Do you own a restaurant, bistro, or café? Are you looking to expand your clientele? A website for your restaurant is the answer. Nowadays people search for restaurants on mobiles and tablets so getting online is crucial to any restaurant business. Serve your customers comfort and convenience. Keep reading to find out how you can promote your restaurant online fast and easy!

Most important information on the homepage

• Template and Image

Choose a template which matches the image of your restaurant, and use an attractive picture of your restaurant in the header. You can easily change the header by following this FAQ.

• Welcome Message

A welcome message gets attention from your customers, and you can mention what kind of services you offer. For example, you can say why your restaurant is special. Maybe you use only bio vegetables, or you get vegetables directly from the farm.

Not only using text but using images will grab customers’ attention. Add some attractive keywords too!

Easy web navigation

A nicely structured menu is a must. Customers have to find all information in a moment when they click the menu.

Register your restaurant’s domain with us

Get your own domain (without “webnode”) which provides a professional image, by registering easily at Webnode.com.

Your restaurant on social networks

Do you have a Facebook business page? Social networks are the easiest way to connect with your customers 24/7, and also to expand your customer base by communicating with them regularly. Link social media to your website easily by following this guide: Add a Facebook “Like Box”.

Avoid a negative image about your restaurant, so update it as much as you can. Created a new one? Share your site with us here and get more customers!

Whether you’re new to the world of online business, or you already have a developed and fully functional e-shop, following your competitors will help you optimize your online presence and get good results with your website. Don’t forget that your competitors may also be of help when comparing your results with theirs, as it will help you find your weaknesses and improve your offer. Analyzing your “rivals” is an important step in the developmental process of any online business strategy.

This article will describe what it takes to gain a complete picture of your competitors. If you meet all the points on this checklist and you analyze them properly, you’ll soon create your own plans for development and optimization.

Optimize Your E-shop for Search Engines

Your competitors already have very good positioning in search engines. So what are you waiting for? It’s important to remember that your customer base varies depending on your online visibility. If your webshop is not on the first pages of Google results, the chance of attracting new visitors greatly falls.

Check the most popular keywords

Finding keywords that other similar online shops are using is easy. On the web, there are several free tools that provide professional analysis. It’s worth trying ISpionage, Spyfu or KeywordEye which will help you find the keywords that led your competitors to success:

Search competitor keywords with Ispionage

Check the meta description 

The meta description of a website usually coincides with the introductory text that comes under each search result on Google. If you add this text to your site, you run the risk of showing phrases randomly chosen by robots that crawl the web. You can check the descriptions of the sites that interest you by entering the website, clicking the right mouse button and selecting “View page source” and then searching for the phrase meta name=”description”. The description will appear in the quotation marks.

Spying on your competitors’ websites can also help you find ideas for your call to action and the message they convey. Call to action phrases are usually short sentences containing an imperative that direct the visitor to a specific action, such as “Buy today”, “Find the perfect gift”, or “Turn your pet into a star.”

What is an Alexa ranking and how to use it to your advantage

Alexa is an independent service that monitors the generated traffic of websites on the Internet. All scanned pages are classified into a special ranking. The lower the ranking, the greater flow of visitors to the website. To check the Alexa ranking of your competitors, simply search for the website in Alexa, or install a plugin for Chrome or Firefox, depending on the browser of your choice.

Presentation and Price of the Product

Some sellers opt for competitive prices, others by the speed of delivery and ease of payment, while others emphasize the unique and special characteristics of the items for sale.

Check online price comparison sites

Since the aim of your online store is to sell products, it’s worth consulting competitive prices. Of the many price comparison services that are online, we would highlight Shopping.com, Google shopping and Buscapé. Don’t forget that you can also export your products to any online comparison site through Webnode.

A description of the products

One of the most important rules of marketing is to present the product in the most clear and striking way possible. A lot of online shoppers decide based on the visual appearance and product presentation. See how the competition does it: do they have only one, or several pictures of the products? What is included in the description? Do they have promotions or discounts?

Payment and delivery

To exceed your competitors and get better results, you should have everything simple and well-organized, up to the last detail. Put yourself in your customers’s shoes, someone who wants to shop for the first time in your store. If you’re not aware of payment or delivery methods that are available in an online store, the probability of incomplete purchases is very high. What are the payment methods that your competitors have chosen? Do you offer free delivery?

And finally: we live in a dynamic world where market conditions change daily. Keep your eye on your competitors every day, optimize your online shop regularly and increase your loyal, returning customer base.

1. In your Google Analytics account, click in the upper right corner on “Admin”.

2. Select the profile (website) for which you want to create a filter.

3. Click on “Filters” and “New filter”.

5. Name the new filter “Work” when visiting or editing your website in the office and select the option to exclude “traffic from the IP addresses”. You can find your IP address when you click on the address whatismyipaddress.com. Enter your IP address in the field that appears after you select the option to exclude IP address.

I recommend you create a filter for all the places where web editing or visit, such as a home, from friends, but also mobile. The procedure is the same. Once created, filters are also stored in your account and can be easily enabled on your other websites.

Was this quick tip helpful? Share it with your friends!

Are you interested in a specific feature of Google Analytics? Tell us what you’d like to know more about and we’ll share information about it in an upcoming article.

One of the cornerstones of successful website promotion is a good search engine ranking. Webnode is well-aware of this. That’s why we created a variety of tools to help Webnode sites rank in top positions in search. In the following article, you’ll learn about the 5 most useful features.

1. Page Properties

Search results show 3 basic pieces of information: website name, address and description. You can fill in all this data in your Properties page. Our article will tell you what to write there to achieve the greatest success.

2. Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions or FAQs are one of the easiest ways to naturally increase the number of important keywords on your site. Not only that, FAQ saves your time while showing a visitor that you know his problems and want to help him as soon as possible to resolve. Add a FAQ page to your website directly in your Webnode editor.

3. Text formatting

When writing an article, make sure you take advantage of our formatting editor. Search engines recognize a title as Headline 1, and Heading 2, 3, etc. as subtitles and credit them greater importance. The same works for images. Be sure to use keywords to get better results.

Not like that! Formatting headings are an advantage really only for headings, otherwise it will harm your results.

Search engines will know that this is not a title in the search results and you’ll rank lower.

4. Social buttons

Not long ago, the developers at Google realized that the number of “Likes” testifies to the quality of web content. It is not just about Facebook, of course, but also other important social networks like Twitter and Google+. The more people will “Like” your content and share links, the better your results will  be in browsers. Therefore, don’t forget to add a social button to your site. Webnode is automatically displayed on all products and articles. The rest is up to you!

5. Domain

The best strategy for a successful start-up of the site is getting your own domain name. If you have your own domain, search engines (and your visitors) will take your business seriously.

How long will it take you to reach the top positions in search engines? Share your experience with your newer colleagues.

The world is ruled by advertising. It’s about time you start using it too. Insert banners in your website and start earning money. In our series “All About Banners” we will gradually reveal the secrets of the huge world of online advertising and how to become rich by applying them. Learn how to estimate the price of a banner. Read on!

Cost Per 1000 Impressions

The CPT meter is an important concept (cost per thousand), alternately CPM (cost per mille), which is the price you set for a thousand displays of the ad. Let’s assume that you put your banner on every page, right below the header. When the visitor enters any of the pages they will immediately see the advertisement. With CPT equaling 4$ and 10.000 displays per month you will earn 40$ monthly.

If you want to check the total number of monthly views of your pages, go to your statistics and check the column “Pages” .

How to Calculate the CPT?

There is no table that can help you determine the price, but there are three different indicators that will help you with the estimation:

1) How much the competition charges for an ad

Browse through websites with the same or similar topic as you, and see their advertising rates. Follow their example. But be careful! If you are new to this and you want to be competitive, you need to offer better terms than your competitors!

2) Value of an ad for a customer

Think about how many customers the advertisement could bring, how profitable it could be, and what is the income of that for the ad owner. Let’s say you have an ad for a music festival on your blog. Tickets for this festival cost $40. Your website has 30,000 impressions (displays of the webpage with the banner) per month. You have to count with the fact that no more than 0,1% of all the visitors will click on your ad, and only 10% of them will probably buy the ticket. So, thanks to you, the festival will get 3 sold tickets. Therefore, you cannot expect more than $120 from the festival.

Of course, not all banners are relevant to your website. For example, a biking shop’s ad fits more in a blog about cycling than in a blog about cars. Think twice before you decide to contact a company.

3) Value of an ad for me

Naturally you won’t do something that will not pay off for you. On the other hand, you cannot expect enormous income in the very beginning. When you set the price too high, no one will give you the banner. Therefore, don’t be afraid to lower the price a little bit. When your website will become more popular, you can raise the price of a banner.

In the beginning, remember to do proper research and try everything out. Get to know your competitors, potential customers, but also your own website. If you don’t have any experience with banners, create your first ad with Google AdSense. With the help of Google Analytics you will be able to see your visitors’ behavior. Make a small experiment and try different types of banners on your website. Which ads are clicked on most often?

In the next chapter we will show you the types of banners and the types of ads that should be avoided. Stay tuned!

Try to guess: How much do you think you could get, if you put a banner on your website right now?

The best ingredients to creating a breath-taking website: dedication, devotion, and a grand goal. Marcelo Rafael Alvarello has created his own recipe with la-cigarra.com. It’s a website developed to give greater visibility to news and people who don’t have the publicity they need. This article will delve into the key reasons why the site became our April, 2013 ”Web of the month”.

The Webnode team has chosen La Cigarra for the professional design Marcelo has created for the website, because it adapts and gives a unique style to every possibility offered by our tool for their own communication needs. The images, text and the arrangement of the information are all well displayed. The layout, in blocks of different sizes, is reminiscent of publishing formats used on social networks like Pinterest or Tumblr, making it very modern. In addition, each block has a button “+ info” which is an efficient and attractive call to action to continue reading.

The activities of the webmaster are focused on culture. I am the Cultural and Social Manager of People with Disabilities. I am dedicated to conducting social integration projects for the most vulnerable: Adapted museums, Virtual Itinerary and Awareness Museums protected by Archaeological Cultural Heritage. La Cigarra was the result of the experience I gained when viewing the pages of Cultural Affairs. I realized that there were many people and news that did not appear publicly and so I felt the desire to make visible those news and people that did not get the needed publicity. Many “Cultural Heroes” are anonymous. Hence my decision to publish all these experiences on a website.

Marcelo chose Webnode because, with his words, it gives me the chance to generate complete multimedia content without any knowledge of web programming. The platform is simple and intuitive, very easy to use, with comprehensive tools and the latest technology to have colorful templates.

We are pleased to help you Marcelo, with your website La Cigarra, in order to give greater publicity to the stories of “Cultural Heroes” that many times, mass media tend to leave aside. For this, and for the visual quality of your page, we wish you much success.

If you are proud of your website and you want to share it with us and the Webnode community, send us an email with your website address to web-of-the-month@webnode.com.

The ideal time of loading the page of a website is around 1 second. Why is this the dream of every webmaster? Because the longer your page loading time, the more visitors your website will lose. Let’s go through the points that will help make your website faster even if you’re not a professional webmaster!

To start optimizing the speed of your website, first you have to find out if your website actually needs it. In one of our previous articles, we mentioned how to test the speed of your website. Let’s see how it works!

• One of the tools described was Pingdom, one of the most popular worldwide.

• Check the average page loading time in Google Analytics. Go to “Content” – “Website speed”. Here you’ll see how long it actually takes your pages to load for your visitors.

How can they be different? Google Analytics shows data in real time because it takes into consideration the country/region/provider/etc. where the website was loaded from. In the detailed information, you can find out if a long loading time is an issue of a specific country or browser, and not really your webpage.

How to fix your page loading time metrics?

The most common reasons of a slow website are actually quite easy to correct:

1. Select images wisely

Images are a very important element of a website, but high-resolution images take ages to load. Apart from choosing a smaller resolution for your images, there’re 2 more things you should keep in mind:

• Format – wrong format of an image can make it heavier than it should be. Choose the most suitable based on your purposes:
  GIF – with few colors (simple image, logo)
  JPEG – many colors and details (photos)
  PNG – high quality images (using layers, transparency etc.)

• Resizing – you can always resize the image in image properties or with coding. But wait! This is an extra step for the website code. Choose to resize pictures manually in programs like Photoshop or Paint.net (it’s free), or even use online services like PunyPNG and others.

2. Don’t overuse widgets

Select only those you really need, meaning the ones your website would lose its functionality without. If you found the widget or plugin that you’d benefit from, try to search for its alternatives: for example both Gravatar and Disqus provide great customizable comments widgets, but Gravatar still loads slightly slower.

3. Avoid flash files

They can be both heavy and annoying. Think twice if you need it or maybe you’d benefit more from a slideshow instead of a flash file.

4. Clear the homepage

Depending on your type of business or personal website, sometimes you just can’t avoid using “heavy” elements there – for example a photography website where you want to show off your best photo sessions. Try to keep at least your homepage simple – put just a few of your best works and guide visitors to pages where they’d find your full portfolio.

As you can see, anyone can fix these mistakes and make a website faster with a simple review of website elements. Do you want to improve your web even more? Check our “Develop your website“ section to find many tips and tricks!

How fast is YOUR website? Share with us!

You have a perfect website, but nobody talks about it? You write great articles, but nobody “likes” them? You want to be known and your posts to be popular, but they are not being shared in social networks? Sometimes, all people need is a small “push”. We have the perfect tool to help you out: meet Wibiya by Conduit. 

Wibiya by Conduit allows you to add a bar with special social buttons to your website. Your readers will be able to see it in the bottom of the screen, no matter what part of the webpage they will be on. The advantages of this bar is its size, pleasant colours and interesting design. Your visitor will definitely notice it, but will not be disturbed by its appearance. Moreover, it will push the readers to share your website with their friends. Take the advantage of the joy of your readers!

How to install Wibiya

1) Go to Wibiya by Conduit website and create an account. Enter your website address, choose type of your website, add e-mail address and choose the password. Lastly, click on “Get the Installation Code”.

2) The system will generate a code that you need to insert into your CSS template before the </body> tag. (Do not forget to save the header. After you apply the template again, insert the image header that you previously had there.)

Fantastic! The social networks bar Wibiya is added to your website.

Do you know all the social networks from the picture above?

Video blogging, or so-called – vlogging, has become a more and more popular way of communicating with users, visitors or clients. Read our article to learn how to start your own VLOG!

A vlog is a collection of videos you make by yourself, or find online, which you post on your website. It’s basically like blogging but in the form of movies.

Why should I vlog?

Video blogging has many positive aspects. Imagine that you run a business and you want to connect with your customers – creating videos is the best way. It will show your human side and express feelings of the company. Videos have the power of storytelling that written posts can be missing. Furthermore, you can promote yourself and your products if for some reason you cannot show up on industry meetings or trade fairs.

Visitors of vlogs spend twice more time checking video blogs than they would in the regular blogs. Another great aspect of having videos on your website is that YouTube is the second largest search engine. So video blogs not only help with showing your human side, but also give you a bigger chance to be found.

What to vlog about?

Content is the most important part of your video blog. When making a video ask yourself: is it important? Is it interesting to my viewers? Does it fit with the other articles and the overall theme? If you answer YES, then start shooting.

Making a video is different than writing posts – it’s very easy to get off topic. Stay focused on your aim of the video. Before shooting the video, write down the most important points and check if you talked about them. The moment you start rambling – stop! The audience cannot watch videos longer than 3-5 minutes anyways. Use YouTube’s keywords tool to check what people are actually looking for and what videos are they interested in.

Check out this example from the Vlogbrothers:

How to vlog?

TECHNICAL ASPECTS: To make a video you can either use a professional camera, a camera from your computer or even a smartphone. You can ask someone else to make the video of you or invest a bit of money into a tripod, so that your movies don’t make your audience dizzy. Editing movies doesn’t need to be very expensive either. Try using Camtasia, the great tool for video editing. In the end, go for some presentations makers, such as  Powtoon, in order to have a professional effect. Remember to have a well-adjusted microphone, proper lighting and… be brave!

Create a personal website with Webnode and upload your videos on YouTube. You don’t know how to add videos to your website? Read our article!

DOMAIN NAME: Find a topic or a main subject for your video blog. Therefore, it will not only be easier for visitors to find your vlog, but also will be easier for you to come up with the name of the domain and find a template that fits with the theme. Learn how to decide on a proper domain name.

What to remember?

• Create a dialogue with the “audience”, make them feel like you had an actual conversation;
• Build curiosity, set goals for your videos which you will reveal in the end;
• Entertain, tell stories, show the human side, transfer emotions;
• Know your audience – wear a proper outfit, use accurate language, choose interesting topics;
• ENJOY!

Give it a try yourself! Do a few takes to compare which is better, to see how you behave in front of the camera and how to improve your body language. In the end, keep in mind that your aim is to show the human side of the company, so make it realistic. For the future, track the improvements you make and see how you are getting better and better.

Webnode offers you many templates, each of them has several variations. But YOU can give them many different faces. All you need is an idea! We present you four websites that use template called “Photolia”. Read more to see how diversified they can get.

Photographer Lucie Blahutová used a one-column design in her website. She doesn’t need more than that. On her pages you will find minimalism in texts with emphasis put on beautiful photographies. For the better effect she uses our sliding gallery to display pictures.

AV Fotostudio welcomes their visitors with 4 horizontal photos that serve as links to particular subpages. It works better than regular menu – the pictures grab visitors’ attention and they click on them out of curiosity. Do you want to have something similar on your website? Into the content box with text insert four images, side by side, and add links to each picture. And… this is it!

Italian portal Wetravel4you went even further.  Owners of this website advise tourists how to travel safely, what are the perfect destinations and what to do once you get there. Their recipe for success? Stunning pictures and great logo!

Our last example is a personal blog about online marketing. Its owner wanted to leave the header empty. Instead, she inserted a text bloc and put a series of small pictures inside. She arranged them the way she wished and created a beautiful mosaic.

In similar ways you can improve each and every Webnode template. Getting your visitors’ attention is the biggest aim. With a beautiful and unusual design you will have higher chances that the visitors will come more often and will become your readers. Give it a try and you will see that it pays off!

Which of the examples did you like the most?