Category Archives: Website Design

Your Business Needs a Mobile Site – Learn How

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How are you treating your mobile customers?

Recent data from several data tracking companies shows that today one seventh of all web traffic is originating from mobile phones. And make no mistake about it,  this percentage is growing rapidly and will continue to do so. This fact is absolutely huge – and something that you as a business owner will need to take immediate action on.

Don’t believe me? Pick up your mobile phone right now and enter the URL of your company’s website. Now take a hard look at what you see. Not pretty is it? Unless you have a mobile optimized web site, your mobile visitor is looking at absolute garbage. Let’s be blunt – no mobile site, no mobile visitor. It’ s really that simple.

How to get it done.

So what do you do about it? You could hire someone to build a mobile site for you. Most web designers would charge you $500 to a $1000 to provide a simple mobile site – maybe a lot more depending on your needs. It would be money well spent. After all, what value do you place on a customer? Remember – you could be losing over 14% of your site’s visitors. Say you have a thousand visitors a month, that would be almost 150 potential customers that you would lose each month because you haven’t bothered to accommodate them.

If you have no interest in learning now to do this yourself then hiring someone is your best option.

How to do it yourself.

But should you want to learn to do this yourself – it’s not that difficult depending on your needs. One excellent resource that we just picked up is from Jason Fladlien titled WP Mobile Pro. In it Jason provide a really slick WordPress plugin that does the heavy lifting and full video training to help you make the most of your small investment. If interested, just click on the banner below.

Of course, should you be interested, you can also use the knowledge you will gain to build mobile websites for others – which could provide a nice source of income. The choice is yours.

 

Google Likes Pages to Load Quickly!

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Test how fast your pages load.

Use this free test. Page load time can actually impact your Google Quality Score.

Faster is always better.

The most common cause of slow page loading times is bloated graphics. Make sure your graphics serve a purpose for being included in the first place. Then make sure any graphic you do include has been optimized to be as small as possible – in byte size. Use JPEG, PNG, and GIF as appropriate to reduce the file size of all graphic elements.

The page analyzer below will measure load times and provide feedback on how you can reduce the load time of your web and blog pages. Websites that include calls to databases (WordPress) and sites that include PHP programs and run Javascript can have added overhead as a result. Graphic elements are a big thing to check, but not the only thing. Run the analyzer and see where you can make improvements.

Finally, the speed of your hosting service can also have a huge impact. You might be able to get by with shared hosting if you take the time to make sure your pages are “lean and mean”. Slow pages will not please the “Google gods”.

Web Page Analyzer – Free web page analysis tool calculates page size, composition, and download time. Gives speed recommendations based on best practices for usability, HCI, and website optimization.

While graphic are one of the first things you might look at there are a host of other things that might keep your site from leaping from the starting gate. These are code based issues involving JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. If you are running your site on WordPress you have database calls to contend with as well. Pages that never change can be converted to static HTML which are then loaded instead of the PHP file that would load otherwise.

There’s a nice article on speeding up WordPress by making some code changes over at Lorelle on WordPress.

Another thing you can do with a WordPress installation, is use one of the caching plugins. I use WP Super Cache which streamlines your code for you. W3 Total Cache is another popular option. After you install one of the caching plugins and configure it, run the Web Page Analyzer linked above and see if your load time improve. You should see a dramatic improvement.

If content is king – then speed must be his queen. Take the time to manage your page load times and Google just might reward you with a higher quality score and higher page rank as well.

Professional Header Templates Increase Traffic

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XHeader Pro Creates Great Looking Headers

As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a good first impression, and when it comes to your blog or website this might mean the difference between success and failure.

Now you can create a good first impression, and dramatically improve the look of your site using a professionally designed header graphic. What might take a new website builder literally hours, can be done in a matter of just a few minutes using the right header graphic construction system.

An attractive header lends an air of professionalism, and encourages visitors to spend more time on your site. If your site looks amateurish, visitors may be inclined to click away, or bounce as its known. You can track and identify this “bounce” phenomenon using Google Analytics (which we will talk about in an upcoming post). Suffice it to say that “Bounce is Bad”.

For now, the issue is how do you find or create a professional looking header graphic if you’re not a graphics professional?

One tool we use to create header graphics is XHeader from the company that created the XSite Pro web development software. While the XHeader product works great with XSite Pro, it works just as well with WordPress and any other web creation software. Actually, most any job that demands a header graphic can be satisfied using XHeader Pro.

XHeader Pro contains a whopping 5,000 header graphics organized into 46 categories that you can use to create a customized header graphic for your website or blog. This is one tool that will save you loads of time and help you create the professional look that you need to present to your site or blog visitors. And with 5,000 header graphics to choose from, you’ll never run out of great ideas.

If I told you there is a tool that would  cost less than what you would likely pay to have just one header graphic created by a professional graphics artist, you’d certainly want to add it to your bag of tools – right? Well one of the great things about XHeader Pro is just such a product.

XHeader isn’t just a lot of templates either, it also includes a complete graphics editing package that allows you to create and customize your header graphic anyway you want. The results are limited only by your creativity.

As an added benefit, the package can also be used to create banner ads to use in your marketing efforts. See the example below – I added a balloon message to a stock header. You can make them different sizes and shapes to meet your particular needs. Just think a little outside the box and you can come up with more applications that require graphics for which XHeader Pro can help.

You can get your copy of XHeader by clicking here.

Check it out – I think once you try it, along with the accompanying tutorials, you’ll be creating more professional looking websites in no time. This site was created using WordPress, the Thesis theme, and XHeader Pro.

Download your copy of this great software today. There is also a free version that provides an editing tool, but with fewer templated to choose from.

Just click below and “Have some fun!”

XHeader Pro Used to Create a Banner Ad

For a limited time you can get a version of XHeader for free – it’s not the Pro version, however it does have most of the capabilities, but with fewer graphic templates. Click HERE to access your copy of the free version. This is a great way to check out this software that can vastly improve the appearance of your site.