Website Design
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Why should my business have a website?
There are many reasons why any business should have a web site. They are:
- To provide basic Information that establishes credibility - just as a listing in the Yellow Pages shows you are serious about your business, having your own company domain reinforces your legitimacy as a serious business. (According to IntelliQuest 68% of US web users shop online.)
- To provide a map to your business location. Sometimes finding you is the hard part.
- To sell your products and/or services. Customers explore alternatives over the web before buying.
- To make business information available to customers and clients 24/7.
- To allow you to update your information as frequently or infrequently as you choose.
- To reach your local market. The web reaches the world, but customers shop it for local information as well.
- To reduce costs, use your site to answer your most frequently asked questions.
- To reduce costs, show your products over the web instead of printing brochures.
- To obtain feedback from customers. It is easy to see what your customers respond to on the website.
- To stay in contact with salespeople, customers and suppliers.
- To test market new services and products. You may also learn that you have a market you hadn't thought of.
- To easily publicize specials you are offering. Couple this with e-mail promotion to your existing clients.
- To reach the media. Newsletter editors may like something on your site and refer to it in their articles. This is FREE advertising.
- To reach the specialized or international markets.
- To enhance your business relationships. Tell your clients about related businesses they might be interested in, and maybe get a referral fee for it!
Five Must-Haves for small business website
A Clear Homepage
The Homepage is the heart of your website and what visitors will most likely land on first. What is the first thing they will see? Is there a focus of what you’re trying to convey? Are there too many distractions? And depending on your customer base, are there too many “fancy” words that only people in your industry will understand?
When creating or reviewing your homepage, look at it with fresh visitor eyes. If you can’t be that objective, enlist the help of a friend or family member unfamiliar with your industry. This is a chance for free focus testing, so ask them the following to help you better understand:
- Can you describe what this website is for?
- Which area draws your attention the most?
- Are there any confusing text?
- After closing the site, what are 3 things you remember most?
- Did you feel that the amounts of text to images are balanced?
Since people are visual creatures, be sure to have imagery to help you tell your business’ story. If you’re using a specific art style of imagery (i.e. modern, corporate, classic etc), use the same style through the rest of the site as well. You want your site to be a cohesive piece, not just a book with a fancy cover.
Unique Title Tags/Header 1s/Meta Description
Each page of your website can either be a treasure trove or a confusing mess to a search engine. Treat every single page as an important piece to your website and craft unique title tags, H1s, and meta descriptions to help increase in rank.
SEO-Friendly URLs
This may be a no-brainer, but still there are websites with page URLs along the lines of www.xyz.com/3827dx87-2jads
What do the string of numbers and letters mean? If you can’t understand it, search engines won’t either.
People are also more likely to share and/or click on the URL when they have a notion of what it will be regarding. Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable clicking on www.InnovationEvolved.co.za/ecommerce-technology/web-design than a random jumble?
Easy Navigation and SiteMap
A sitemap is like a roadmap for search engines, it’ll lay out the groundwork of where it needs to go and where to index.
If you have a dynamic website builder, such as the InnovationEvolved.com, it will automatically build it for you so that each new category, or child category you create, will be auto-updated on the site map. In addition, the site map is always accessible via the Footer of the site.
If you don’t have a dynamic website builder, and your website has less than 500 pages, you can go to XML-Sitemaps to generate one so that you can submit it to Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines webmaster tools to help them crawl your site better.
Fresh Content
Search engines tend to favour sites that get updated often, as signals to them that your site isn’t “dead.” For Ecommerce sites, your product pages may not change very often and sometimes you’ll increase inventory which isn’t considered “frequent.” For Service sites, the content on the majority of your pages will most likely stay static as its “information” based. An easy way to introduce fresh content to your website is to create a blog. There, you can choose to update 1 to 2 times a week or even daily if you’re feeling ambitious. If you have an Ecommerce site, you can possibly write tips or ways to better use your products. If you have a Service site, you can share expertise in your field that helps your customers keep you top of mind. Whatever topics you pursue for your blog, make sure it’s relevant to your audience and the customers you’re wishing to drive to your site.
Wondering where to start or how to revamp your site if you need to adjust to incorporate the website must-haves? We are here to help you start or transfer your existing content. Whether you have an Ecommerce website or are Service-based, our system can easily integrate all of the must-haves discussed without needing you to touch any code but is still under your control. In addition, the system provides you with your own Merchant Account and credit card processing so you can start accepting payment quickly.
We at Innovation Evolved offer following web services:
Web Hosting
This involves paying a company to store your web site files on their server so that your website can be accessed from anywhere in the world via the internet. Since your website has to be up 24/7 the servers are constantly on but sometimes develop faults and have to be shut down for maintenance that is why genuine web hosting companies cannot guarantee 100% uptime.
Domain Registration
A Domain Name is a singular name that works as identifier for a website on the Internet. Each Domain Name therefore is a unique address indicating a location on the Internet. The domain name is used as part of a website address (e.g. www.mydomain.coza) or email address (e.g. info@mydomain.co.za).
Website Maintenance
This involves keeping the site online with up to date information always displayed. It is often thought that companies can save money by having their own staff make modifications to the website. This is in error: Professional website managers perform this task better, we do this every day. Websites can be unintentionally damaged by incompetent "upgrading", links can be broken or lost, files exposed or deleted. We watch over your site on an ongoing basis.
Social Plug-ins
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Like Button
Let people share pages and content from your site back to their Facebook profile with one click, so all their friends can read them.
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Share Button
Allow people to share to Facebook, share with particular friends or with a group. Alternatively, they can share in a private message.
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Facepile
Display the profile photos of the people who have connected with your Facebook page or app.
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Tweet Button
The Tweet Button is a small widget which allows users to easily share your website with their followers.
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Follow Button
The Follow Button is a small widget which allows users to easily follow a Twitter account from any webpage. The Follow Button uses the same implementation model as the Tweet Button, and its integration is just as simple.
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Share Button
Enable users to share your website with LinkedIn’s professional audience, and drive traffic back to your site.
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Follow Button
Make it easy for prospective customers, job-seekers, and business partners to engage with your company.
Adding a Follow Company plugin to your website lets you quickly and easily grow your LinkedIn Company Page community so you can engage with your target audience, develop relationships, and acquire leads.
When a user clicks on the Follow Company button, they will automatically begin following your Company Page. Status updates you post from your Company Page will now show up on each follower's homepage. Encourage followers to like, share, and comment on your posts- this helps spread the word to your followers’ entire network.
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Sign In with LinkedIn
Make it easier for people to sign in or register with your site by using their LinkedIn identity.
With LinkedIn's new APIs, it's easy to let your users bring their LinkedIn professional identity and network to interactions on your site. Customize functionality based on a user's geography, work experience and network. With minimal work, you can grow your site registrations and build a rich, personalized experience.
RSS Feeds
RSS was designed to show selected data. Without RSS, users will have to check your site daily for new updates. This may be too time-consuming for many users. With an RSS feed (RSS is often called a News feed or RSS feed) they can check your site faster using an RSS aggregator (a site or program that gathers and sorts out RSS feeds).Since RSS data is small and fast-loading, it can easily be used with services like cell phones or PDA's. Web-rings with similar information can easily share data on their web sites to make them better and more useful.
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