5 Steps to a Successful New Website Launch5 Steps to a Successful New Website Launch

In this digital age, a website is important for your business to survive. Being one of the most powerful tools for marketing, you need to hire a website designing company that can give you the most amazing website design and help you with your website development.

Below are the important steps to help you ensure that the launch of your new website will be a success.

Start With the Website Development Project

Prior to starting a site project, see to it that you consider your budget, and the people who will man the whole process. Validate if your existing website developer has the necessary skills for achieving your digital goals or it might be time to search for other options.

Establish the Foundation

In the same way that engineers don’t start a building without blueprints, you should have a set plan that includes all the must-haves and the nice-to-haves. Most of the time, different stakeholders have their own wish list which can lead to scope creep, inflate budgets, and delayed launch without really giving support to your business objectives. Experts recommend that you take a look at your marketing and business plans, value proposition, brand, market/customer augmentation, existing digital assets, and technological needs.

Look for the Right Partner

After documenting all the requirements, there are numerous options for developing the new site. You can opt to purchase an out of the box solution with monthly fee, hire a full service website maintenance company, or use a freelance website developer. It is best that you choose a renowned web development firm that specializes in website design, website optimization, website speed, SEO and everything involved herein.

Manage the Project

Once you chose the right firm, see to it that you sign a contract which includes your milestones and buildup requirements with specific dates. The moment the project takes off, supervise the entire process as there will be some unexpected things which can happen. When you are involved, these will never come out of the blue.

Track the Progress and Celebrate Your Brand New Site

See to it that you understand what you are reviewing in every phase for you to sign off on deliverables with complete confidence. You also have to track for any bugs in your chosen web partner and ensure that an analytics solution has been put in place from the very first day for measuring your performance. If this is an ecommerce site, test all steps of the process of ordering to guarantee a smooth experience for customers and an optimal sale conversion. Aside from the post launch warranty, your chosen web firm must also offer a maintenance and security program to keep your site updated. This is imperative.

Remember that the launch of your site is merely the start of a wonderful journey. You have to be hands on in everything to ensure that your site will not only enjoy a successful launch but also a thriving popularity in the many years to come.

7 Reasons Why You Should Rethink Your Website Content Today

You’ve hired the finest e-Commerce design agency in your area or online to make a professional-looking and easy to navigate website. You’ve also put in a lot of hours to ensure that each aspect of the website wows your targeted audience. However, your website isn’t generating the results you expected. Perhaps, it is the best time to rethink the content of your website today. Below are some of the reasons why

Low Traffic

Your website isn’t generating the traffic you want and this might be a direct result of having poor web content. Have you tried optimizing your web content and your website to get high ranking on your search engine? Have you tried testing your call to action buttons? There are several questions that you have to answer and a professional might help you with this.

Poor Visibility

Once your customers are looking for you over the internet and cannot find your site, it is a clear case of extremely poor online visibility. This is also the reason why you’re not getting enough traffic to your website. Try typing your business name into Google or some search engines. Does it appear on the first page? It must and if it does not, you should rethink the content of your website.

Low Sales

The numbers don’t lie. Although your website isn’t generating traffic, it must be able to convert customers who visit your site. If your web content isn’t engaging enough, your visitors could be bouncing off very quickly. Review the average time your visitors spend on your website and review the analytic for you to know the bounce rates.

Boring Content

Content isn’t just text. It is actually everything that will help you communicate and spread the word about your business. If you think stunning web design is enough, better think twice. Your web design can do so much if you will combine it with good web content.

Your Web Content Fails to Identify Clearly What You Can Do and Who You Are

If your web content fails to convey who you are effectively and the products or services you offer, it’s useless to your readers.

Your Web Content Fails to Give Solutions or Answers

People searching online are typically looking for solutions or answers. Websites that provide such solutions or answers can be attractive while one that does not might be forgotten or passed over.

Web Content is Failing, Pedantic to Connect with the Readers Emotionally

While this may be true that a person is searching for services or products, they do not really like to be told that they do not understand on how to do something on their own. 

 

The Bottom Line

Making web content that attracts your targeted audience is a trial and error procedure. However, it has lots of benefits to your business. When you have made a blog post, you may promote it across your social media channels through a link back to your site. Your attractive content will start moving traffic from various social media channels to your site.

10+ benefits of using Laravel.

Laravel has brought many advancements to the PHP community. With every new version updates, it is disclosing new innovative features to the developers, making their tasks much easier. It also takes care of the security issues. Laravel was made to strengthen security, speed up database migration without data loss, and make the entire process of creating a web application a much easier process. In this article, we will list some of the most common problems, which very often arise during web development, and how Laravel Development enables us to solve all these common problems in a cost effective way.

Benefits of Laravel 

• Building an authentication and authorizing system- Laravel makes implementing authentication very simple. Almost everything is configured out-of-the-box. Laravel also provides a simple way to organize authorization logic and control access to resources.

• Integration with mail services-  Laravel provides a clean, simple API over the popular SwiftMailer library. Laravel also provides drivers for SMTP, Mailgun, Mandrill, SparkPost, Amazon SES, PHP's “mail” function, and “sendmail”, allowing an application  to quickly get started sending mail through a local or cloud based service. In addition to support for sending email, Laravel provides support for sending notifications across a variety of delivery channels, including SMS (via Nexmo) and Slack.

• Integrations with tools to make web development faster-  Laravel supports popular cache backends like Memcached and Redis out-of-the-box. By default, Laravel is configured to use the file cache driver, which stores cached objects in the file system. For larger applications, it is better to use an in-memory cache such as Memcached or APC. However, with Laravel it is even possible to configure multiple cache configurations.

• Fixing technical vulnerabilities- Laravel helps to secure the web application by protecting it against the most serious security risks: SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, and cross-site scripting. Laravel itself is secure. We can tell you first hand that the codebase is fanatically guarded, and that the code has been vetted by several people.

• Configuration error and exception handling- Error and exception handling is already configured for any new Laravel-based project. In addition, Laravel is integrated with the Monolog logging library, which provides support for a variety of powerful log handlers.

• Automation testing work- Laravel is built with testing in mind. In fact, support for testing with PHP Unit is included out-of-the-box, and a phpunit.xml file is already setup for the application. The framework also ships with convenient helper methods allowing for expressive testing of the applications. It provides easy ways for simulating basic behavior of users (making requests to the application and examining the output, for example, clicking links, filling out forms).

• URL Routing Configuration- All Laravel routes are defined in the app/Http/routes.php file, which is automatically loaded by the framework. The most basic Laravel routes simply accept a URI and a Closure, providing a very simple and expressive method of defining routes.

• Open Source- It is free, open source framework that will allow you to build large & complex web applications easily. All you need is a text editor & PHP installation to get started.

• Composer Feature-  Laravel uses composer dependency manager for the installation and up gradations of different third-party packages. This feature allows developers to easily manage all the required dependencies instantly. This is very useful for any developers to create applications of any sizes.

• Message Queue System Configuration- The Laravel queue service provides a unified API across a variety of different queue back-ends. Queues allow you to defer the processing of a time consuming task, such as sending an e-mail, until a later time, which drastically speeds up web requests to your application.

• Internal Templates- Laravel uses Blade, a lightweight yet powerful templating engine which is pre-installed in it. The blade templates are compiled into plain PHP and cached for optimal performance.

• Object Oriented Libraries- Laravel is the only framework that includes a variety of pre-installed libraries. The most popular and useful library of Laravel is the Authentication library. This library has very advanced features for login and database securities.

Little Known Ways to Make Your Website Load Faster

There is nothing more frustrating than a website that takes a gazillion years to load. As every second counts in this fast paced world, it has become more imperative than ever to check with your website designing company that your site loads faster.

Aside from the usual incorporation of the proper SEO and website optimization into your website design, the best website developer will also see to it that your website speed is at par with the needs and demands of potential visitors. When it comes to proper website development, a reliable website maintenance company knows some of the secret but proven effective ways to make your site load faster than ever.

Go for a Caching Plugin

This particular method can be considered as one of the most important ways you can try. This is found to be most effective for the WordPress-based websites. Since WordPress is something based on the PHP language, the moment the site loads up, there are lots of PHP calls being executed. The plugin will cache your page then store it as HTML files. You can choose from different cache plugins available in the market today which can give a remarkable boost to your website’s loading speed.

Use a CDN Service

Content Delivery Network or CDN is a type of service which can improve the loading time of your site through reducing the server load as well as offloading static resources such as image, theme, JS content, CSS, and others.

Stick to a Clear Website Design

The use of a clear template can decrease the loading time of your website on other devices. This will also reduce the loading time of your website on regular PCs. When your site can load faster in the portable devices such as smartphones and tablets, your website will see a remarkable boost in its traffic, thus making your site more popular along the way.

Stay Away from a Dense Footer and Sidebar

Most blogs use the footer and sidebar for showcasing various widgets. These widgets can slow down the loading speed of the website through consuming a heavier user load. In order to avoid it, many blogs today go for a minimalistic design for increasing its loading speed.

You can remove any unwanted widget from the sidebar and footer to reduce the loading time of the site. To increase the loading speed of the site even more, you can also try getting rid of the individual post widgets. The social sharing buttons found on the home page and next to a post can delay the loading speed of a site up to a great extent. You can remove these buttons to speed up the performance of your site.

Turn Off Commenting

It is something that most blog owners will want to avoid, since commenting depicts a site’s popularity. This is why usually blog owners don’t follow this method. However, turning off commenting can make your site load much faster. You also have to avoid the use of external commenting systems. These systems make use of large files and scripts which can increase your loading time. It is completely upto you whether you want to try this method or not.

Web Development Trends to Watch Out For in 2017

Website development has been a dynamic industry that layers and reshapes itself depending on the changing trends and the newest technological advancements introduced.

The year 2017 promises to bring an exciting surge of ecommerce web design and development including the use of design snippets inspired by virtual reality and artificial intelligence and more, What trends in web designing and development will stand out this year?

Virtual Reality to Rise to Fame

Virtual reality is among the hottest subjects of discussion in 2016. The trend is also expected to take websites a notch higher in 2017. There are now many websites which instructed their website development company to employ virtual reality. This trend is expected to spread wider and further this year.

How will virtual reality affect web design and development? An expert web development company can root for more advanced and immersive 3D effects made possible by augment reality on sites in order to give visitors a more engaging and memorable experience.

For instance, if it is a real estate site, a web design company can use the virtual reality quotient for real estate tours to assure a more engrossing and interactive feel for website visitors. VR-based websites can in fact show amazing potentials in increasing the CTR of a website since when you engage visitor better, you will also have better chances of success.

Artificial Intelligence to Change the Rules of the Game

Artificial intelligence is the hottest buzzword in 2016 as it steadily makes its way to web development industry recently. It is said that artificial intelligence shakes hands with website development and design. In fact, it is no longer new to find a graphic design company that makes use of artificial intelligence technology in coming up with customized sites.

How does this process work, then? A website development company assigns dedicated AI assistants. You will be asked several questions about the website you are planning to build. These questions are meant to grasp a better understanding of the particular theme of your business and the industry it belongs to. Based on the extensively programmed algorithms, the assistant will then create the most suitable combination of branding, layout, design and content for your site.

Static Site Generators to Join the Crowd

Static site generators create websites from plain text. The static websites enjoy a good amount of perks such as improved security, speed, deployment ease and smarter tackling of surges in traffic. In the same way that content delivery networks and APIs are increasingly becoming more vital for the web, modern site developers also hold high hopes this year for the rise of static site generators.

The year 2017 sure has seen the launch of a plethora of brand new trends and endless possibilities that any website development company must be aware of in order to make their websites edgier and more competitive than ever before. You can harness the potential of these latest trends when you employ the services of the most dependable web design and development company.

To what Extend can SEO Affect Your Website

SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. It’s the process of getting traffic from the “free” or “organic” search results on search engines.

All major web companies such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have search engines, where web pages, videos or even listings are shown and ordered depending on what search engines consider most relevant to users. SEO techniques are used by all the sites that rank #1 in your searches! Therefore, mastering SEO will be an amazing advantage to your website as well as to your business.

Get Top Ranks With SEO

The task of getting top ranks in search result pages with SEO is not possible unless your website has some SEO optimized content. Therefore, you need to bring your website to a high position in order to start earning money. That’s why search engine optimization helps a lot as it’s effective to help a business thrive on the internet. Experts use a lot of different ways to bring their websites to the top. They engage in on-page and off-page activities to give a little boost to the rankings, and not just that, to traffic and conversions of your websites. And after proceeding on doing that again and again, your website will become very popular!

Once getting a top-rank position, your website will get more exposure and will gain a lot of visitors, some of them turning into loyal readers. Of course there will sometimes be people who don’t like your website and you can’t let yourself be discouraged by that, each person has their own taste. Most important thing on SEO optimized websites are the architecture and links so your website can be in the spotlight of the engines. Also, you should read the rules about SEO before getting into it so you don’t violate any of them.

SEO Explained

While owning a small business and wanting to draw more attention to your website, you can start by understanding SEO itself. Even though it’s not some rocket science, it can be complicated. You’ll need to understand how to combine parts of it to get the most out of them. Some of them being: 

• Your business + Website
• Demands of the niche you are in
• The rules (as stated above)
• The competition

In all my time studying SEO, I’ve learned that the competitors are the hardest thing about SEO. You have to be better than them in every way possible or they will out-rank you. They will not wait for you to catch up with them and they will try to bring you down by any means possible. Therefore, having attractive content as well as good links, you are on your way to the top of the ladder!

Conclusion

In conclusion, SEO is not hard and it’s not easy, you need to do your homework before hopping in this kind of journey. Your website should be relevant, have keywords and links to your other articles or to high trusting websites such as Wikipedia.

How Can a Professional Graphics Designing Company Be of Utility to You?

If you haven’t hired a professional graphics designing company yet, then, it is about time that you discover how these experts can help you out.

Two Heads are Better Than One

Chances are you have no idea what you really want, but with just a few notes, a good graphics designing company will know what you need right away. It is always valuable to have an outside perspective from a person who has the skills and knowledge in graphic design and marketing. Combined with your knowledge about your business and product, and their expert knowledge on design, you can expect to get better results.

Brand Development

A professional graphics designing company can also help with brand development through continuous projects. While you might need just one project for now, it doesn’t mean that you won’t need more in the future. A constant communication with your designer regarding your long term aspirations and goals makes it more possible for them to help you come up with your brand strategy. Strong brands have consistency where everything is pieced together for continuity. Hiring a designer who can handle all forms of media and works side by side with other marketing experts can give you seamless transition together with your growing demand for design.

Save Time

While you might have the software or skills necessary to build a website, logo, or brochure, you might end up spending long hours trying to find yourself around software you are not familiar with. It can rob you of your precious time that you could have allotted for running and focusing on your business operations instead. You can save so much time if you let a graphics designing company take charge of the creative part.

Save Money

Despite having some knowledge on design, a graphic designer can give you much better results. When you hire a professional, you also get invaluable knowledge, insight, and recommendations that the designer has acquired from his years of experience, thus helping you save money and time along the way. Through outsourcing, you get the same invaluable expertise with no overhead of having to hire in-house. You will get exactly what you pay for when you hire these professionals.

Quality Speaks for Itself

When you have a skilled graphics designing company to back you up, your current and potential customers will see nothing but top of the line graphics, and this can affect how they see your business as a whole. A properly executed and beautifully designed piece gives you a more professional image, which will then instill confidence among your target audience. Graphic designers are known for their creative eye for perspective, composition, font selection, hierarchy, and color which can never the taught. Designers can also help with paper selection and print quality, which is possibly the most crucial element to finish off your project in the most professional manner.

Always take your time when hiring a professional graphics designing company. Check their portfolio, and ask about the type of work they did in the past. Take note that designers don’t just answer your questions, as they also ask you about your goals. These are the type of companies that truly care about quality.

6 Things to Bear in Mind before Getting a Website Designed

So, you have finally decided to put up a new website. Instead of taking a plunge right away into this project, you can save yourself both money and time when you consider these 6 important factors you need to keep in mind. 

 

What’s Your Objective?

It may sound a bit obvious, but it is a must to have a clear and definite objective for your new website. Do you wish to establish an online presence for your business? Will it be for personal use? Without an objective, it will be impossible for you to get started. 

Look for Examples

Try to check the website of your competitors, or look for websites that caught your interest. This will help you not just in narrowing your objective but also in giving you a good idea of what kind of design and style you would like for your new website. 

 

Pay Attention to Branding

With no branding, your website will never have its own identity. You still need branding even for websites meant for personal use. For bigger companies, it refers to logos and other existing branding materials you already have. On the other hand, you can also come up with something new to modernize or spruce up your existing brandingidentity. 

 

Don’t Forget Content

It is undoubtedly the most crucial factor to enjoy a quick turnaround. If you already have an existing website and you are contented with its content, it’s perfectly fine and you can just transfer copy. If you don’t have any content at all, getting some could help. You can choose to write it yourself or hire someone to do it for you. Good content can help create a site map which serves as the basis of websites. 

 

Color Scheme

The color scheme for your website could coincide with your business brand, or you can choose something different for your website. While colors are not really that important, it will be great if you get a feel of what you want to achieve right from the start. Pick colors that will complement and blend well with each other. 

 

Images and Videos

Finally, consider the images and videos you will use on your website. Was there ever a time you find yourself in a website completely bare of images. For sure, there was never such a time. Images of the products, your team members, your business premises, and just about any image related to your company or website can be very useful. More personable images are always better. You can opt for stock photos, although these might not be a good idea all the time, especially if you like your site to be specific and individual to your company alone. It is also important for your images to be updated so when you revamp your old site with old images, it is recommended to get a professional who can take top of the line and updated images and state of the art videos. 

 

These are just some of the many factors you have to consider when you build and design your website.

What are Visitors Reading on Your Website? - Ever Given It a Thought?

You spent most of your time writing your site content. You want them to attract your target audience. You craft each phrase with extra care. You published it on your website, eager to see how they can affect people.

But after some time, nobody even cared to read your content. No tweets, no shares, and no comments. So, what did you do wrong?

When you run a website, it is not enough that you just put up any content out there. You have to check what your site visitors will read, and what kind of impact your words will have on them. Here are some of the things you can do to engage your readers to make them trust your content, stay on your site pages, and interact with your website information.

Use Line Break

 

Turn even the most complex content into reader-friendly paragraphs with the use of white space. You can feature one idea for every paragraph. You can keep these short, with 3 to 4 sentences max. Then, write several paragraphs with just one sentence.

Add Compelling Subheads

See to it that you write your subheads and headline before anything else. A strong headline which signifies a strong premise is important to entice your readers to check you out. Solid subheads can keep your readers more engaged as these act as mini headlines which will keep them perusing the rest of your content. After writing your subheads, go through them again to see what readers or visitors will understand once they read only that part of the article. Is the story compelling? Will they have a gist of the article?

Stick with Deep Captions

Based on studies, it is revealed that image captions remain to be among the most-read copy on online pages. Pair your strong images with deep captions. These deep captions are around 2 to 3 sentences long, enough to ignite the interest of your readers to dig into the entire article.

Create Billeted Lists

Billeted lists create irresistible fascinations for readers. These can be scanned easily to present several points. These will look different from the rest of your content, providing a visual break for the readers.

Add Helpful and Relevant Links

You can use internal links back to your content to keep more people on your website and make them read your best material. The external links will show that you have researched on the subject, and you want to highlight experts. Great content makes use of these two to add value and expand the understanding of your readers. One more benefit of internal links is that these can make it less frustrating when others scrape your content.

Check Your Format

After using numbers, subheads, billeted lists, as well as other formatting to highlight your content’s key elements, read through it all over again. Look only at your text to see if your reader will get the main gist you want. Were you able to pull out the most relevant and interesting words, the words which can turn scanners into readers?

Can Website Visitors Really Turn into Potential Clients? Why Not!

Increasing the number of website visitors is something that can take up too much time. But, is it possible to turn these visitors into potential clients? Why not? To help you out, here are some ways on how to make it possible.

State Your Offers Clearly

What actions do you expect your site visitors to make? Do you want them to spend time reading your content or buying your products? Each of these must have a call to action button. You have to be clear with your offer to customers. You will look more credible when you are more specific with your offering.

Make the Most Out of Live Chat

Customers love it when their questions are answered right away, and the best way to make it possible is through the use of a live chat feature. A customer who is unsure of a product will get a better idea about it if they can interact with someone from the business. There is a higher chance for them to go with a live chat instead of talking over the phone. This way, you can turn more undecided visitors into sure paying customers.

Add Testimonials

These days, it is no longer new to see websites with testimonials complete with the customer’s picture. Testimonials are usually around 200 words, but to make them more effective, you can request your customers to offer a story-like testimonial instead. This will hook more potential customers as it will seem more authentic. You have to be more creative where you use these testimonials. You can add them in your checkout page, sales page, recommendation pages, and just about everywhere. Using these can leave a big impact as your site visitors see credible faces endorsing your business or product.

Collect Email Addresses

For the longest time, email marketing is regarded as among the most crucial methods to convert your site visitors into paid customers. You can collect their email addresses with the use of offers such as free consultation, free eBooks, or anything which could entice visitors to give you their email ID. You can then engage them through an effective email marketing campaign wherein you offer them with more promotional and information content. See to it that you don’t forget your customers and consider them as mere numbers. Give them enough reasons to lure them into purchasing your products or using your services.

Use Comparison Page

When you are in a market with lots of demand, it is already a given that there will also be more competitors in the field. It means that these potential customers will compare your products with those of your competitors before making a purchase. You can help them by adding a landing page with such comparisons. Make sure you give them reasons why they should pick you over your competitors. This can best be done in the form of comparison chart complete with symbols, numbers, and images which will add the much needed color to it.

Use these pointers to turn your website visitors into potential clients.

8 Critical Elements Every Website Homepage Must Have

Are you thinking of creating a website for your business? Since it is the best way to reach your potential customers, you have to be very particular about its various aspects. Your visitor's buying decision should be triggered after visiting your website. Your website design and features should grab the attention of the visitors so that they spend more time there.

 

Since homepage is the first page which will pop up when a visitor visits your website, make sure it has all the important elements intact. Your homepage should summarize your business in a nutshell. Designing the homepage of your website in the best possible way is a must for your business marketing. Listed below are some of the most significant factors which should be considered before creating the homepage for your website.

1. Use Attractive Headlines

Instead of over-stuffing your homepage with content, use relevant and catchy headlines. Remember that you have got less than 15 seconds to impress your visitors. Go for attractive and catchy headlines which will engage your users. Your headlines should be captivating enough to ensure that your visitors will visit your website again and again.

2. Give Short Descriptions

Your headlines can attract your visitors but you will need description to keep them glued to your homepage. The homepage has got less space and many things have to be integrated so go for a short descriptions. Add short description about the products below each headline to help your potential customer take a buying decision. You can convert your visitors into customers by description.

3. Provide Easy Navigation

Your visitors will stick to your website if you will provide them with an easy navigation. Since you cannot integrate everything on the homepage, you will have to make your visitors go for other pages as well. Try to make the navigation within your website as easy as it can be. Your users should not face any problem while surfing different pages of your website.

4. Integrate Direction Indicators

A good homepage should have the proper indicators to guide your visitor to their favourite page. Being the owner of your website, you would certainly like your visitors to visit certain pages first. Make sure that your visitors move to those specific pages first and then to other pages. Use arrows to guide your user throughout your website.

5. Incorporate Social Media Buttons

In today's world the impact and utility of social media is phenomenal. By incorporating different social media buttons, you can connect with millions of people around the globe. You should use social site buttons on your homepage. Once clicked these buttons should redirect your visitors to the profile pages of your business. You can get direct feedback from customers for improvement.

6. Show Testimonials and Awards

It is always better to show your achievements and appreciation on the homepage. You can use testimonials and awards as a useful marketing tool to promote your business. Positive feedbacks and prizes makes you more credible in the eyes of customers. Your past happy and satisfied customers can bring you new customers with their words of appreciation on your homepage.

7. Proper Call to Action

Any website without proper call to action will not serve its purpose. Your homepage should use call to action. If you want to use your homepage as an effective marketing tool for your business, call to action is a must. Your visitors might get confused without call to action and leave your page. Use call to action if you do not want to lose any valuable customer for your business.

8. Relevant Images and Videos

If you want to use your website's homepage as a marketing tool, images and videos can help you in a significant way. Your images and videos are going to convey things in a detailed and easy way. Your visitors will find it easy to connect with the images than the content on your homepage. Use images and videos to connect to your visitors in an interesting and engaging way.