Web Development Archives - Ramirez Creative Solutions

Bad Websites Create An Invisible Audience

It’s inevitable to know that bad websites will create an invisible audience. Most people believe that if they can just get a website online, then their business will start to bloom. Well chances are, that if your website is not giving the potential customer a call to action, then you won’t earn customers. If your website is horrendous, it’s going to serve as a direct representative of your actual work. Don’t be a victim of bad websites, you want to have a website that not only looks good, but has a healthy conversion rate. Let me explain.

What’s The Point of Having a Website?

Granted if you’ve paid for something as a business, then you want to see a return. It’s an investment right? Understand what you are getting a website for. What is the actual need? Why is it important? What should my website do for me to create revenue for this business? These are questions that I ask myself every day, and these are questions that you should ask yourself, when you are in the market for a website. Even if you already took the website adventure, and you’re in the market for a redesign, do your homework. Having a website means that you have an online representation. Once you have a website online, you have just given your business an identity, a heartbeat. It’s alive. Be careful though, because as easy as it was to make it alive, it could lose its life without the proper maintenance and continued vision for the website. You have to nurture and care for your website like it’s your baby. Technically it is your baby. It’s your job to make it grow, or work with your web developer so that he can make it grow. Your web developer will serve as your professional gardener. The smart thing to do for your website, after you’ve developed the vision for your website, and have put that vision into code, is to now re-evaluate your website on a regular basis. Capitalize on the good that you see coming from the website, and make changes to tackle your efforts for damage control.

Nobody Hits the Ball Out of the Park the First Time!

By reevaluating your website regularly, you’ll be able to see and to know what has worked and what hasn’t. Do yourself a favor, and scan your competitor’s websites. See how they are advertising. How do they draw attention to their prices? How do they introduce their products or services? If you study the people that have done things before you, then you are most likely not going to make the same mistakes as they have. You want a winning formula, so study those that have a winning formula. Work with other entrepreneurs to see how they manage their business through their website, and take notes. No matter what field it is in, business is business. As your website grows, continually add to it, build it up like it’s a strong tower, because again this is the identity of your business. Before a potential customer calls you, they are most likely going to scout your business through the internet. A bad website is like not having one at all. Matter of fact, it’s probably better not to have a website, then to have a bad website. At least, if you don’t have a website, then you can gain customers through good word of mouth, but bad websites will deter customers from using your services because of the quality. The quality of your website should measure the quality of your actual work.

How Do You Track Your Website Efforts?

There are plenty of tools to track your website efforts. I prefer Google Analytics because with Google Analytics it will show you where your traffic is coming from, what links they clicked on, what operating system their using, what countries their coming from. Google Analytics is the best free tool out there to track your website efforts. It talks about bounce rate? Your bounce rate is how long a visitor stays on your website. It tracks new visitors to returning visitors. How many pages are visited per visit. It tells you how many actual page views you have, and it will break down the actual source links for you so that you can know where your traffic is being driven from. If you don’t have google analytics attached to your website right now, you are missing out on a vital part of your business. In order to evaluate your business, you have to be able to have a measuring point to compare it to. Google Analytics gives you this measuring point so that you can track your success or lack thereof.

Conclusion

Bad websites will murder a company’s internet marketing campaign. Make your website work for you. Partner with your web developer so that they can help you strategize to attack your target market. This is a war, and you are at war against the search engines. In order to win, you have to put in the work to manipulate the search engines to bite on your Search Engine Optimization efforts. If your SEO is in place, it will make your website a lot more successful. Allow your web developer to help you with this, so that you don’t get stuck trying to manage your website, but you become the brains behind the strategy.

God Bless!

Free Websites Are Headaches for the Consumer

Warning: To anyone searching for free websites, you will find what you are looking for, and you will get what you pay for. In my years of developing websites, I’ve had the unfortunate opportunity of scrapping many free templates for a more effective website. Though I’ve made money on these ventures, which is always a plus, but it burdens me, that companies will sell a hosting service to a customer, and then give them a free website builder. It’s criminal because most customers don’t know what they are doing, so when they’re done, the website will be horrendous. Secondly, they are stuck to that layout, which stifles their creativity. Thirdly, the company will then charge the consumer for layout changes and separate themes. So my point is, that if you are serious about your business, then you should be serious about avenues that you take to advertise it as well. If you have a template builder that you just plug your information into, chances are, there is probably 100 other people with that same free website template within your demographic.

Be Willing to Invest in Your Website

When you think about advertisement, you think of business cards, flyers, posters, anything that you get printed to display to the public. Well, this is true, print advertisement is good advertisement. Your website is part of your advertisement as well. The same way you invest money into your print advertising is the same way you should be willing to invest in your website. Count it as an investment, because with investments you should see some kind of return, Correct? If your website is designed properly, it should be able to expose you to the public enough that you at least have people signing up for an email list, which will be potential customers.

Determine What You Are Willing to Invest

Set yourself a budget aside for your website. The same way you budget your bills, roll your website into your bills as part of your business expenses. Don’t be afraid of the price, most of the time you are not paying the whole bill up front. Most companies will take half up front and half when the job is finished. Your best bet is to go with companies that have design packages, so not only are you getting your website designed, you are also getting some other benefits with the package, such as logo design or some initial Search Engine Optimization done, and etc. Once you are willing to invest, then you’ve already bridged the gap from consumer to business owner.

Do What You Do Best

Whether you know what you want, or you are not sure, do what you do best, and that is run your business. The reason you chose to hire a web developer to develop your website is because 1.) You probably felt overwhelmed with the whole web design thing. 2.) You don’t have time to work on a website or to manage it. 3.) It was just easier to go with a professional. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than being disgruntled with any aspect of your business, because it makes you disgruntled in other aspects of your business. If you are disgruntled, it’s probably because you are trying to tackle a project that isn’t in your skill set. Someone along the way said that doing “this certain thing” would be a great idea, and they were probably right. What they failed to mention was that they didn’t do it all by themselves, they had help. Be willing to outsource the things that you don’t know how to do, so that you can concentrate on the daily operations of your business.

Conclusion

As you can see, trying to upkeep a free website could be your worst nightmare. You will lose sleep, with how much time and effort it is taking you to build and construct this website, and it’s not as beautiful as you want it to be. After you finished it really is just a website, and it’s not doing anything for you. Hire a professional. Sit down with them, and tell them what websites you have seen that you like. What things you would like to see in your website, and what you hope that your website can do for you. Sky is the limit. I hope this helps retrain your thought process on why free websites are probably not the best idea. I pray I help save you from a future headache, and I encourage you to hire somebody to take care of your website for you.

God Bless!

Do My Graphics Compliment or Compromise My Content?

One question you should ask yourself when putting your website together is, “Do my graphics compliment or compromise my content?” Compliment vs. Compromise in the world of web design will effect what Google Analytics describes as “Bounce Rate.” Your Bounce Rate is how long a visitor visits your website. If your graphics compliment your content and your content compliments your graphics, then most likely visitors are going to visit your website longer. Granted, if your graphics have nothing to do with your content, or they’re just not innovative or cutting edge, then most likely that potential customer that you worked to get to come to your website will, “Bounce!” I’m going to talk about these two very important roles that should co-exist in the life of your website.

1. Professional and Relevant Content Writing

The content on your website should be standardized by the leading specialist in your certain field. So suppose you owned a carpet cleaning company, your research for your content writing would be on companies such as Stanley Steemer and Chem-Dry. You want to study what your top competitor is doing in order to write your content. You don’t want to be totally out in left field while your top competitor is steadily gaining new clients. The reason why your top competitor is your top competitor is because they have a formula that works. So as you begin to write your content, you want to use the same buzz words that the competitor is using, and ultimately these buzz words should double as your keywords to help with your search engine optimization. There’s nothing new under the sun, and there’s no business that hasn’t already been done or thought of. Your services are probably going to be very similar to what your competitor is offering, so study their work.

2. Graphics That Adhere Your Content

When you’re communicating the look and feel of your website to your web developer, they should have enough common sense and knowledge in graphic design to find or create pictures that are relevant to your topics or services. Not only do you want relevant graphics, but you want your graphics to act as an adhesive, tying the two together to create a marriage between content and graphics. Without graphics on website, your content would look like one long run-on sentence. This would work, if people were information first. Unfortunately, people have short attention spans, and like dogs, we need to see the shiny object in order for us to run towards it. Instead of this being a problem, this is part of the solution, because it gives you and your web developer the opportunity to be creative. We were created to create, we have divine revelation, and creative integrity written into our DNA, so use it. Be as creative as possible, without being overwhelming. The same way that you study the competitors website for content, see how they are using their graphics to marry their content, so not only does the content tell the story, but the graphic speaks as well. There should be no reason why your website should look and feel like it stepped out of the 1990’s. With evolving software like Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator, your web developer should be able to create some graphics that separate you from the competition. You and your competition should be running a leg to leg race. Don’t allow the competition to have the upper hand, study their work once again, and then be innovative and unique in your approach. As long as you have dreams and ambitions for the success of your business, then your ideas should come by the handful. Don’t think because you are not an artist or a graphic designer that you don’t know what you want. Sketch out some ideas, verbalize it, and a good graphic designer will be able to capture your vision, and supply you with a physical copy of your idea.

God Bless!

5 Valuable Tips to Increase Your SEO Ranking

When developing a website, one of the first things you should have in mind is, “What is my game plan for the SEO Ranking of this Website?” Most likely, the first question that a customer usually asks before having a website designed is, “Am I going to be able to be found?” The answer to this question is conditional. It could be “yes” based on the amount of work you as the customer are willing to do, or it could be “probably not” if you’re not willing to update your information on a regular basis.

1. Keeping Your Information Fresh

The best way to keep your information fresh, is for you to make up your mind, and say that I’m willing to do what it takes. So if you’re willing to do what it takes, then the same blog that you are reading now, is what you will do to keep massive amounts of information coming to your website. What if you’re not a strong writer? There are individuals called Content Managers and this is what they specialize in, is Content Management, writing and editing information. The best person for this job is probably the same person that developed your website.

2. Why Is It Important To Blog?

Not only does blogging keep massive amounts of information coming to your website on a regular basis, but blogging keeps relevant information coming to your website on a regular basis. Blogging relevant information to your website is significant, because it increases the amount of keywords that are in your website. When your web developer develops your website, he should develop a keyword or key phrase list that will be imbedded in the source code of your website. The more times these keywords or key phrases appear in the content of your website, the higher the possibility of your website ranking within the search engines.

3. Driving Traffic To Your Website

Once you’ve established a writing schedule for your blogs, once a week, twice a week, once a month, then you are going to start posting links to your blogs via social media. I truly believe as a business, that social media makes blogging all worthwhile. Every time you blog and you post these blogs through Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, you are creating what is called back links. Back links are exactly what they’re called, links that lead back to your website. This starts to create traffic. With back links available, this increases the validity of your website. The more back links that you can get back to your website, the more your traffic will increase. Thus, increasing the possibility of your website ranking within the search engines.

4. Video and Picture Tags

You may ask, “Is there any way that I can label my pictures and videos, that would help my SEO Ranking?” Absolutely! With pictures and videos you can add titles and alt tags to them to make them SEO friendly. Your title tag is going to be the label of the picture when someone rolls over it, and your alt tag is what will show, if the picture doesn’t show when being viewed on the browser.

5. Basic SEO Rules

When the search engine spiders or robots are scanning through your website, there are some basic things that they are looking for. Side Note* If there is a whole bunch of useless code in the header of your website, then it will take the search robots too long to get to the content of your website resulting in a low SEO Ranking. That’s why it’s important to use external style sheets and external files for your javascript and jquery files.* The first thing that the search engine robots should see is your list of keywords or key phrases and your meta-description. Secondly, your keywords and key phrases should be used in your heading tags. Naturally, the order of importance matters based on the chronological order of the heading tags, with H1 being the most important, and H6 being the least important. Then after you enter your heading tags, you want to make sure that your content is saturated with your keywords and/or key phrases.

Conclusion

So as you can see, developing SEO for your website isn’t just one thing, but a group of things working together to help create a ranking for your website. Working together with your web developer to help you manage these task, will help your website begin to appear in the search engine rankings. If you do these things continuously, then you are setting your website up for a very successful campaign, and more importantly increasing your public visibility. Warning: Do not get complacent or satisfied with where you are currently ranked, because chances are, you won’t be there next week!

God Bless!

What are the Benefits of Having a WordPress Website?

First of all, what is wordpress? Simply said, it is the fastest growing and most widely used open source content management system available. The limitations that you can do with it, are becoming far and few, and the benefits are through the roof. What are the benefits?

1. The Importance of a Content Management System

The first benefit is the importance of having a content management system or what we would call a CMS Platform. After your website is completely set up and stylized by your web developer, then a small amount of training will take place, then you, the user, will be able to make edits to your website, without any coding experience whatsoever. You might ask, “What is it that I can edit?” The answer is everything! From adding pictures and videos, paragraphs, color schemes, it can all be done with a couple of hours of training by your web developer, and the click of a button. The unique thing about WordPress is that it wasn’t created as a content management system, it was created as a blog format, but over the years it has evolved into a very powerful tool for the consumer.

2. WordPress is Completely User Friendly!

Don’t be afraid of getting on the backend of your website, and finding something so unfamiliar, that you are terrified to use it. If you can edit your social media account, Twitter, Google +, Facebook (which by the way is not user friendly whatsoever), then you can edit your WordPress Website. Also I highly guarantee, that after you get used to it, you’ll definitely enjoy being in the pilot seat of updating and editing your newly designed Worpress Website.

3. Multiple Users with Different Roles

With the ability to control the show, and who has access to the backend of your website, you can set up multiple users with similar roles as you, or totally modified. If you have a business partner, or even an employee that’s going to manage your web content for you, then you can set them up as administrators. Or say that you want someone that is going to post a weekly blog for you, you wouldn’t want them to have full editing capabilities to your website, just blog access, well you can do this by setting this person up as a “Contributor”, and they’ll have a very minimized account to work with. This will save you the stress of worrying about them having total access to the website, just the parts that you want them to have.

4. Adding and Deleting is a Breeze!

Whether you have a 10 page website and want to add 5 more pages or delete 5 pages, WordPress gives you the ability to this quickly and efficiently. Even if it’s a promo page, or a page that will be short term page, you can create it. Also if you want to add a page that is not in your site navigation, this is no problem. Just create an alternate menu, and substitute it for the main navigation, and don’t include this page, very simple!

Overall

Trust and believe, that this isn’t all the features to what WordPress can do, but this is some of the highlights. The more and more you use your wordpress website, the more things you will discover, and fall in love with it. So in conclusion, WordPress is fun and gives you a feeling of control and accomplishment. With you partnering with your Web Developer, the two of you will be able to come up with exciting and new ways to advertise your business through your new WordPress Website.

Bells & Whistles: Everything Wrong With Interactive Web Design

It’s 2012, and with the recent additions of responsive websites, it seems that the web world is getting a lot more simpler. From Ipads to Iphones, Android Phones, it seems that if your website is not mobile phone ready, then you are behind the curve. This brings us to the 5 things that are wrong with interactive web design.

1. Websites with Flash Animation

Though there is really nothing wrong with flash design, because you can do some really exciting things with flash design, but it all comes back to being mobile phone friendly, which flash is not. Actually, I don’t ever anticipate it being mobile phone friendly. In my opinion, in a couple of years, flash and web design will cease to exist, at least when it comes to sites that are going to be viewed on a mobile level. *Sidebar* Flash for Educational sites for children is incredible! (Maybe a future blog!)

The reason why flash is becoming so unproductive is because it has its own platform, it acts as an imbed, rather than a coding language. The answer to this as of late has been the introduction or the revival of Jquery, Json, and all of these other client side coding languages that are taking precedence over flash, because they’re doing the same exact thing, but with coding languages, and this not only is mobile phone friendly, but SEO friendly, not that flash can’t be SEO friendly, but is it truly SEO friendly, probably not! I’m truly convinced that flash animation will never go away, but I do believe that we will have to get a little bit more creative when it comes to using it in the future.

2. Unique and Innovative Navigation

Though on a regular desktop or laptop platform, this distinctive GUI for unique navigation can “WOW” your users, but the actual benefit of having them is most likely, next to none. The problem is because most websites being viewed on a mobile scale, will minimize the navigation to a small box in the upper right hand corner. So the solution really, is a standard navigation. You really don’t have to reinvent the wheel, there is plenty of standard navigations seen on a large scale that will give your website style and class, and on a mobile scale will degrade rather nicely.

3. Creative & Abstract Design

Websites can be creative, and still carry the business and professional feel that you desire. You don’t have to be so abstract. Matter of fact, abstract websites, carries the potential to push your customers away, rather than generate business. You want your website to work for you, and most consumers are used to doing things a certain way, like surfing the web. *Helpful Hint* Consumers don’t like change! * Don’t try to change things around so much, that you create a usability issue. Remember, you have about 8 seconds to impress a customer. If they can’t figure out how to navigate through your website within the first 8 seconds of their visit, you’ve lost a potential customer.

4. The Absence of SEO

Many people, and many companies have no clue what Search Engine Optimization is. Matter fact, many people think that it’s just this magical thing that happens when you place your website on the internet. As many of you all know, SEO takes much and perpetual work. Now the absence of SEO, doesn’t really have anything to do with what’s wrong with interactive web design, but it does have something to do with the sole importance of having a website. Why do we have websites, to create an awareness of our products or services, and if people can’t find you, how will they ever know what products or services you offer.
The answer is that we should tag everything that should or could be tagged, attach keywords to our blogs, and web pages, and do relevant searches on the words that you are using. So whether you are being viewed on a major platform or mobile platform, you will be able to be found, and efficiently viewed by the consumer.

5. Static Vs. Interactive Websites

Just because your static website is not attached to a content management system, or have some kind of flash in it, doesn’t mean that it can’t be as creatively effective as the ones that are. Remember your javascript and jquery is still supported on the mobile platforms, so your website will still degrade rather nicely. Be aware of this though, that you are not using a lot of scripting languages such as PHP, to power your website, so proportion your website strategically. Make sure that if you are going to load your websites with pictures and text that you do some research on what pixel sizes work better on mobile platforms.

Closing

So as you can see, there is nothing really wrong with interactive web design, but too much of anything is not good. This may be an old cliché, but less is more. With normal scale websites, you want to draw attention to the product or service, and not beat around the bush. So maybe we can take something away from the uprising of mobile websites, by designing strictly to the product or service, rather than trying to fluff the site up, giving the impression of more, when there isn’t, and there doesn’t really need to be.

God Bless!

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