Don’t limit your website audience

When creating a website it can be easy to get carried away with advances in design and build in lots of moving elements and changing banners etc, but you do need to keep in mind who your audience are and what it is you are trying to achieve with the site. If you make your website too futuristic and have lots of different call to action banners or moving elements you may find that some viewers find it too confusing and do not know where to go once they have landed on your site. When this happens you will often find a larger percentage of your viewers leave without having found what they were looking for.

One way to tell if this is happening is to check your bounce rate. If your home page has a high bounce rate then it may be that it is putting people off. You should also check what description of your site is showing in the Google, Bing or Yahoo listings and ensure that it is relevant and correct. You can often influence what is shown here by updating your meta date for that page, which is often used as the description for the site.

What is the difference between on page and off page marketing?

Often in the world of marketing, you will come across the terms on-page and off page marketing or optimisation. It is important to understand the difference between the two and to know what you should be doing in both areas to improve your presence on the search engine results.

On page optimisation is essentially making changes on a page or pages within your website or by adding new content to your existing site. It may be that you add a blog or that you optimisation the content on a page in include more keywords. On page optimisation also includes adding internal links to other pages and adding meta date, adding XML site maps and internal linking to relevant pages. It may also include changing the way your URL’s are displayed and ensuring there are no broken links.

Off page or marketing is something that you do off your website that is aimed at improving the traffic to your site and your rankings on the search engines. This may be building up external links to your site by getting links from other quality websites or directories, guessed blogging on other sites, social media interaction and uploading videos through YouTube that relate to your website. All of these can influenced your website positively.

Making sure you create a website that is secure

Security is often high of everyone’s priority when it comes to buying items online or sharing sensitive data. If you are gathering information on your website, whether it be names and email addresses or card details, you need to ensure that you offer your customers a certain level of security.

There are legal requirements that need to be met so that you can ensure the data is collected and stored in the correct way to protect your users. The security of the checkout or forms is often done by the programmer when the site is being built. Programming should not be taken lightly and needs to be secure in all aspects to ensure that your data is protected and that your website offers protection against hackers. The programmer needs to ensure that they keep up to date with all the latest advances in online security as well as the vulnerabilities so that they can program in the correct way.

If the programmer creates a checkout or form submission section that is not done then this can cause serious issues for the users and for the company.  It can leave the process open to hackers who will be able to access the information that is being passed through to third parties (such as Sage Pay or PayPal).

Password security is another vital part of online security. Passwords should only be stored on a database in an encrypted way and processes should be in place to ensure customers choose secure passwords for their account on your website. This may include setting the password option to be a minimum of a number of characters, include at least one symbol and mix of upper and lower case letters. You should also ensure that they do not use words such as their name or the name of the site in their password. 

Ensuring your website displays correctly on different browsers

The world of web development can be complex and with industry changes happening all the time it is important to keep up to date with advances.

Companies such as Bing, Google and Mozilla have some of the most popular browsers and often bring out new updates or new versions of the browsers. These changes can all of a sudden cause a website to not display correctly.

It is very frustrating to go on to a website where the layout is all out of alignment or images / pages won’t load correctly. This can often causes people to leave a site and go elsewhere. This is usually caused by a browser compatibility issue where the website has not been programmed correctly to work on multiple platforms. It may display fine on one browser but not on another.

If your companies has a website it is worth checking it on some of the main browsers to see how it looks and performs. There are even websites that allow you to type in your website address and it will check the compatibility for you.

With new versions being released quite often, it is not always possible to build a site that displays correctly on all previous versions, so ensuring backward compatibility for at least the last two or three versions should mean that it displays correctly on the majority of visitors browsers.

IT and website back up

All too often people forget to do a backup of their files and documents and only realise when something goes wrong and they need to reinstate it all. Backing up your files and documents is vital when using any sort of technology as all technology is prone to problems and you may find that you lose everything in an instance.

If you have your website hosted by a third party, they are likely to do backups for you. As a web developer you need to check how often these are done and if they are automated or you need to do it manually. If you host a website on your own server then you will need to organise backups of site files and databases.

When backing up files and folders from a laptop for example you need to make sure that the device you are backing up to is firstly large enough to accommodate the files and documents and that it is reliable. It is advisable to always have two backups if possible, in case the first one should fail, you have another means of accessing the data.

Portable hard drives are often a popular choice for creating backups as they are easy to use and provide fast, efficient storage solutions. 1TB portable hard drives start from £65 upwards. 

Have you got what it takes to be a programmer?

Being a website programmer requires a certain amount of skills and often you need to have a real interest in technology and computers to be successful. Website programmers can vary in terms of their ability, qualifications and experience and this is often reflected in the amount of money they ask for in employment or what they charge to clients if self-employed.
To become a programmer, you do not need any qualifications, but it will often go in your favour when applying for a job at an agency if you do have a relevant one or at least a good amount of experience. You can self-train to be a programmer, so it is a career that can often start off as a hobby until the person becomes confident that they have the skills to do the job as a full time career. As the world of technology and marketing is ever changing it is important to stay on top of your game and keep up to date with new advances and changes that you need to take in to account when you are programming.
You may start off in a junior programmers roll when you are first employed, but if you put the time in and are able to learn quickly, you can often progress up the ladder quite swiftly.

Improving your SEO on your website

SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimisation is very important when marketing your website. You will often be up against a number of competitors on the search engines such as Google or Bing and you need to try and make sure that your website comes top for your best keywords or phrases. There is a lot that is needed in order to get to the top of Google, especially for competitive phrases and you need to ensure that you are targeting your efforts on the right ones.

Ensure that your website is set up o Google Analytics and also Webmaster Tools, as this will allow you to analyse and track how it is performing. You may also want to use third party tracking software that can automatically check your positions for certain words or phrase on a weekly / monthly basis.

The basics of SEO should be done when the site is first created. This is things such as setting up generic and relevant meta titles, keywords and descriptions for each page, creating friendly URL’s and sorting out any canonical issues such as redirecting non www. To www. Once this has all been done you can start to expand on your SEO by creating additional content and pages on the site. You may also want to have a blog or a news section which will allow you to easily update your site without having to keep adding to the main navigation.

Turning your website in to a shop

If you already have a website and have now decided you would like to start selling products there, you may wonder how the best way to go about it is. Depending on what content management system has been used to build your site, you may be able to simply bolt on an e-commerce section and start selling with ease or you may need to reconfigure your website to allow for products and a shopping cart.

Adding a shop is not just about adding products and a check out process, you may need to redesign much of your site to turn it into an e-commerce site as opposed to a brochure site. Often shop sites have products shown on the home page such as featured products or special offers. Your current home page may not currently accommodate this, so you will need to redesign it to fit in. Sometimes if too many things are bolted on to a website, it can start to look a bit cluttered and viewers may get confused about where they go to find what they need. Often when businesses decide to sell online they use the opportunity to revamp the whole of the current site and relaunch it.