The effectiveness of these calls to action will determine how successful your website is at converting visitors, improving how effective they are will directly affect the success of your website.

What is ‘call to action’ in digital marketing?

In digital marketing CTA’s get a lot of focus, it’s because of how important they are and the impact they can have. A lot of digital marketing work involves tweaking the design and copy of these CTA’s monitoring the statistics and making changes based on these statistics to improve them.

CTA’s need to stand out to the user, grab their attention and let them know where to look next. You can do this by tweaking the design, changes to the size and colour of the element can have a massive impact on how visible the element is on the page.

Call to action colour

For an example of colour, look at: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/call-to-action-examples (conveniently with some call to action examples on!) they have a clear button in the top right with ‘Get Hubspot free’. As they have a clean website design, they have been able to use their brand colour (orange) to draw attention to the CTA. They take it a step further by introducing additional buttons in the orange as you scroll down the page. This tactic helps to reinforce to the visitor that orange equals action.

If your website has already used its brand colours throughout the design, you can still implement the same strategy by selecting an additional complementary colour. Using ‘colour theory’ https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips/the-7-step-guide-to-understanding-color-theory/ you can find a set of secondary colours that pair well with your existing brand.

Call to action Size

The size of the CTA element also affects its visibility. You can see examples of this all over the internet when they use large pop-up banners to fill the screen. The element does not always have to be a pop-up, simply making it larger than surrounding elements will draw attention to it.

It’s important with the size not to go overboard with it however, as you can alienate the visitor if you impede their task. Therefore pop-ups should be used with care!

Call to action position

Where you put the call to action will also have an impact, traditionally people read webpages left to right and top to bottom or in an ‘F’ pattern as they skim the content (https://cxl.com/blog/10-useful-findings-about-how-people-view-websites/ ). This means that important bits of information need to be at the top left, this is why the logo is traditionally placed here & the navigation tends to follow.

We should clearly position the primary CTA at the top of the website, with secondary links placed sparingly throughout.

How many calls to action per page?

The more elements you have on the page the less importance each of these has, this means the more CTA’s you place the less likely they are to grab the users’ attention. You can tackle this by reviewing which ones are really important and removing those that only distract. It’s not to say you can only have one, but it should be perfectly clear which is the main one.

You can include secondary CTA’s and avoid them competing with the primary one by placing them at the bottom of articles or towards the bottom right of the page, as this is where visitors focus will end up. These additional CTA’s could also be repeats of the main one to help reinforce it, but could also be directions into other areas. For example, if you’re on a product page and the current product is not exactly what you want? Here is a CTA to another related product that could be!

The danger with this is you may end up distracting visitors who would have otherwise acted on the CTA on the current page. This is where testing and reviewing the statistics will help you fine tune the balance between the two.

I would suggest limiting each page to one clear and possibly two secondary depending on the content.

Call to action text

The copy/text of the call to action will also have a large impact, it’s important to be direct and to the point clearly showing what you expect the visitors to do. Short and sweet copy like ‘Buy Now’, ‘Click Here’ or ‘Download Now’ stand out to users and direct them onto the next step.

It’s important however that the rest of the page content gives them context, you need to build up the narrative to visitors so they know what it is they are buying etc.

This is another area that should be reviewed with testing and changes made to see the impact, fine tuning the CTA’s will help get better results.

CTA and Landing Pages

You will have CTA’s throughout your website, but Landing Pages push a single aim and may have their own CTA’s in place. Your primary sites CTA may be ‘contact us’ for example, encouraging visitors throughout their visit to your website to make contact, but your landing page on your new product/service may be ‘buy now’ as your focus has shifted to be about converting visitors to customers for this specific product.

You can highlight this shift in focus by how the CTA’s are presented, you could make the landing page CTA larger and place it more prominently on the page, for example. The other tactic some websites use is to remove the site wide CTA and sometimes remove other distractions such as the navigation! They aim this tactic at focusing the visitor solely on the landing page content and limit the ways off of the page. A good example of this in action is Amazon, once you start the ‘check out’ process you lose access to the main navigation!

This will help visitors focus down on what they are supposed to be doing, completing the checkout process, but will also limit to options to explore the rest of the site. Amazon has obviously tested this process and concluded that the percentage of users who now successfully complete the checkout process instead of getting distracted outweighs the lost sales form people who may have spotted something else to add to their basket.

Testing Calls to action

We all make assumptions, its part of daily life, but with CTAs it’s important that we test these assumptions because they can have a big impact on how successful they are at converting visitors. For example, if the action you want users to take is to sign up to your newsletter, you could have ‘Newsletter sign up here’ as your button. But how do you know this is more effective than ‘Subscribe’ or ‘Sign up’? – without testing you won’t!

You can skip testing every eventuality by being clever with your CTA’s in the first place. ‘Newsletter sign up here’ is a poor choice as its long and not very direct, ‘Subscribe’ or ‘Sign up’ are much snappier and give visitors more of a direct action to take. But which is best, and how do you test it?

This is where you need to look at your goals and website statistics, in this case the goal is clear – we want more people to sign up! But how to we test this? With A|B testing, this is the process of putting one option up, monitoring the results and then repeating it for the second option. With both options being tested, you will then look at the results and say option A or B was better and have the figures to back it up!

Sometimes the results could show your original CTA was better! But at least now you know. Reviewing your CTA and making these tweaks to copy, design or even the rest of the pages content, will help you incrementally improve it. Overtime these will add up and the CTA you have at the end of the process will be much more effective than the one you started with!

This is time consuming, but lessons learnt from one can be rolled out to others. If you learn that on your website a red CTA attracts more attention, you know to start with this with your next CTA! We can take some of these lessons over to other sites, but it’s important to review them as what works on one site may not work on others.

What does HTTPS mean?

HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, but that’s not very helpful, is it? Let’s break it down.

HTTP has been the standard way of transferring web pages from the server side to the clients for many years. It’s the way they transfer the files from one device to the other, it’s why you see at the start of a website address in your browser http:// before the website address.

These requests and the servers’ responses are sent as ‘plain text’ meaning that they are not secure. This means that it’s easy for hackers to eves drop into the communication and monitor what’s going on.

For day-to-day browsing you may think so what, but it becomes a large issue when you start thinking about logging into websites, banking details and other online activities that need to be protected.

This is where HTTPS comes in, essentially this is the same as HTTP but this time the connection is encrypted. This prevents hackers from eavesdropping in on the connection keeping your activity secure.

When is HTTPS used?

Go back a few years and the advice was that HTTPS should be used when there is sensitive information being sent. This meant logins, ecommerce, online banking and similar.

It was thought there was no benefit to encrypting the connections for basic web browsing, such as looking at the news or looking at cat photos! The problem is this information can be collated over time to build up a picture of the person.

This picture can assist hackers in other areas, they will get to know your hobbies, favourite websites and even who you talk to online!

Why is HTTPS important to me?

To tackle the insecure nature of HTTP, Google announced they would start using HTTPS as a ranking factor. This means that websites without HTTPS installed will rank lower than websites with it. It was Googles way of nudging the web to use HTTPS as standard and was very effective, after all google ranking is key to every website.

Recently they have taken it a step further by marking HTTP website as ‘insecure’ in their very popular chrome browser. This gives visitors to the website a poor impression of the site and means they are likely to go elsewhere.

So what is an SSL Certificate?

SSL certificates is how HTTPS works, essentially they are needed to enable to encryption of the data transfer between the server and the client. SSL certificates are issued by an authorised third party, they check the details of the website and create an ecryption key.

The certificate is then installed on the web server, enabling the use of HTTPS.

When the visitor loads the website, their browser will download the certificate and check its validity with the authorised third party before using it to create a secure connection.

These certificates need to be renewed this is done annually to meet with the suggested security advise.

I have my certificate, now what?

Once you have a certificate, you need to update your website so that it can use HTTPS. This means reviewing your website and its links to change them from HTTP to HTTPS.

You need to do this for all of your resources but also any you may load from third parties because for the page to be secure everything needs to use HTTPS.

Depending on your website, this process can be a quick and easy job or a lot more fundamental. Talk to your developer to see and make a game plan in place to update your website.

The good news is that once this work is done you won’t need to do it again each time the certificate is renewed.

What are website hosting services?

To answer this, we first need to look at how a webpage makes its way to you when browsing the web. This process starts with your device wanting to locate a page, this can be from typing in the website address (also known as the URL) or from you clicking on a link – for example from a Google search results page.

When you make this request, your device sends a request out onto the internet looking for your website. It does this via your internet provider and the Domain Name System (DNS), this will essentially convert your requested website address from the human-readable format “google.co.uk” into an IP address “8.8.8.8”. Once your device has this IP address, it can send a request directly to the server set up on the other end to handle requests. This server will then send the files that make up the webpage to your device for it to display, these files will include HTML, CSS, images.

Website hosting is the service that maintains the server set up to handle these requests for your website, its most likely a server in a large data center that’s created specifically to host websites. The different types of hosting vary in their setup, but they all come down to a computer constantly connected to the internet ready to send out the files that make up your website.

Your website host will charge you for the ‘rent’ of the server space with this money going towards building the servers, maintaining them and their software but also to cover other things like power use and other features like email services and DNS management.

Why website hosting is important

Website hosting is really important to the success and health of your website, it’s hard sometimes to justify something intangible, but hosting is like many things – “you get what you pay for”. The best website hosting will give your website a strong, reliable home. This will enable it to serve your visitors quickly and effectively, something that has a direct impact on your website’s ranking in search engines and with your visitors themselves.

Google: “Speed is now used as a ranking factor” https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speed

53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t load within three seconds https://www.marketingdive.com/news/google-53-of-mobile-users-abandon-sites-that-take-over-3-seconds-to-load/426070/

Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time https://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/research-site-speed-hurting-everyones-revenue.htm

These show why hosting is important in terms of speed, but reliability is also key. If your website hosting is not up to scratch, it will affect your uptime and could leave users unable to access your website. If this happens often enough, Google will notice and penalise you in the search results.

How much does hosting cost?

The cost of website hosting varies depending on the features and the performance, its important to get the right fit for your website so you are getting the performance you need without paying for something thats overpowered. Hosting with a bit of breathing room for a growing website is always a good idea, as is a service that allows upgrading to more powerful hosting if required.

Free hosting providers

There are some services that offer free hosting, these tend to be very limited or tied into other services, some require the use of specific domains or TLD’s (the bit on the end such as .co.uk). These are not really suitable for anything more than simple single page hobby ‘holding sites’. I would strongly suggest any type of serious website or business site look for something more suitable.

Shared hosting services

This is the most basic level of hosting I would suggest. They come in many shapes and forms, but the thing they all have in common is that the resources the company has are shared between all the websites they host. Putting it simply a single server may be shared by thousands of other websites.

The portative affects of this approach is the cost, the upkeep and other costs are distributed out over the large number of sites. The negatives are the performance is also shared, meaning you will only get a small portion of the power on offer, this may be sufficient but worth keeping in mind for larger/more popular sites.

They also restricted this type of hosting in what you can instal, the service provider will set up a standard environment and it’s the same for all users. There may be limits to what software/services you can install.

Virtual private servers (VPS)

The next step up is a VPS, these give you a virtual server to set up as you require. They typically give you full control over it, meaning you can install any services/software you want but at the cost of you needing to take responsibility of the management (updates, backups etc).

They are ‘virtual’ because the hosting provider will create them using specialist software, this allows them to host multiple virtual servers on a single physical server again helping to keep the costs under control. Each server in this situation will host fewer websites than the shared hosting option and typically will have a portion of the server sectioned off. For example, if the server has 12 processing cores, they may set it up to host 12 VPS servers, each with a single core reserved.

Dedicated server

Like VPS hosting this gives you full control over the services and software installed on the server, this time however you are not sharing any of the resources on the server with anyone else. This gives you a massive amount of performance but comes at a cost as you are not sharing the cost with other people & you being responsible for updates and maintenance to the software/services.

Cloud hosting

While this is more a way for providers to arrange their hosting platform, it can be a very useful service as it combines the benefits of the other types while limiting the additional costs. Cloud hosting is when a group of servers are combined into a hosting platform, websites are then hosted on packages set up on this platform.

This set up lets websites benefit from the resources of the whole cluster of servers, so, for example, if one server has a hardware failure the others can take up the slack and keep all the websites live while the server is fixed.

Some set ups will include servers from around the world in their platform, this means it will serve users from around the world from their closest server helping with the speed and performance. This is similar to how content delivery networks (CDN’s) work and can give your website a real boost.

The last key point to this type of hosting is the ability for it to scale up and down as required, it means you can start off with a base package and as you need it you can scale up the resources without needing to move servers.

Which website hosting service is best

This really depends on your website and what features it needs, you need to look at the number of visitors you are expecting and what they will be doing. The more visitors you have, or the more complex activities your visitors are doing, the more performance you will need. If you already have hosting in place, it will give you a good starting point when looking, think about how your current website is doing and if it’s slow in places or at peak times look at the next step up.

For new websites this is harder to judge, my suggestion would be to look for a platform that will let you grow, starting off with shared hosting or better yet cloud hosting will give you a cost effective starting point to give your website a good start. You can then evaluate and increase hosting as your site grows.

If you’re in any doubt, talk to your developer, or look at the recommended specifications for the software your website running on to help guide you.

First posted: 6/11/19
Updated: 14/4/21

To understand what a domain name is and why they are important we need to look at how the world wide web works, a simple website comprises a set of files (text, images, sound etc) that are stored on a web server which is a computer connected to the internet with the specific job of hosting websites. Each web server has a specific address called an IP address, these are unique to each server on the internet and let users connect to a specific web server.

These IP addresses are like post codes each one is a way of referring to a unique web server on the internet, take this website for example the IP address of google.co.uk is 74.125.224.151 if you type this IP address into your browser it will load the website (try it and see). The problem with IP addresses is they are not very user friendly, easy to remember, or descriptive of the content that’s on the website. The solution to this problem is domain names. A domain name is a user friendly way of referring to the web servers IP address by giving it a name.

When a user types in a domain name it will look up the IP address of the web server so that the user can connect to the website, there are some limitations to the content of domain names but they are allot more user friendly than IP addresses.

How do you register a domain name?

We know now that the domain name is a user friendly way to locate website files online, but how do you get one? And once you have it, can you keep it?

Domain names are so crucial to the smooth running of the web that there are several layers of protection in place to keep it secure. Part of this is that each TLD (Top-Level Domain), also known as domain extension, such as .com or .co.uk has a single body that looks after the registration. For the .uk domain names, this body is Nominet.uk, they look after the system for all of the domain names that end with .uk. This includes the most popular .co.uk but also .gov.uk, sch.uk and the lesser known net.uk, Nominet ensures they only register each domain name to a single person at a time and maintains the system that lets the world wide web know where to look for settings for all of the .uk domains.

So when registering a domain name, you just contact Nominet? Not exactly, you need to go via a domain name registrar, these are companies who specialise in helping consumers register and manage domain names. They act on your behalf to register the domains and give you a host of management options that let you connect the domain up to other services such as emails and websites. Many of these also offer these other services, helping to keep everything under one roof. Shop around because like many other services prices for these vary. https://www.20i.com/ and https://www.123-reg.co.uk/ are examples of popular UK domain registrars.

It’s important to note that these domain registrars will also let you register other domain names, for example ‘.com’ domains helping again to keep things in one place.

The other option for domain names is to have a 3rd party register them on your behalf, this lets you hand over the job to someone who can deal with it and the maintenance of the domain for you. The classic example here is your web developer or creative agency who will build your website will register it for you, alternatively your email or your IT support provider may also offer this as a service.

How to select a domain name

Now we know what a URL is next we will look at how to chose one, domain names should be easy to read and remember so it’s best to go with something short and recognizable such as your name (eg. Alex-Wells.co.uk) or something that describes who you are what you do or your product (eg. AirportTaxis.com or BirthdayCards.co.uk)

It will Benefit your SEO strategy if you choose a domain name with some keywords in it as google will give you points for it, for example the domain name usedcars.com will get extra points for the search term ‘used cars’ but it’s a balancing act stuffing lots of words into your domain name will make it hard to read & understand and google will detect you are trying to stuff lots of keywords into your site and you will lose any SEO points.

Once you have chosen the domain name you want, you will need to select an extension, this is the bit at the end for example the .com or the .co.uk

Which one you choose is up to you (check out the possibilities and their intended uses here) but if you are a UK company a .co.uk would be best, followed by a .com as these are the two that people are used to seeing and using. If they are already taken you could opt for having a .net but failing that I would suggest thinking of something new.

There are several websites that will let you search for domain names and register them for you, I use www.123-reg.co.uk to register domains.

If both the .com and the .co.uk domains are available, I would suggest registering both to ensure no one else can.

How to keep domains safe?

When you register a domain name, you pay an annual fee to secure it – some companies offer the option to pay this fee up front for several years. This could, for example, be 10 years, others renew this annually. It’s important that you check this and keep track of it because if you miss this renewal your domain name registration will expire and your domain name will be up for grabs!

I strongly suggest setting it to an annual renewal and setting it to auto renew (this is normally the default, but check!). This will mean that unless you turn it off, the domain name will auto renew each year. It also means that you will likely get an invoice/email notifications about this each year – this serves as a friendly reminder where your domain name is!

It’s very easy to forget who you registered it with 10 years down the line if you don’t let anymore emails etc! – I have seen it a few times.

Make sure your payment details and contact details are up to date so if your provider sends you notifications about your domain, you will get them and be able to resolve any issues.

It’s also really important you keep your login details safe and secure!

First posted: 1/11/19
Updated: 5/4/21

This first impression is vital because it can be the difference between someone staying on your website or simply pressing back and looking at the next website on the list. This will affect the conversion rate and the profitability / effectiveness of the website. Turning this on its head a website that makes a good first impression will increase the likelihood of keeping the visitors attention and making a sale, it also goes a long way to attracting repeat business and recommendations from your visitors which can be a very lucrative revenue stream.

Now we know how important it is to make a good first impression lets look at some of the key areas that affect this

Pop ups / Auto Sound

Filling your users screen full of intrusive pop ups is one of the fastest ways to make a poor impression, its the same as getting a bunch of junk mail through the post – people don’t read them and hate getting it the difference between getting this junk in the mail and on the internet is we cant to anything about it in the post but can online by not visiting your website again! Its just rude and the benefits are rarely worth irritating your visitor.

The only thing worse than pop ups is automatically playing sound – well maybe pop ups that automatically play sound but that’s just asking for trouble! Assuming you can play sounds automatically and without the users permission is not a popular move, the first thing people will do is press back leaving your site and going onto a competitor’s site.

The solutions to this are easy, to start with don’t use pop-ups unless you absolutely have to and then have them appear in the same window as the website and not in a location that stops the visitor from seeing your logo, navigation or content areas. With audio and video do not have them automatically playing, draw users’ attention to them and give them controls for starting and stopping the media. A popular method is to have a video that auto plays but is on mute and will only play sound when the user instructs the website to.

Website speed

Website speed has a massive impact on the impression people get from a website, a slow website will mean people will have to wait and that’s never a good thing for a website – it will discourage people from exploring the rest of your website including your product and information pages!

A slow website will also send people back to the search result so they can try another result to get the information they are after without having to wait for the page to finish loading.

There are several things that will affect the websites speed from the server it’s hosted on (learn more about types of website hosting here) to how it has built, but there are some basic tips that all websites can use to help increase the speed of the site:

• Compress images before uploading them (more on compressing images for use on the web)
• Combine external resources into a single file – CSS, JavaScript, etc
• Use external CSS style sheets to remove duplicated content
• Use a content delivery network
• Host video files with services such as YouTube
• Compress / minimise website code
• Update CMS (what is a CMS?)

 Advertisements

Adverts on your website can say allot about you and can really discourage some users from staying on your website – some points cross over to those already mentioned for example adverts with sound or pop-ups are a no no but these adverts also add to the loading time of your site so careful thought is needed to implement adverts successfully on your website. Overly intrusive adverts can also put people off your website – for example full page adverts that users need to press a button to ‘continue to content’ will simply impede a good user experience and send people away from your website – these are even worse when you are forced to wait for a timer to run down before you can continue.

Adverts in the middle of the content can also take away from the user experience as your users are busy reading your content and do not want to have to skip advertisements – if you really must use adverts keep them above or below the content or even better to the sidebar on the right and as unobtrusive as possible.

It is also worth reviewing how effective the adverts are – especially those generated by automated advertising networks because the money they bring in might not be worth the poor user experience, you may be better off removing them or handling your advertisements manually and getting relevant suppliers that link in with your websites content.

Poor / hidden navigation

Navigation is one of the most important areas of your website design, you need to ensure its easy to find and use or you will end up with users who either cant or do not want to explore the rest of your website and will not go any further then the first page!

Good navigation should go across the top of the website near the top of the page or down the right-hand side – this is because people are used to looking here for website navigation, so expect it to be there. Your navigation should also use relevant and descriptive words to explain what each link does to enable visitors to find what they are looking for quickly and easily – splitting large sections of the website up by using drop down menus is a good idea but make sure they are easy to use.

Alternative navigation features such as ‘fat footers’ or secondary menus in the side bar are also a good idea to help people find other sections of your site after they have finished looking at the current page, another option would be to add a ‘you may also like’ section to the bottom of each post directing users to posts on similar topics that they may be interested in.

Your website is hosted online, so it’s easy to skip it when assessing your business from a digital point of view, but it’s vital you include your website in any backup strategy because it is still just as much at risk as your files on your device, more so in some cases.

It’s not just the cost of a new website we are trying to avoid, but the reputation damage downtime could involve, and the time spent on content creation (images and copy)!  

Why should we backup?

There are several threats to your website that backing up can help with. These vary from familiar issues to website specific ones that you may not have considered, but each can have devastating impacts on your site if not addressed. 

Looking at more familiar issues first:

Hardware failure

This is when the physical hardware itself fails, it could be a hard drive which stores our important data on or the whole device, in our everyday life this would include physical damage from dropping the device for example, to old age with the device failing from everyday wear and tear. With your website sitting on a web server, physical damage from it being dropped is much less likely but hardware failure is still a real issue, everyday wear and tear for example with the server on and running 24/7 is more of a danger. You then have power surges and other threats that could damage the hardware.

Data centres put measures in place to help mitigate these issues, with redundant hardware and systems in place, but it’s important to ensure your important data is safe.

Software issues

Again looking at the webserver and its software, it could be compared to your device and its own operating system, how many times has an update caused issues? The good old Windows Update just before an important meeting or a setting change taken the internet offline? While the issues affecting web servers are different, there is still a real threat from software issues to your website.

Accidental data loss

How many times have you deleted something, accidentally or intentionally, only to realise you still needed it? This is a real threat to your website, especially when it grows in size and when using a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress. WordPress tackles this with post/page revisions, but what about media files? Or if the system has cleared out and has removed your revisions? 

Some website specific issues:

Hacking

Your website is up and available to the world 24×7, this includes your customers but also more malicious people who will attempt to crack into your site, the reasons vary massively, from the more mundane defacing the site, to stealing data on customers. Once the site gets compromised setting things right can be a big undertaking, even more so without a known safe backup available.

Hosting provider going offline

No website host can claim 100% uptime, they stick to 99% figure to cover themselves for that unseen issue that takes services offline, the host then puts measures in place to protect against that issue but what about the next one? In the past we have seen hosts with a good track record of reliability go offline for days because of an unseen problem, having a recent backup of your files will make moving to a new supplier easier.

WordPress updates

From a security point of view keeping your website updated with new security patches is vital, it can however sometimes trigger issues with the site that may require rolling back to the old version which would require a backup of the site before the update! Find out more about the importance and risks of WordPress updates here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/just-how-important-wordpress-updates-alex-wells/

Developer issues

We all try to build up good business relationships, but sometimes this is outside of our control. I have seen developers go dark on clients leaving them without full access to websites or hosting accounts; in some situations, this resulted in needing to construct a whole new website! A backup under the clients’ control would make restoring the site in this situation significantly easier.

What to backup

Now we know why backing up is a good idea the next question is how to back up, I am looking specifically at WordPress websites but some points will apply to all sites – it’s important either way to check with your developer first to make sure the best solution for your site is put into place.

Traditional websites, think non CMS static sites, would only comprise files – this meant that you could backup the website by logging into the FTP/hosting account and download the files directly. For a WordPress website and others that use a database, it’s vitally important that the backup also includes the database itself. At a basic level, WordPress stores the media files and the website theme as files, but it stores everything else in the database, think of pages, posts, menus and settings! The database is the very heart of your site, but without both parts, your backup will not be complete.

The take away is: it’s important to backup the whole site, files and database, to make sure your backup is complete.

How to backup

The best tool for this really depends on your website, its size features and your hosting package, discussing it with your developer will help to identify a solution that fits your needs. At a basic level logging into the FTP account and downloading all the files and taking a copy of the live database via your control panel will give you a fairly flexible and portable backup. 

Some hosting solutions include website backups as part of the service, these can be a simple button press and the host will automatically zip up the website files alongside the database in a nice easy-to-use format or it could be an automated service that backups the website at set intervals, enabling you to restore the site should you need to.

With WordPress, there are a range of plugins that will help with this task, I have had a lot of success using Backup buddy, it will let you set schedules for your backups so you can run them regularly without having to give it your own input, you can also set it to send the files ‘offsite’ to a 3rd party such as Dropbox giving you access to your backups should your host have issues. These tools will also let you run backups of the whole site every so often but the database more frequently, this is useful because a whole site backup can take time and produce large backups whereas a database backup tends to run much faster and result in a smaller file size.

You might, for example, set the whole site to backup once a month, and the database to run once per week or even daily depending on the popularity of your site and the frequency of updates.

How often to backup

This question depends on how often the website gets updated and how important these updates are protected, for a simple information-only site that gets updated once in a blue moon you may only backup the site when you make changes, for others that have daily updates added backing-up up the database daily is a good idea. 

If you need your developers input there may be costs associated with getting a backup which may impact your schedule.

What to do with the backup

Once you have a backup it’s vital you store it safely and somewhere you have full access to, this way should the worst happen and you need access to it you won’t be reliant on 3rd parties (developer or host for example), it’s also a good idea to look at cloud storage to protect the backups from your own equipment failure. If you have systems in place to backup your business files already include your website backup in those, otherwise, a service such as Dropbox or OneDrive will enable you to store it safely in the cloud.

Your backup needs to be regularly updated, as mentioned backup buddy can automatically generate a backup and send it ‘offsite’ to dropbox all automatically which takes a lot of the admin out of the task.

The popularity, however, comes with some issues, WordPress is a target for malicious users attempting to target thousands of websites at the same time by finding a single hole in the platform’s defences. One of WordPress’s big selling points is the vast array of plugins and themes available, paid and free, that help users quickly extend the functionality of their website, this, however, opens up more avenues into unsuspecting WordPress based sites. The threat is real and is a numbers game, it’s much more efficient to target a platform which thousands of sites use rather than one site at a time.

It’s not all bad news, WordPress’ popularity comes into play again, alongside its open-source foundation; these two factors mean there are over 100 people contributing to updates to WordPress itself and thousands more reviewing, testing and documenting the CMS. This means that security issues are being looked for by, identified, tested and resolved by everyone in the WordPress community.

When issues get fixed, they make updates available to all WordPress sites though the built-in update system, this keeps all the sites up to date with the latest security patches. This same system can also update plugins and themes if it has submitted to the WordPress plugin store.

The WordPress update system

Knowing why it’s important to keep WordPress updated is one thing, but knowing how to do it is the real key. WordPress makes the whole process as easy as it can by constantly monitoring your website and its installed plugins, it compares these to the latest versions available and if they need updating it will alert you in the admin area. Recent versions of WordPress take this a step further for the core, when they detect a new version, they will automatically download and install it! 

To view the update area of your WordPress site login to the admin area and view the dashboard, if there are any updates you will it will alert you to them here. On reviewing the updates, you can see if there are any for: WordPress core, plugins, themes or translations, it also lists updates under ‘Updates’ in the menu under ‘Dashboard’ and if they are available for plugins, it will alert you on the ‘Plugin’ menu.

The easiest method is to view the updates via Dashboard -> Updates as it will show you all the updates in a single place, making it easier to review and process the updates. This update system works wonders; however, it is important to note that not all themes and plugins are compatible with this system. With WordPress being so popular, a wide range of ‘premium’ themes and plugins are available to purchase outside of the WordPress system. Not all of these have integrated themselves into the built-in update system, instead, they rely on either the user manually updating them or their own methods of ‘calling home’ to check for new versions, usually alongside the verification of a valid license. 

Sticking to popular well-trusted plugins and themes will help to ensure that they are easy to install and update, the WordPress plugin directory helps by displaying users’ ratings giving each one a rank out of 5. When looking for new extensions looking over these reviews is a good way of making sure you only install the best plugins.

Things to watch out for

The update process is vital and deals with the vast majority of updates with no issues at all, it is, however, possible for things to go amiss so it is important to know steps to take to minimise issues and help recover should you need to. 

Backing up

The first and most important is to make sure you have a regular backup system in place, this is something you should have in place anyway so that if something goes horribly wrong with your site, you can roll back to a backed-up point to recover it. WordPress sites have various options for backing up and its best to discuss these with your sites developer to make sure it’s covered, some website hosts offer this as a service and will deal with backing up automatically for you. If you want more control over the process plugins come into play again, one option is Backup buddy which lets you zip the whole site up and either download it or send it to cloud storage such as Dropbox. Whichever solution you use make sure backups are taken regularly to keep things safe, with plugin backup tools you can take a backup before starting any updates which will ensure you have an updated backup!

Order of installing updates

With the site backed up the next thing to watch out for is what order you do updates in, it’s recommended that we update the WordPress core first then the website checked before continuing with the plugin updates, this is because plugin updates are for the latest version of the core and sometimes plugin updates will require the new core version to work correctly. This is why you will normally see a flurry of plugin updates around the same time as a core update as they are making sure they are compatible with the latest version.

Not having too many plugins

WordPress plugins are fantastic and really help to add functionality to your website, it’s important to make sure not to get carried away and install too many. Each additional plugin adds additional complexity to your site, which increases the possibility of an update interfering with the others and causing issues for your site. Large numbers of plugins will also have other negative effects, such as slowing the site down or increasing the overall size of your site (something that will make backing up and restoring your site more time consuming). It’s something I see all too often, in a few particularly bad cases there have been multiple plugins doing the same job! This increases the chances of the plugins interfering with each other and causing issues.

Not applying too many updates at one time

This is true of a site that has not been updated for some time and has numerous updates to do. If you update all of them at the same time and run into an issue, you won’t know which update caused the problem. Installing the updates one at a time (for complex or really out-of-date plugins) or in small batches and checking the website after each round will narrow down the candidates should something go wrong.

Disable plugins

If the worst should happen and an update causes your website to go down and prevent access to the admin area, it’s rare but can happen, it’s important to know how to go about restoring access. Linking to the above point if we know which plugin, or group of plugins, has caused the issue we can disable them with the aim of fixing it without having to revert to a backup. 

To disable a plugin you will need to login to the hosting control panel or FTP and delete the plugin folder from /wp-content/plugins, you can also rename the folder to break the link but keep the files. If you work through the suspect plugins one at a time checking the site between each you should be able to narrow down which plugin is at fault.

With the increasing popularity of QR codes its useful to know how they work so you can look at ways of implementing QR codes in your business or for your website. QR codes in their simplest form are just a way of presenting information it is just in a format that smart phones can read using its camera, the system works in the same way barcodes do when you go shopping the barcode readers on the tills can read the bar code and get the information from it.  With barcodes the data held is a number which you can normally see underneath it, this number is then looked up in a database so the till can find the price for the item you are trying to buy.

With QR codes the information held can vary from a simple number to more complex subjects like full contact details, the most popular type of data to store in a QR code is a website address. This type of QR code will let users scan it and be automatically taken to the specified website, this saves users from entering website addresses using the phone keypad a time consuming and mundane task that discourages users from visiting your website at all.

As the information held in the QR code becomes more complex the QR code itself becomes more complex as illustrated by the two examples bellow.

The two QR codes both point to website addresses however the one on the left is a longer URL and as a result the QR code needs to be more complex to display all of the information. The problem with the more complex QR codes is that they are not as easy for the smart phones to read – this can lead to users not being able to scan them or the QR code needing to be larger for it to work.

The solution for this issue is to use a URL shortening service so that the URL the QR code contains is short and when users scan it they will be redirected by the shortening service, this type of solution provides a useful side effect – the number of people scanning the QR code can be tracked. This will let you know how many people are scanning your QR codes and in turn let you adjust your marketing to maximise the benefits of this new technology.

1) A set of brochures are created to advertise a new property with a QR code that goes through to the development home page, when the development sells and the website is taken down the QR codes can be redirected to the agents website.

2) A company prints a large number of promotional leaflets informing customers of the offer with a QR code that goes through to the website, when the offer has finished the QR code can be set to go to the home page or even to a new offer page.

Simpsons Creative has integrated this service with a wide range of clients from property agents to clients wanting QR codes on their business cards, with many clients opting for this type of QR code just encase they want to redirect it in the future – why risk needing a reprint when a dynamic QR code can be created to prevent this?

Did you know there are some handy uses for QR codes on websites! click here for more

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Website landing pages work by reinforcing a specific message that your visitors my have already seen, for example in a magazine or advert, an example of this is a new product launch that features in a printed adverting campaign and directs users to a page specifically about the product. With the page focusing the users attention on a single message and call to action you help funnel them into the action you want them to take.

If you look at the examples its easy to identify the call to action the website wants you to make

The actual call to action can vary from buying a product or signing up for a service to simply signing up to a newsletter, no matter what the aim you can focus the information and users attention to boost conversion rates which will make your website more effective.

With landing pages having an effect in 92% of cases (source: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/15051/How-Effective-Are-Dedicated-Landing-Pages-New-Data.aspx) with 43% rating them very effective its a technique that’s worth considering.

Something else to consider when starting out with landing pages is something called A/B testing – this basically involves creating two landing pages featuring different designs, copy, features or offers. This will leave you with landing page A and landing page B hence the name, the next step will be to monitor the results of the landing page looking at number of visitors and number of conversions.

From this data you will be able to see which of the two is performing better, at this point you could either ditch the under performing page and focus all of the traffic on the more effective of the two. Alternatively you could undertake a second round of testing by looking at what made the page successful in the first round and creating two derivatives of this in an attempt to make the page even more effective.

Looking at an example if in the first round you had two pages, one with a photo and the other with a video and the video page was more effective in the next round of testing you could try two different video styles. Another variation could be to take the video version and change the copy to see if it improves the conversion rate.

This A/B testing could go thought several rounds of testing each time making the landing page more and more effective with the goal of getting more and more users to perform your call to action, at the end of the process you will be getting more conversions then with your first landing page.

With that in mind its also important to point out that this A/B testing can be an ongoing task but with it increasing conversions its a worth while investment!

With these pages being different from the rest of the website it can work out to be a costly experiment however there are things you can do to limit the costs involved, to start with make sure your website lets you change the copy yourself with a CMS (learn more about CMS and WordPress here) as it will mean you can implement A/B testing with your content pages especially with WordPress being so easy to use.

Another key point is to have Google Analytics installed so that you can monitor the visitor numbers to your website, also make sure you know how you will be measuring the conversions from the pages.

Google however want to ensure they are providing the best possible search results to their users as a more effective service means more users and in turn more revenue for Google through advertising so they are constantly trying to improve their results and filter out the ‘low value’ results that website owners have pushed into the search results.

Recent updates to the search engine have had dramatic effects in the performance of some websites as its removed some ranking factors at used to be vital to a well performing website – this is something they have done several times in the past because people use the ranking factors to push the sites and as Google further refine their search engine websites that are attempting to ‘trick’ their way to the top will continue to suffer with each update.

Content is king

So what’s the best way to rank well without risking issues when Google update their search engine? the answer is simple – create high quality engaging content – by creating content that users will want to consume not only will Google view your website more favourably but your website will also benefit from social media sharing resulting in further increases in visitors.

So how do you go about adding content to your website? for many the easiest solution is to add a news or blog sections which then enables you to post regular contributions to your website that do not necessarily  need to be structured like product information pages. Other possible ideas would be to add FAQ guides or product guides on your products or services all of which should not only increase the amount of content but also benefit your customers.

Adding regular additions to your website does not need to be an expensive experience with a content management system (click here to learn more about what a CMS is) as this will enable you to make changes to your website yourself – talk to your website developer to learn more about the options for upgrading your website to incorporate a CMS if you don’t currently have one.

Before starting to write additional content for your website make sure to take some time and research keywords as this research will let you know what search terms people are using to find your services and you can make sure to include them in your content to help your rankings more on what keywords are can be found here and there is more information on how to do keyword research here.

In summary build a good website with decent content and not only will you rank in Google searches but you will be unaffected by Google search engine updates

For me content has always been something that comes in at the last minute and is often ‘shoved’ into the website as an after thought however I have recently started to read a very interesting book called Content Strategy for the web by Kristina Halvorson & Melissa Rach this book has made some very good points already that have got me thinking and I only a chapter or two into it!

The key point so far is that its important to have a strategy behind your content, this is because without a strategy there is no focus for the efforts people are putting into the websites content, by outlining what the purpose of the content that is being created is you will be able to focus all of the efforts to push forward a single goal.

It also provides other benefits such as the ability to research keywords before starting to write content which means you will be able to write more effective content which will attract more visitors and potential customers.

Another key point they make is there is such a thing as to much content and instead of simply creating more and more content its important to review and look after your current content making sure that it is still as effective as it could be, the type of content that can sometimes be left to go stale are product pages and even content on the home page as people believe once its done that’s all there is to it. However it is important to review and test this content as its the first thing visitors to your website will see and can result in them engaging more with your website or leaving altogether.

So how do you go about testing your content and making sure it does not go stale? To start with a content review of all of the content on your website is a good idea – this can even be done in sections if you have a large website – this will involve looking at product text, examples photos etc to see if there are better alternatives around or if they are inaccurate. With the results of this review in hand you will know what areas of content need looking at so will be able to make a plan to address the issues with the content.

The next step is to test the content and example of this is to have two product landing pages, each using different imagery or copy to attract users to do something (buy your product, sign up to email alerts, connect via twitter etc) then by measuring the numbers of people who perform this call to action on each of the different landing pages you will be able to identify which page is more effective. You can then take the more active page and do a variation of it and again monitor the performance of the pages to see which works best. This process can be continually repeated increasing not only the conversion rate of visitors to customers but also your understanding of what works and what does not.

This means that when you come to add another product to your site you will already have a fairly good idea what will and won’t work meaning you can skip allot of the testing done the first time around.

Alternatively try something new monitoring the results and bring any positive features back to existing landing pages, this process is own going and can make a massive difference in the number of conversions you achieve.

But what if your goal is not to sell but to inform? You can measure the success rates in other ways such as the number of returned items, number of support calls (better web content less need for customers to ring) or the visitor numbers to your site.

The important part of content strategy is to set a target for your content – e.g. Increase sales, reduce support calls, increase newsletter sign ups, increase enquires or even increase brand awareness. Knowing what your target is not only means you produce better more effective content but it also means you can measure your success and adapt to insure the biggest possible impact for your effort.

So what are your next steps? 1) take stock of all the content on your website 2) ensure all content is valid and up to date 3) define your targets for the next 3-6months 4)plan the content changes /additions you want to make to meet these targets 5) test the performance of the content and improve accordingly to maximise the effects

My next steps? To continue reading this very useful book!!

What are your experiences with content strategy? I would live to hear from you in the comments below.

With the data being anonymous you do not need to worry about data protection and securing the data as this is all handled by Google you can get on with looking at the trends in the data collected and improving your website. To get started you will need to have a Google account to sign into the analytics service you can do this by visiting www.google.com/analytics

Installing Google Analytics

Installing analytics on your website is easy if you know basic HTML, if not i would suggest getting a website development company or website developer to install the code for you to ensure it is set up correctly. To install the code you first need to add a new profile to your analytics account, each account can have up to 100 different websites per account but most people will only need to keep track of a handful of websites – web developers however should be keeping tabs on every single website they create and these can require more then one account.

To add a new website to your profile click on the admin button in the top right of the screen, you will then be taken to the admin area of the site, this area will then give you the option of adding a new website profile – you need to click on ‘ + New Account’ this will then bring up the page that lets you add a new website to your profile. Fill in the fields as requested and press next / accept.

On this next page you will be shown some java script code, this section of code is unique to your website and is how we will install the analytics service on your website, you need to copy this code and paste it into your websites head section just before the closing head tag. Make sure to install this snippet of code on every single page on your website or it will not track your visitors accurately, if your website is running on a CMS such as WordPress you may be able to insert the code into the template files and the CMS will install the code on all of your pages automatically for you. With WordPress the template file you require is the header (header.php) template file, if you paste in the code to this file all pages on your WordPress website will be covered by the analytics service including all pages created after installing the code.

What information can i get from Google Analytics?

With the tracking code installed your website will start feeding information on your visitors to the analytics service,  the data on the analytics service will always be 24 hours out of date so visitors on your website now wont show until tomorrow. With the data coming in we will be able to look at some very useful statistics they key one being number of visitors – knowing how many people are looking at your website is fundamental to knowing if your website is successful or not. No matter what your website is for from a shopping site to an information website if its not being visited then its not a successful websites knowing the visitor numbers will let you know if you need to make improvements or not.

Simply logging into the analytics service will show you the visitor numbers for the past month, you can change the time period by clicking in the top right and adjusting the settings. You can use this information to look at visitor numbers and how they change over a period of time, for example if you introduce a new service or run an advert you will be able to look back on the visitor numbers to see what the effect was on the number of visitors your website received.

Other useful information that you can get from the tracking is the devices that people are accessing your website from, this includes how many people are viewing your website on a mobile device. This information can be used to see if your website is being accessed by lots of mobile visitors and if so give you an indication to if you should look into responsive website design to cater for your mobile visitors.

With all of the pages that visitors are viewing being recorded there is another useful bit of information we can get from the recorded statistics, by looking at which pages are the most popular on your website you will know the content that is attracting the visitors. With this knowledge you will be able to tailor the content of your website to target your activities to maximize the usefulness of the website to the users which in turn will increase the number of visitors your website gets.

or put more simply it will let you know which topics to blog about – whats the point in blogging about topics no one wants to read?

Site plan / site map

The first thing you can do is to have a good idea of the layout of your website – not the page design itself but the site structure, this is called a site plan and lets the developer know how many pages you require and in what order they need to be on the website. A site plan can be a simple indented list or a flow chart diagram – as long as it clearly defines which pages go where it will be suitable, a common aid web developers and designers use when planning a site map is to write all of the pages on sticky notes and use a large table / wall to place them in the correct order as they can be easily moved around before a final site map is created.

This step benefits the process because the developer can take the number of pages into account before they start the design which ensures the design caters for all of the pages, it also means that development is not stalled with the developer waiting for you to decide which pages you want and reduces the chances of having to go back and add or remove pages later on in the project.

Copy

The next thing you can do to help reduce development time is have the copy ready for the developer to drop into place, this will help prevent the development stalling when the copy is needed but will also mean the copy can be dropped in as the pages are created which speeds up the process.

The way in which you provide the copy also effects the amount of time it takes to process it – for example its important to make it clear which pages the copy is meant for with files names or headings as having to stop and work out which page the copy needs to go on will slow down the development and cost more in the long run. Make sure the copy has been reviewed for spelling and that it is relevant and up-to-date – especially if your lifting the copy from an old website.

Also make sure you provide the copy in a digital format and not handwritten or printed out! as the developer will need to copy this out instead of simply copying and pasting it into the website.

Images

Any images you are going to use on your website should be ready to go so that the developer has access to all of them when they start working to prevent the project stalling – if the images are to large to email or if you have allot of them pop them onto a pen drive / CD and post it with enough time for it to reach the developer or make use of services such as Drop Box.

Images that are for specific pages or products should be identified – place them in folders with the copy for the page or name the files by the product code to make it easy for the developer to locate the images that go with a specific page.

Research

This is an important step as it helps you define exactly what it is you want from the website both from the design and the features of the website itself – having a good understanding of what it is you want will enable the developer / designer to better meet your needs with the design of the site itself but also with the features and functionality the site has.

Spend some time before you meet with your web developer looking at the design of other websites (particularity in your industry) and what features they offer, narrow it down to 3 of your favourites and take them with you so that you can discuss what you like about them and why you like it.

Having a list of features you want your website to have will help the developer get to grips with you website and quote you on how much the features will cost -a good idea is to put them into three categories 1)  Must have 2) could have 3) would be nice to have. This will let the developer know your priorities and if there is time left in the project work on the additional feature you would benefit from the most.

Updating a website built in WordPress is very easy (especially compared to transitional websites) it works much the same way as other applications you use online such as email clients, shopping websites or office applications you simply type the content into a box and press save as shown in the example below:

you can do standard things such as make text bold or insert links all using the tool bars built into the editor, simply put if you have sent an email before you should be able to update the content on a WordPress website! If you are looking at starting a new website talk to your developer who will be able to set you up a ‘test site’ or ‘sand box’ so that you can play with WordPress without it affecting your actual website.

A big plus of an online CMS is the fact that you can login from any computer connected to the internet, this means that your developer, friends or even family will be able to login and help update the site if you are away or are having trouble.

Thinking about getting a WordPress website? take a look at the Simpsons Creative help website which shows you how to use the CMS  http://www.simpsonscreative.co.uk/help/wordpress/ taking you though the steps required – it will give you a good understanding of what you will need to know to be able to update the content on your website.

Not all content has the same value to both search engines and to your website visitors, this is why its important to ensure your content is meeting the needs of your users while at the same time ensuring the search engines are getting what they need to rank your website for your targeted keywords. Target keywords are the search terms you want your website to appear in the search results for (read more about keyword research).

Writing good content needs to be a balance between using keywords of importance to you and also ensuring the content itself is useful to your readers not only because this will help improve your search ranking but also because your visitors will be more likely to share your website with others via social media networks – this can be a very important source of traffic and can itself help improve the performance of your site – a snow balling effect.

Other important things to keep in mind is the language in use – don’t use overly technical terms as this may scare off some of your users but in some industry’s its unavoidable so adding definitions could be a way to help users with this, while on the subject of language ensure your spelling is up to scratch as well as it has a direct effect in the opinion your readers build about you and your website while reading your content.

Another thing to keep in mind when creating content is how does it fit into the website as a whole? This is called content strategy and helps ensure your website makes sense as a whole but also helps identify the content your users are after – this can enable you to create content that attracts more and more visitors to your site. Content strategy also highlights an important part of working with content – the fact that it should never stand still and should be reviewed constantly to ensure its always as effective as possible.

When it comes to building a website, it helps to have a process to follow, especially if you are new to it. Following good guidelines help you work better and get things running along more smoothly. Web designers may not all necessarily follow one methodology throughout, but the basics remain the same.

A typical web design project goes through a standard six step process: learn, plan, design, code, launch and maintain.

Learning is the most fundamental step of web design process. Done more so on the designer’s part, it is as important for you as the business owner to learn what to expect from the designers, as well as to take in all their expert advice. The more they know what you want and need to accomplish, the better your chances of ending up with a successful website. Don’t be intimidated by the million and one questions the experts throw at you. In fact, you should be relieved and give them your utmost confidence. They are merely proactively finding out what you want.

Once, they’ve learned what needs to be built, they then need to plan how to make it happen – and it all begins with establishing a design strategy. A lot of serious research, brainstorming, sketching and mock-ups are done in this step of the website design process. This is also where ideas take on more of a tangible state.

When the legwork of learning and planning are done, it makes the next step, design, much easier. The design phase itself is pretty straightforward. It’s practically bringing the mock-ups to life and really sweating the details. At this stage, the experts will be seeking a lot of feedback from you. It is absolutely critical that you are completely satisfied with the outcome, as once the coding is put in, it’s ten times more difficult to make what would be a simple change here.

Once you’re happy with everything, all the coding is implemented and your website becomes real and live. All the validating and testing are also done at this stage to avoid any hiccups once launched.

The final step of the process is maintenance. This optional step may be carried by the experts or by yourself. If you choose the latter, the web designers will brief you on how to properly maintain the site.

The most important thing throughout the whole process is for you to continuously give the web designers feedback and for them to constantly seek feedback from you. A lot of time and effort, not to mention headaches, can be saved by doing this.

This means that sections of the site that are vital today may in a matter of months may become irrelevant, this is what is is important to constantly review your website and its strategy to ensure it is as effective now as the day it was built (if not more so!) but what do you need to look at? and how do you tell which areas are more / less popular?

Monitor website usage

By monitoring the visitors behaviour on your website you will be able to look at what areas of the site they are using and look at what you can do to improve these areas or implement additional features to attract them to other areas of the site you wish to push. Without knowing this information you are effectively flying blind hoping to second guess your visitors needs but with Google Analytics you are able to monitor exactly what your users are looking at and for how long meaning you can a) track the popularity of areas on the website and b) monitor the success of strategy put in place to attract visitors to different areas of the site.

Installing the tracking code on your website is free and easy to do: more on installing Google Analytics can be found here  a website developer will be able to assist you in adding the code if you are not comfortable installing it yourself – if your website is running on a popular CMS there is most likely a plugin available to help get your tracking installed (for example this plugin for Word Press)

With the tracking code in place you will be able to start looking at the numbers and make decisions on how to progress your website, for example:

• Publish two blog posts on different subjects you would be able to see which attracted more readers and you could adapt your content strategy to include more on the popular topic which is likely to attract more visitors
• Create two landing pages for the same product / service featuring different marketing messages and look at the conversion rate between the two pages to influence the next set of landing pages (repeating this process over and over will result in a very effective optimised landing page)
• monitor the number of visitors to product pages on your site to see which ranges of products are more popular and increase your focus on these items – alternatively increase marketing of the other product ranges to increase awareness
• place call to actions on different pages / different locations to test which attracts the most attention  / conversions
• monitor where users leave your site to identify poor performing pages that could be losing you business (long forms, hidden P&P charges etc)
• add additional information / images to products to see if it increases sales (the process may take longer but an increase in sales will be worth the effort!)

With the tracking information you will be able to constantly monitor the performance of your website, products and content and adjust accordingly to improve the website as a whole a process that will increase the number of visitors and potential customers.

All data collected is securely held by Google and is anonymous meaning individual users can not be identified preventing data protection and privacy issues.

Other areas to keep in mind when reviewing the website is the content strategy (learn more: What is Content Strategy? and why should I care?) as well as the design of the website itself – tweaking a strong design can extend the life of a website however it is important to remember that no website design will last forever and at some point you will need to look at a whole new design, but by looking after your current one with small regular changes you can extend the time and effectiveness of the website.

If you will be regularly updating the content on your website (which you should be) then a content management system is a must – even website developers make use of them to make our lives easier – for example this website has been built using WordPress a popular CMS. (Learn more about CMS: What is a Content Management System?)

The same can be said for people in other professions such as artists, writers and other professions by putting restraints on the creativity and freedom of the activity there is always a chance of taking away the enjoyment, this is where personal projects come in – they give you the freedom to explore and create without the restraints of a ‘professional‘ project. This freedom is important because it not only helps keep and interest in the subject area as it reminds you why you enjoy it, but also gives you the chance to explore your skills and learn new things, and other personal endeavors for self-enrichment. Taking myself as an example personal projects have thought me massively more then all of the ‘professional’ projects put together as it gives me a chance to explore new programming methods and advance my understanding of others without worrying about project deadlines or client requirements.

All of the new skills developed during the personal projects can then be taken back and used on the professional projects benefiting your work as well as your skills because of this you can see why companies like Google give employees time of during the week the explore their own personal projects.

On the other hand because there are no deadlines in place completing the projects can take a long time but its not always about the final project but more about the things you learn along the way.

Normally it boils down to two main options a static website or a website built with a Content Management System (CMS) . A CMS is a system that lets the client update parts of the website themselves without requiring my input, this normally includes the copy of the web pages and the management of the blog or news sections.

There are several benefits to building a website with a CMS the most obvious is the fact that you will be able to update the content of the website yourself – if this is something you are likely to do often (and you should!) you can save allot of money by doing it via the CMS and not having to pay your website developer to do the updates for you.

Other benefits include the ability to edit the SEO strategy of your website yourself – or get a 3rd party who specialises in SEO to look at it for you, while SEO can be a complicated industry if you talk through the basics with your web developer and apply what you learn to your website it will make a huge difference to your SEO performance and again by doing it yourself you will save money.

Another key benefit of a CMS is the ability to update your website quickly, this means you can take advantage of trends or maximise the impact of a new product launch because you will be able to update the website as and when you want to.

The downside of a CMS is that it will cost more money to implement as it takes longer to build and for the web developer to train you on how the system works but in the long run the investment will be worthwhile as you wont need to pay for the majority of the updates.

There are two main types of CMS, the first is a pre made solution such as the open source CMS WordPress (click here to learn more about using WordPress as a CMS) the second is a bespoke system created purely for your project, normally a simple website will make use of a pre made solution however if the requirements of the project mean this is not possible a bespoke system will be created (you can learn more about bespoke websites here). The benefits of a totally bespoke system is the fact that it can be tailed specifically for your website making it more efficient however it will take longer and therefore require a larger budget.

If you have any questions or comments about websites or CMS development please feel free to leave a comment below