Crafting the Perfect Contact Page: Essential Tips for Small Businesses

Recent Blog

Maximizing Productivity: Smart Tools for Busy Professionals

We all feel it: that constant pressure to do more, even when we’re already swamped. For busy professionals, just working harder isn't the answer. The real trick is working smarter. By using the right tools, strategies, and mindsets, you can turn your daily grind into...

How AI Assistants Are Changing the Way We Interact With Data

For a long time, working with data felt weirdly intimidating. Even the most simple questions often turned into a frustrating process involving spreadsheets, complicated dashboards, confusing filters, and endless exporting between different software platforms. A lot of...

Building a Strong Digital Foundation as a New Business

Building a strong digital foundation sets a new business up for success through online interactions that can boost branding, marketing, and sales. But many new companies actually struggle with this, even though it is easier than ever, and with modern tools focused on...

See more Business Tips

The post Crafting the Perfect Contact Page: Essential Tips for Small Businesses first appeared on DFW Website Designers - 817.247.6003.

So today I wanted to give you one of the best and easiest tips that you can do for your website to improve that page load time. One of the best tasks that you can do is resize your website images to make them smaller. I understand that this is a bit of an annoying thing to do. But there are fast ways to do it or rather I should say faster ways to do it and I’m going to give you one of those tips now.

Improve Your Website Images

If you have a large website, this is going to take you quite a bit of time, and if you can, I highly recommend that you outsource this, but you don’t have to, and you can do it entirely by yourself. There’s this free tool and it’s called Canva https://www.canva.com/ and it’s pretty awesome. Personally, I paid for the professional version of Canva but you absolutely do not have to do that. Now if you happen to run Photoshop or a tool similar to that’s perfectly fine, but I run Photoshop, and I don’t even use it for this that because Canva makes it so simple.

So what you’re going to do is go to one of your pages and you’re going to run it through a page speed tester. https://gtmetrix.com/ Once you have an idea of how fast or slow that page is, you then have an understanding of what if you should change anything on that page or not.

Image Size Affects Website Load Time

Once you know hey this page has a lot of images and it’s running kind of slow you’re going to want to right-click and download the image from that page to your hard drive. Then you’re going to go to Canva, and you’re going to choose your image size. For an internal page, every website is designed differently. This is where a rule of thumb comes in handy. I like to create images that are 1200 x 628 because if someone comes to your website and wants to share something to Facebook it will work perfectly. Facebook will not share anything smaller to its site. Since Facebook rules the world I always like to optimize for Facebook image size.

So go to Canva say that you want to create a custom image size and make that 1200 by 628. Then upload your image from your hard drive. Add a dimension to your canvas area and resize it accordingly. Then here’s the tricky part download an image from Canva as a JPEG file. That JPEG file will be smaller than a PNG file or any other kind of file type.

Go back to your website remove the existing image and replace it with your new image.

Renee’ Groskreutz
Blogging Coach, Digital Entrepreneur, WordPress How-to Blogger
WordPress Support & Maintenance: http://iteachblogging.com/wordpress-maintenance-plan/
817-913-6547 (texts ok too)

Listen to my blogging podcast on iTunes: https://itun.es/i6L44v8

The post Why Google Hates Your Big Website Images first appeared on DFW Website Designers - 817.247.6003.

Email lists are how you connect with your people. It is a great way to share your latest product, share tips, and tricks and ask questions of your audience.

Growing an email list doesn’t have to be overly complicated. I get it. It is a frightening proposition at first. Too many business owners it sounds, and as a result, they back burner the project. Today this post will take the fear of list building. To build a list effectively, you need just a few tools.

✓    A Website
✓    An email marketing tool
✓    An email sign up form

Before we dive in though, let’s have a little chat about logistics. There are quite a few steps to set up an email list, but once you have it done, it will be well worth it.

We will go into the steps in more depth below but here is an overview graphic for you.

There are a variety of options here to consider. If you are starting out list building, I would recommend that you consider MailChimp. They have a free choice for the first 2,000 subscribers to your list. They also make it super simple to sign up.

Step 1: Go here and sign up https://mailchimp.com/

Step 2: Create your first list

    2A: Click on Lists at the top left

    2B: Click on Create List on the right

    2C: Follow the prompts from MailChimp

The next step is to embed a sign-up form on your website. Fortunately, MailChimp (as do most email providers) give you a free embed form that you can place directly on your site.

Note: This is an excellent step in the process to outsource to your web developer, but you can do it yourself for sure.

How to Find the MailChimp Embed Form

Step 1: Log into MailChimp

Step 2: Click on Lists

Step 3: Click on the drop-down arrow on the far right of the form

Step 4: Click on signup forms

From here you can choose the Embedded forms options. You will want to copy the code and paste it into a page on your website.

Once you have finished, your email opt-in form should look similar to the one below.

Personally, I prefer something far more attractive, and this is why I use Thrive Leads to stylize my opt-in forms. Thrive Leads is a premium WordPress Plugin that costs $67 a year. It is quite powerful but will need to decide if you are ready to upgrade to such a tool.

I have a full in-depth review of the Thrive Leads here, along with tutorials on how to use it http://iteachblogging.com/thrive-leads/. With this tool, you can have an email opt-in form that looks something like this below.

Now that you have an idea of what is involved in creating an email list, I wanted to leave you with a few tips.

You need to provide readers with a reason to join your list. It is rarely as simple as: Sign Up Here! Those days are far over.

However, you can entice them with what is called a Content Upgrade. A content upgrade is merely a gift that the reader gets for signing up for your email list.

Great Content Upgrade Ideas

✓    Free PDF
✓    Free Video Series
✓    Free Ebook
✓    Free Coaching Call With You

Ok, so that is it. There is a bit of tech involved with creating and setting up an email list, but it is well worth it. If you do this and stay in touch with your subscribers the potential for business growth is there.

“You don’t want a huge list.  You want an engaged list….the gold isn’t in the list anymore, it’s in the engagement.”  ~Scott Stratten.

Featured Image: Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde on Unsplash

The post How To Stop Being Afraid Of Email Marketing first appeared on DFW Website Designers - 817.247.6003.

Note: It turned into a longer newsletter than I intended. If you don’t want to read all of this look for the bolded parts and you will get the general idea.

The first conference, the one that I am going to talk about today, was WordCamp in Austin. WordCamp is a 2 day conference for WordPress Geeks and I fit right in. At this conference I got to spend some time with amazing minds such as the developer for Thesis Theme 2.0 and some reps from hosting companies.

This was my first WordCamp and I look forward to WordCamp DFW in October. If any of you have interest in WordCamp do let me know.

I felt as though large boulders of data were being shoved in my brain during this conference but in a good way. The course that blew me away was The Future of Responsive Design by Nick Batik.

What We Already Know About Responsive Design

We all know at this point is that responsive website design is not only crucial for a website but is all but required at this point. We know how seriously Google is taking this because they told us so on multiple occasions.

Check out this article just six days ago from the Huffington Post: How Important is Responsive Design. In this article you will see amazing stats about mobile search and if you want even more stats and numbers just let me know. This is a fascinating conversation and it the conversation is shifting quickly.

Here is an excerpt from the article that you don’t want to miss:

And Google realizes that unhappy people will go elsewhere, meaning that bounce rates increase and the site will not rank on mobile searches. This creates a whole big headache involving Google’s external link algorithm and on-page errors. Which in turn, also harms your SEO.

In other words, it’s just bad for business for both Google and all of the websites that aren’t taking advantage of the benefits of responsive design.

What We have not been Thinking About with Responsive Design?

As Nick said in his talk, a year ago we were not even talking about mobile responsive design hardly at all. It was not on the radar but over the past year a tremendous amount has changed. This change has forced us all to think a great deal about how the websites look when they get small.

Over the past 9 months we have all as developers spent a great deal of time thinking about how a website looks on a phone and that is wonderful but…

What Does Your Website Look Like When it gets Big?

When he asked this question, I literally heard gasps in the room because he threw up a rapid series of images that challenged us all. There are now walls in malls that are being turned into screens for people to search websites. Consider what I am saying here, it is not a wall of small tv’s but rather a single wall that they expect a single website to fill.

There are odd shaped signs that they expect to display local websites on in various locations. In this talk Nick said that there was currently no solution for this problem but he did have some ideas. He is requesting that developers work with him on a project to be the set of folks that solve this problem. It is an exciting future for web design and it is also an uncertain one.

The Good News about Responsive Design

The good news is that this year you and your company just need to think about what your site looks like when it is small.

Do you have to pinch and zoom to read the content? If so, that is bad and people will leave your site or at least that is what Google says. This pinch and zoom effect is why people leave your website and that sounds terrible but frankly, I have started to find it frustrating as well.

Why is this all good news? Well, if you are reading this newsletter then odds are good that your website was built on WordPress. That means that half of the battle for this mobile responsive design is done.

This is not information that I wanted to bring to all you because it may involve an update of your website or blog and that is not something that any small business owner wants to consider. However, considering the urgency that the search engines are placing on this issue it feel like you needed to know.

WordPress is trying to help folks resolve this issue and there is a WordPress plugin called WPTouch that they are providing. Here is a link: WP Touch Plugin. Personally, I did not have any success with this plugin at all and wound up having to redesign my website but you may want to spend some time playing with it and give it a shot.

One final note, having two versions of your website no longer considered a reasonable solution by the search engines. There was a time, about a year ago that some people would have a mobile version of their website built and then have their desktop version of their website. This essentially meant that you had two versions of your website and Google considers that duplicate content and cheating. They want you to have just one website that looks good on all formats….no pressure right??

Just know that we are all in this together. There is no perfect version of responsive design and no matter how hard you or your web developer tries there will always be hiccups on some device at some point. Another piece of good news is that if you have a responsive designed site you will likely get search preference over your competitors who do not.

For further reading on this topic here is a quick list of links:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/4-seo-benefits-responsive-web-design/92807/

I hope that this information helps you. We are here for you and if you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask us. This is what we do and we love talking about it.

The post What Blew My Mind, Responsive Design first appeared on DFW Website Designers - 817.247.6003.

Actionable Marketing Tips:

When developing your video strategy, think about where your customers are in the sales process (their “customer journey”) and then create several videos that align with the different stages:

For brand awareness, you should have a video to introduce potential customers to your brand or service.

When they decide that they want to know more about your brand, consider offering them a “solutions overview” video to address some of their challenges.

Toward the end of the customer journey, you should have several product videos to demonstrate how your product works or what benefits it offers. Cisco makes over 1000 videos per year, just to make sure that their prospects understand the product throughout all phases of their customer journey.

via Mobile Social Media Exploding According to New Research | Social Media Examiner.

The idea of making videos can be quite daunting and time consuming. While we do have a green room that we offer up for client use and we do offer video services, know that this is something that you can do yourself. Having a YouTube channel is free and it just takes a gmail account to set it up.

It is amazing the quality of video that an iPhone can make. There is even an iPhone film festival, check out the video below.

Another option in video making is one that I do quite often, on screen tutorials. If you are selling a digital product like I am then you may find on screen tutorials like the one listed below quite intriguing.

The post Mobile Social Media Exploding According to New Research | Social Media Examiner first appeared on DFW Website Designers - 817.247.6003.

Apple has mastered the art of simplicity. Do you remember those iconic silhouette Apple iPod commercials? If not take a look at the video below.

Apple has one of the best designed websites in the world. Steve Jobs was obsessed with simplicity. He did not want anything on his products that was not absolutely necessary. He would challenge ever button, every dot and ever curve. Apple treats their digital presence in the same way.

When you got the iPhone 5S page on their site you will  see one thing, a beautiful view of the phone. When you look at this webpage you don’t just see a phone but you see a work of art, a thing of beauty. With this one page they are creating a mood, a feeling, dare I say a sensation.

There is no other product competing on this page. There is no fancy sidebar asking for you to sign up for a mailing list. There is just subtle options above the phone for you to click on a link and learn more.

My question to you today is, are you overwhelming your website visitors with too much on a single page? What can you do to really draw a potential buyer in?

Challenge: Go look at your website and ask yourself what can go away? Analyze five pages on your site and just sit back and think about the message that you are trying to send. We are a visual sort of people and we make snap decisions on a website. If this was not your website would you know what action the website owner wants you to take?

For further reading on this topic, check out the Kissmetrics post: Using Neuroscience to Design a Better Blog http://blog.kissmetrics.com/using-neuroscience-for-blogs/

The post Why your site should look like Apple’s first appeared on DFW Website Designers - 817.247.6003.

Ok wait, mostly free because it still costs you time.

When is the last time that you used the Yellow Pages? I do not know about you but I honestly do not even know if I have one. I saw a truck in my neighborhood the other day with the rear door open. It was full of yellow pages and I got a huge feeling of dread come over me. I hate waste and I knew that if it got delivered to my house that it would go directly to my recycle bin. I saw all of this to remind you of the reality that we all know, people are searching for your business online. Oh and don’t forget that today, tonight at this moment people are searching for you on their phone.

If people are searching for your business online you best make sure that your business is there to be found.

Lucky for us there are plenty of places online to be found and below I am going to provide you with a list of a few places for you to list your business. Note that most everyone will want to charge you for better listings but that can add up. For now consider just listing your business as many places as you can for free. See if the free listings have any impact for you over the next six months and go from there. All of those small fees can start to add up over time.

Yellow Pages Online

Bing Places

Insider Pages

Local.com

Google Places

This is a short list of places but it is enough to get you headed in the right direction. The key factor is to make sure that your business bio and links all match up across each platform. You may want to take this opportunity to check in on all of your social media bios as well. Test your links and make sure that all of your descriptions match. Your business can be found online, it just may take a bit of work to get there.

The post Is Your Local Business Listed? first appeared on DFW Website Designers - 817.247.6003.

What is SEO?
In the most simple terms, SEO is a series of steps done in reference to a website that helps search engines find it easier. For example, it may be something as simple as making sure that you are using words on your pages that people are actually searching for. Another example of SEO is submitting a sitemap of your navigation to Google to make sure that they know your site exists.

Are you using an SEO plugin on your WordPress Website?

Why Use an SEO Plugin?

• Custom Meta Title
• Custom Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Focus Keyword Density
• 404 Monitoring

There are several free SEO plugins that you can choose from for your website.  We are huge fans of two WP SEO Plugins in particular:

Yoast SEO Plugin 
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/

Renee’ is using the Yoast Plugin on her personal blog. She loves the focus keyword function which helps her see what her keyword density is. She says that it also helps her stay on track and not wander off topic.

SEO Ultimate

http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/wordpress-seo/

This is the plugin that FunTeam is using on their new DFW Website Designers website. The main reason that the team is using this plugin on the business site is because of the 404 monitor.

No matter which of these plugins that you choose, you will not go wrong. The key factor is to make sure that you are considering SEO when you are working on your website.

Linking
Having a good link structure is important.

Outboud: You need to be generous with your out boud links. An out bound link is when you link from one of your website pages to a web page that does not belong to you. It is what we did above with the Google Webmaster Tool. We linked out to another site.

Onsite: Make sure that you link to your other internal pages. This way you give strength from one page to another. Plus you offer up people information from one page to another that may be quite helpful to them. If you are working on a Silo Structure you will want to study the idea of onsite linking in more detail.

Sitemap
A sitemap is basically what it says. It is a list of your website pages. Go check out oursitemap here to see what we mean. If you have a Google Webmaster account for your website you can log in and submit your site map to google. We use a plug-in to create our sitemap and update Google but you can also do it manually by using the tool on this page: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Just doing this step alone will help Google find you better.

We hope that these tips help you with your Website and Blog efforts. Our goal is to provide you with all of the tips that we learn as we learn them. Thank you for taking the time to read this newsletter.

The post Newsletter: Are you using an SEO plugin on your WordPress Website? first appeared on DFW Website Designers - 817.247.6003.

Be Focused: Pay attention to audience trends. Scan all the channels for changes in audience, demographics, customer feedback and new trend appetites.

It reminded me that there are old trends that we may be missing as well. Social Media and Digital Marketing move so quickly and at times it can be hard to keep up. I recently started a blog about blogging and I forgot to go back and see what is trending on Twitter about blogging. When I did go back I found a great thing that has been happening for a long time, a Twitter chat. The chat happens on Sunday nights with the hashtag #blogchat. I decided to jump into this conversation and I made some wonderful connections. My tip to you is to spend time stalking the social world and finding out what is happening in your field too.

3 Content Marketing Tips That are So Easy to Follow, that They Actually WORK!
http://www.chrisducker.com/content-marketing-tips/ Getting involved with content marketing is one of the easiest ways to create a tribe of fans and followers…

I have recently discovered Chris Ducker and you will not be sorry that you watched this video. In this particular video he says do not offer too much unless you are ready to fulfill it. For example, do not say that you are going to blog daily unless you are really prepared to blog daily. You do not want to break people’s trust unintentionally.

The Most Effective Content Marketing Tip Ever | LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140301165247-2142418-the-most-effective-content-marketing-tip-ever
The Most Effective Content Marketing Tip Ever. March 01, 2014. Sorry. I’ve been toting this one around in my pack for a while now and haven’t yet shared it with …

Create 90 pieces of content in 90 days based on the 30 questions.

• Create 30 blog posts. The headline is the question. The copy is the answer. Immensely simple. Ridiculously valuable.

• Make 30 videos. Same topics. You might change the title ever so slightly. A lot of people would rather watch than read. Don’t get all worked up about the fact you’re not a professional video producer. Select the person best qualified to answer the question, point your digital device at them and press record.

• Make 30 podcasts. Why? A lot of people choose to listen, rather than read or watch. If your videos are talking heads (professional video speak), your podcast can simply be the audio track of your video.

Go with this sequence : post, video, podcast. Repeat 29 times. Or go with this: 30 posts, 30 videos, 30 podcasts. Whatever floats your boat.

These are three great resources to gain more ideas about content marketing. The last tip by Barry Feldman is wonderful because the average person or company will never fulfill those goals. If you can in any way find the time to do it, you will have a high probability of achieving content marketing success.

The post Just a few content marketing tips! first appeared on DFW Website Designers - 817.247.6003.

She had created a few pages, not blog posts, but she was not ready for the public to see them yet. She went ahead and published the pages, though. She wanted to be able to easily review the pages; which is why she published them. She thought that because they were not added to the nav bar that no one would find them and all would be fine.

However, considering that she has really great SEO built into her site people were finding those pages. When they happened across the page, excited and ready to read; they would find blank pages or pages that were incomplete. This would confuse the reader, and the reader would promptly leave the site. As a result, her bounce rate started to increase and those readers are likely not going to return.

So the moral of this story is to leave pages and posts in draft mode until you are really ready for the public to see them. These may cause a bit of inconvenience for you but that is far better than losing readers.

Terms:

Bounce Rate:  Bounce rate is when a visitor to your website leaves after only visiting one page. If someone does not click on another page of your site then they are bouncing away.

Why is this bad?

You want visitors to be engaged and spend more time on your site. If you are a blogger you want them to read more than one posts. The goal is to engage the reader and bounce rate is a great way to measure engagement.

Website Bounce Rate Notes:

Bounce rates with a website is a bit more tricky so you must keep the goals in mind. If your main call to action and your goal is for a potential client to call you for service then you may be happy with a higher bounce rate. So imagine that you are a plumber and your goal is for people to find your website, see your phone number and call you for immediate service then you would measure your success by phone calls.

In this scenario keep in mind that you want to provide plenty of resources for people to learn more about your company and services and while some people may click thru to read more it will likely not be the norm. In the end the additional pages may just provide more SEO opportunities and more entry points for people to find your phone number. We always explain to clients that a website with more quality pages will bring you greater success.

So what has been your experience with SEO? Do you have any tips that you can share?

The post Not ready? Don’t Publish first appeared on DFW Website Designers - 817.247.6003.