Top Reasons Why Your Website is failing

Having the best web design Santee is not the only thing you need to ace it in digital marketing. There are so many other things you have to think about in order to build a website that helps you beat your competition. In this article we will be looking at the main reasons why your website is failing and how you can fix it.

Not mobile friendly

This is a no brainer. When hiring a web designer Santee you want to hire one that will be able to create for you a website that is responsive. Over 60% of the visitors you will be getting on your website will be using mobile devices. If your website is not mobile friendly you will end up losing those visitors. It is also good to note that having a mobile friendly website will boost your search engine rankings.

When getting a new website built, you need to make sure that it is responsive. You have to test it not only on desktop browsers but also on different mobile devices. Great web design agencies offer mobile friendliness as a standard.

Not optimized for search

You probably already know this. Most of your traffic will come from search engines. What this means is that if your website does not rank well your competitors will always have an upper hand. Optimizing a website takes more than doing the right keyword research. Your web design Santee has a part to play on your website’s SEO. Ensure your web designer optimizes your code for search.

To further optimize your website for search, you must use a combination of both short and long tail keywords. Take note of voice searches and use keywords people use when speaking. You also need to check that the technical SEO of your website is in good shape.

No promotion

It is common for people to create a website and leave it at that. One thing you must remember is that there are thousands if not millions of websites that are similar to yours. For you to get in front of your target audiences, you have to optimize your website.

The only way to success in digital marketing is to actively promote your website. The good news is that there are marketing firms you can hire to help with marketing. Your web designer Santee can also help with the following:

  • Organic traffic
  • Paid advertising
  • Email campaigns
  • Social media marketing
  • Referral links

Other common issues that may be dragging your website behind are slow page load speeds, no call-to-action, broken pages & links, and poor navigation. Always perform an audit of your website frequently and improve it.

Web Design Santee

Avoidable Reasons Why Your Business Website is failing

Hiring an experienced web designer Santee is very important when creating a website. It is also good to learn of the things that may cause your business website from excelling. In this article we shall be looking at the four avoidable issues that may be limiting the success of your website.

Undefined business objectives

The first thing visitors want to learn when they get on your website is your business’ objectives. You may have the best web design Santee but if your website doesn’t define the purpose and mission of your website visitors will be confused and click away. The homepage of your website should define what your business is all about. The information you share must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. No serious client wants to do business with a company that doesn’t have goals.

Poor user experience

How easy is it to navigate your website? This is the first question you need to ask yourself as soon as you open your business website. Statistics show that more than 75% of visitors will abandon a website if it is not easy for them to find the information they need. Don’t make information hard to find or content hard to comprehend. A cumbersome website will kill your business. Ask for user feedbacks and make the recommendations they are proposing.

Ambiguous taglines

The content is what determines the success of your website. High quality content will keep visitors coming back for more and compel them to share it on their social media platforms. All other components including media and web design Santee play a supporting role to support the content and make it more effective. You also need to remember that users don’t read, they simply scan through content until they find what they want. Your content should be specific, memorable and consistent. You must also make your content scan-able by using whitespaces, subheadings and lists. Your web content must also tell visitors how your content can help them, why they should care about doing business with you and what value you will deliver.

Ineffective calls to action

Not having a call to action will make your website ineffective. This is because visitors want to know what you want them to do next. Even so, using your CTAs poorly will not lead to any positive results. Effective CTAs will create a sense of urgency, and encourage users to respond. The CTA must also be placed strategically on your website so that they don’t just stand out but also make sense. Use a specific color to highlight your CTAs.

These are the most important things you should ask your web designer Santee to do when creating your website. In all that you do, you must never ask for too much from the visitors. For example, don’t require them to fill out long forms before they can complete a purchase or view your content.

Web Designer Santee

Which is the Best Web Hosting Package to Use?

Before you start working on a web design Santee, you have to think about hosting. The files of your website will have to be stored somewhere. Although it is possible to host your own website on a local server, it is better to host it on a remote server. When you choose a hosting company to work with, you will be presented with at least four options to choose from. They include the following.

Shared hosting

This is the most affordable hosting option. The shared hosting plans cost less than $10 per month. The problem with this package is that your website will be placed on the same server as several other websites. This means the bad reputation of websites on the shared severs can tarnish the reputation of your website more so when it comes to search engine ranking. Your web designer Santee will mostly recommend shared hosting if your budget is limited.

Cloud hosting

This is a more reliable hosting option. Your website will be hosted on several severs instead of just one server. The beauty of this option is that in case one server fails your website will still be reachable through other severs. Cloud hosting is more expensive than shared hosting but cheaper than Virtual private servers. The cost for managed cloud hosting can, however, be higher than the cost of using dedicated hosting.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

With this option, the hosting service provider will divide one sever into virtual services. This means that your website will get hosted the same as dedicated hosting. The reason for this is because each virtual server has allocated resources which are not shared. Unlike shared hosting where a website can take up most of the resources, you will maintain the same allocated resources throughout when using a VPS.

Dedicated hosting

This is the best option for a business website. All the resources are dedicated. Needless to say, this is the most expensive hosting package you will come across. It is perfect for large companies that have high-traffic websites. The cost for dedicated hosting starts from $100 per month.

Always consider the reputation of hosting service before purchasing a hosting service from them. Today most hosting companies offer domain name registration which means you don’t have to use more than one company to get your domain and hosting. You must also consider your website needs in order to select a package that is perfect for your website.

Web Design Santee

Key Features to Consider When Choosing a Web Hosting Service

An experienced web designer Santee will be happy to tell you that hosting packages are not the same. Yes you might have selected a dedicated package from one company but the results will not be the same across hosting companies. Some companies offer better services than others. If you are searching for the best hosting package, here are the key features you need to look for in a hosting service.

Storage and bandwidth

The amount of bandwidth and storage you need will depend on what you will be hosting on your website. For example if your web design Santee will rely heavily on high resolution images you will need a bigger storage. On the other hand, if you want your website to load fast and if you expect to get lots of traffic, you need to get more bandwidth. Bandwidth is what determines how fast your website loads. If you have high traffic, and offer video downloads you need to get more bandwidth. When deciding on the bandwidth to use you have to account for traffic spikes as well as growth.

Be wary of unlimited plans. Unlimited never means infinite. In most cases, you will end up paying more if your visitors exceed the average customer that is set by the hosting company. Always take the time to understand what the hosting company means by unlimited.

Security

Security has to be a top concern when deciding on the hosting package to use. Most hosting companies offer SSL encryption, SPAM protection and some form of website backups. For an ecommerce store, you will need extra security. You have to look beyond the basic features and check for such features like hack protection and DDoS protection. You will find these features under the advanced plans.

Automatic backups

Once your web design Santee is done, the last thing you want is to lose everything. This is why you need a hosting company that offers automatic backups as well as one-click restore. Getting daily backups means you will be able to restore your website easily in case it is compromised in any way.

Customer support

Last but not least, you have to make sure that you will get dedicated customer support. In case something goes wrong with your hosting service, you should be able to get the technical support you need to restore your website. If the company has a poor customer support you will end up suffering.

These are the key features you need to look for when choosing a hosting package. More time has to be committed in learning more about the hosting company. Are their services reliable? Do they have a good reputation?

Web Designer Santee

Best Ways to Optimize Your Website’s Performance

The primary focus of any experienced web designer Santee is to create a website that loads fast and one that performs perfectly. The main focus is usually on speed. Nobody wants to spend his time on a slow website. If your website is slow, visitors will quickly click away and this will be registered as a bounce. A high bounce rate will not only cost you valuable business but also push your business ranking down. If you want to learn how to optimize your website’s performance, here are the top things you need to do.

Test your website’s speed

You will not be able to pinpoint the issues on your website without first testing its speed. The good news is that there are so many online tools that you can use to test the overall speed of your website. The results will help you know where your website is lacking. Here are the most popular tools you can use:

  • GTMetrix
  • Yoast Google Analytics Plugin
  • PageSpeed Insights
  • Pingdom
  • YSlow
  • Web Page Analyzer

Optimize your images

To improve the speed of your website, you need to optimize the file size of your images. This is the first thing you need to do to your web design Santee. Your images need to be in small file sizes. You don’t have to sacrifice resolution when doing this. There are many tools you can use to resize the file size without sacrificing resolution. You also need to use suitable formats. JPEG is optimized for photos whereas GIF and PNG are recommended for icons and web graphics.

Use CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. You need to use CDN if you display a large amount of data. CDN uses a huge network of servers situated in various locations to help deliver content to visitors much faster. The closer to a CDN server a visitor is the faster the content will load.

Reduce the number of plugins

Plugins will save you from coding every function that you want on your web design Santee. The problem, however, is that using too many plugins will cause your website to be slow. You should only install a handful of plugins and deactivate and remove the unnecessary plugins from your website. If you are not sure if plugins are the cause of the slow speed, you can deactivate all of them then test the speed.

Enable browser caching

This is the first recommendation a web designer Santee will give you. With browser caching, your pages will be stored on the website of your visitor. What this means is that when the visitor comes back to your website, the page will not have to be loaded afresh but just to be updated. As a result, it will load much faster.

Pick a reliable web host

Last but not least, you need to use a reliable web host and select a package that offers the resources that you need. Steer clear of shared hosting plans if yours is a resource-intensive website.

Web Designer Santee

Web Design Santee – 5 Things that Slow Down a Website

Web design Santee is not something you should rush. There are so many things you have to consider. Top on the list is the speed of the website. More often than not, websites fail to meet their purpose because they are slow. As a result, they record high bounce rates which subsequently lead to poor ranking on search engines. If you are wondering why your website is slow, here are the main things you should consider.

Third-party online ad network

To monetize your website, your web designer Santee will recommend that you use online advertising. Although this option will bring in money, it poses a risk to the overall performance of your website. This is mostly because the codes, mostly JavaScript, which is used to display online ads can cause your website to be slow.

Wrong web host

One of the first things you will need to do when creating your website is to find a web host. This is where your website’s data will be stored. Not every web host will guarantee reliable speeds. Most websites are slow because of poor choice of web host. If yours is a resource intensive website and you select a web host that cannot keep up with the demand, the performance of your website will decline. In this case your website will be slow and may even keep on crushing. This is common when using a shared server environment. Changing your web host or upgrading to a new web host can solve this issue.

Too many plugins and widgets

If you are building your website on WordPress, you may be tempted to use plugins to add functionality. The problem with using too many widgets/plugins is that they will cause the speed of your website to decline. What is more is that some plugin might conflict with each other thus slowing your website even further. Be careful when selecting plugins and use as few of them as possible. Only install plugins that are updated regularly and ones with good ratings.

Too many external embedded media

It is highly recommended to embed external media instead of uploading videos directly to your website. Doing so will help your website to load fast. Even so, it is good to note that having too many embedded media will slow your website. This is because too many external embedded media add additional code to your pages. This will affect the load speed.

Using large image files

This is the most common mistake people make when working on a web design Santee. Failing to reduce the size of image files will bloat your website. You need to trim the size of the images before uploading them.

There are many other things that will affect the performance of your website. An experienced web designer Santee will make sure that your website is optimized for both speed and performance. Don’t hire just any designer that comes your way.

Web Design Santee

Top Reasons You Should Work with a Web Design Company Instead

Hiring a web designer Santee is easy. The hard part is finding the designer who can deliver exactly what you are looking for. Working with a web design company is definitely the best bet when you want a website built. In this post we will be looking at the main reasons why you should work with a design company as opposed to working with an individual web designer.

Access more professionals

Working with an independent designer for your personal website is a good idea but if your website has several elements you will do best to hire a web design company. The reason for this is because when you get web design Santee done by a design company you will have access to a team of professionals which includes content creators, graphic designers, web designers, programmers and even a research team. This means you will end up with a website that is perfectly refined. This is unlike working with an independent designer who does everything by himself.

Professional coding

The best thing about working with a design agency is because they only work with experienced programmers. The programmers have done intensive research in web development and will guarantee that you get a concise and refined code for your website. The code is further reviewed by several experts to ensure it has no errors and that it meets the stringent standards set by the web design company. When working with a design company, you can be guaranteed of getting a bug free website that runs smoothly and fast on just any web browser.

Professional look

Nobody wants their website to look cheap. If your website looks cheap potential customers will doubt your website. People associate cheap looking websites with malicious websites. You don’t want the look of your website to impact the reputation of your brand negatively, do you? Web design companies have built many websites before yours and will be able to create for you a website that radiates the impression that you want. A professional looking website results in higher conversions.

Other benefits you can count on when working with a web design agency is better user-experience, extensive online marketing and a great competitive advantage. The only thing you need to do is make sure you hire a company with a great reputation when it comes to web design Santee. Don’t forget to take a look at their previous work. Can you spot what you are looking for in their work?

Web Designer Santee

How Does a Web Design Impact Your Bottom Line?

Web design Santee is mostly thought of in terms of aesthetics. What most people forget is that the web design plays a bigger role than just the looks. In this article we will be taking a quick look at the main ways your web design might be affecting your bottom line.

User experience

Every web designer Santee knows that the web design is the interface that visitors interact with. What this means is that if that interface is hard to use their experience will not be pleasant. With that being said, a poor design can easily cause you not to capture the attention of your audience. The web design is what directs the eye of the visitor, creates the professional presentation, increases functionality and helps build trust. The web design is also the part of your website that builds an emotional connection.

As you can see, it is very important to give more attention to the web design regardless of whether you are working on a blog or a business website. Your website must also not have annoying popups and other distracting web elements. If visitors feel annoyed, they will click away from your website. You also need to make use of clear call-to-action, intuitive sitemap and white spaces.

Search Engine Optimization

Some website owners don’t know that their web design Santee has the potential to affect their SEO negatively. Most of your new clients will find you through search engines. If your website does not rank well you will lose traffic. One of the ways web design impacts SEO is if it is loaded with too many elements that end up slowing your website. A website that takes long to load up will have a high bounce rate. This is perceived by search engines as a sign that your website is not as important. As a result your ranking will be pushed down. Design also impacts your SEO if there is poor navigation. Not having a responsive web design will also push your website’s ranking further down.

Load speed

How fast your website loads up will determine if visitors will stay on or leave. Load speed is mostly impacted by the elements on the website including images and plugins. Creating a simple website is the key to building a fast loading website. The sign up and checkout also matters. If you require shoppers to enter too many details they will leave.

As much as building a remarkable website is important, you have to keep the three facts in mind. Don’t build an attractive website that makes it hard for visitors to use your website. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Web Design Santee

Why You Need to Separate the Layers of Web Design

If you have any experience in web design Santee, then you know a website is made up of three layers: structure, style and behavior. The three layers work together to give your website the look and function that you need. All in all, it is good to note that even though these layers are important, you should always consider using external script files. The three layers should also be separated for these key reasons.

Shared resources

When the JavaScript or CSS file is created externally, any page on your website will be able to use that file. This is a great thing because when you change that file to make changes to the typographic styles on your website, every other page that uses the style-sheet will get the change. An experienced web designer Santee will recommend creating these files externally because you will not need to edit every page individually to update the look.

Faster downloads

Separating the layers of your website will also offer the benefit of boosting the overall performance of your web page. This is because when you are sharing the style-sheet or script, when a visitor opens one page the script or style sheet will be cached by their web browser. What this means is that when opening other pages the browser will not have to download the script or stylesheets again. This is because the shared resources will already be on his browser’s cache. Other pages that are requested will load much faster. This will improve the page performance and speed.

SEO

Studies have shown that websites that have clear separation of structure and style tend to perform better for search engines. This is because the search engines are able to crawl the content more efficiently and understand a page without getting bogged down in the visual style as well as behavior information. Your web designer Santee will hence recommend using external stylesheets so as to boost SEO.

Accessibility

External script and style sheets files are more accessible to both browsers and people. Software like screen readers are able to use structure style easily without dealing with other styles that are unreadable.

Backward compatibility

Another key reason why you should consider the use of external style sheets in web design Santee is because it will make your website backward compatible. You website will be both browser and device compatible because where CSS styles or JavaScript cannot be used visitors will view the HTML.

The above are just the main reasons why you should separate the layers of your website. For an even better web performance, always work with an experienced web designer. Don’t rely on guesswork when creating your website.

Web Design Santee

An Overview of the Three Layers of Web Design

As you plan for web design Santee, you have to think about the three layers of web design. Every website that is created combines structure, style and behavior. These are the three layers of a web design. Experienced web designers liken web development to a three-legged stool. The three legs are structure, style and behavior. A website will not perform efficiently if it lacks any of these three layers. Let’s take a look at the three layers.

Structure layer

This is the layer made up of the underlying HTML code. Solid HTML is the same as the foundation of a house. The rest of a website is built around the solid foundation created by HTML. The structure area is where the content of your website is stored. The HTML structure can be made up of images and text and will also include hyperlinks that the visitors use to navigate a website. All this has to be coded in standards-compliance HTML5 and includes images, text and multimedia.

Your web designer Santee will represent every aspect of your website’s content in the structure layer. What this means is that visitors who have turned off JavaScript or whose browser cannot view CSS will still be able to see and use the functionalities of your website.

Styles layer

This is the layer that dictates how the structured HTML document will appear to a visitor. It is defined by CSS. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) contain stylistic instructions for documents on how they should be displayed in a browser. The style layer includes the media queries that change a website’s display depending on the screen size and device. The visual styles reside in external style-sheet. Multiple style-sheets can be used. It is, however, good to note that every CSS file will require an HTTP request in order to fetch it. What this means is that the overuse of style-sheets will impact the overall performance of your website.

Behavior layer

This is the layer that causes a website to be interactive. It is what enables web pages to respond to the actions of a user as well as change depending on the set conditions. The language used in the behavior layer is JavaScript. It is also not uncommon for a web designer Santee to use PHP and CGI.

The behavior layer is the layer that is activated directly in a web browser. The layer is used to interact with the Document Object Model. Creating valid HTML is crucial for Document Object Model interactions in behavior layer. To optimize speed, use external script files when building in behavior layer.

As you can see, web design Santee takes more than what visitors can see. This is why you need to hire an experienced web designer to help with the development.

Web Design Santee