Where Does Your Business Website Rank On Our Web Design Essentials Scorecard

Web Design Essentials

You will find that many skilled and creative professionals prefer to use checklists for each project they embark upon, and that will be the case for many web designers. Given that the creation of a website has several elements that all need to combine and function properly, a checklist is an ideal way to ensure each one is present and optimised.

For business owners who have a website, those same web design checklists can be useful, either to evaluate any new website that has been designed for them or to properly assess their current website to ascertain whether or not it needs to be redesigned. As such, we have outlined a simple web design checklist below which includes 25 desirable web design elements. With a point for each one, how many out of 25 does your business website score?

Website Structure & Navigation

  • Consistent Pages: All pages should have a logo, header, and footer visible.
  • Limited Levels: Do not have so many levels on your website that it feels like an endless maze.
  • Search Function: Help your visitors find what they need by having a search box.
  • Current Location: Let users know where they are using features like breadcrumbs.
  • Simple Menus: Your menus and subsequent navigation should be easy for all.

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How To Decide If Relocation Is Right For Your Business

How To Decide If Relocation Is Right For Your Business

The decision to relocate a business should not be taken lightly. Apart from the upheaval and the risk that the decision to move is wrong, there is a multitude of arrangements to be made to facilitate the move. These include hiring professional removalists and even interstate removalists to help you plan and carry out the move when it happens.

However, before you get anywhere close to that point, the decision to relocate your business needs considered thought. Whilst a move might seem to be the right thing to do, it should not be done on a whim, or simply because the offices you are considering “look nicer”. Being in fantastic looking business premises is desirable, but that should not be the driving force behind your decision.

The decision comes in three stages. The first is to identify what positive reasons you have for relocating. Next should be considering what impact the move will have on a range of matters. Finally, if you edge towards deciding to move, confirm the needs of your business will be met by the location and premises you choose.

Reasons For Relocation

No two businesses will ever have the exact same reasons for relocating so we are not going to prescribe what yours should be. Instead, here is a list of the main reason that can justify relocating.

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5 Key Things to Consider in Your Web Design

Web Design

You’ve decided to hire a professional web designer to create your website – good for you! Content management has had a lot of emphasis in the past year or so along with the importance of images and so many current website owners are looking to have their website’s rebuilt. Others have a clearer picture of what they want to get out of their new websites. Web Design Perth have provided the 5 key things to consider before you hire a web designer and get your project underway.

    • Who is your audience and what do you want to tell them? When you start your project, the very first thing to determine is who your potential clients and prospects are. One of the most common mistakes made is for companies to become all caught up in what they ‘think’ they need their site to tell the world about how wonderful they are. There are certainly things that are important to tell your audience but remember that the visitors to your site need a simple question answered, “what’s in it for me.” If you look at everything from that viewpoint you’ll be headed in the right direction.

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Design Tweaks to Level Up Your Website

Design Tweaks to Level Up Your Website

If you work in real estate or interior design, then part of your job is to keep up with the latest trends and preferences of customers. In the same vein, doctors and nurses have to continually keep up with new information and developments.

Web design is no different. Tactics and norms go in and out of fashion, and sometimes, change completely. But for someone who owns and operates a business, they aren’t likely to keep up with these trends.

So we’ve collected a few important ones right here. If you apply them, your next website should be ‘levelled up’ compared to where it started.

Negative and Clean Space

If you get a chance to in to a newsagent and pick up two magazines. One should be low priced, perhaps a ‘gossip’ or ‘weekly’ style magazine. The other should be a higher end, monthly magazine, around $15 per issue. Contrast the layouts of the two.

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What Content Should I Publish For A Local Audience?

What Content Should I Publish For A Local Audience

You hopefully already know that creating excellent and high-quality content on your website is essential, not only for SEO purposes but also for conversions of visitors into leads and ultimately customers.

What you might not know is, that if you are a local business, and you are trying to attract local customers, the types of content you need to create is different. By different, we mean different than the sorts of content a company that operates nationally, or globally might publish on its website.

On that note, what we often come across is a local business, which has a great product or service that local customers adore, but when you look online, their website and content tries to make it look like they are a bigger outfit than Apple.

Now, there is nothing wrong with having the ambition to grow your business as big as possible, nor is it wrong to make your website look as professional as can be. However, when your audience is a local one, apart from answering the questions they ask on Google, you want to be speaking to them via your content, not a global audience that might not even know your town or city exists.

So, let us look at the sorts of content you should be creating for your local business, and more importantly, how content that resonates with the local audience is more likely to turn them into your paying customers and clients.

Here are a few of the main types of local content you should consider using on your website.

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How Google Gathers Info About Your Website Users to Determine Your Ranking

Google Ranking Factors

It should not come as much of shock to know that Google and many other online organisations can track your activity online in multiple ways. Whatever your views on the rights and wrongs of that, some of the information they gather can indirectly help you to positively impact your website’s ranking in SEO.

SEO Company advise that the specific information that is relevant to this is that relating to the way in which visitors to your website behave and react. This can be accessed via tools such as Google Analytics and used to assess what improvements you can make to your website to improve your users’ experiences.

All of this is important because Google is increasingly taking account of the experience of users as measured by its algorithms when determining the ranking of websites. If two sites appear equal in all SEO factors, then it will be the one whose users are deemed to have a better experience that will outrank the other.

Here are the main ways that Google gathers information about how good or bad an experience your users appear to have when they visit your website.

Session Duration
It is a straightforward assumption to make that if a visitor to our website spends a long time on it, then they have found something they like or that interests them. If they have arrived at your website following a search, then Google will recognise that the keyword they searched for must be highly relevant to your website and that the content there is good.

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How Entrepreneurs Can Avoid Social Media Liability

Social Media Liability

Every small or big entrepreneur is aware of how their company can grow by monetizing the valuable digital marketing medium – Social Media. Today, it has become one of the main marketing tools for the growth of a company because it offers a superior potential to generate leads and improve rate of investments (ROI). However, social media imposes legal implications, too. Therefore, it becomes important to avoid mistakes that could lead to a lawsuit against you and ruin your company’s image.

One thing that is pretty obvious is that no matter how big the social implication would be with the use of social media, it does not outweigh its benefit, and hence people continue to stick to it. Here below are three legal tips that will help you stay away from lawsuits.

Alertness

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3 Ways To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking For Free

Search Engine Ranking

These days, it has become somewhat mystifying to many people as to how to rank highly in the organic search engine results. Previously it was relatively straightforward and required only relevant content, some quality backlinks and some navigational structure. Things have become a little more complex with various search engine algorithm updates which are taking place on an almost weekly basis now. Many webmasters and business owners have found that their sites have dropped off the rankings but can not figure out why.

Quality of Content
According to Perth based SEO experts, SEO Perth forget quantity. Gone are the days of making a new page for every single little keyword that you wish to rank for. Now it is all about relevancy and quality. Five pages of top quality content that target a variety of relevant keywords and concepts will provide significantly greater benefits over time than 500 pages of low quality, keyword stuffed shallow content. People naturally link to top quality, useful content and it is these natural links which provide the most value to your rankings (and usually, at no cost to you as people simply link to your website because they love your content or want to recommend it to others). The great news is that it doesn’t cost any more to create less high quality content than it does to create a lot of low quality content.

Go Social
There is no doubt that links and “chatter” from social media has an impact on search engine rankings. People are finding websites through sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus in increasing numbers and the search engines can not ignore this. Think of social media as a sort of voting system; each time your links are shared or clicked through, this can have a positive impact on your search engine ranking.

Be Mobile Friendly

Unless your website can be easily and fully accessed on mobile devices, you are missing out on a huge chunk of your audience, as more and more people access the web from their mobile device. The time that someone stays on your site can be a ranking factor, so having those mobile users quickly click away as they see your site does not function on their device can result in a negative effect on your organic search engine rankings in the short and long term. Whilst nobody knows exactly what factors are used to determine the search results, these are some of the most basic and necessary points that any site owner or webmaster should keep in mind in order to have a good chance of ranking well in the big search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.


How Can I Learn To Use WordPress?

Learn To Use WordPress

WordPress is the world’s largest content management system (CMS). It’s estimated that over a third of the internet (34% of all sites) runs on WordPress, which makes it a logical thing to learn about if you want to become a web developer.

However, learning how to use WordPress can be confusing for those without any previous experience. I know I found it quite hard to navigate the first time I tried to use it, and I’ve only come to know it inside out through years of experience and hard work.

With this in mind, I’ve put together this short article outlining some of the best ways to learn WordPress.

Why Should I Learn WordPress?

Before we get into the best ways to learn how to use WordPress, I just want to touch on a few of the reasons why you should at least consider learning it. These include:

  • For personal fulfillment. If you enjoy learning new things, then learning how to use WordPress is probably a no brainer for you.
  • To become more employable. The digital world is rapidly growing, and it doesn’t look like slowing down anytime soon. It therefore makes sense to assume that WordPress developers are going to remain in high demand for some time to come.
  • So you can build your own website. Finally, you might think about learning how to use WordPress so that you have the skills and experience to build your own website without having to pay a developer.

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons to at least consider learning WordPress. Now that we’ve covered them, let’s have a look at a few of the ways to do it.

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Software Dispute Resolutions

Software Dispute Resolutions

Commercial disputes can be time consuming, costly and damaging to the long term reputation and success of your business. If it comes to it, commercial disputes can be resolved in a court of law with the aid of commercial lawyers. However, there are better ways to resolve disputes if you’re willing to be reasonable and talk things through with the other party.

Alternative dispute resolution, or ADR, is a method of dealing with commercial issues without going through the courts. They usually involve the use of a third party (such as a decent lawyer) who will act as the go between for you and the other party involved in the dispute. If problems can be worked out using ADR, you will probably save yourself money, time and a lot of bad press.

What Types Of ADR Are There?

There are a number of different types of alternative dispute resolution that can be used according to your circumstances. In some cases, more than one type of ADR can be used. The most common methods in Australia include:

Mediation – Commercial dispute mediation involves the used of an impartial third party mediator who can work with both parties without vested interests. A mediator’s job is not to make agreements or discuss terms with both parties, but to act as a go between and to facilitate discussion.

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