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How To Get Your Website Ready for the Holiday Season   no comments

Posted at Dec 2, 2022 @ 9:00am website

As the holiday season approaches, it’s time to plan and ensure your website is ready for a surge of customers. With some thought and preparation now, you can avoid any technical hiccups that might arise during this busy period. Ensuring customer satisfaction will certainly bring a smile to everyone’s faces – so start updating today!

1. Optimize for Mobile Devices

If you have a website, it’s important to make sure that it’s mobile-friendly. With the growth of smartphones and other mobile devices, online shoppers don’t have to be chained to their computer desks to check off purchases from their holiday shopping lists. Developing a simple and functional theme specifically for your mobile users can increase your potential customer base. The easiest way to do this is to make use of responsive designs. With a responsive design, your website will modify itself automatically to create the optimal layout for the customer’s mobile device; these designs can accommodate both smartphones and tablets. Due to the smaller screen size typical of mobile devices, you probably won’t be able to maintain the same design as your desktop version, but you can still use the same branding and color scheme.

2. Improve Your Website’s Loading Time

Get your website holiday-ready with a few performance tweaks! You may want a website with all the latest bells and whistles but consider your website’s performance before you load it up with high-resolution graphics and elaborate scripts. Sluggish loading times on your website frustrate your customers and may encourage them to shop elsewhere. Before the holidays start, have your technical support team run tests on your website to see how fast each page loads for the average user. Changes to your design, such as reducing large images and eliminating complex coding scripts, can help your website perform better. You can also opt for a better cloud solution or web hosting server for your website to see even more improvement in loading speeds.

3. Secure Customer Data

Shopping online presents unique risks, some websites don’t safeguard customers’ data properly, putting these individuals at risk for identity theft and other issues. Investing in robust security software is a good way to protect your customers’ important data. Your technical support staff should keep apprised of the latest developments in online security to help your customers stay safe. To help alleviate your customers’ concerns, you can include information on your website about the security protocols that you use and offer tips on how your customers can shop online safely.

4. Offer Friendly Customer Support

Browser problems, incorrect stock levels, and missing orders are just some of the common customer issues your staff will need to work through. Make your website ready to tackle the holiday rush by ensuring you have enough staff on hand and that customer service is prepared. . Offer customers a variety of options, including live chat support while they’re browsing, social media engagement in case anyone reaches out there first, or an email ticketing system for those who prefer more personalized communication. Going the extra mile with customer care can make all the difference; proactively anticipate common problems so solutions are already available when needed!

5. Boost Your Search Engine Presence

Get ahead of the holiday rush with improved search engine rankings. Improving your search engine rankings before the holidays begin can help fuel your success during the holiday rush. There are many ways to help boost your search engine rankings, starting with refreshing older pages on your website to give visitors updated material. Offering fresh information to your visitors is a good way to impress search engines and show that your website is active. Adding special features, such as a blog, can also help. If your blog content is particularly noteworthy, you can expect more traffic to head your way. Your blog content should offer something useful to readers, such as tips for using your products.

6. Prepare a Festive Look

A festive design for your website encourages your customers to start thinking about the holidays. You don’t need to spend excessive money on a festive look; changing some pictures and making some cosmetic changes, such as altering the font color, can help dress up your website. Your holiday look should also include banners displaying any specials you plan to run, including discount codes.

7. Brush Up Your Social Media Presence

As the holidays approach, use social media to create a buzz about your products and increase traffic to your website. Don’t let your social media networks sit unused with only a link to your website; update them frequently and interact with your customers. Make sure your profile on each platform matches so that you have cohesive branding. As the holidays draw near, using social media to announce your specials will help you get more interest from potential customers.

8. Beef Up Your Website’s Server

Don’t let large crowds of shoppers ruin your website’s performance when the holidays roll around. If your website is unable to handle massive amounts of traffic at once, a crowd of shoppers on big sales days could lead to sluggish performance or an outright crash. Major server problems are not something to be taken lightly; investing in the right server infrastructure for your expected traffic is a good way to avoid these issues. If your customer base is larger, you might need a dedicated server to keep your website afloat during the holidays. Dedicated Servers may cost more than basic shared or cloud hosting, but your website won’t be at the mercy of problems caused by other websites/users on the server.

Examining every aspect of your website before the holidays arrive can help you prepare a strategy to improve customer satisfaction and your business’s success. A good website requires many things, including fast loading times, quality customer service, and security. Working on these elements early can ensure that your website is ready long before your customers even start to think about tackling their holiday shopping lists with your business.

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Written by admin on December 2nd, 2022

7 Steps to Redesigning Your Website   no comments

Posted at Jun 26, 2018 @ 9:45am website

Website Redesign

Redesigning and refreshing your website can be one of the most important business decisions your company makes. A redesigned website can mean more visitors, more sales conversions and a positive impact on your bottom line. Of course, redesigning your website may also be one of the most time and resource intensive tasks you undertake. That’s why planning ahead is essential. Creating a detailed plan for your site redesign ensures that your efforts will be both time and cost effective, and it helps to ensure that your site truly meets your business needs too. Here are seven steps to take as you develop your website redesign plan.

 

1. Evaluate Your Current Site

Taking an honest look at your current website is the very first thing you should do if you’re planning a redesign. Start by making a list of what works on your website. Then, make a list of everything that isn’t working. You’ll want to consider basics such as site color, visual layout and your company’s logo. You’ll also need to take website functionality when it comes to navigation, contact forms and e-commerce tools into account. Ask your staff for their opinions about the current site, and be sure to take a second look at any feedback you’ve received from website users too.

Part of evaluating your current site is looking at important metrics. Be sure that you’ve considered:

  • Overall site traffic
  • The bounce rate for visitors
  • Your site’s current search engine ranking
  • Your site’s performance ranking
  • How visitors spend their time on your site
  • The conversion rate from lead to customer for your site
  • The total monthly, quarterly and yearly sales generated by your site.

 

2. Create Goals for Your New Site

Once you’ve evaluated what does and doesn’t work on your existing site, you can start setting goals for your new site. Maybe you want to attract more consumers in your local area, or perhaps you need to redesign your site so that it accommodates visitors on tablets and smartphones. Create both aesthetic and use-related goals to direct the general redesign process.

In addition to creating these general goals, you should also create specific goals based upon current website metrics. For example, you might aim to increase traffic by 50 percent or to improve the search engine ranking of your site. Creating clear goals based on metrics will make measuring the success of your site redesign much easier.

 

3. Get to Know Your Audience

You might think that you know your website audience, but there’s no room for error when it comes to investing in a redesign. Work with your internal marketing team or hire an outside consultant to do research on your target demographic. Understanding who is likely to visit your site and what tools they hope to find on your site will be invaluable during the redesign process. Be sure that you’re also looking at the keywords that visitors are using to find your site so that you can target them during the redesign process.

 

4. Take Stock of the Competition

In addition to getting to know your audience, it’s essential that you get to know your online competition too. Start by reviewing the websites of any major, brick-and-mortar competitors. How are their sites organized? What are they doing to convert visitors into customers? What kinds of resources are they offering to visitors?

Once you’ve evaluated local or real-world competitors that you know about, conduct keyword-driven searches to identify online-only businesses that might be competing with yours. Evaluate these sites using the same criteria you used to evaluate other known competitors. As you evaluate your competition, jot down ideas of how your website can set your business apart from others.

 

5. Identify Your Content Strategy

A visually striking website is important, but a redesign is useless unless you also have a strong content strategy. Decide what types of photos, graphics and text you’ll use to attract visitors to your site and engage them once they’re there. Evaluate the current content of every page of your site, and determine how it can be improved or built upon. Think about the strength of your site’s current SEO strategy and what can be done to improve it.

If your website doesn’t currently feature a blog, now is a good time to consider adding one. Ensure the success of your blog by deciding:

  • How often you’ll create new posts
  • What type of information posts will include
  • Who will write your posts or how you’ll source them

 

6. Make the Big Design Decisions

Once you’ve determined your overall website goals and have decided what type of content you’ll include, you can start making aesthetic decisions. Consider the overall layout of your website, what colors it will use and whether your logo needs to be redesigned. Remember that making your website an extension of your branded image is essential.

Of course, you’ll need to make technical decisions as you make design decisions. These include the framework on which your site will be built and how you’ll meet mobile optimization needs. Be sure to go over site security concerns with your design partner too. Preventing hackers from accessing customer information is essential to building confidence with web visitors.

You also might want to take a look at your Cloud or Web Hosting provider. Inquire whether you have access to the amount of bandwidth and resources that you need to improve the speed with which your audience can access your website’s content.

 

7. Create a Project Completion Timeline

Once you’ve made major redesign decisions, you should create a timeline for your website relaunch. Your chief priority here should be to minimize site downtime and ensure that visitors can still use your site during the redesign process. As your redesign progresses, be sure that you’re meeting your timeline goals. Doing so is essential to budget control and allows you to alert website users of coming changes in a timely fashion too.

As with most big business decisions, the success or failure of a website redesign depends largely on planning. Taking the time to plan now will ensure that you get what you want from your site redesign and that you’re able to stay on budget while doing so too. Make a thorough plan now so that you can kick back and enjoy the success of your new website when it launches.

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Written by David Maurer on June 26th, 2018

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