Best Web Design Practices for Small Business Owners
Hi, everyone. I'm glad to see so people here from all over the world. Welcome to our webinar, "best web design practices for small business owners".
My name is Geri and I'm the Community Manager of SiteGround. I'm really glad to introduce our speaker for the Megan Gersch . Megan is a well-versed web designer, marketing and branding expert with more than 15 years of experience. She's here to tell us more on how we can build a better business image online by streamlining the way the information is presented on our websites.
But before I give her the mic, there are a few details I would like to share about the webinar. First, the event is with duration of one hour. Her presentation will be about 40 to 45 minutes. And at the end we have a QA session.
So, if you have any questions related to the topic, you can post them in the section, "Ask a Question" on the left of the chat. You can also upvote the questions that you like the most for better visibility. And at the end of the presentation, we'll try to cover as many as possible. Next, there will be a recording of this event. It will be uploaded tomorrow on our YouTube channel.
You can click the green button on your left "Subscribe" and this way you will be notified once the recording is uploaded. Okay. We're done with the boring part. And now I'm leaving the stage to Megan and wish you all a productive webinar Hi, everybody.
Let me just go ahead and share my screen right now. Give me one second. Okay. Thank you guys so much for joining us today, again, we're going to be talking about the best website design practices for small business owners.
I'm super excited because I'm very, very passionate about this topic. I'm a branding and website designer, and I love working with bold businesses that love to really push the envelope when it comes to design. So, this is a quick overview of what we're going to be covering today. First, we're going to be going over how exactly to organize your website pages, making sure that your website is organized in a way that makes sense, so that when people come to your website, they find what they're looking for.
Then we'll dive into a little bit about branding your website. So this is essentially how you're going to build trust with your customers and folks that are coming to your website, then we'll dive into a little bit of website optimization strategy. This is one of my favorite topics because it's essentially the small tweaks that go into making your website a robust platform that's going to ultimately drive sales for your business. Then we'll touch on a little bit of marketing opportunities on your website.
So essentially this is how you are going to get in front of your customers at scale over and over. And then lastly, we're going to be touching on ongoing maintenance to your website. So why this is important, what you can be doing in your ongoing maintenance, and that is kind of it for the presentation.
So let's dive into it. So first let's talk about organizing your pages. The first thing that you want to do when you're thinking about organizing your pages is you want to get really, really clear on what your primary and secondary offers are. Essentially, this is going to drive the entire format of your website, and it's going to really dictate what pieces of content you put first, second, third, fourth, et cetera on your page. So I really want you to think of "what does your customer, what is your ideal client really want when they're coming to your website"? Maybe this is the opportunity to book a call with you. Maybe it's, they're looking for a specific product that you've been promoting on your social media.
What does that one thing, because you're going to want to feature that top front and center on your website. Is that better? Yes. Thank you.
Perfect. Okay. So the homepage on your website is obviously for the most part, going to be the first thing that people see when they visit your website. So this is ultimately your first impression that you get with your clients and customers, so that you really need to make sure that your website is really well put together, tight. Make sure that people, when they visit your homepage, they can get like a real bird's eye view of what it is that you offer.
So I've broken down some of the elements that go onto the homepage. Obviously we have the main navigation of the site, and I touched on this just a little bit earlier. Making sure that your, your primary offer is at the top of the homepage with a striking image, a headline, and a "Call to Action" button. This is one of the biggest mistakes that I see businesses make on their website is that they'll have the offer there, but there's no way to take action on it. So having that "Call to Action" button is super important. Underneath all that, you might want to feature some products or services.
So like on an e-commerce site, this might look something like featuring your best sellers. For a service-based business, this might look like featuring some of your most sought after services. And then talking a little bit about your past clients. If applicable, I've seen websites where they feature some kind of "as seen on CNN" or other newsworthy publications. It just helps to build that credibility right off the bat with your website visitors.
And then to further assert that credibility, we want to also include testimonials and reviews. These are going to be different depending on if you have a service based business or a product based business, but it is great to include them right there on the homepage. And then lastly, you want to include your footer and I will dive into the two navigation portions of this a bit deeper here in a second. So, this is kind of breaking down the website navigation structure when it comes to your website. So this is going to be a little bit different when it comes to service based businesses versus product based businesses For the most part, folks already know. We've been using the internet enough at this point where we know as human beings to click on the logo of a website in order to go to the Home page.
This is one of the big mistakes that I see a lot of businesses make as well, is that you don't really need to include a Home piece of text and your main navigation in order to direct people, Home, people already know to click the logo to go Home. And so on the service provider side, you would include your different services, any past work or case studies and About page, a blog. If you have one, as well as how to get in contact with you and on the product based side, you would want to include the specific product categories as well as an About page , a blog, if applicable once again, and your contact info and any shipping or legal policies.
I did want to give an example of the top level navigation here. I'm pulled in just a screenshot for Macy's obviously there's a product based business. They, they sell a lot of different types of products.
And I wanted to highlight this bar at the top here, where they have broken down the different categories. So essentially they are making it super easy for the website visitor to find what they're looking for very quickly. So you can think about how to implement this strategy for your own website, especially if you have a lot of different types of products, or if you are a business that maybe you sell sunglasses and accessories and like mask chains or like different masks, those kinds of things. So breaking it down by category is going to help your visitors to find what they're looking for faster. And if we scroll down to the bottom of that website, you'll see that this, this is essentially the footer section. And you'll notice that this piece of navigation is a bit different than the top level navigation.
So here we have the different categories of how you can shop, but here we're more so focused on shipping different information of like how to contact Macy's, their social media icons. It's a bit more of like, I want you to think about it almost as like a secondary navigation. So the top level navigation should be like your most priority items for like how people can shop. The footer should be more of like, if people have questions or returns or like how to get in contact with you, those kinds of like supplementary things that people might have questions about. The footer is the place where you should be putting those. Okay.
So I wanted to give an example here to have a hero banner image as well. I wanted to show you a poor example first. So, but I mentioned that it should have a striking image as well as a headline and a call to action. One thing I wanted to mention with this is that you only want to have one call to action within your hero banners.
And this is because if people are presented with too many options, they have the potential to get overwhelmed. And it can, if people get overwhelmed on a website, they have the potential to just bounce off and not take any action at all. So that's not what we want, especially if we're trying to sell products or services. So on the flip side of that, I wanted to show you a great example of a brand that is doing this right. So right now we're looking at the Vans website.
And their hero banner, you can see that they have that striking image. They have that headline and they have a single call to action. So this is a much more effective strategy than the other. Okay. So let's talk a bit about product pages.
My biggest tip for this is to always show your product in use. Um, this is going to help you to, or help your customers to envision. What that product is going to look like in their life.
And it's also going to help them to envision themselves once they get that product. So if you're selling like a specific lifestyle associated with your brand, you can convey that in your product photos. Show the full outfit of somebody wearing a handbag or something like that, so that they get a full sense of like that lifestyle that they're essentially buying it. Also on the product pages, you want to include add to cart button as well as your product title, product description, any technical details that are relevant to the product, and then also reviews of the product. So again, I wanted to give an example here. You can see that Macy's is giving us a very striking image.
It's not shown in use here for this specific example, but the image, because it's overlaid on a white background, it does make it feel very clean. it just feels like a very trustworthy site, just because it, it looks very well put together. Then we also have the product title highlighted as well as the call to action and the product details. And if you were to scroll down on this product page, you would also see the customer reviews. I personally love the way that this specific example of the customer reviews has been laid out. It gives you a lot of different, like detailed information as the customer.
One critique that I would give to this specific reviews section is that it really helps as a customer to see the face of the person leaving the reviews. So let's say for example, I left , "this timepiece won't break the bank" review. If I were able to link that with my Facebook profile or something, and it was that functionality was able to bring in my photo, like my profile photo. It just helps the customer to associate a review with a face. It just humanizes that piece of the brand a bit more and builds that trust even on deeper level.
Okay. So let's talk a little bit about featured works pages. So essentially this would be more on the service-based business side. And this is essentially where you want to show work that you've done, projects that you've worked on.
This is where you want to show off your skills and like show the different projects that you have contributed to. And so obviously you want to show images or video, if you can of this specific works, and then you really want to make sure that you're explaining the transformation that client went through, like showing before as an actors can be extremely helpful, making sure that. Explaining how you were specifically involved in the project. Like obviously for service-based businesses, there's a lot in a lot of cases, there are teams involved in projects. And so specifically outlining how you were involved can be really helpful to potential employers. And then also making sure to link to other featured works.
This is a great way to provide a great experience for your website visitors as well as to boost your SEO. So on the about page of your website. The biggest thing to remember is that this is not your resume. It shouldn't be stiff. It should feel personal.
It should have a photo of you. Like I've given the example of here. One thing I wanted to point out about this specific photo example is that you can really get a sense of the business atmosphere that this individual works in, but there's a way that you can integrate that into your about page, whether that be integrating some of your brand colors or showing your personality in some way.
Go for it because it's just going to make you a human in the sense of like, when people love to buy from other people, , when they are doing business and it just helps you assert that kind of human element. Also, you want to tell your business story. So tell people how you got started. Like, what is the driving factor from you? Starting your business, include a call to action on the page as well. One awesome way that I've seen product-based businesses do this is that they will tell the story of the business.
And then underneath of it, they will have like, essentially like a curated section of products from the owner's favorite picks or something like that. And it has like the top 3 products that the owner recommends. Anyway, I just thought that was like a cool way to integrate a call to action onto that page, because a lot of the time about pages almost become like a dead end on websites. And so you don't want that. You always want to be giving your website visitors, something else to do or something to take action on.
Lastly, I think I had mentioned this already, but always try to infuse your personality. So on the contact page, this is where you would put a contact form. If you want to list your email, making sure that you include a domainname email address.
It's super helpful. If you have social media links that you want to include, that can be helpful as well. And for brick and mortar businesses also, including your , physical location, as well as your phone number provides that extra way for people to reach out to you.. Okay. So now we are going to dive into the branding on your website.
So why does branding matter? Branding is essentially the visual elements that you can use on your website in order to build trust with your audience. It also helps to reinforce that customers are in the right place. So I always like to give this example.
If I see one of your businesses posts on Instagram, let's say, and I click over to your profile. I clicked to your website. Does it feel like the same experience from your social media to your website? It should, because it should be using the same colors, the same fonts, all of that kind of stuff. So that I, as the customer, without you blatantly saying it, I am reassured that I'm in the right place. Branding also matters because it helps to strengthen brand recognition over time. So when we continually show up with the same look and feel over time, people will start to recognize that.
I always like to give the example of Coca-Cola There is probably a certain color that you associate with Coca-Cola, right? It's red. And that is because we've seen those promotions over and over and over again. So you can create that with your brand as well. And it also helps to create an experience for your customers.
When we're thinking about different brands, you can think about like Toyota versus Tesla. Those are probably two different experiences in your life. When you think of those two brands, figuring out how you can position your business in that way, like what type of experience you want to create for your customers? All of that will dictate the branding, the design choices that you make for your website. So I touched on a few of these earlier, but how can you implement branding on your website? You can do this through your logo, your color palette, your fonts, any patterns, textures, iconography, as well as your brand voice, and ultimately to be successful with this, you really need to be consistent, making sure that you are using high res imagery and everything should just look very cohesive. One big tip too, that I give to my clients is to use your brightest brand color for your calls to action.
What this is going to do is it's going to help those calls to action, really pop off of the page. And so when we're scrolling a website, there's a lot going on. Those calls to action should be very, very prominent so that the website visitor doesn't miss them..
also it's I mentioned a little bit about this earlier, too, but making sure that you're humanizing your brand, showing your face, especially if you're a service provider, folks need to know, like, and trust you before they will buy from you. And so making sure that you are showing your face on camera, putting photos of yourself on your website, where you show your face, you're smiling, you look friendly and inviting. It can really help to build that trust. And then finally using blocks of color as well as background textures to distinguish the page sections. This is a big mistake that I see a lot of businesses make as well.
A lot of, I do a lot of website reviews on Tik Tok. When I take a look at people's websites usually towards the middle to the bottom of the website, folks will like the content will just start to bleed together a little bit. And so using different background blocks can really help to differentiate those sections.
Okay. So let's dive into some website optimization strategies.. So I talked about this a little bit earlier, but always thinking about how you can organize the content so that it's easy to find. And a big thing when it comes to website design is taking a look at your content and seeing what you can subtract from it. Taking things away from a website design can often be so powerful because it helps to guide the website visitor to wherever you want them to go.
Website, visitors love to be guided. If they're hit with too many messages at the same time, again, they might get overwhelmed, open another tab, get a phone call like it, it has to be very pointed and very directed. When you are designing your site. As I mentioned earlier, calls to action should be easily recognizable. You can do this through using your brightest brand color maybe using buttons. It is often a great way that you can make them stand out a little bit more.
And then also ensuring that your website is mobile friendly - over half of what website use at this point is conducted over mobile phone or tablet. And so you really need to make sure that you're accommodating for those smaller screen sizes. You can do this through various websites that will help you to test that.
You can also just test on your phone test on your friend's phone, your tablets, very, very important to get those tests of your website. And then also making it clear immediately what your website is about. So again, like using that top hero area of your website is going to be super important. This kind of bleeds into the next point too the term "above the fold" on your website is essentially a term that came from the old newspaper days where they would print a newspaper.
Literally fold it in half and everything that was listed on the newspaper that was above the fold was considered to be the most prominent information, like the most important information that they wanted you to know. So that term has carried over to website design and everything that you see on the page without scrolling is known as content that is [above the fold]. So essentially this is your most important real estate on your entire website. So you have to make that piece count. Oftentimes people won't get past that area. So if you are missing a call to action and then in that area, or you're not using that area for specific offer, you could be missing out on sales.
So if you have a product-based business, uh, making sure that the products have add to cart buttons, this is a very, very important piece of the puzzle. Always looking for ways to reduce the number of steps from someone seeing your product to purchasing. So I'm going to have a, uh, a diagram on one of the next slides, which will kind of better illustrate what I mean here, but we always want to be thinking about how we can reduce that friction. When it comes to somebody actually getting something into the cart and purchasing. So, and asking yourself this question.
If somebody only visits your homepage, would they have a general idea of what it is that you offer? If the answer's yes, then you're probably doing a good job. if the answer's no, then you probably have some. And then, as I mentioned earlier, subtracting things from websites is often one of the best things that you can do, taking a look at your checkout process and seeing if there are any fields that you might be able to remove. One of the, I've seen a lot of checkout processes that say, enter your birthday or enter, like, where did you hear about us? Those are the types of questions. While those questions might be great for marketing purposes. The checkout is not the place to collect that information.
It should be very, very streamlined. Only include the information that is absolutely needed to fulfill those orders and if the person checks out. So a few more website optimization strategies here. You always want to make sure that your web, your language should be clear and using a single color for links and buttons. What you do like when you use a single color for these elements on the page, you're essentially training someone without directly saying. This color equals a link in thing.
So this thing is clickable on my page. And so it's, we've all been using websites for a long time at this point. And it's something that we just get trained to do. Once we see a certain button on the website, we'll automatically our brain just registers.
Okay. "Blue equals something clickable". So using that consistency throughout your site can be. And then also doing a functionality check for your site. So checking your forms, making sure your sliders are working any other interactive elements.
I was kind of looking at a site the other day that had like a 360 view on it for products. So just double checking that on desktop and mobile to make sure that everything is working properly. Honestly, if you have something broken on your site, and this is one of the quickest ways to break trust with customers, just because it feels like you haven't upkept your site in a way. So making sure that you do a lot of testing, different browsers, different devices can be super helpful. And then also consider adding a chat bot to your website. So this is something that has popped up over the last few years.
It's been super helpful, especially for product based businesses, because it essentially helps the business answer quick questions that they get very often, FAQ's that kind of thing without having to get a human involved. So think of the top 20 questions that you get asked in your business, set them up within a chat bot and then the chat bot can kind of answer those questions for you. All right.
So let's talk about some marketing opportunities on your website. This is one of my favorite topics as well. So the first that we're going to talk about is email and text marketing. One of the biggest questions that I get asked in my Tik Tok channel is "Which one should I be using - email marketing or text marketing?" Honestly, this is going to be different for every single business. I always tell my clients to test both and see which one works better for your business.
If you are marketing to a younger demographic, let's say you're marketing to gen Z, text marketing might be more effective for that audience. So I always say, test, see what works for you. And then kind of lean into that a little bit more. One thing. Caution you with when it comes to email and text marketing on your website is that sometimes there are, if you're using plugins for those types of functionality, that those little pop-ups can often compete with each other.
So it's really, really good to test, um, to see, like, if it's too abrasive, when somebody hits your website, are they getting hit like two or three different pop-ups that can also turn somebody off when you are browsing a website. So just be careful and make sure to maybe embed one on your homepage and maybe do one as a pop-up. And then also thinking about how to create automations from your email and text marketing.
So a lot of platforms have this built in already, but they have templates that you could use, but thinking about cart, abandonment, welcome series, any discounts, there are lots of businesses that do like birthday rewards and stuff like that. So thinking about how you can integrate that into your business. Always personalize when you can. So at least it's using somebody's first name. Um, you can significantly increase the, the rate at which people will receive that message if you use somebody's first name.
So do you think about how you can capture and use that to your advantage? And then the biggest tip that I always give to people too, is always make sure that you're using an incentive to capture that information. So people do not give away their email address anymore just for, for no reason. So you have to incentivize them. So get them a discount code, give them a free checklist, give them some kind of template what's in it for them. Think about what they really want as your consumer and offer that in exchange for their contact information.
Okay. So this is the diagram that I was talking about earlier, but essentially this is the slide where we're going to be talking a bit about how to minimize the clicks between somebody seeing your product to purchasing. So on the right side of the screen here, you can see that I'm basically outlining the different steps that it takes from somebody seeing the product purchasing. So perhaps they see your, Instagram posts, then they go over to visit your profile. They click the link in your bio. They find the product on your website.
They add it to cart, and then they go to checkout. There are most likely some steps after this, within the checkout that people have to go through. So it's probably even longer process in this, but essentially here, you see, we have six different steps or clicks that people have to go through in order to even get that product into their cart.
So we want to take a look at those checkout flows, count them out to see there's going to differ for every single business, but see if there are ways that you can minimize those clicks. Less clicks equals higher conversion and means ease of shopping. Shopping, and purchase decisions are emotionally driven. So the more that you can capture that person in the moment, the better off you're going to be as a businessand you're going to see a higher conversion rate. I also wanted to mention here, if you are on Shopify using Shop Pay, or even taking a look at IG shopping can make that process a little bit easier. Okay.
So let's talk a bit about adding pixels to your website. So even if you don't plan on running ads immediately, you can get a ton of great data from your pixels, anything from age range, to location of your customers, lots and lots of different data that you can collect on them. So that isa thing that you can implement on your website, also integrating Google analytics. This can help you to get insight on like how many, like what pages are most popular on your website, getting really granular with the data from like where people are coming from, and that kind of thing. And then also using visual hierarchy on the page.
So this is an amazing example on the right side of the slide, but essentially a visual hierarchy is just a concept where you can use larger, bolder texts and images to grab attention, and then smaller, lighter weight texts can feel secondary and less important. So you can use this as a guide and it will help you to essentially drive people to where you want them to look. And then finally I wanted to include a slide on search engine optimization. Honestly, this could have an entire presentation on its own. So this is just a, if you want to dive in deeper to this topic, highly recommended, um, just Googling some information about it, searching on YouTube.
There's lots of amazing resources out there, but essentially this is what the pieces of your website that tell Google what your website is going to be about. And the way that you rank on Google is through keywords. And so one tool that I wanted to suggest here is called Ubersuggest. It's a free tool that you can try and you can essentially use it to find different keywords. See what other pages are ranking for their specific keywords.
And then I've also listed a few places where you can list those keywords within your website. Okay. So finally, let's talk about ongoing maintenance to your site. This is a super important topic just because it helps your website to run smoothly. So, first we want to talk about updating plugins. Ultimately, this is like plugins (especially if you're using WordPress) plugins get updated, updated fairly regularly, along with the platform.
And this can be for a variety of reasons. Maybe they've added more functionality to the plugin, or it's a security patch. There's lots of different reasons, but ultimately updating your plugin plugins regularly can help prevent. website issues down the road.
I've seen websites before where they haven't updated their plugins and something completely broke on their website. And it was like that for a week or so. So it is important to kind of keep tabs on the updates of the plugins. And also, we want to think about security updates. This is a topic that is especially relevant to WordPress, just because it is an open source platform, but just making sure that you are providing that secure experience for your customers, especially if you're selling products and just keeping it up to current standards and nobody wants their website to get hacked.
Obviously that's a horrible situation or cloned. And so keeping up to date can help to prevent some of those things. And then thinking about how you can update it, update the content on your website. So this might look like updating blog posts, adding new pages, linking the pages together on your website. And this can be really helpful when it comes to SEO. Again, this could be a whole separate webinar about that, but yeah, keeping your website fresh is just a great way to keep people coming back for more.
Okay, so thank you very much. That is the end of the presentation. I did have a freebie for you, guys.
This is a free website checklist. (linked at the side bar). So I'm going to take a look at the questions and answer some of these top voted questions. So if you haven't, um, submitted a question yet, please do in the question box is just to the left of the chat.
So I'm going to answer some of theseTop Asked questions. So let's take a look at this one. "What is the best way to create a platform for interacting with clients include including retrieving a signed waiver, scheduling and payment from clients on my services and on my WordPress site?" I actually don't use WordPress for this. I use a platform called Fresh Books, just because it has a lot of personal information that can be collected there.
So I use a third party for that. I'm going to move on to the next question here. "When building a site, what should be in included to improve Google analytics so that your site comes up when people search related terms?" So that is actually not related to Google analytics at all. That is the search search engine optimization that I mentioned earlier on in the presentation. So again, this could be a whole webinar that you could teach on that, but essentially looking at the different keywords, using that tool Ubersuggest that I mentioned in the presentation to find those keywords, to make sure that you are using the right keywords on the site.
I did list a few places that you can include them on your site, but that's essentially how you get Google to recognize what your site is going to be about as well as rank within those search results. Okay. So the next question that I'm seeing is "my MailChimp email list seems to be getting a lot of bots.
I researched putting a capture onto my website, sign up with no avail. Do you have suggestions for how to put a capture on my email or another way to protect signups in general on my WordPress site?" So for this kind of in general, I don't recommend using MailChimp, but I do know that there is a way that you can integrate that capture. I think it's in the audience settings. If I'm not mistaken, however, that would be all on the MailChimp side and not on the WordPress side.
So essentially if you're using a MailChimp embed on your WordPress site, that is how you would control that within the MailChimp settings. Let's see the next question here. "What's the most effective way to display photos on their website when some are stock images, customizing, Canva and others. Others include before and after pictures of organizing projects?" I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this question. However, you can certainly use like before and after is like side-by-side photos. So essentially like creating that as a single photo.
In Canva, you could also just use it as like a slide show. So like slide 1 is theBefore, slide 2 is the After. I've also seen websites where they have like a slider that kind of like displays both photos. And as you slide the slider, it kind of like shows the before and after. So that's an option as well.
So let's go on to the next question here. "I have a blog that doubles as my website. My question is could I put a landing page to sell my services on the first page of my blog so that it, so that if the first visitor first thing, a visitor sees you can link to that page?" Yeah, you certainly could do that. It depends on, this is kind of a bigger question on like your whole, your overall strategy, but landing pages are a great way to kind of, again, we want to direct the website visitor to exactly where you want them to look and landing pages are a great way to do that just because there's not any distractions of other products on the page or other offers, no email lists opt-ins any of that kind of stuff. So that could be.
It's hard to say though, without like knowing the specific scenario, how do I balance a good web design without having too much copy, which I'm told? I have a, is it through blogs that I can get found for topics and subjects? I sell education courses and mentorships. So. A good rule of thumb that I like to give people is if you have three paragraphs, if you have more than three paragraphs, you should be dividing that text with a header. it should be a header, three paragraphs of text, and then another header, and then started over again. So breaking up your page in that way is a great way to visually kind of distinguish the different sections that you are going to. Number one question of all the times, but why am I not getting leads? How to increase leads the only way passes through design, the way passes through design.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this question. However, There's lots of different ways to obtain leads. I mean, social media, email marketing, or getting, driving people through ads that could be like a whole separate webinar in itself. Like essentially like driving traffic to your business. Can't there be privacy issues with displaying customer faces and information on reviews, particularly under GDPR and California, like privacy laws. For my understanding, if the person gives the permission, there's not an issue there.
I could be wrong. I'm not a legal professional, but that's just my understanding of it. Can you recommend any chatbots? One that I really like to use is many chat. That is probably my favorite at the moment. It's a pretty powerful interface and you can kind of like drag and drop to create your different workflows to this thing keeps updating, sorry.
It gets kind of, uh, lots of these. Just say to unmute. Let's see if there are any other ones that have popped up to the top here. What will help me most to sell more books and attract views of the blog on my website, but ultimately there's a lot of different options. Here's the thing about marketing is that all marketing methods work, it just depends on which ones you want to spend your time on. Some are short plays, some are long plays.
They all work. It's just a matter of getting really good at whatever marketing method you're going to be using to drive traffic to your website. One thing that I've seen a lot of authors do that is especially effective, especially through like video marketing, is that they will essentially set the scene, start telling the story of their novel and then they will they'll they'll say in order to get like the ending of the story, you have to go to X place and kind of tease it in that way. So that might be something to play around with there. I think I answered most of these. Let's say.
As a brand grows, is it better to split an online shop into its own website and then promote each site separately on social media? This really depends on your website. I would say if the, if the audience is the same as. Probably fine to keep them alongside the same website. However, if you're, if the e-commerce side of your business is kind of merging away from, if it's beginning to be two different audiences, then you might want to think about having two different websites. Excuse me, one second. From one of the guys I'm going to get some water.
How can I get a P an opinion about my current website? Thank you. So I actually do offer one-on-one website reviews and you can check those out. If you find me on social media, there's a link in my bio where you can book one out with me. Please say something about mobile web design and unique identification practices to.
On authorized mimic sites. I just had a friend that had to deal with this, uh, unfortunately, and there's a lot of legal that goes into it that I'm not qualified to answer, but that's a really, really unfortunate thing that has been happening a lot more lately. Excuse me guys. But yeah, I am just not qualified to answer that. Should you include an about me blurb on your freelance website? Absolutely. This is a place where people are going to need to get to know you before they will know, like, and trust you.
Right? So if you are able to let them know a bit about you, why you started your business, the types of projects you'd like to work on, et cetera, that can be super helpful. So I'm just looking through the questions here. Can you explain the difference between pixels. Sorry. Can you explain the difference between pixels and Google analytics? Yeah.
So pixels are essentially like a small code snippet that you add to your website, so that the specific social media platform for that, for that pixel data gets sent back to that platform. So let's say for example, you are adding a Pinterest pixel to your website. It will, every time somebody hits your website, it will send that data back to Pinterest. Facebook is the same, et cetera.
When it comes to Google analytics, this is a tool that you can look at more for like the individual analytics of like which pages are getting enough traffic. And so, yeah, it's a really helpful tool for digging down into like where people are coming from, their demographics, all of that stuff. Can you change your domain? Absolutely. I've been a part of several companies that have done this while I have been working there.
Essentially, all you need to do is buy the new domain, switch over the DNS records for that website. And that's it. It takes a few days to populate. Lots of comments asking if the presentation should be.
Or we'll be shared later and yes, it will be posted on YouTube channel for psych ground. I did cover what above the fold means for action buttons and the presentation. Is it bad to have a large slider at the top? In my opinion, sliders are becoming a bit outdated. It's much more effective to just put a single promotion there instead of just slides going over and over most of the time, people will not see slide 2, 3, 4, et cetera.
And so it's just better to have a single promotion there. Again, it kind of goes back to that kind of idea of like, there are, you really need to direct people to where you want them to look. And so the more choices that you're giving them, the more overwhelmed they're going to get.
2022-03-21 04:21
