Blogs

Login issues? Check your domain for underscores

I recently migrated a WordPress installation to a new site, and when demoing the new install, I found I was unable to log in. I checked the usual places, the database had the correct URL, there were no funky redirects, and I disabled ALL the plugins. This led to 30 minutes of hair-pulling confusion and frustration. Login worked from Firefox on my desktop, but failed in Safari and from every other machine I tried it on. This was strange because the installation was fine on the other URL, and there had been no changes to the files. After some sniffing of the traffic to the browser, I found out that the cookie was sent but not being set in Safari. A quick search led to this embarrassing revelation. This is from the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986

Unreserved Characters:

Characters that are allowed in a URI but do not have a reserved purpose
are called unreserved. These include uppercase and lowercase letters, decimal
digits, hyphen, period, underscore, and tilde.
unreserved = ALPHA / DIGIT / “-” / “.” / “_” / “~

That is to say, underscores aren’t specifically allowed in domains. So, if a cookie comes from a domain that the browser is rejecting, it. Luckily, this was a staging subdomain, so I was able to relocate it easily. Something to look out for…

Best WordPress Backup plugins

Creating WordPress backups is the very best thing that you can do to help your site. Backups will help save you in situations once your site gets hacked and offer you peace of mind, or you accidentally lock yourself out.

There are numerous free and paid backup plugins for WordPress, and most of them are user-friendly for backing up your blog content, files, or other things. But using these best WordPress backup plugins, always guarantee that your blog always saved from accidental loss. Sometimes we lose our blog’s important files or page files. But if there is no backup plugin installed, then you will lose these things permanently. So you must use the following plugin to secure your blog files.

If you purchase WordPress hosting, they offer free, limited file backup. But it’s not enough. You must back up your WordPress files with care. Because no one cares about your things like yourself.

If you are not already backing up your WordPress website, then you should pick one of these best WordPress backup plugins and start using it right away.

UpdraftPlus:

UpdraftPlus is a free WordPress backup plugin. It allows you to create a complete backup of your WordPress website and store it on the cloud or download it to your PC.

The plugin supports scheduled as well as on-demand backups. You can choose which files to copy. It may automatically upload your backups to Dropbox, Google Drive, S3, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email, and several other cloud storage solutions (see our detailed guide on the best way to copy & restore your WordPress website with UpdraftPlus).

UpdraftPlus also has a premium version with add-ons to migrate or clone a website, database search and replace, and multisite support, along with other things. The premium version also gets you access to priority support.

Duplicator:

Duplicator is one of the free WordPress backup plugins. You can backup or restore your WordPress files most easily. You can reduce server loading time between domains or hosting. Because it gives a 100% percent grantee for your blog. They also offer Pro features.

You can manually back up your whole blog or any parts. You can transfer your WordPress blog to another hosting provider without losing your files. If you want to enjoy a free backup plugin for WordPress, just remember this, and you will get more benefit.

BackWPUp:

BackWPup is a free plugin that lets you create a complete WordPress backup for free and save it on the cloud (Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace, etc), FTP, email, or even on your PC.

It is simple to use and allows you to schedule backups by your website’s update frequency.

Restoring a WordPress site from a backup is very simple. The BackWPup Pro version includes priority support, the capability to store backups, along with some other cool features.

BackUpWordPress:

BackupWordPress is a WordPress backup plugin with a scheduling service. It allows you to make schedules that are unique for your database and files. The issue is that the free version doesn’t let you store your WordPress copies.

Then you’ll need to purchase a superior extension if you would like to store your backups on Dropbox, Google Drive, and so on. The extensions are offered for each service, and you can buy the one you need or the whole bundle.

VaultPress:

Although it started as an independent plugin, VaultPress is now a part of Automattic’s other product called JetPack. You will need a JetPack subscription plan to use VaultPress. There are multiple pricing plans with different sets of features.

VaultPress plugin offers an automated real-time cloud backup solution starting at $3.50 per month. You can easily set up VaultPress backups and restore from backups within a few clicks.

The higher plans of Jetpack also offer security scans and several other powerful features.

There are a few downsides to using VaultPress.

First, it is a recurring expense that can add up if you have multiple WordPress sites because you pay per site.

Second, you will have to subscribe to JetPack, get a WordPress.com account, and install the Jetpack plugin on your site.

Lastly, backups are stored for only 30 days on the lower plans. If you want an unlimited backup archive, then you would have to pay the $29 per month per website, which is significantly more expensive for beginners when compared to other solutions listed here.

VaultPress, as part of the popular JetPack plugin, gives good value for money. If you’re already using JetPack for other features like JetPack CDN for photos, social media promotion, etc, then it’s an easy pick for you.

My WP Backup Pro:

You need to confirm your blog backup first. Because it’s the most important part of blogging. If you want to secure your blog, then you need to use a premium WordPress backup plugin. You can choose this plugin for your blog. Because it’s a premium and has amazing features.

There are multiple backup options for multiple popular storage providers. In fact, you can set up automatic or manual backup to this storage without waiting. In an emergency, you can restore your files at any time. My WP Backup Pro completely offers to migrate your WordPress site easily.

Final Thoughts

Choose the plugins according to your needs. Each plugin that we listed here is good.

Do NOT store your backups on precisely the same server as your site.

By doing that, you are placing all of your eggs in 1 basket. In case the hardware of your server worst you get waxed or fails, then you certainly don’t have a backup that defeats the goal of setting up backups.

That is the reason why we highly suggest storing your backups on a third-party storage service such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, etc..

That’s all. We hope that this list helped you decide on the WordPress backup plugin that is ideal for your website.

Form API introduction for the Houston Drupal Users Group

As part of our commitment to the Drupal community, we’ve been leading demonstrations and explanations of parts of the Drupal system. This week, we covered an introduction to the Form API.

Form API Basics:

Why should I use Form API instead of just printing the form?

• Form API is extensible and interoperable: Your exposed elements could be submitted via AJAX or edited on the fly by theming functions. Without you having to write a single additional line of code.
• Form API is safe(r): FAPI provides validation features and causes you to consider the security implications of the data you are working with.
• It’s the Drupal way.

Check out the attached presentation for more information, and feel free to leave a comment with any questions that you might have. Note also that I’ve attached some simple sample code for you to play with. It’s heavily commented and ready to go.

The Ultimate Guide to Important Pages In Website

This post will answer a very common question that most small business owners have:

What are the most important pages on a website?

We are a website design and Development company in Houston, We often get questions from our small business owners: What are the most important pages on a website? what pages should my website have necessarily? And mostly, this question comes from small business website owners. This is because they have recently joined the digital world. And they are making themselves acquainted with it slowly.

What pages should my website have? This is a very common question online entrepreneurs and small business owners ask when they are looking to develop a website.

When it comes to creating pages for your website, there is a set of web pages that are standard or general, which all small business websites should have. Below is a list of the most common pages that every website should have, and the type of information these pages should feature and include. If you need to create a website, we guide you step-by-step through the process of creating a small business website using WordPress.

Why Do You Need A Small Business Website In The First Place?

Your website is the best chance you have at making a great impression on potential new customers online, and your website is the face of your company in the digital world. Though your outbound content, social media channels, and ads might capture their initial interest, your site is where they’ll end up making a final purchasing decision.

Having a website creates a trust factor for customers. They know what other fellow customers say about you, your history, your location, and other important information.

Don’t have a website yet?

No worries, our special plan for a small business website can give you a kick-start.

Most Important Pages For Your Small Business Website

The number and type of website pages will depend on the nature of the business. But some pages are common that every small business website should have on their website.

A typical way to pinpoint the important pages in a website is to ask:

1. Have the highest likelihood of attracting new traffic.
2. Form the strongest impressions with new users.
3. Have the highest chance of achieving conversion.
4. Give you the best chance to sell your brand.
5. Are weighted more significantly than other pages by search engines.

With those qualifying factors in mind, Let us discuss what to put on a website for business.

• Home Page:

The home page is the first page most users will see, it should tell everyone who you are and what your company does. Your homepage needs to be well-designed, load fast and look professional. so if you make a bad impression, your engagement with a new user can easily end prematurely. It’s also the first and most important page Google considers when understanding the purpose and function of your site.

A homepage design should have:

1. Clear headline
2. Interesting and related text/colors/images/animation/video
3. Easy navigation
4. Upfront contact information
5. Brief info about your company, services, and/or products.
6. The home page is the most important landing page of your website. Because mostly users land on your website’s homepage and then find their way on your website.

Therefore, if the homepage is not intriguing to them, they will bounce back and decrease your chances of sales.

Moreover, even the search engines crawl through your website’s homepage to gain knowledge about your company’s services and products. And understand the purpose of your website.

It is always a nice practice to include a strong headline above the fold of your home page. This way, you will make the purpose of your website very clear to your visiting users.

• About Us Page:

People do business with other people, and visitors want to learn a bit more about who the people are behind the company. The about page is often one of the most visited pages on any website. This page should give a brief summary of who you are, your company history and what isolates you from the competition.

About Us, page needs to include:

1. A brief summary of your company,
2. History of your company,
3. How you are different from your competition,
4. Goals and objectives of your brand, and
5. Any other special mentions and accomplishments.

About Us, page gives you the liberty to soft sell your products/services. Give your best shot to convince your visitors about why they should choose you above others.

• Contact Page:

Putting the information about your company and its services is great. But it is of no use if users cannot contact you for their requirement.

Therefore, ask your website design company to create a contact page that communicates well with the users and increase your sales and conversions.

If a user has landed on your contact page it means he/she is very much interested in your services. Therefore, make sure the contact info is out there in all forms:

1. By phone
2. By email
3. Physical address
4. Contact form

If for some reason you cannot give a phone number or address then at least mention an email address and a contact form.

The contact form should be small and easy to fill. Nobody likes long essay kind forms to just send a requirement email.

You can also include a few reviews and testimonials on the contact page to build that extra level of trust and confidence for your company.

• Services/Products Page:

When a user lands on your website he/she will try to access the information he’s seeking without wasting any time. As it is there are only 5 seconds for any business website to impress its customers.

Therefore, the dedicated services/products page is mandatory for small business website owners. Mention all the services or products you offer in your services/products page.

This way your potential clients will immediately come to know whether or not your business can help them in their seeking.

If your services/products are too many, then you can add a brief summary of them on the main page. And add links to the respective service/product page for detail information.

This page should also include the benefits of using your services/products and how they are better from your competitors.

• Privacy Policy And Terms & Conditions Page:

Both of these pages are extremely important for your small business website.

A privacy policy page informs a user about how your company will use their personal information.

A basic privacy policy page should include:

1. Information about data collected,
2. Source of data collection,
3. Accessibility of collected information to users,
4. Sharing or usage of the collected data.

A company should strictly abide by the information provided in their privacy policy page. If there are any changes to your company’s policies then the update should be made on the page also.

Either ask your local website designing company to make the updates. Or if you have a WordPress website then you can make the edits in the content by yourself.

Similarly, a terms and conditions page is also necessary for your business website. It basically highlights the terms and conditions a user must agree with so as to use your website.

This page should include the terms like:

1. Cookies Policy
2. Legal Regulations
3. Intellectual Property rights
4. Copyright Laws
5. Third party links etc.
6. Moreover, include all the information here which a user has to agree to for accessing the information on your website.

Other Important Pages For SEO Purpose:

• Blog:

It is very important for any small business website to regularly update content on their website to increase their Search Engine Rankings.

And, the most simple way to do this is to add blog posts on your website regularly. A blog page is a snapshot or collection of all the posts on your website.

Therefore, utmost care should be taken to design a blog page to interestingly showcase your posts with a summary beside each post.

• Sitemap:

Sitemaps are extremely important for users and for search engines. They come in two formats:

.xml – for search engines, and
.html – for website users
Ideally, every website should have a sitemap which links to all the important pages on your website. Mostly the favorable position to place a sitemap link is in the footer of a website.

• 404 Error Page:

A page not found or 404 error page appears when a user tries to access a page which has either expired or moved to a new location.

Therefore, website designers should create a 404 page to inform the user about the fact that the page he/she was looking for no longer exists.

Also, give a user options to go back to the homepage or other important pages on your website. You can also include a search form for the user to type the query he/she interested in.

• Other Pages:

There are some other pages that are not mandatory but recommended so as to improve the user experience and SEO rankings.

1. Career Page
2. Testimonial/Review Page
3. Portfolio Page
4. FAQ Page

Summary

When you decide to get your website then make sure you have the most important pages included. These important pages are Homepage, About Us, Services/Products Page, Contact Us and Policies Page.

If you are looking for a website design company to create your website, then contact us now.

Key Elements Of UX/UI Design

Most people interact with the Internet daily, but not everyone experiences the Web in the same way or for the same reasons.

That’s why a great UX (user experience) is key for many businesses. If you’ve ever deleted an app or refused to shop online at a certain site again, you’ll know that the value that could represent across thousands of people can hit businesses where it hurts. UX is a huge, ever-growing field, and the expertise behind each decision we make and the path we follow in our digital lives.

When you want to make or buy something while on a website, you make decisions. Analyzing the key elements of UX, you will better understand how these decisions are made. By meeting the needs of users, we motivate them to stay on the website, engage in interaction, and be more satisfied.

What is UX?

Before going to see the most important elements, let’s address what is UX?. UX is an abbreviation for user experience, and it refers to all the aspects of the end user’s interaction with a system, product, service or company. it means that when designing any kind of new interface, it is important from a user experience perspective that you try to be consistent and predictable in your choice of interface elements. Overall experience encompasses all the elements that together make up an interface, including visual design, text, layout, brand, sound, and interaction. Great UX design is all about choosing to adopt the right elements when appropriate to help with task completion, efficiency, and satisfaction. Whether you’re designing an app or a website, UX design is all about usability. Designing for the user experience.

To ensure the UX of your website is just as good (if not better) than everyone else’s, there are a few key components you should consider during the design process. The process goes from bottom to top.

• Strategy:

The strategy defines the reason why an application or product exists, why you are doing the whole business, who you are doing and why people would use it. The main goal here is to define the needs of users and business goals. This can be done through strategic research where potential users would be interviewed on one side, and business needs would be adjusted on the other.

• Volume:

The scope defines the functional and content requirements. What features and content should the product contain? Requirements should meet strategic goals.

1. Functional Requirements: related to the functioning of the entire side, as certain parts work together. These are the characteristics that the user needs to store to achieve a specific goal.
2. Content Requirements: the information we need to give value to what we do (text, images, video). Without defining the content, we will not know how much time it takes the complete the project.

• Structure:

The structure defines the user’s interaction with the product, the behavior of the whole system, how it is organized, and how much it should be displayed at a given moment. There are two structural components: interactive design & information architecture.

1. Interactive Design: When functional features are already defined, it defines the user’s relationship with the product as a system that needs to respond to given user requests.
2. Information Architecture (IA): When requirements are given, it defines how the content should be organized and where it is set, in order to facilitate the user’s understanding of the product.

Excellent Interactive Design:

1. Helps users meet their goals;
2. Has effective interactivity and functionality (what the user can do);
3. It informs the user about changing conditions while on the page (the file has been saved, feedback when the wrong email has been entered, etc.);
4. Prevents errors when the application requires confirmation from the user for a potentially harmful effect (eg, deletion).

Excellent Information Architecture:

1. Organizes content by categories and priority information based on user needs and business goals;
2. Making easily understandable content and switching from one content to another is simple.
3. It is suitable for your audience.
4. It is flexible for adaptation and adapts to changes.

• Skeleton:

The skeleton determines the visual form of the screen and presents all the elements that need to interact. Shows how the user moves through information and how the information is presented to be clear, effective, and obvious.

Wireframes are widely used to create a visual format. It is a static diagram that presents the visual format of the product, which includes content, navigation, and all forms of interaction.

The skeleton is divided into three parts: Design of the interface, design of navigation, and information design.

1. Interface Design: Presenting and editing elements so they can interact with the functionality of the application;
2. Navigation Design: the way of navigating through the information;
3. Information Design: presentation of the information in an easily understandable way.

The skeleton should answer the following questions:

1. What visual forms should be presented on the screen?
2. How can interactions be presented and divided?
3. How can a user move around the site or application?
4. How can the content be presented?

• Area:

The last step. It refers to how your product, typography, colors, the actual layout, and so on will look. The goal is to simplify things, be easy to understand,for  and the user to absorb the necessary information. It is necessary to visually present the entire content and buttons, for the user to know what they can do and how to communicate with them.

Conclusion:

Everything is connected. If you do not have a clear strategy, you pay the price over the entire project. An ordinary decision can completely change the course of the project. It’s okay to make your decisions change from time to time, and of course, you can “punch”. It’s not good to make fixed decisions because, in the end, it can turn out to be a product that no one wants. Changes are inevitable.

The root of every successful design is a strategy, which later becomes the scope where the goals of the user and the business are set. Below is the structure where the interactions and the distribution of information are defined. Through wireframes, “scanners are made” to present the interactions and structure defined in the design. The skeleton allows the information to be presented. Finally, on the surface, all the decisions made up to then are taken into account, and a final visual presentation is made.

Understanding Your Role in the Design Process: Problems, Not Solutions

In terms of aesthetics, a design is, by and large, a tool to convey a message to your users. Are you a large company? Are you a professional? Do you have a sense of humor? Or simply (and most importantly), “What is it that you do?” These are all questions that will be answered for your users in fewer than 5 seconds of viewing your website, so you must be sending the right message. Just because you’re a small company doesn’t mean your site needs to be presented as such. There are several steps you can take to assure yourself that you’ll end up with top-notch website design:

• Understand Your Users:

It’s important to understand your users and their expectations. This is usually accomplished via experience in any given field; alternatively, market research can supply you with the answers you need if you’re relatively new in your industry.

• Inform your designer of problems in your design; avoid supplying him or her with solutions:

When I design a site for a client, I’m inevitably supplied with a solution. You should let your designer know of the problem you’re having rather than give him or her a solution. For example, I might be told to remove the blue background and replace it with a pink background. What the client should really say here is that the site needs to look more feminine (assuming that’s the problem). There are many alternative remedies for this other than the most obvious (making the entire background pink).

• Leave your (Personal) tastes at the door*:

If your website isn’t for personal branding, it’s important to try to avoid seeking designs that satisfy your tastes over the tastes and needs of your users and your business. If you have an idea you think would be great or if you see something you hate, it’s best to gather opinions from several other people before getting your heart set on it. Designers hear ideas all the time; many ideas that are new to clients fall cliché to the ears of designers. Oftentimes, we know something will not work based on the fact that we’ve already tried it in the past.

• Don’t be afraid of change:

If your business has never had any professional marketing or branding consultation, it’s usually best to let go of any de facto branding you might have and let professional designers guide you to something more appropriate.

• Talk to Your Designer:

It’s important to keep an open line of communication and to express your concerns. As designers, we love input and ideas from our clients and anyone else who has the patience to look at our work. We especially love well-thought-out ideas rather than seemingly arbitrary ones. The biggest mistake clients make is dictating the design before discussing their options with their designer, this approach will result in a failed design. After all, you are paying someone for their expertise in design, it doesn’t make sense to try to take on the role of a designer.

If you have an idea or concern, discuss it with your designer. A good designer will give you feedback and will supply a solution or solutions (s).

*Be aware, there is a gray area; you need to be happy with your final design. Just because your design was not dictated by your taste doesn’t mean you have to accept whatever you receive in terms of design.

Your taste will have an effect on the site’s outcome – that’s ok (sometimes it can even work in your favor). What you want to avoid is having your design dictated and possibly hindered by your personal taste, rather than what’s best for your company, brand, and/or users.

If you take nothing else from this, remember Problems, not solutions.

Simple And Most Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid

SEO is one of those strategies that you can implement in a few weeks, but it takes time to master it, so you can compete for high-traffic words and phrases. You’re still learning, and with a few adjustments, you can probably get that first-page ranking.  It is also a fact that SEO is a fast-changing industry, and what worked a few months ago may not work today, so you need to stay educated and informed about the latest SEO developments. The same basic SEO errors are repeated over and over. Most of these are easy to find and fix, the kinds of things that any decent SEO consultant should be aware of.

If you have a site and don’t have an SEO consultant, these are a few of the things you can quickly go and check yourself. If you do have an SEO consultant, they should have brought these issues to your attention. Some common SEO mistakes are tough to avoid. Testing optimization approaches is also difficult because you can’t verify your methods in real-time, since search engines’ rules are becoming hard to predict.

To keep you and your site on track, here are some of the most common SEO mistakes we’re seeing in 2018:

Content With The Wrong Keyword:

Many people publish useful content regularly to boost their brand exposure and credibility. It also demonstrates to search engine spiders that they are active. But, many SEO professionals mistakenly put the wrong keywords, which further affects their website ranking. So, before writing any content, make sure that you have done detailed research as to what keywords should be included. Then, make sure to include the right keywords or related keywords throughout the content and especially in the headings.

Optimizing Content around one keyword:

For a long time, keywords were the focal point of SEO. If your blog post or content had a lot of keywords, it would be on Page 1. If I decided to write the word “SEO” 100 times in all of my blog posts about SEO, those articles would have been #1 on Google. But Today, that practice not only provides a poor user experience for your audience, but it’s simply ineffective since search engines are becoming increasingly better at determining search intent.

Do not optimize any pages for just one keyword. Instead, think bigger about the need your content can fill and hone in on keyword topics that include a variety of relevant and related search terms.

Not having Unique Content:

The next typical mistake is related to the quality of your content. While duplicating texts was a common practice back in the day, today, search engines penalize this approach. Copying and plagiarizing content is seen as a spammy practice and is highly discouraged.

Duplicate and thin content simply don’t work. Instead of ripping off a copy from other places or using software that ‘spins’ the content into a new shape, it’s worth investing in creating original and meaningful texts. This is the only way to make sure your website doesn’t get downgraded and pushed to the back of search results.

Not Having Unique Title Tags and Meta Descriptions:

This is probably the biggest SEO mistake, and despite the emphasis given by both Google and Bing, still, some websites do not provide unique titles for each page.

The most common mistakes are:

1. Having all pages under the same title.
2. Including the website name in the page title (it’s ok to do that for the homepage, but it’s not needed for the rest of the pages).
3. Making the page titles more than 65 characters in length.
4. Descriptions should be unique (between 150-160 characters), non-keyword-stuffed, and attractive to the user.

A good description can increase your click-through rate (CTR), and if your content delivers what is promised in the description, it is more likely to have high conversions as well.

Slow Loading Website:

Nowadays, technology allows folks to acquire what they desire at the drop of a hat. When someone visits your website, they are supposed to see everything in the blink of an eye. Google has also stated that 53 percent of mobile website visitors leave the site if the site takes more than 3 seconds to load. If your videos, images, pages, call-to-actions, or other elements load bit by bit, you may risk losing their attention and can lose your business as well. Make sure your site has the fastest loading time.

Not Using Anchor Text for Internal Links:

Have you ever seen links in the body of a web page for “click here,” this post,” and other generic text?

From an SEO perspective, it’s a waste. Sure, using a call to action as your link may increase clicks, but it also costs you the opportunity of tailoring your anchor text, one of the most important components of SEO.

For example, if you write a blog post and you want to link to your e-commerce services page, make the anchor text “e-commerce website design services” or something similar. Also, if you absolutely must have a call to action, try to at least include some relevant keywords in the link. For example, “click here to learn more about our eCommerce services”.

Not focusing on getting quality backlinks:

I am not a big fan of the term “link building”. In fact, I don’t even like to hear it, I like to use the term promotion instead.

Nevertheless, the reality is the same. Whether you call it link building, off-page SEO or promotion, it is one of the most important processes if you want to achieve high rankings, especially in Google.

When building links, don’t make the following SEO mistakes:

1. Don’t build too many links too fast. The whole process needs to be natural, and it is not natural for a 3-month-old website to have tons of links pointing to it. Go slow and steady.
2. Don’t use keyword anchor text links. In the near past, keyword anchor text links were very important for rankings, but now, if you have many of those, you can get a penalty instead.
3. Don’t direct all your links to your home page. Diversification is a better practice.
4. Don’t buy or exchange links with other bloggers and don’t participate in any link scheme (either free or paid).

Not Optimizing URLs or Site Structure:

Often, when building a new website, your web developer doesn’t integrate the best SEO practices into the website structure. This is totally understandable because the web developer is not an SEO specialist. Therefore, an overlooked facet of site architecture (in other words, the way the website is laid out and how the pages connect) is fairly common.

I would argue it’s the single most underrated area of SEO.

In general, the home page of your site is going to have the most authority because it’s going to have the most incoming links and the best quality of inbound links. Authority (or link juice) flows throughout a website from high authority pages to low authority pages through links. For every step away a web page is from the home page, the less and less of that total authority is going to be passed to it. All other factors being equal, the further away the page is from the home page, the worse it will rank.

I’ve seen cases of high authority web pages being buried deep in site architecture and losing rankings dramatically. I’ve also seen the reverse, where web pages are moved closer to the home page and suddenly jump several spots in Google. Ultimately, you want to create your website structure so it is easy and intuitive to navigate for users.

A flat structure often satisfies that requirement and will help you get more of those users to your site through search engines.

Forgetting Mobile Users:

Whether you’re a B2C or B2B brand, much of your audience is likely using a mobile device to find good content. If your content isn’t mobile-friendly, the user experience will be negatively impacted.

Take steps to ensure that your website and its content are mobile-friendly and responsive. Also, focus on creating content for users who would typically use a mobile device.

You are not active on Social Media:

Social media is one of the best and most effective ways to promote your website or new content.

It is a huge mistake if you are not active on at least one social media platform.

Most SEO experts agree that social signals are gaining more ground as a ranking factor, and besides the hidden SEO benefits, social media is also a good source of traffic.

You don’t have to be active in all networks or spend a lot of time socializing without a purpose.

You need to find which platform is best suited to your audience and try to build authority and trust by following the leaders in your niche and sharing informative and useful content.

Expecting Instant Results:

An SEO strategy is always a long-term strategy; it means that it will take some time to settle into search engines and to see the outcome. Many SEO professionals make this mistake and expect instant results as soon as they execute something new, but that’s rarely seen in the case of SEO. Once you make any amendment, give some time to your effort to create an impact.

Forgetting About Analytics:

Last but not least, the only way to know if your SEO optimization and content efforts work is to track their progress. Many marketers would disregard the numbers, but this is a serious mistake. Setting up and regularly reviewing your analytics is essential for your optimization results.

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are just two of the main tools you can use to measure and get an overview of your website’s performance. With their help, you can see how your optimization is working for the different kinds of content and using various strategies you are trying out.

Conclusion:

For sure, the above list is not 100% correct. There are many more SEO mistakes that even experienced webmasters miss. Nevertheless, the above mistakes are the most important.

In addition, it is almost certain that when these mistakes are corrected, the benefits to your website will be immediate.

Build a Better Paintball Website

Here at eMUNICATIONS, we love to play paintball. The game has a lot to offer: teamwork, adrenaline, exercise, and good old-fashioned sunlight (something usually alien to the eMUNICATIONS team).

Naturally, we also like good quality websites (something usually alien to the paintball community). Most paintball websites I’ve come across are in a state of disrepair — there’s usually little to no thought of the end-user, core information is hard to find, and very few of them are using social media in a useful way.

Until recently, most field owners I’ve talked with seem to dismiss their website as an afterthought. This wouldn’t have been a major problem five years ago, but in today’s world, the quality of your website is just as important as the quality of your field.

Not everyone has an eye for design, but when your online presence is clean and professional, it communicates that your business is clean and professional. You may not want to pay for professional design in order to cut costs, but avoiding this expense will only help your costs in the short term; your revenue will suffer in the long term.

One of the biggest frustrations I’ve experienced with paintball field websites is the lack of pertinent information or poor placement thereof. Within the first five seconds of viewing a website, the user should be able to identify your field’s hours, prices, location, and contact information. Some paintball fields keep wacky hours or will open up on random days, and they don’t do a good job of letting their customers know when these things occur. This is where social media comes into play.

Many field owners are reluctant to use social media — some dismiss it as hype, some are intimidated by it, while others simply don’t care. Facebook, for example, is a great way to let your customers know of any unscheduled open days or last-minute changes of field hours. It’s also a great way to get more people to your field and more people looking at your business.

One of the latest social media services is “location-based”. Companies like Gowalla, Foursquare, and now Facebook are all working in the location-based realm, and this sort of thing is VERY advantageous for paintball field owners. These services allow users to “check in” where they are. So they’ll broadcast to every one of their friends, “I’m at Joe’s Paintball Park”, which is a clickable link with your field’s contact information. If only five customers check in, that’s generally at least 300 people who were exposed to your company. You can even create an offer like this: “x% off admission when you check in using Facebook.”

So, paintball field owners, you have a lot of work ahead of you and a lot of new players to catch the attention of. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Want to know more? Drop us a line.

See you on the field!

jQuery Quickie For Zebra Highlighting In Tables

If you haven’t taken the time to check out this framework you absolutely must do so now. jQuery allows you to accomplish so much more with so much little. It may be a little arcane to look at the first time, but after a little research, you’ll wonder how you lived without it. Case in point, here’s a quick script to add zebra highlighting to a table with id ‘myTable’.

// Do zebra highlighting

$(“#myTableID tr:even”).addClass(‘altrow’);

This code can be added to an existing page and automagically apply the styles necessary. (You’ll still have to define the style in your css)

While you can do something similar using just CSS using the :even pseudoselector, it is not as universally supported. And jQuery will allow you to do far more than simply alternate table colors.

Google Analytics Reports You Should Be Analysing To Improve Your Marketing

You may be using Google Analytics, but are you sure that you are using it to its full potential?

Google Analytics provides users with the ability to measure every aspect of a website, from unique visitors to referral sources, to bounce rates, device types, time on page, click through rates, and so much more. Knowing which reports analyzing can be difficult when you’re wading through so much data.

To help you out, we have put together a list of custom and standard reports. With this, you’ll be able to quickly draw actionable marketing ideas to improve your results. And get better insight into your marketing performance.

• Mobile Overview Report:

Considering that mobile internet users now outpace desktop, it’s fairly safe to assume that your mobile and tablet experiences need to be as good (if not better) than the one for desktop users.

If your mobile visitor numbers are growing, it’s a good sign that your website is healthy and will likely rank well in Google Search.

Accessing this report is easy to follow these steps.

1. Step 1: After clicking on the Audience section, go all the way towards the bottom to find the Mobile > Overview.
2. Step 2: Now select your primary conversion goal under the appropriately named Conversions section.
3. Step 3: The first place to look for discrepancies between devices is in the engagement or Behavior section.

Significantly lower numbers on mobile and tablet (vs. Desktop) is your first clue to a poor mobile experience.

• Traffic Acquisition Report:

It’s important to know what channels are producing traffic to your website. When looking at a specific date range for this report, be sure to compare to the previous year to see how your traffic compares to the same dates last year. This way you can see website improvements over a particular time.

This report is especially important if traffic is down since it will help you see what channels have changed.

“Referrals” tab (Acquisition -> Overview -> All Traffic -> Referrals). This will tell you which external sites are driving traffic to your site.

• Audience Behaviour Report – NEW VS. RETURNING:

Getting a user to come to your site for the first time is great. Getting them to visit again is even better. After all, it is the returning visitors who usually end up becoming readers, followers, and customers.

This standard report in Google Analytics will tell you what percentage of your users are coming back to your site.

You can find it by going to the Audience -> Behavior -> New vs. Returning in your Analytics account.

Why is this significant? Returning visitors are more engaged in your content, and they’re more likely to take an action such as filling out a form or making a purchase, than a new visitor.

• Landing Pages – Bounce Rate:

It’s important to know which pages people are visiting and spending time on versus pages where they land and immediately leave. It’s best to view your top landing pages and analyze which ones are contributing to your website’s high bounce rate. Once you identify the pages that are causing users to leave, focus on fixing those pages to keep users more engaged on that page such as adding more targeted content, images and a call to action.

Find the report – Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages.

If the report shows that some pages have a substantially higher bounce rate than others, you can take steps to make high-bounce-rate pages more engaging.

• Top Search Pages Leaking Visitors:

As we’ve seen so far, visitors don’t always do what we expect them to. And they don’t always find what they’re looking for.

That’s evidenced by high bounce rates, especially on important pages that are bringing in a ton of traffic to your site.

Finding those pages that (a) rank highly, (b) bring tons of traffic, but (c) fail to convert them could give you another quick boost of new leads or customers.

1. Step 1: Start by locating your most popular content under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
2. Step 2: Now we’re going to use another filtering or sorting tool to make this information more relevant. “Bounce Rate” and “% Exit” in the Explorer tab.
3. Step 3: This will give you a visual comparison between the bounce and exit rate for all your pages. You can drill down further to get this data for each page.

Use this report to find pages with low engagement and detect UX problems on your site. For example, if visitors are exiting a three-page article after reading only the first two pages, there’s probably something that is causing them to leave on the second page (too many ads, bad copy, a distracting link in the sidebar and so on).

Conclusion:

Don’t worry about running A/B tests. And don’t waste time with a new page or content creation.

First, go back and fix all the stuff that’s not working. The poor device experiences. The high potential pages or posts are hidden from the world on Google’s page. And the popular pages that people are leaving immediately in droves.

Next, connect the dots by getting people from the most popular pages and paths to your pages that convert (or assist conversions) the highest.

Raw data, by itself, is meaningless. But using these five simple reports can help you layer in context and gain actionable insight that has the power to increase leads and sales literally overnight.

How High-Quality Content Impacts your Website SEO

Nowadays, in times of digital marketing, companies definitely prefer to use SEO. But, for best results, it is essential that the content available on the site is not only relevant but also something that will attract the clients. The site content should be such that it will allow the SEO to promote the site and allow the clients to understand the company and its services, encouraging interactions.

When it comes to SEO, We hear Content is the king for engaging the users and thus good quality content in SEO holds a prominent place. All the SEO tips advocate about posting high-quality, relevant and unique content, which should engage the users instantly.

When it comes to most of people content strategy they always think the more content they have the better their search rankings will be. However, search engines know better than that and you should always choose quality over quantity.

What is high-quality content?

To answer this question, Google’s Hummingbird update, along with the removal of the keyword tool. had emphasized quality content as a deciding factor for ranking well. And Google’s quality guidelines clearly mentioned out what they’re looking for.

Here are their exact words:

1. Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
2. Don’t deceive your users.
3. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
4. Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Content isn’t just frequently updating your website with blogs, videos or images. While that can be good for your website, search engines decide what makes your content worthy. Are you creating the same content that can be found on other sites? Is your content providing value to its visitors? Is your content relatable and unique? Is it answering the questions that someone is searching for? Fresh, interesting, easy to read, and credible content with the right number of keywords impacts the quality of content. Remember, high-quality content provides a valuable experience to its’ visitors.

So the message is clear: Focus on content, not keywords.

What is low-quality content in SEO?

Low-quality content, on the other hand, is only concerned about stuffing the keywords in such a way that it is spotted by the search engines, thus helping in boosting the rankings. It has nothing to do with the user experience and this is the reason why most of the times low-quality content ends up in achieving nothing. It has duplication issues, poor grammar, meaningless sentences, etc.

Any content does not meet these criteria is most likely low quality for SEO:

1. There is not enough main content on the page to satisfy the searcher.
2. The main content is not very good. Someone searching for something is unsatisfied by the content.
3. Perhaps the main content is good, but there are too many ads and pop-ups for the user to have a satisfying experience. The page is slow to load, or hard to read.
4. It is difficult to find out who is responsible for the website or the page content, and there is no good reason for anonymity.
5. The website has a negative reputation.

How does this affect SEO?

when quality content is created, it drastically improves your visibility. And without visibility and exposure, your content is just another one of the millions of articles that are posted every day on the web. Nobody sees it, Nobody shares it, Nobody does anything with it. Search engines care about the user experience. Their goal is to get you to the answer you’re looking for faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between you and the knowledge you seek. Google looks at the overall expertise, authority, and trust of a site. They call this E-A-T for short.

When evaluating the main content of a page, they look at:

1. The quality of information on a website.
2. The quantity of information on a site.
3. The external reputation of a website.
4. The internal information on a website.

If you want visibility and exposure, you have to commit yourself to the grind of consistently creating quality content.

How do you develop high-quality content?

With good content dominating search engines, you’ll need to invest time and money into developing high-quality content. Think outside the box, use other creative tactics, and try to become an industry expert to be considered a trustworthy resource, which will then lead to higher search rankings.

So, focus on this point:

1. Get to know your readers.
2. Keep the focus on customers, not selling.
3. Create content regularly.
4. Create content for every stage of the sales funnel.
5. Talk in their language.

How Do You Know If You Have a Piece of Quality Content?

Here’s a great benchmark for judging whether you have a piece of quality content or not. If someone reads that page, are they going to change the way that they approach their business or problem? A piece of content that compels someone to change their business strategy or influence their decision-making can be considered high-quality.

Conclusion:

In the end, quality content isn’t about a sales pitch. It’s about establishing trust and authority. Quality content should be all about solving a problem, addressing an issue, or offering up original research.

CMS for High Schools: Getting it Together

The biggest advantage of using Drupal for a high school website is the ability for the staff to make edits without any previous web building experience. However, this is also the biggest disadvantage.

The root of the problem is a lack of communication between editors. The goals of the site become lost in a sequence of delegation, design standards eventually go out the window and goals of individual features are lost. Eventually, the site loses its vision, falls victim to a design by committee and designers reach for a tissue to wipe away their tears. Rest at ease, there is a very simple remedy to this common conundrum.

Ideally, the school should have a single person who understands the goals and design standards. He or she should meet with all site contributors and review its standards and goals thoroughly. If there are too many editors, meeting with each one individually will become impractical. A simple handout should suffice. Keep in mind, none of these remedies are fail-safe; the person in charge should also be responsible for periodically reviewing the site to ensure quality.

Only you can prevent design by committee.

On Page SEO Checklist Needs to be Checked Periodically on Any Website

Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process, you have to keep making effective changes in your optimization strategy to keep your site working well and appearing at the desired position on the web. We make a lot of changes to our site, from changing the theme to adding new plugins, from updating plugins to refreshing the old content. All such things ultimately affect your On-Page SEO Health, which reflects in your site’s performance and ranking.

To make sure that your site will always perform at it’s the best level, you should perform ON Page Optimization on regular time slices. This is because, only link building is an ongoing process and all things other than link building, changes frequently. That’s why you should take care of the optimization process more often and more carefully to maintain the site’s performance at its peak.

Site updates, theme updates/changes, plugin updates, adding a new plugin/functionality, and other changes can cause some accidental errors that could lead to on-page SEO issues. Unless you proactively look for these errors, they will go unnoticed and will negatively influence your rankings.

Keeping the importance of SEO in mind, here are important checks that you need to conduct weekly to ensure that your on-page SEO is on point.

Check Robots.txt to see if you are blocking important resources:

It is very important to check the Robots.txt files regularly. Many times we block some important stuff unknowingly, which is not crawled by the search engines. In CMS like WordPress, Drupal, it’s very easy to block something important because initially, WordPress, Drupal comes with many default settings.

For example, blocking out the wp-content folder in your Robots.txt would mean blocking out images from getting crawled. If the Google bots cannot access the images on your site, your potential to rank higher because of these images is reduced. Similarly, your images will not be accessible through Google Image Search, further reducing your organic traffic.

In the same way, if Google bots cannot access the JavaScript or CSS on your site, they cannot determine if your site is responsive or not. So even if your site is responsive, Google will think it is not, and as a result, your site will not rank well in mobile search results.

check your Robots.txt file, go to Google Search Console -> Google Index -> Blocked Resources.
If these resources are blocked, you can simply enable them by adding

For example, let’s say you are blocking the following two resources:

/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/image.jpg
/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js

You can unblock these resources by adding the following to your Robots.txt file:

Allow: /wp-includes/js/
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

By adding these files, crawlers will be able to crawl your site’s important content. To ensure that if these resources are now crawlable or not, go to Crawl -> Robots.txt Tester in Google Search Console, then enter the URL and hit the Test button.

Check your site for broken links:

Links are the most important factor in SEO. As links are the concern, they got affected very frequently. You should do a link check on a periodic basis. Broken links damage site performance very badly, you can easily fix your internal broken links with the help of a broken links checker. But if the external links are broken than it is very difficult to manage.

It is so because you have no control over the external broken links. There may be a possibility that the page you linked with is no longer exist. Such links show the error of 404 (Page Not Found) which negatively affects your site ranking.

If you are using WordPress, you can also use a plugin like the Broken Link Checker. This plugin will find and fix all broken links.

Another way to check for broken links is through the Google Search Console. Log in and go to Crawl > Crawl Errors and check for “404” and “not found” errors under the URL Errors section.

If you do find 404 URLs, click on the URL and then go to the Linked From tab to see which page(s) contain this broken URL.

Regularly check your indexed pages:

It is very important to check that all your pages are properly indexed by a search engine. To check this, simply type “site:sitename.com” into the search panel and hit Enter. By doing this, you can easily figure out that all your quality pages are properly indexed. You can also check if there are any low-quality pages.

By roughly scanning through these results, you should be able to check if all pages indexed are of good quality or if there are some low-value pages present.

Quick Tip:

If your site has a lot of pages, change the Google Search settings to display 100 results at a time. This way, you can easily scan through all the results quickly.

An example of a low-value page would be the “search result” page. You might have a search box on your site, and there is a possibility that all search result pages are being crawled and indexed. All these pages contain nothing but links and hence are of little to no value. It is best to keep these pages from getting indexed.

You can easily exclude such pages from being indexed by disallowing them in Robots.txt or by using the Robots meta tag. You can also block certain URL parameters from getting crawled using the Google Search Console by going to Crawl > URL Parameters.

Check the HTML Source Code to ensure everything is right:

It’s one thing to use SEO plugins to optimize your site, and it’s another thing to ensure they are working properly. The HTML source is the best way to ensure that all of your SEO-based meta tags are being added to the right pages. It’s also the best way to check for errors that need to be fixed.

You can check the following things to make sure that everything is working fine.

1. Check to see if the page has a meta robots tag, and ensure that it is set up properly and working well.
2. Check for the page has a rel=”canonical” tag and make sure it is showing the proper canonical URL.
3. For mobile responsiveness check if the pages have a viewport meta tag.
4. Check for the OG Tag in the pages.
5. Check to see if pages have proper OG tags (especially the “OG Image” tag), Twitter cards, other social media meta tags, and other tags like Schema.org tags.

To check the source, do the following: Open the page that needs to be checked in your browser window.  next Press CTRL + U on your keyboard to bring up the page source, or right-click on the page and select View Source. Now check the content within the ‘head’ tags ( <head> </head> ) to ensure everything is right.

Mind Your Down Time:

It’s necessary to notice your site’s downtime patterns. Down Time ruins your visitor’s experience which will hurt the site on page SEO health in a long term. Too often, downtime negatively affects a site’s ranking factor and the Search Engine Optimization strategy. You should regularly audit your site performance.

Request your hosting provider to regularly send the performance report so that you can easily check site performance. If you are having too many downtimes, than you should switch the hosting service and get a hosting service.

This is because numerous hosting services are available that offer hosting services at a very low cost. But their performance is not good all the time and they are not even reliable. Switching to a better hosting gives better performance and fewer downtimes, which means less bounce rate.

Check for render-blocking scripts:

You might have added a new plugin or functionality to your blog, which could have added calls to many JavaScript and CSS files on all pages of your site. The plugin’s functionality might be for a single page, yet calls to its JavaScript and CSS are on all pages.

For example, you might have added a contact form plugin that only works on one page – your contact page. But the plugin might have added its JavaScript files to every page.

The more JavaScript and CSS references a page has, the longer it takes to load. This reduces your page speed, which can negatively impact your search engine rankings.

The best way to ensure this does not happen is to check your site’s article pages using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool on a regular basis. Check to see if there are render-blocking JavaScript files and figure out if these scripts are needed for the page to function properly.

If you find unwanted scripts, restrict these scripts only to pages that require them, so they don’t load where they are not wanted. You can also consider adding a defer or async attribute to JavaScript files.

Check Site Loading Speed:

The site’s loading time matters the most for keeping the bounce rate low. For maintaining a good on-page score, the site must load fast, i.e, within 3 seconds. According to research, 75% of users will not revisit the site if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. You can easily conduct a site speed audit by Google’s free tool.

Check for Mobile Usability Errors:

Sites that are not responsive do not rank well in Google’s mobile search results. Even though your site is responsive, there is no saying what Google bots will think. Even a small change like blocking a resource can make your responsive site look unresponsive in Google’s view.
So even if you think your site is responsive, make it a practice to check if your pages are mobile-friendly or if they have mobile usability errors.

To do this, log in to your Google Search Console and go to Search Traffic > Mobile Usability to check if any of these pages show mobile usability errors.

Conclusion:

From the above On Page Optimization definition, we can conclude that it is an endless, time-consuming process and has many aspects. But if you properly audit perspectives carefully, you will have better optimization for your site without doing anything related to Black Hat SEO. Don’t wait for a perfect time to edit. Make a checklist and perform your On-Page Optimization now to ensure smooth and swift working. If you have a Drupal site, Please follow “13 Things that Will Help to Improve Your Site’s Ranking“.

Apart from On Page Optimization, another most important thing is the Off Page Optimization. We can say that Off-Page optimization is the fuel to keep running the blog posts effectively. From social sharing to link building, all these aspects matter the most for keeping the traffic coming to your site. Check out our blog on Off–Page SEO Techniques to Improve Online Reputation.

Here’s a Nifty Snippet For Displaying a Menu Block On Appropriate Pages

For a recent site, we needed to have a menu block be visible on pages that were represented in the menu. That is to say, if the page you are looking at is in the “Editorial Stuff” menu, display the editorial stuff menu block.

The trick here is to use PHP to determine the block visibility for the menu blocks. If we’re looking at a node derivative, the node id should be in the link_path field of menu_links. If we’re looking at a page created by another module (views, for example) then the URL will be there.
We run a quick query to check for the existence of the value and return true or false based on the success.

You should be wary of using this if you have more than two or three blocks, since this means a mandatory string lookup query per block and per page. If you’ve got more than a handful of menus, it’ll likely be worth implementing a module with some smarter logic to cut down on the DB load.

Why Mobile First Design Principle is so Important on Website Development

Mobile First Design: Historically, most web designers and their clients have approached the desktop side of any project first, while leaving the mobile part as a secondary goal that gets accomplished later. Even with the rise of responsive design, many of us begin with the “full size” site and work our way down.

One downside to doing this is that priority is essentially given to desktop/laptop users. Unfortunately, many design elements and functionality that are optimized for desktop computers and laptops do not transfer well to the mobile version of the design.

The growing importance of mobile designs has contributed to many designers following a “Mobile-First” strategy with their designs.

In this article, we would like to talk about why it is now so important to do this.

What is a mobile-first Design?

Mobile first design is a design strategy that says when you create a website or app, you should start sketching and prototyping the smallest screen first and work your way up to larger screens. Essentially, it’s about delivering the right user experience to the right device.

The reason that this makes sense is that with such limited real estate on small screens, UX designers must prioritize the most important aspects of their website and apps, namely content.

For many years, mobile websites were an afterthought to the design process. An addition, not a necessity. The slow decline of desktops, coupled with the rise of mobile phones over the last 5 years, has shown that mobile-first design has to take priority.

Mobile-Friendly vs Mobile-First Design:

We’ve got used to the terms responsive and mobile-friendly design. Isn’t this just the same as mobile-first web pages? Although the two terms sound somewhat similar, they bear different meanings.

Responsive design is built around the concept of media queries that target specific devices and viewport sizes. With this in mind, you can code up your initial CSS given a mobile perspective and then use media queries to selectively serve up additional styling as the viewport size increases.

This is likely the opposite of the method that you typically take with responsive design: start big and then reduce. Given the arguments above, though, there’s obviously a lot of logic behind structuring your media queries from small to large.

Mobile-first web design is an independent technical approach to building websites. Instead of building a site for the screens of larger devices primarily, the technique suggests that you put a smaller smartphone screen at the heart of your web development strategy. This allows you to focus on the essentials, mainly, bringing the primary focus on the design elements and pieces of content that bear the major importance for your brand and your audience.

When a user accesses mobile-first web pages, additional layers of content are added. This makes your site well thought-out and content-centric.

Why the “Mobile First” Principle Is So Important?

Mobile conversion rates are up 64% when compared with the average desktop conversion rates. So, designing mobile first can lead to more profit for your business. And since Google ranks for mobile-friendliness, it makes sense to bear this in mind when starting a new project.

This way of designing is also beneficial when it comes to download times and users accessing your content as quickly as possible. With fewer elements, the page will load faster. When you consider a 1-second delay causing a 7% loss in conversions, it pays to design mobile first.

When you design from the smallest screen to the largest screen, this is known as progressive enhancement. It’s about designing with a strong foundation and adding enhancements as you go.

With mobile first, you create your strong foundation. This foundation will help strengthen other designs for tablets and desktops. The foundation should always be content and mobile first design emphasizes content over navigation – users get the information they need quicker.

This will also make your life easier since the mobile-first design starts off by tackling the hardest screen size to design for. The rest inevitably falls into place.

Mobile-first design forces you to really focus and maintain clarity by removing any unnecessary user interface decoration. By removing any distractions, you’ll invariably improve the user experience, and that makes good business sense.

How to create a Mobile-First Design?

One of the best and quickest ways to build mobile-first pages is to use a responsive website creator that allows you to build unique designs code-free. The popularity of drag-and-drop page builders grows at a fast rate. There is no need to spend time on the learning curve in order to be able to create versatile web pages without tweaking the code.

Moreover, you can use ready-made web themes that include all the essentials that are needed for a quick start to your web project. All you need to do is select a web theme that suits your topic, adjust it with the help of the drag-and-drop admin panel, upload the pages with your content, and bring it online.

Conclusion:

Neglecting mobile design in this day and age is a UX design sin. Delivering a pleasurable user experience should be at the heart of what we do. Using this mobile-first approach will not only make your life easier as a designer, but it’ll make the life of the user easier too. And isn’t that why we do this?

How Much Does A Website Cost?

How much does a Website Cost?

We are asked all the time. The problem is that there is no simple answer. There are many variables to price, and it is important to know these variables to make the right decision for your company’s website project.

First, a web designer or a web design firm. Many individuals are capable of producing the files needed to create a website. The problem is how capable they are. Today’s Internet technologies are very complex, and there are many issues to know, design standards, usability, technical choices, programming languages, database design, web services, social networking, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, server administration, maintenance, and much, much more. It is difficult for one person to have expertise in all of these areas. Additionally, an individual can easily get bogged down if they take on too many website projects at one time. A professional firm has the resources to move around to keep your project on a timeline. This all said an individual working from their home could be less expensive than a professional firm with a team of specialists. It is important to consider these issues together.

Second, what is the business model of the web designer or web design firm you are considering? Generally, there are three business models: a website builder application, such as you will find on GoDaddy.com, a flat rate price for a template website, or an hourly rate for a customized website. A website builder is simply an application that resides on a website server, whereby you choose a rudimentary, generic template and access the content area on the page with a text editor. Typically, these website builder applications charge a fixed monthly rate. You can add additional features for an increase in the fixed monthly rate. This is a very inexpensive way to “just get a website online”. Their shortcomings are that they look very generic, are not very flexible, are not specific to your industry, very poor performing in search engines, you do not have assistance in how to write or present your concepts on the website, it is not transferrable, you are limited to the functionality offered by the website builder application.

Many web designers or website design firms will offer a flat rate to develop a website for you. This rate is usually derived from the website designer’s experience, and it is quoted broadly to fit the designer’s experience or expertise. For instance, you want a blog on your website. there are many ways to design a blog, and there are even more ways to present the blog to your website visitors. To control costs or the time involved in delivering this website functionality to you a web designer who is using a flat rate price will provide a set of pages and programming code that the web designer is familiar with or may have already produced. If the blog does not perform the way you want or is displayed as you wish, too bad. A “blog” was delivered, and you get “that” blog for the price that was quoted. This is true with other features, calendars, membership lists, newsletters, email blasts, etc. Many inexperienced web designers do not have programming skills and will provide a flat rate price because they utilize “off-the-shelf” solutions to your feature/functionality requests. Most of the time, they lack the programming skills to write a customized solution or to even make code changes necessary to effect the exact changes you want. Or, the “off-the-shelf” solution does not allow for code changes.

Most reputable, experienced, and professional web design firms provide website design and website programming, and consulting services at an hourly rate. These rates can vary widely, but it is usually the fairest way to provide web design services. Two things are critical when hiring a web design firm under this business model: be as specific as you can about the features and functionality you want on your website, and get an estimate of time/cost up front on that specific features/functionality list before beginning your website project. It is also very telling if your web design firm does not provide some room in the budget for contingencies. There will always need to be some changes or some additions. The web designer must put some padding on the estimate.

It is impossible to provide a price with any confidence when you tell the designer, “I just want a simple website. Nothing fancy.”, etc. Do you want a calendar? Blog? Newsletter? eCommerce? Membership directory? All of this functionality takes additional time to program into your web design. The design, the look, and feel, of your website, is contingent on these features – how to display them, where to display, etc. It is easy for costs to get out of hand once the project starts if you do not focus on completing your project quickly. If you run hot and cold on the process of designing and programming your website it will cause the firm hired to have to start and stop. This is a very inefficient use of their time, as they have to re-educate themselves on the project each time. It is also important that you communicate well with the web design team so they are not guessing at layout positions, minor features, and styling issues. It just costs them time and your money if they have to redo things.

Finally, there are some additional costs after the website design and programming phase – hosting of the website, hosting of email services, domain registration, search engine marketing. There can be additional costs depending on the details of your website (i.e. electronic gateway fees in the case of processing credit cards online, etc.) but, these are the primary charges you can expect on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis for just about any website. Web hosting/email hosting fees typically run about $10/month to $100/month, $200/month or more. Domain registration typically runs $9 or $10 per year to as high as $35/year. Search engine marketing such as Google Adwords can be budgeted but is difficult to predict because some industries are more competitive than others. The reason for this is because you bid for the position of your ads. Your budget could do the job as low as $100/month or may be as high as $1,000/month, $1,500/month or, more per month.

By the way, if you are getting bids from several web designers/web design firms, be sure you are comparing apples and apples before making your selection. It can be difficult to be sure what one designer is proposing matches up to the other designer’s deliverables. If you have any question or are unsure about a comparison, call the designers and ask for clarification. They will be happy to discuss it with you. We recently had a client who thought they were making a fair comparison. They didn’t. After awarding the website design project to a web designer working out of his house, they learned not everything was covered in the chosen estimate. The project finished over budget and it was completed late causing difficulties with sponsors and advertisers. The lowest price/cost estimate is not always the best value.

So, by now you are saying, “Great Kevin, HOW MUCH DOES A WEBSITE COST!” eMUNICATIONS charges an hourly rate. We will sit down with you at no charge to learn what your goals are, what your feature/function desires are, make suggestions, and we will come to a pretty good understanding of where we are headed. eMUNICATIONS will then provide you with a written estimate of the time and costs to build a customized website that will deliver the professional appearance, features, functionality, and results you expect from your website.

eMUNICATIONS uses a programming environment called Drupal. We are experts in Drupal and have done many websites utilizing this terrific programming environment. A well-respected (and big) Drupal training firm named Lullabot did a pricing survey among Drupal website design firms. You will be happy to know, eMUNICATIONS is on the low end of these scales. Not because we are less capable but because we are extremely efficient and specialized.

So sorry, as any reputable website design firm will tell you, to find out “HOW MUCH DOES A WEBSITE COST”, you’ll have to contact us and tell us what the goals of your website are.

Off-Page SEO Techniques to Improve Online Reputation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the techniques used to improve traffic to a website. This is where you construct your web pages and implement certain techniques to help you rank as high as possible on search engine result pages (SERPs). The higher your pages can rank on Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. results pages, the more traffic your site is likely to get.

SEO can be split up into two separate categories: On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO.

On-page SEO refers to settings you can apply on your website so that it is optimized for search engines. and it includes optimized titles and snippets, search-friendly URL structures, friendly navigation, user sitemaps, internal links, text formatting, user-friendly 404 pages, accelerated pages in terms of loading, mobile-optimized pages, high-quality fresh content, image optimization, external links to relevant sites (not broken) etc.

Off-page SEO refers to optimization activities you can do outside the boundaries of your website. Anything taking place outside of your website and contributing to your ranking is considered off-site SEO: social media marketing, influencer marketing, mentions (direct or indirect), guest blogging, and so on, so forth.

By deploying better off-page SEO techniques means you are trying to prove to your readers and search engines that your site is trustworthy, authentic, relevant, and could very well be popular in your industry, other benefits like the increase in rankings, increase in PageRank, more exposure.

Let’s get to the ultimate off-page SEO techniques checklist and learn some lessons.

Link Building:

Link building is another popular way of promoting your site. If you produce a popular, unique post for your site, then other people may want to link to it. Perhaps you have copied/published another website’s content on your site; don’t forget to place their website link as a reference. Do it for others and, if your content is trustworthy, let others do it for you. This is another way to increase your link popularity. Link building should be about quality, not quantity. If you try to ‘trick’ search engines by building artificial links, you are more likely to get a penalty rather than an increase in rankings.

Blogging:

Blogging is one of the best ways to promote your website online! By writing a blog for your website, you give a reason for visitors to keep returning to your site and keep up to date with your latest posts. It also helps search engines to crawl your site more frequently, as they have to update your latest blog post entries, which ultimately helps you rank higher in search engine results pages.

If you’re not very good at writing content for your blog, then you could always hire a guest blogger for your blog and ask him/her to write precise and unique content so that your blog can gain more credit from a search engine point of view.

Blog Marketing:

If you have created any kind of content which is share-worthy, then don’t hesitate to reach out influencers in your industry. Tell them to check your blog and ask for link backs from their blog. Make sure you get the links from completely relevant domains.

Engage in Social Media:

Social Networking is bigger than ever these days, If you want to make your business, website or blog popular, engage with people on multiple social media platforms. Social media presence will help grow your business and also help you get more backlinks.

Forum Submission:

Find forums online that are related to your sites and get involved within that community. Reply to threads, answer peoples questions, offer advice, etc. This all helps to build up your reputation as someone who is an expert within that position. Try to use “Do-Follow” Forums so that you can include a link to your site within your signature, which helps search engines crawl your site.

Directory Submission:

Many people may say that directory submission is dead! I believe that it isn’t as you are increasing the likely hood of people seeing your website. It is purely based on how effectively we are selecting those directories and how efficiently we are choosing the category for submission. You could submit to general directories, but for maximum effect, you are better off submitting to suitable directories. Of course, I agree that it gives quite delayed results, but it is worth doing it.

Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking sites are one of the best platforms to promote your website. When you bookmark your webpage or blog post on popular social bookmarking websites, you gain high traffic to your webpage or blog.

Photo Sharing:

Share your photos on popular image submission websites. Before submitting your images please optimize them with the correct URL and title tag. Before submitting your images, check if they have a proper title, description, and tags.

Video Marketing:

Just like photo sharing, if you have any videos that you have used on your site, then you can submit them to sites like; YouTube, Vimeo, etc. allowing people to find your content in other ways.

Answer the Questions:

One of the best ways you can get high traffic is from question and answer websites. Join high question and answer sites and search for questions related to your business, blog or website and give clear answers to these questions. Give a link to your website which will help in bringing you more visibility.

Infographics Submission:

Make creative infographics. These days, infographics are getting popular on the internet. Submit your infographics on infographics submission websites and give reference links to your webpage or blog. The image sizes differ with different websites

Conclusion:

Off-page, SEO is NOT just about backlinks as most people think. It involves your overall website trust, authority, social signals, and many other things. This off page SEO techniques guide is written to discuss some of the crucial factors that can improve your overall website authority on Google search. Don’t just rely upon on page SEO if you want higher rankings. Whenever you publish a new post, make sure to follow the off page SEO techniques mentioned here. Please always check your Google analytics report to improve your website.

Last but not least, avoid playing with fire and practice black hat off-page SEO techniques. You can turn both search engines, visitors, and subscribers to enemies. You can get penalties from Google, get blocked by visitors, or blacklisted by subscribers. And nobody wants that.

Dynamic sorting in Views for Drupal

A common problem that I see when working with non-table views is dynamic sorting. It seems as if there’s no easy way to make use of the sort functionality that views provide without using the table style. This is the method that I use to get around the problem. I’m not the first to do it this way, and I’m also not convinced it’s the easiest way to do it. But it does work and we’ve used it without trouble.

I create a module to contain a function to handle the sorting. That makes it easier to make changes on the fly and keeps code out of the database where possible. You’ll still have to do some work in the view, but it’s minimal and hopefully self-explanatory. Below, I’ve outlined the parts of the view that need to be edited or added. In this case, I want to be able to sort on title or price, but your case will likely be different. Change the sort features as appropriate.

Create an argument of type “Global: Null”. It can come at any point in your list, but there must be an argument present in that URL location or the code will not execute. I usually add a title or search type. Set the argument to display all values if not present and add a validator. Choose a PHP validator and add the following.

return _mymodule_handle_sortables($view);

That will allow you to edit the contents of the function quickly/easily without having to edit view / save view/preview view at each iteration. Note that I pass the $_GET variable. That’s not strictly necessary since it should be available in the function anyway. I just do it for easier readability.

First step, get the names of the sortable fields with the devel module:

function _mymodule_handle_sortables(&$view) { dpm($view->sort); }

Preview the view and note the names of the fields. Once you’ve got them, you can do the following to alter the output of the view:

function _mymodule_handle_sortables(&$view) { switch ($_GET[‘sort’]) { case ‘sell_price_asc’: unset($view->sort[‘title’]); $view->sort[‘sell_price’]->options[‘order’] = ‘ASC’; break; case ‘sell_price_desc’: unset($view->sort[‘title’]); $view->sort[‘sell_price’]->options[‘order’] = ‘DESC’; break; case ‘alpha_asc’: unset($view->sort[‘sell_price’]); $view->sort[‘title’]->options[‘order’] = ‘ASC’; break; case ‘alpha_desc’: unset($view->sort[‘sell_price’]); $view->sort[‘title’]->options[‘order’] = ‘DESC’; break; } return true; }

Add a PHP header to your view and add the following to it:

Now you can dynamically display a sort header. Here’s an admittedly overdone function to do that:

function _mymodule_sortables($g) { // Collect all the relevant GET parameters $gopts = array(); foreach ($g as $k=>$v) { if ($k == ‘q’) continue; $gopts[$k] = $v; } $opts = http_build_query($gopts); // Preserve the sort choice for selection $s1 = $s2 = $s3 = $s4 = ”; switch ($gopts[‘sort’]) { case ‘alpha_asc’ : $s1 = ‘selected=”selected”‘;break; case ‘alpha_desc’ : $s2 = ‘selected=”selected”‘;break; case ‘sell_price_asc’ : $s3 = ‘selected=”selected”‘;break; case ‘sell_price_desc’ : $s4 = ‘selected=”selected”‘;break; } // Unset the sort option so that it can be set in the url manually below unset($gopts[‘sort’]); $opts_sort = http_build_query($gopts); $output = “

Sorta-zz-a$ – $$$$ – $

“; return $output; }

Note also that I provide a means of choosing a different “display” within this view by preserving the url options and adding direct links. I’ve got a grid view and list view, the header provides links to the pages for each and preserves url options.

I ripped out some code for readability and to focus more on the point of this article, so let me know if you have any questions

Improve your Website Design to Attract New Customers

Your website is the prime component of your online marketing. Therefore, the ultimate goal of web design is to attract new customers, keep their attention, and move them to act. This to true if you have a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) model or a Business-to-Business (B2B) model. How is your website performing?

There are many online articles discussing online marketing techniques and attracting prospects to your website. But what happens when your website visitors get there? Poor website design can diminish or negate all your hard work. If you have a high bounce rate, poor engagement, or a low conversion rate, consider these web design tips to attract new customers.

Pick a Consistent Color Scheme:

Your business communicates a lot at first glance, and it all hangs on the color scheme. Since colors evoke a message and emotion, it’s no surprise that banks typically favor blue (which emotes a feeling of security and trustworthiness), and companies that prioritize organic living and the environment opt for green logos (signifying growth, freshness, and health).

Specific statement colors not only speak to your business’ intended message, but also to the demographic you’re trying to attract. And when you’ve decided on a color scheme, make sure to use it consistently across all manner of branding, while scaling back on your general color palette.

Keep Upgrading Your Logo:

It has never been more important for your company to have a recognizable logo – after all, it’s not just an emblem on a card anymore. A logo appears on your website (both desktop and mobile), across your social media entities, as a favicon on a web browser, a mobile app tile on a smartphone, and more. When looking for a logo, try to make it as simple as possible and as unique as your brand.

Use Custom Photos And Visuals:

Innovative use of custom photos is the only way you can stand out in this competitive market. It is never a good idea to follow through with mediocrity, especially when it comes to aesthetic appeal, which decides the outset of your web page to your target audience

It may be easier to just skim through online stock photos and pick a relevant few to use for your website, but it will also make your site less innovative and less interesting. Creating your own concept of the kind of images you want and getting proper pictures taken for your site will make it more exclusive and make the idea you are trying to get across of your site more appealing and special.

Stay On Point:

The first thing a person visiting your site will notice is the top 1/3rd of your page, and hence that area must contain the most basic and essential information regarding your site. This includes what the site is about, how the customer can use the site to find or do what they came for. A smart layout will enable the users to find the options or information they are looking for more easily and will surely make the site more user-friendly. Avoid descriptions that are too long or convoluted. Everyone is looking for a fast and simple way of finding information, so unnecessarily long instructions or definitions will not be appreciated by anyone.

Designing That’s Responsive:

It is not wise to assume that your customers will only visit your site via a computer. With a single person surfing the internet through several devices, it is safe to assume your site may be visited by a phone or tablet. But for many websites, it is difficult to load the site when the user shifts to an Android/ iOS device, as the layout is solely made for entering the site through a computer browser. Making your site sensitive to changes in devices will ensure easier access for your customers, and so they will be less prone to not entering your site, even if they change devices.

Showcase indicators of Trust Prominently:

No company wants to give the impression that their services have never been used before, yet we’ve all seen websites that look hastily thrown together, untested, or sketchy. One way of strengthening your reputation is by showcasing appropriate accolades and other indicators of trust prominently on the homepage.

Has your startup been mentioned in the New York Times or reviewed on popular tech publications? Does your company have any well-known VC backers, or have they formed professional relationships with already established brands? This information, with appropriate links and graphics, should be incorporated.

Consider how Viewers read your Site:

Research from an eye-tracking study from the Nielsen Norman Group has shown that internet users are more likely to read content in an F pattern: first in a horizontal bar across the top of the page, and then horizontally again a little further down. Then they scan the document vertically from top to bottom. The implications are that visitors don’t necessarily read the whole document – they scan, and even then, mostly just the first two paragraphs on a page.

Applied to a business website, it may be more effective to communicate the most important information on the top third of a page, with generous use of keywords. Try to break up large chunks of text with appropriate graphics. I try to do the same thing in various columns I do here on Inc. Regardless of whether or not this model works for your company, it’s increasingly important to consider how viewers read your site.

Keep it Simple!

It’s easy to get carried away by all of the elements that everyone says you need. However, even with today’s surplus of SEO features and custom design elements, it’s never been more important to scale back, get rid of all non-essential details, and keep it simple.

On a practical level, people aren’t just finding your company on a computer anymore. Screens are getting smaller, which means all-important information needs to be featured more prominently. They also have shorter attention spans. People are scrolling faster, so if they don’t find what they need at first glance, they’ll look elsewhere. As we’ve learned from Apple, simple is beautiful. So if you’re building a new website, or simply updating an old one, just remember: keep it simple.

Conclusion:

These are a few simple tips you can cater to your use when designing a website. Of course, if you find implementing these tips a bit too intimidating to do it yourself, we are providing web design services. At the end of the day, all you will need is some creative thinking and a knack for perfection.

Social Media Marketing Tips to Improve Your Small Businesses

Social media isn’t just for personal use anymore. Businesses small and large have been using platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for years – to the benefit of their bottom lines. And, if your business is struggling to make an impact, it’s time to make a change.

With 70 percent of the US population claiming at least one social media account, lagging behind on social media is no longer an option if you want to grow as a business. However,  constantly changing algorithms and increasingly savvy competitors admittedly make it hard to find your audience, particularly without a little advice.

Here are some stats to help you understand the importance of social media marketing for small business and why you need to take it seriously.

1. According to a survey conducted by eMarketer, 88% of businesses use social media.
2. 96% of the people who talk about your brand online aren’t following you on social media.
3. Customers spend 20% to 40% more on products/services by companies who engage with them on social media.

Being a small business owner, you should see social media as a robust tool that can help build strong awareness, increase the number of sales and build a real customer base. When you truly understand the potential of social media marketing for small business, you will see that the results that you achieve are far better.

That’s why getting a few tips from experts can do wonders for your next campaign. Take a look at what we found to be the most helpful social media tips out there today and reach your audience.

Get Started:

If your business doesn’t have a social media presence by now, you’re possibly feeling apprehensive about jumping in this late in the game. With more 60 million business pages on alone, making an account now might seem like a pretty daunting task. However, in 2018, it’s more about “now” than it is about “perfect.”

“Don’t be afraid to just get started — walks you through the steps and provides additional help resources so you don’t have to have every little detail set up perfectly. Just get going and learn as you go,” said Sandi Krakowski, serial entrepreneur and active social media user, to Business.

Social Media platforms like are designed to be updated as you go. There’s no reason to be worried about creating a “public relations disaster” because you poorly punctuated your “About” section. Get your company on now, and figure it out along the way. You’ll get the hang of it.

Commit to a Plan:

When it comes to social media marketing for small business, having a strong and clear strategy is the first step towards finding success. There are many reasons why a business may fail to get results with social media marketing, but sometimes it is only because they did not know what they were doing.

“It all starts with planning,” wrote Brian Peters of Buffer. “Create a social media strategy and write it down in order to hold your business accounts. Your strategy should include a basic company mission statement, content plan and goals. And most importantly, a powerful statement on ‘why’ people would follow you on social media, what kind of content you plan on creating and posting, and what you hope to achieve.”

For instance, if you are marketing on Facebook, you should not only focus on getting more likes to your posts and your page but also try to boost the number of leads and sales you’re getting. Try to align your social media goals to your business goals.

Audit Your Social Media Online Presence:

If you’re looking to improve an existing social media presence, it’s essential to first take stock of what you’re working. And that means, it’s time for an audit. By inspecting your current audience, content, and overall social media strategy, you can learn a lot about what customers want from your business.

So how do you conduct a social media audit? Taking simple steps, Gather Data, Ask some key questions, Look at your audience, Determine top performing post, Do brand check, compare to competitors, reviewing your content, and Compare to revenue, leads & conversion target, will make a huge difference when it comes to your future social media success.

Create a Social Media Calendar:

Creating quality social media content is not enough. You also need to make sure that it reaches your followers on a consistent basis. An effective way to share the right kind of content is to use a social media calendar. Without complicating things, a social media calendar is nothing but a detailed schedule of the type of content you will be posting to each of your social media accounts. It gives you the much-needed clarity to post social media updates that matter.

There are multiple ways to create your social media calendar. You can either choose to go the simple way by using a spreadsheet or calendar in your Google Drive or use a more robust approach by using a paid tool.

It doesn’t matter what tool you use to create your calendar, what actually matters is how detailed it is and how you will be executing it. Because ultimately your precise execution plays a major role in making your efforts successful.

Having a clear social media calendar allows you to stay accountable, be consistent, save a ton of time, get more productive, and achieve peace of mind – all of which contributes to building a result oriented social media marketing approach.

Get Inspired by Other Brands:

When you are doing social media marketing for small business, it is easy to get confused and misunderstand what your audience is looking for. This can lead you to create content that does not go well with your overall business goals. Which is why you need to spend time looking and analyzing the type of content other businesses are posting to their social media accounts.

These companies can be your direct competitors or may even compliment your business. The idea is to get a clear understanding of the type of content that is working for them. Look for patterns and see what’s fetching them the most social response.

You can also leverage social listening to find insights about your prospects and what they want to see from you. This not only ensures that you create appropriate content on a regular basis, but it also helps you stand out from the crowd.

When seeking inspiration, it is not necessary that you only stick to analyzing other small businesses using social media marketing. You can also go beyond and actually learn from industry leaders and bigger brands such as Starbucks, Oreo, Netflix, Apple, etc. It allows you to grab some real social media social lessons firsthand.

Don’t Forget Video:

As technology has improved, the video has become incredibly popular on social media. From live feeds to GIFs, the medium has become the go-to method for marketers to get the attention of potential customers. And, suffice it to say, it’s working.

“The domination of video has been a long time coming,” wrote Brent Barnhart of Sprout Social. “Eye-catching, entertaining and capable of stopping scrolling users in their tracks, video represents the ideal way to encourage fans to spend more time engaging with your brand.”

The stats back this up, too:

If you haven’t been convinced that video needs to be part of your social media strategy to date, it’s time to rethink your approach.

Choose the Right Platform:

One of the things that can impact your social media marketing for small business results is the choice of your platform. In order to get the most out of social media marketing for small business and make your brand stand out from the rest, it is crucial that you choose a platform that is suitable to your business goals. If not, you may end up spending your time and money on a social network that will most likely not give you a favorable return on investment.

Do not make the mistake of selecting a social media platform based on a wild estimate or on what others are doing. It is important that you take into consideration your target audience, their preferences, and other demographics before starting to work with a platform.

Develop Separate Personas:

Once you have the minute details that you find common between the best customers, it’s time to organize them into different personas, which helps you target with more precision when using social media marketing for small business.

You can easily do this by creating a list of customers within your audience that share the same kind of goals and face similar challenges. Create separate groups out of these customers and categorize them. Each category you add is nothing but a unique persona that you will be leveraging later on.

For instance, if you are a yoga teacher, some of your students may want to do yoga to perfect their posture while others may aim to do it for building muscle strength. While both of these customers want to do yoga, but for different reasons or goals. Which is why it makes sense to create two different personas for them.

Conclusion:

The reality is that, even with all the social media tips in the world, it still takes a lot of time, energy, and resources to get right. Even then, there is no guarantee you’ll be able to foster success through social media, particularly without help from an Expert. That’s where a We can do wonders.

You won’t need social media tips, because these services are set up by experts who can do the hard work for you. We improve your social strategy with the knowledge necessary to make an informed decision, so you can reach new customers while keeping your current customers happier than ever.