delayed in reaching the main page of your site that contains your marketing message.

2. Not Using Your Home Page Properly

Why It’s Bad:
A website can sometimes be a potential client’s first contact with your company. If the main page of your site isn’t set up properly, then contact may never go beyond the first visit to your site. Obviously this is a bad thing! The first page a visitor sees on your site needs to contain your marketing message: Basically what you do, and why they should hire you instead of another company. This information, as well as links to other important information about your business that a customer will be interested in (photos, testimonials etc.) needs to be displayed above the fold (a fancy term that means displayed without scrolling down) in a manner that is simple and not confusing. This ensures that visitors can find all the information they need about your company from your website, and increases the chance they will contact you and become a client.

3. Inconsistent Navigation

Why It’s Bad:
Have you ever been to a website that had shifting navigation? You’d visit one page and the navigation would change to suit that section of the website. Didn’t that drive you nuts? If it bothers you, it will most likely bother the visitors of your website as well! All the navigation to every section of your site needs to be on every page. This will avoid frustrating your visitors, because a visitor that becomes frustrated with navigating your site is more likely to close the browser window than become a client.

4. Using Tables for Layout

Why It’s Bad:
This is a more technical aspect that is hard for a non-technical individual to detect. However when hiring a web design company, you should ensure that their web design is done in pure CSS (new), and not with Tables (old). CSS allows you to control the look of a site across all browsers, something that is difficult to do with tables. It also has many features that allow CSS pages to load much faster than a page built with tables. Remember, you have less than 10 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention, and if you use 2 seconds to load your page, then you have wasted precious time! Fast loading times are important.

5. Putting Text in Images or Flash

Why It’s Bad:
Not only is there a significantly higher load time for images or flash versus text (which causes your page to load slower), but search engines cannot read text in Flash or Images. If they can’t read the text on your site, then they can’t rank you for search terms related to your webpage. So it is important to keep your text as plain text and not images or graphics as much as possible.

Hopefully you find these tips helpful the next time you design a new, or redevelop an existing, website. Remember! We always provide free quotes, so contact us today!

Disclaimer: This article is only intended to be used as an introduction to the world of Search Engine Optimization. Many of the advanced techniques are not discussed. Please don’t take this article as the be all and end all of Search Engine Optimization, it is a vast subject that could never be completely covered and explained in one single article.

Welcome to Part 2 of ‘The Basics of SEO’! This next set of definitions may be a bit more technical than the ones discussed in Part 1, but even if you aren’t technically inclined, having a basic understanding will help you instruct any web developer you work with in what principles to follow. Also, many content management systems (like the one we offer) will allow you to modify all of these SEO factors as easily as you’d edit a Word document.

3. Meta Tags

Meta Tags cover several pieces of code that are placed in the “head” of a page on your website – basically, this means they aren’t displayed in the browser window with the rest of your site. They allow you to define keywords and a description for your website. When the Internet was first developed, these tags were one of the important factors in search engine ranking, but their weight has been significantly reduced these days mainly because of webmasters abusing this system.

That being said, there is still value in defining keywords, and especially in including a description on each page. When your site becomes ranked in the search engines, they will often pull a random paragraph of text from your main page to display under your result for the search. Some times they choose the right text, and sometimes they don’t… but if you use a meta description on the page, then you can control exactly what’s displayed in the search engine when someone finds you.

Having your website on page one of the search engines is only part of the battle. You have 10 other webpages competing for the user’s click, and if your description is custom written to entice a user to click on it, you will have a leg up on the competition.

4. Search Engines Read Text Too!

In Part 1, we discussed the importance of placing keywords in your title tags, and this principle applies to the text of your site as well. It’s a good idea to incorporate the terms you are trying to rank in the text on the website, but keep in mind that the copy still needs to make sense to your users – and if you overdo it (i.e. the keyword phrase every fourth word) your page will most likely be filtered out of the results.

There are also html codes you can use (that any web developer will know) to emphasize your keywords to search engines. The most important of these are the “Heading Tags”. Like anything else, you don’t want to overdo it, but you should at least have your main key phrase in a “H1″ header tag at the top of your page. These on-page factors don’t make a massive difference, but every little edge you can give your site will help.

5. Dynamic Content

Search Engines love websites that are constantly changing and updating. It lets them know that the website is growing and changing to meet users’ needs, instead of sitting dormant. Not only do search engines like websites that have new content all the time, but customers do as well. If you are updating your site with information related to your products and services on a weekly or monthly basis, then your customers will keep coming back to your site for the helpful information you provide.

Developing a blog or newsletter can help you maintain communication with your customers and will allow you to ensure you have their changing needs and requirements at the forefront of your business.

If you’d like further advice or consultation on SEO or anything else discussed in the SEO Basics intro, please feel free to contact us!

Disclaimer: This article is only intended to be used as an introduction to the world of Search Engine Optimization. Many of the advanced techniques are not discussed. Please don’t take this article as the be all and end all of Search Engine Optimization, it is a vast subject that could never be completely covered and explained in one single article.

You may or may not have heard of search engine optimization (SEO for short). However, it has been a powerful marketing tool for businesses for many years, and its effectiveness will only increase the more Internet-savvy our country becomes. A properly implemented SEO campaign can result in new local clients and customers finding your business and buying from you. However, most people don’t even have a basic understanding of SEO, and one of the big problems with the SEO Industry is there are many companies who don’t really know what they are doing and will charge you money for SEO services without providing any real value. In the next article, we’ll discuss what to look for if you’re hiring an SEO company… but before we do that, let’s take a look at the basic factors a search engine considers when ranking your website:

1. Inbound Links

It’s no accident that this is the first item, as it’s probably the most important factor when determining where your site will rank in the major search engines (Yahoo, MSN and Google). What is an inbound link? It’s simply another website placing a html link on their website to your website (so their visitors can click on the link and visit your site). Generally, the more links to your website the better, however not all links are created equal. Some links will provide more benefit to your site than others, and some will even harm your website. Here’s an example to help you understand how this works.

Picture a line that is used for rating link quality. The left end is the highest quality links, so on that side you’d see links from CNN.com, or CBC.com, or any other website that is very popular and everyone knows about. If you move all the way to the right end of the line, you see the lowest quality links that will actually harm your website’s rankings. Here you will find links from pages that have 1000’s of other links on them, and are full of content about discount Viagra and anything you’ve ever gotten a spam email about.

All of today’s major search engines use the number and quality of links pointing to your website as a gauge of how other webmasters view your site. Essentially, it’s a giant popularity contest. The more ‘good’ websites linking (i.e. voting) for your website, the more clout they will give your site when it comes to ranking for particular terms.

This begs the question: “How do I get the right kind of links to my website?” This is the proverbial “age old question”. There are a number of techniques that can help build links to your website. The problem is, they are all extremely time consuming and require a certain degree of computer knowledge. This is one of the aspects of SEO that all but the most dedicated website owners will need to seek help for.

2. Title Tags

While links are probably the most important factor when it comes to ranking for competitive terms (search engine terms that a lot of other webmasters are trying to rank their pages for), you need to tell the search engines what term would be a good match for your page, otherwise you won’t rank for any terms that will bring your site traffic that might turn into customers. One of the best ways you can tell a search engine what term to rank your page for is the Title tag. I know you’re already asking, “What exactly IS a Title tag?” Well… look up at the very top of this browser window, up at the blue bar with the X to close the window on the right side. If you look at the left side, you will see “The Lifeline Blog” or “The Lifeline Blog » The Basics Of Search Engine Optimization: Part 1″ depending on what part of our site you’re on . That’s the title tag I’ve defined for this page.

So how do these work? Let’s use another example. Click here to open the Lifeline homepage in a new window. Notice the Title tag I’ve defined for that page is “Hamilton, Brantford and Simcoe Ontario Web Design – Lifeline Design”. Click here to open up a Google search for the term “Simcoe Ontario Web Design”, you’ll notice our site is on the first page in part because of the Title tag. Google has looked at my site, and deemed it relevant to the term I’ve put in our Title tag, so we’re showing up on page one. Let’s look at another example, click here to open a Google search for “Brantford Ontario Web Design”. For this term, the Lifeline site isn’t on page one, but page two. “Brantford Ontario Web Design” is a more competitive term, so just choosing the right Title tag isn’t always enough! We don’t have enough good links (yet) for Google to place the site on page one.

Selecting The Right Title Tag

How do you select the right Title tag for your site? The most common mistake is using the exact same Title tag for the entire website. You should change the Title tag to be descriptive for each page. Also, what you want emphasized should be placed at the beginning. So if your business is Bob’s Flowers that serves Simcoe Ontario, your Title tag should be something like “Flowers and Floral Arrangements in Simcoe Ontario – Bob’s Flowers” Instead of “Bob’s Flowers – Flowers and Floral Arrangements in Simcoe Ontario”.

How do you change a Title tag?

A Title tag is a fairly easy code change on a website, and you shouldn’t have to pay much at all to get someone to change the Title tags on your website to titles you’ve defined. Perhaps you have a CMS (content management system) that allows you to edit the content on your site without having any technical knowledge. The better CMS systems will allow you to edit the Title tags for each page yourself. If you’re interested in a CMS system that can do this, contact us.

This concludes Part One of The Basics of Search Engine Optimization, I hope you’ve found it both interesting and informative. Please stay tuned for Part Two where we will cover the remaining basics of SEO like Meta Tags, On Page factors (the text on your page) and dynamic content.

This may have been true 5 years ago, but these days? Content is no longer king. While it remains an extremely important factor of a successful site, according to the official Google blog, as of July 2008 the Internet was growing by ” several billion pages per day”. Think about that number for a second, several billion… and while not every single one of those websites will be chocked full of quality content, even a small percentage of that number results in a vast number of new websites with quality content being added to the Internet every single day.

What does this mean for the old “Content is King!” mantra? It means that those (for the most part, there are of course exceptions to every rule) who focus solely on quality content and ignore other important factors like a professional design and marketing will have their quality content lost in a sea of other quality sites, while those site owners who focus on all the important factors of running a successful website will rise to the top and be successful.

Content is very important, but so is the design of your site, along with a successful marketing campaign. Your content has to be good, but you need more than that these days.

All I could think of was, what a missed opportunity for the company that provided the website for free!  A medium to large non-profit organization is usually well connected in the community, and offering discounted or free services and products to them can often promote your business better than any advertising campaign.

There are two ways to look  at providing a free service. The correct way is to treat the recipient as a valued, paying customer,  providing what they need for their website and resolving any issues promptly. The wrong way is to view the project as a freebie, and therefore  feel that your business has no obligations to the customer who is getting a free service.  Having the  wrong attitude makes  your offer of free services a waste of both time and effort. The customer will not be satisfied with the end result and will have nothing positive to say about your business.

If handled correctly, providing free services can help market your organization and grow your business… just remember to keep the right attitude in the process!