Just a quick one today, with so many design your own website services available (another blog on this will follow) and businesses managing their own websites we thought we would assist with the things you don’t get told.
We have nothing against companies managing their own website(s) or using online designers like Wix or Squarespace. These are very good platforms.
What we do have an issue with is that the businesses who decide to go at it alone miss out on so much. I can take a photo but that doesn’t make me a photographer. I might not understand about colour correction or levels, making the picture warm or cold and how to edit. This is the same with a website.
You can design it to how it pleases your eye and happy that it represents your business. Well done you. No what? stick online and hope for the best? You could do that and this is what most do and then wonder why am I not getting any business?
Going at it alone or using these online design sites are fine, please don’t misunderstand but there are areas you need to consider:
- Who will maintain the site?
- Who will upload and manage content?
- Will it be secure? Do I need to do anything for it to remain secure?
- How fast does my site load? It’s slow how can I change that?
- Is it a responsive site?
- What do I need to do to do that?
- How can I tell home many people are visiting my site?
These are just a few questions that customers come to us to ask and resolve. We salute you for taking the initiative to learn and develop your site and brand but just as I wouldn’t know how to offer your service 100%, you may not know how to set up a website 100%. How to get found, Where to put body or head code, How to enable Google tools and effectively work for you.
We would make the case for you to speak to us and you should. We can, and do, work with customers that go most of the way to developing their site and we help to complete it or maintain it going forward. Sometime what you save in the beginning you end up paying out later to get some one to fix. An old boss of mine used to say ” You buy cheap and you buy twice”, in a lot of cases this is true. You don’t usually get a Ferrari at Ford prices or another great analogy.
How can we help?
We know that despite warnings or advice customers will go out and do it anyway or perhaps you have a site and feel it needs something. To help we have compiled a list of tools that you can use to see how great your site really is and if there is anything you can do to correct it.
These tools are a guideline, they are automated and do not take into account many different factors but give you a good idea and some good practices to move forward and give you a better fighting chance.
These are some tools to check your site:
Google Test My Site
Test my Site is an quick and easy tool to check your speed and overall performance across devices including fixes to help better your site. You can also access the detailed report. The tool is completely free.
Google Mobile Friendly test
With the mobile friendly test you can see how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device. It will offer a score and page loading issues and additional resources
Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the performance of a website or web-page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.
Website Grader
We love Hubspot they offer some great tools and this is no differnet. A free SEO and Website grading tool. Get a good look at your site performance, Mobile Readiness, SEO and Security. All with next steps.
Google Index
Not sure if this is what it’s called but it is a great tool. Getting your website involves work but how do you know what they have included? Are you indexed correctly? Visit Google and type in the search box site:yoursite.com (change yoursite.com to your website address). Then when you hit enter it will return all the pages indexed with google.
There are so many areas you need to have in place to effectively rank on Google, be found on search engines in general and monitor the activity on you site. Would you know what they all are? We will include on another blog post in the future.
Conclusion
Website is so much more than pretty pictures and contact details. For many businesses this is their shop-front, the main way they generate business. With businesses failing and going into liquidation because they haven’t been forward thinking enough can you afford to leave it to chance?
Let the Onzigo Digital help and work with you to create your best possible shop front and ensure longevity and focus on what you’re good at. Running your business!!
