Many different online publications and web design agencies publish “rules” about the best ways to design a business’ website. However, it’s often not that simple and what might work for one company may not fall in line with the overall brand or objectives of another.
So, we’ve written up a list of 10 useful tips that we feel often benefit brands and businesses when they’re setting up their website and homepage for the first time, or just making some tweaks to an existing design.
It doesn’t matter how great your business is, what products or services you offer, or even how appealing the layout of your website looks, if the text isn’t readable then people are going to quickly click away and look somewhere else.
There are obviously a range of factors that would make text unappealing for visitors to your website:
Too small and it’s hard to read and navigate.
Too big and it can mess up the rest of the layout.
Too text heavy without headings and it’s impossible to find what you’re looking for.
Too unusual with a crazy font is just irritating!
However, a concern that’s cropped up a great deal recently amongst online and design communities has been low contrast fonts and there’s even been a “movement” created called the Contrast Rebellion, to combat this problem.
YouTube’s promoted videos feature enables anyone who creates video content to promote their videos across the whole YouTube platform, especially at the very top of search results and in the “suggested videos” sections.
For instance, if someone searched for “cars in London” a video about your garage could come up at the top of search results, or if someone else was watching a video about fitness, an ad about your gym and personal training services could be recommended at the top of “suggested videos”.
This has many benefits for your company because it will help people to better understand what you have to offer, drive views to your content, it’s more cost effective than Google AdWords and YouTube now only takes money from you if the video as been viewed, rather than just clicked on.
So what have you got to lose?
If various people or agencies have helped you set up a social media presence for your business over the last few years, you may find yourself with more than one Facebook page. You then have to make a decision which to use, which can be irritating if both have a dedicated following.
So, we suggest merging your pages into one. Unfortunately you can’t turn a group into a page, this trick is only for merging pages. And if you’d like to turn a personal profile into a page, that’s a process Facebook now fully supports with its Profile to Business Page migration service which handles everything for you.
To begin merging pages you firstly need to decide which page will be your main page, the one all fans will be transferred to. Copy the URL of this page, then go to this form and add in the details of only the page that you want to keep.
What width should a website be?
Unfortunately there are a lot of resources online that offer people differing information and statistics, so it can be hard to figure out what’s best.
When you’re referring to the width, size and dimensions of your website, it’s important to make sure you understand the terminology that your web team is using. The screen resolution is basically the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed on your screen, depending on the setting you choose on your computer (or the default setting your computer operates at). So if you were to have a tiny screen that is 10 X 10, then that means there are 10 pixels along the top and 10 along the side. Although you’d never get one that small!
You don’t have to understand how this works, but you need to know that screen resolution evolves over time, as computer screens have been generally getting bigger (remember the tiny 14″ screens?) and their resolution much finer. What this means is that websites can be a lot wider than they used to be, contain more information, have bigger picutres, banners etc, and still fit most screens without needing to scroll horizontally to view the entire thing.
This is the reason why, when you come accross an “older website”, it looks very narrow and old fashioned compare to more contemporary websites.
In May we explored five ways for you to make the most of Linkedin, the biggest professional social network for businesses and individuals alike. We discussed ideas such as showcasing your services and getting your own personal URL.
However, there are now even more options when it comes to representing your company on Linkedin and making new business connections.
When we first talk with clients about using social media, they often worry they would need to be updating their social media accounts individually, even if they want to post the same information on all of them.
However, this isn’t necessarily the case.
There are plenty of ways to link up your accounts, so if you want to tell everyone about your latest offering, you don’t have to write the information in each of your networks separately, you can do it in one go!
Here are just a few of the key ways to link up your social platforms:
A few weeks ago we discussed some of the changes made to Facebook at the annual f8 developers conference and asked how these changes to Facebook could affect businesses in the future.
Well since then there have been a few other changes, tweaks and new additions which we wanted to share with you and suggest how they could affect individuals and most importantly business pages in the next few months.
Google’s extremely popular suite of measurement tools, Google Analytics, has had a number of revamps over the past few months, most notably with the introduction of real-time statistics and figures that give you instant information about who’s visiting your website and how they’re engaging with your social media content.
