Small business websites

WordPress Gutenberg has dropped this morning - 7th December Australian time. We flagged it was coming in our post Gutenberg is Coming: What You Need to Do to Prepare. Now that it has dropped, we have filmed a quick walkthrough of what you will see when you...

If you have had your website for a few years, you tend not to pop in and visit it all that often. It’s a bit like a distant relative. You know that they’re there, and hope that everything is fine, but unless they make the front page of the local paper for breaking out of a nursing home to run away and become a groupie with Justin Bieber, you don’t think much else about it. However, ignoring your website does have a downside when technology changes and something breaks on your site.

Many small business owners like adding YouTube videos to their websites or blogs. Videos are great for engagement and are a fantastic way to share information and connect with your audience. The problem comes when the lovely YouTube video that you embedded into your site ends, and your potential clients are shown a stack of “related videos” as the final screen.

Changes to website code rarely make headlines and aren’t something that I normally talk about on my blog as they are more effective than Stilnox in inducing slumber. Website code is generally created by raging introverts fuelled by energy drinks using liquid cooled computers in darkened rooms. It is not inherently sexy or newsworthy, except when an icy blizzard of code is bearing down on small business websites, and my businesses need to know what is about to hit them.

WordPress powers 31.9% of all websites across the internet, owning nearly 60% of all the content management system websites. Over 600 new WordPress websites are launched each day across the world compared to just 170 per day for Squarespace. And yet, most business owners think that their WordPress website just is an elegant digital brochure sitting in a virtual rack that promotes their business for them when no one in the business is looking.

One of the more challenging questions both small and large businesses face is whether to display their phone number on their website, and if so, which number should they use. Why you don’t want to include your phone number on your website There are a multitude of...

Humans always search for absolute meaning in life. However, at times we find that “everything is relative”, often to our frustration. Absolute vs relative take on a whole new meaning when we talk about websites, and the difference between the two can cause links to...

This is part 2 in a two-part series about GDPR Compliance. One of the things I recently did to get my small business ready for GDPR was revise my privacy policy and site terms.

In Australia, certain small businesses with an annual turnover of less than $3million, already need legally compliant privacy policies in place and displayed on their websites.

For the past fortnight, your inbox has probably been stuffed fuller than a toddler’s cheeks with unsupervised lollies around, with emails telling you how committed the email sender is to your privacy, and please take a look at their new revised privacy policy terms.

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.