There your have a small local business or a larger enterprise business your website is a powerful tool to reach new customers, show potential customers what you offer and give your company credibility. But when is the time to get your business online?

Starting a new business.

If you’re just starting up a website should be one of the most important things to ensure you prioritise. Your website is your storefront to the world, allowing users to see your services, contact you and if you’re an ecommerce store make purchases. Regardless of your business industry a website will help generate leads before you even start trading. Having a site from the word go helps build the reputation right away.

Expanding your business and reach

If you’re already trading and looking to grow, then creating or re-designing your website is essential to achieve that growth.  Traditional methods such as referrals, word of mouth and advertising will always help but being online and present will expand that audience. If you are planning on targeting customers outside your geographic area then having a wider audience is crucial.

Steaming operations

Having a website isn’t just to show users what you offer, it’s a useful tool in streamlining workflow. Whether that’s sales via eccommerce, having user guides, documents and FAQs to offer support or even having contact forms to gain leads. It saves you time on tasks and frees time for other parts of your business.

Enhancing user experience

Over the past number of years customers now expect to be able to engage and interact with businesses online. Whether that’s booking appointments,  looking for help or purchasing having a website that offers this is key to customer satisfaction. Ensuring your website has a great user experience and everything they might need is easy to find.

Investing in growth

A website is an investment, not only in terms of financial terms but in terms of giving it then time and effort to ensure the site grows, attracts customers, continues to get leads and ultimately save you time. Some of the things you can do to help your site improve is keep it updated, work on your Search Engine Optimisation and if you can commit to it have a blog/news section. When this investment is nurtured it can become the foundation of your marketing strategy.

Conclusion

Ultimately the answer is different for every business, but in general getting yourself online is a wise move and can play a crucial part in growth. If your business is ready to grow and take those next steps then for you the time is now.

Finding the right web developer can make a world of difference. There are a number of developers around the world sometimes you need someone local who understands your area, the community and can meet up and talk about specific needs. Here’s a few tips on finding that right person for the job.

What do you need?

• • Before you start looking for a developer you need to have an understanding of what you need.
  • What kind of website do you require. Ecommerce, portfolio, blog)
  • What budget are you working to?
  • Do you have any must have features? Ie: contact forms, payment gateways, API integrations.
  • Do you have a preference to the content management system? ie: WordPress, Shopify etc…

Having a detailed brief or list of requirements will help you and the developers you speak to get a better idea of the task and hand.

Recommendations

Like with any other business word of mouth recommendations are typically a great starting point, ask friends, colleagues or business owners you have a relationship with to find somebody reliable.

Online directories

There are many places you can look through to find listings for web developers. Here’s some of the more popular and trustworthy.

Google My Business

If you search for developers in your location, ie: “web developers in Liverpool” or “web developers near me” you will be presented with results and those with Google reviews. This gives you a better idea and a certain level of trust.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great tool for connecting with and searching for web developers. On this platform you can also see testimonials, work samples and filter by local area.

Search Engines

The classic way to find web developers, you will get many results but with filtering by area, specialty ie “WordPress developer Liverpool” you’ll get more accurate results.

Once you think you’ve found a developer

One your search is over and you have found that missing piece important next steps are something to consider.

Communication

How has the communication been? If they are responsive and communicate in a way you understand then that will aide the project.

Long Term Support

Will the developer continue to support after the project is launched?

Contract

What does the contract cover? How many revisions and work changes are permitted.

Deadline

When is the deadline? Can they meet it?

Conclusion

It can take some time to find a good developer, lots of research, emails and looking at portfolios. But it’s key that your developer has the technical skills and understands the project and your vision for the project. Communication, defined goals and milestones and mutual respect will be the keys to a successful partnership and will help you achieve your goals.

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a term that was originally coined back in 2010 but in reality, it was happening a little before then. In a nutshell, before sites were responsive, they typically had a desktop version and a mobile version. Many sites used URLs such as m.facebook.com to deliver a different version specifically for mobile.

The approach RWD takes is to consider both design and development of the site and allow it to respond to the screen size of the user, thus removing the need for a second “mobile” site and offering a consistent user experience regardless of what device the website user uses.

How does it affect you?

When working with a web developer it’s essential to have a site that offers a good experience on all devices because many sites have a higher percentage of users visiting from a mobile device – mobile devices are anything that isn’t desktop.

This varies from industry to industry but many sites have over 80% of visitors using mobile, so if you don’t have a site that works well on a variety of devices then you could likely lose that user and potentially a sale or lead.

From an SEO point of view Google will be less favourable to sites that don’t offer a fluid mobile experience both with layout and of course website speed.

How do I know if my site is responsive?

There are several ways to quickly check. You can of course try on your phone, tablet or other devices. You can also use a tool such as Responsinator which will give you an overview and allow you to gain an idea if your site looks as it should.

For those more confident, most browsers have a RWD mode which you can access from developer tools and basically give a similar output to the tool listed above.

My site isn’t responsive!

If you have identified your site isn’t responsive that’s a good first step, you are now in a position to rectify the problem and make your site perform as well as it should.

I have a developer
If you have a developer already that’s great, speak to them and iterate your findings on your site’s mobile issues and your developer should be able to help you improve the site.

I use a cheap theme
If using a premade template, you can contact the template provider and ask for any updates or raise this as an issue or, alternatively, you can find a new template that is responsive.

I don’t have a developer or use a cheap theme
This is the worse case scenario and if you’re concerned about your site moving forward you’d need to find a skilled website developer to assist you in either working on your site to optimise and allow it to become a responsive website or create a new design with bespoke development to allow a consistent look and feel on all devices.

I personally offer bespoke design and development and all of my sites are fully responsive and offer users a great experience.

My site is responsive!

That’s ideal, a responsive site will help you offer great experiences to your users and shouldn’t impact your SEO or search engine rankings.

Don’t forget that nothing is perfect and you can always improve. As I mentioned earlier website speed is a key factor in ranking and retaining users. You may have a site that looks great on mobile but takes 10 seconds to load.

I’ve written about website speed in the past, learn more here.

Simple answer is yes, and more so now than ever. Google have used speed as a ranking factor since 2009 but it didn’t rank mobile performance or didn’t in an “official” capacity. The desktop result was the only speed factor used and for many sites desktop typically isn’t too bad speed wise.

You can use Google’s PageSpeed insight tool to get a quick idea of how your site performs on mobile and desktop and it will provide you with any issues it finds and most importantly what is slowing down your site. Search Console should highlight any crawl issues and will offer a mobile usability report. Using these tools you will be able to see the problems and get some idea how to fix them in an accessible, effective way.

How will my PageSpeed affect me?

Getting a score of 100/100 does not guarantee a top ranking in Google, nor does a slow site mean you will be penalised heavily. A slow site with good content will still likely rank better than a fast site with poor content but if a competitor’s site is faster than yours you may find your search rankings dropping for certain terms.

Google states the speed update “will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries.” Which sounds like nothing to be concerned about, but a low speed score and quality score will have negative results.

Those who use Google ads may need to pay a higher premium or if the site speed and quality is poor it could well fail to serve ads at all. WebP is an format for images which employs both lossy and lossless compression, along with animation and alpha transparency. Basically makes it super small and super fast.

A few interesting facts:

• 52% of online shoppers state speed is a reason they return to a site.
• 46% of users don’t revisit poorly performing sites.
• 77% of websites take over 10 seconds to load on mobile.
• 40% of people will leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load
• 90% increase in bounce probability when page load speed dropped from 1 to 5 seconds.

How can I speed my site up?

The first step is to see what is causing the greatest speed issues, in most cases images are a big issue. Many are not sized correctly and optimised and are not served in a “next gen” format. Here are a few solutions for WordPress.

Images

Smush

Is a solid plugin for offering image optimisation and the pro version even offers the “next gen” images.

WEBP Express

This is a plugin which offers the WEBP image conversion and one I used personally.

Caching

Caching is basically a way of improving your sites loading times and allows the code to be minified and delivered much faster.

W3 Total Cache

This is a well-established plugin and does an amazing job but it may not work on all hosts.

Autoptimize

Not as well known as W3 Total Cache but had pretty much the same features and in my experience works on the vast majority of hosts.

Basically…

The more in depth answer to the initial question is yes page speed is important, not only can it affect your page ranking, your visibility, it can affect your Google ads and end up costing you money on ads that aren’t served correctly or worse still, losing visitors and potential sales for a poorly performing website.

I encourage you to try the tools I mentioned and if you feel confident addressing some of the speed issues yourself you will soon start to reap the benefits of your work. If you’re not as confident or your site is more complex I do offer website optimisation as a service.

Looking to learn more about the Speed Update? Read about it here: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speed

This a question I’m hearing more frequently of late. Whilst both have their own merits and flaws, WordPress is an Open Source content management system with it powering 40% of all websites whilst SquareSpace is a closed source website builder.

How easy is each platform to use?

If you’re looking for a quick website right out the box with minimal knowledge then SquareSpace is a clear winner. It may not be as flexible as WordPress but it’s the easiest “out of the box.”

With SquareSpace you simply sign up, and you are offered various options on look, feel and domain name. WordPress is more complex where you need to purchase a domain and hosting before you can get going with your WordPress site. It’s still an easy process but not as easy as SquareSpace.

Functionality

WordPress is the clear winner here. WordPress has thousands of plugins to extend functionality and if you have a web developer they can create custom plugins to offer whatever level of functionality you need.

Squarespace has some good option such as giving the user the ability to change CSS, basic SEO settings etc.. but ultimately you are limited to the integrations and options Squarespace offers.

Ecommerce

Both platforms support ecommerce but to quite different levels and costs. WordPress you can get your store up and running with no extra costs aside from your hosting and domain fees. WordPress uses WooCommerce and it’s extremely flexible and supports a huge number of payment gateways and shipping options.

SquareSpace does offer eCommerce but it’s very basic and only supports 2 or 3 payment gateways so if you don’t use PayPal, Stripe or Apple Pay it won’t work for you.

The other point of note is SquareSpace charges a 2-3% transaction fee on all sales unless you upgrade to the top eCommerce plan meaning you either risk the transaction fee or upgrade for no fee and the minimum, you’ll pay per year would be over £300.

How much do they cost?

WordPress is Open Source so there is no cost for the content management system itself, your costs will be hosting and domain fees which would be likely under £50 per year.

SquareSpace costs approximately £100 per year for the basic plan, and around £500 for the top plan per year. As mentioned earlier you could end up paying 2-3% on transaction fees if using eccomerce.

So which should I choose?

If you want a basic website with as little effort as possible and flexibility and price isn’t a major concern, then SquareSpace would be a decent choice to get a quick web presence in place. With SquareSpace you can export some data but ultimately SquareSpace controls your data meaning the website is never really “yours.”

If you want more functionality, flexibility, and options to grow your site and keep costs down WordPress is considerably cheaper and will enable your site to grow as you need it without having to upgrade plans. With WordPress your data is completely yours and only you have access to it.

I may have a certainly level of bias as a WordPress developer but the TLDR; version is:

WordPress: Quite fast to setup, More cost effective, more flexible, full ownership

SquareSpace: Very fast to setup, More expensive, less functionality, no ownership

Looking to learn more about WordPress and how it can help your business? I’m a WordPress Consultant and would love to chat! Get in touch.

As cliché as it sounds the old adage “you buy cheap, you buy twice” carries some weight. This statement coming from a web designer/developer probably sounds even more clichéd, but let’s try to back this up with some evidence.

Good, Cheap and Fast would be the ultimate goal in development but good design and development typically can’t be all three.

The Good

Good design takes time. When I start a project, I first look at the current site and use some time for planning. Looking at the structure, functionality, what works on the current site and what doesn’t.

When not supplied with a brief of work, time is spent closely working with the client and ensuring all of the goals, functionality and integrations are in place before we start. Having a strong brief helps not only with costing and timelines but helps to create a strong foundation on which to build upon.

The Cheap

Cost is always a consideration, and whilst this is a huge factor in your web project doing it “on the cheap” will always end up costing you more in the long term.

There are sites such as ThemeForest where you can purchase a theme, make a few customisations, upload your logo and end up with a decent looking site and created on a budget. Many of these themes are less than £50.

The Fast

Getting a project over the line in the shortest time possible again is a factor but getting something over the line doesn’t mean cheap and it doesn’t mean good. An ill-planned project or project where cost influences the direction will likely end up with the site not being fit for purpose.

The solution?

Not a solution as such but a few good ideas to enable you to get the best work you can for your money and delivered in a reasonable time.

A brief

A solid brief will help the designer/developer with timing and cost, they will know exactly what the workload entails and there will be less time spent in the discovery period and having meetings to put together a schedule of work.

Inspiration

A moodboard or some examples of what you like aesthetically or examples of functionality, again will save time and portray your goals to the developer and having that visual representation of your needs is helpful.

Branding

If you have branding already then, a branding pack or branding guidelines will help form the palette and typography for the project. This will enable the design phase to move more promptly.

Communication

This is the key piece of advice. Occasionally developers talk “tech”, we try not to but sometimes slip into tech-mode and this can cause confusion for both parties. If you are unsure what the designer/developer means, then ask. It’s entirely our fault for slipping into tech talk and we occasionally need to be reminded to talk in a language everyone understands.

Setting clear goals, price and time scale is key too. If the web developer is not able to offer a fixed price, or offer a timescale, or agree to a particular deadline, the project can quickly spiral.

What to do next

It’s important to understand your own needs and work towards those. If you want a single page holding site then a £50 theme and minimal customisation might well be a good fit and stay within a set budget. If your site has more complex needs, this might not be the path for you.

Take some time to read up and create a brief with your thoughts and ideas and once you know the goals of the project the more understanding you’ll have on what direction to take.

Ultimately, it will be your website and you understand your business needs, this makes you the best person to create the initial brief, not a developer.