You must have seen the adverts (huge budgets), sites like WIX have been spending on advertising (mostly YOUTUBE) and have been tempted to create a WIX website, Regardless of the provider WIX, Squarespace, site123.com etc some things remain the same. And our experience of delivering websites will help you in creating your own.
3 Things some clients can't ever seem to deliver
Of course I value my clients and I don't want to be unkind but without your deliverables how do you want to have an awesome website! These are very helpful if you are creating your own website too. writing for your own business is hard.
What should a client deliver better to get a better website?
- COPY and MESSAGE! Before much at all I ask new prospective clients to look at the sections or pages of the site and copy to determine the size of the project. However it's the message and narrative that also needs to give me some inspiration for understanding what you need to achieve. We can help but the better you do in this the better will be your shiny new website.
- IMAGES- Of course we can help with getting quality images and video but you are sure to have assets already that can help and yes we can lift them from your existing online assets such as facebook but the quality and lower resolution should mean then they are only placeholders. Also the issue with this is that they then drive a negative view. When you are reviewing something NEW to see OLD images you already know takes your mind to a negative view.
- GRAPHICS- If you don't have a logo then perhaps some branding might be a good idea. So if you have the cash get some business cards and stuff done at the same time.
VIDEO- You may think that getting a professional video made is not possible but there are so many useful tools that you can get a professional video made to send a message for under £100.
Tips to build your own website
Get the menu right first time
Every single piece of content should be accessible with as few clicks as possible hopefully just 3. But as important is the way in which people understand your offering and how the menu serves to show and underline this. If you mess with the menu you can also mess with your url's which doesn't allow google time to learn what your website is about in short it's bad (really bad) for SEO.
Don't change the url's
If you have mapped out your site correctly as stated earlier you shouldn't need to have issues with changing url's. If you do decide to split content into two different pages then do it, but not after 2 months of the site being live. It is often helpful to block search robots until you are fully happy with the website. But you might loose some valuable crawl time if you do that too. So again a nod back to getting the pages and map right first time.
Optimise your website
There are GZIP compression optimisations, image optimisations as a minimum, beyond this cache pages and reduce calls to the server for content that doesn't change. We are getting a bit technical if we carry on. I just wanted to offer this as something you can learn and do some DIY with. Please try and make your site https which is encrypted pages. Of course some of the paid site builders do this for you and that can be very good news.
Minimise the use of plugins
Try not to install too many plugins unless you really need them. Plugins offer useful functions but also can leave you with a headache when the CMS updates or the plugin updates. For this we offer a service to get your website up to date and offer a cheap plan to keep your site secure and running smoothly.
