SMALL BUSINESS WEBSITES

While people are more comfortable searching and buying online, there are more hackers and scammers out there than blowflies at a sausage sizzle. This creates a dilemma. People want to buy from you, but they are worried if you are a business that they can trust. You may have the best product or service in the world, but unless people trust you, they will ghost away from your website faster than you can say “Would you like an invitation to my Tupperware party?”

“Wow! How cool is that!” The first time I saw a slider on a website (many years ago), I was in awe. It was a truly beautiful thing. I could get multiple messages across in just the one patch of real estate, and surely the movement would grab attention.

So, I added in a slider to my site … along with thousands and thousands of other website owners.

If your business has a website, there are two tech things that you need to do as soon as possible. The first is easy to spot if you need to do it to your site, the second is a bit harder. (I know that not everyone geeks out on tech stuff as much as I do, so I am going to try and de-jargon this as much as possible.)

Carrying excess weight is incredibly challenging. I am overweight (10kg for each broken heart) and with each kg I find it harder to zip along and do what I need to do. I now lumber rather than lithely lift, I think twice before doing everyday things, and flying gives me a double whammy of horribleness (tall, fat people are not greeted with welcoming arms by most airlines).

Why am I am telling you this? Excess weight is not just an issue for ageing business owners. It also applies to your online presence.

Let me tell you a tale of three different business owners.

The Fabulous Creative – The first business owner is a highly talented designer that runs a creative business. While her business name was perfect when she first started her business, as the years progressed she found that the name felt like a tightly laced corset.

Get a bunch of small business WordPress web designers around a cheese platter, and after a few red wines you can guarantee that someone will ask, “So, what are your favourite plugins?”

They are not trying out nerdy pick-up lines (or if they are, I have missed the signals in my eagerness to get to the camembert). What they are talking about are programs that add extra capabilities to your WordPress site.

WordPress is like grown-up Lego. You have your core program, and then you add bits onto it to give it extra functions. These extra bits are called plugins.

Imagine that you spot someone interesting from across the room at a crowded networking event. With canape in hand, you start to make a beeline across the room to chat to them, only to have your way blocked by a friend who says, “Mate. I wouldn’t go and talk to that person. They can’t be trusted and are likely to rip you off.” Would you continue walking or go and talk to someone else?

When you buy a shiny new website, often your web designer fills it with demo data or example content just so you can see how your web pages would look when you add your words onto the page.

You then send through your copywritten pages to be uploaded onto your website to your web designer. Your website is assembled and then launched to much celebration, champagne and praise from your mum.

I love Wordfence to boost security on WordPress websites. It is a non-negotiable addition to every website we build because it works at helping to keep the bad guys out!

One of the features that we loved with Wordfence was the inclusion of a caching feature called Falcon. It sped up websites by between 30 to 50 times, without adding significant load to the server.

Any website worth its digital salt is designed to get people to take action. No action = no money.

We often focus on the big things when trying to improve responses – site redesigns, rewriting the content and increasing site loading speed. These are vital, but we also need to take care of the tiny details. The micro-words and the smallest elements of a website: The call to action buttons that people click to take action.

When you are in a small business, your to-do list can seem more confronting than trying to climb Mt Everest in stilettos. Here are five fantastic free alert services we use with many of our clients, that will help you monitor and track your online presence. No stilettos in sight!

Have you ever noticed that wearing activewear sneaks up on you? It starts just one day when you forget to get changed after the gym. And then before you know it you live in stained, baggy trackie-dacks with t-shirts holier than the Vatican (UGG boots optional).

Small business websites are like that. They start out looking brilliant and shiny new – with a high commitment to keeping them trim, taught and terrific. Then business gets in the way, and you start to get comfortable … really comfortable.

In the past 12 months, I have built more websites and written more website copy for tradies than any other industry group.

For many tradespeople, it has been their first website.

For others, they have had a basic website their wife, cousin or next door neighbour whipped up for them a few years back in exchange for a carton of beer. These sites look like the average person on the street has had a DIY go at plumbing, or carpentry. They sort of work – but they are not built to spec. and are losing clients for the tradie.

Most start-ups and small businesses choose a WordPress site for their first website. Why? WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, and is used by 26.4% of all websites. It is also the fastest growing system – every 74 seconds a site within the top 10 million sites worldwide starts using WordPress.

In our business we see a LOT of small business websites! Often we upload the web copy or blog posts that we have written to WordPress websites for our clients, and we see the same mistakes being made over and over with their websites.

When you are thinking about a first website for your start-up or small business, it can be a bit confusing trying to work out who to call and what each person does, let alone what you need to do.

Today we will take a dive into some of the secrets of a successful first website.