Author: Tim K

Web design Santee keeps on evolving. Before all you needed was a simple static site with basic info about your website. After the birth of smartphones, you needed two versions of your website; a mobile version and a desktop version. Today, what you need is a responsive web design. This is a web layout that adjusts itself automatically to fit any screen it is being viewed on. Although this method of web development has been around for almost a decade now, not many people consider it. If you are one of those people, understanding the benefits of having a responsive web design might help you reconsider.

Cost effective
Running two versions of your website can be expensive and time consuming. This is because you have to handle maintenance twice. What is more is that having two versions of your website increases the risk of duplicate content which can lead to negative SEO. These are not problems you can expect to deal with when using a responsive web design. As a web designer Santee, you will only be running one website. This means tremendous time and money saving.

Better web traffic
More than 60% of the visitors you will get on your website will come from mobile users. This is according to data from InMobi. This means having a mobile friendly website will help you accommodate more visitors. What is more is that in 2014, Google made upgrades to its algorithm which gives ranking priority to websites with mobile friendly websites.

Improve SEO
In addition to the new Google algorithm update, having a responsive web design Santee will boost your overall ranking. When mobile users land on a website that is not mobile friendly, they will quickly click away. This is registered as bounce rate. A high bounce rate will impact your online reputation thus leading to poor ranking.

Improved user experience
Nobody wants to keep scrolling left and right to read something online. This is what you get with a website that is not optimized for mobile. A responsive web design will adjust to fit perfectly in any screen it is being viewed on. It will also load faster. This will lead to improved user experience. Needless to say, a better user experience will lead to more traffic and more sales.

Less time spent in marketing
Last but not least, it is good to note that having a responsive web design will save you time that would have been used in marketing. The reason for this is because you will only be marketing a single website.

There are so many reasons why you need to invest in a responsive web design. However, you should not hire just any web designer Santee to help with that. Make sure the person you hire has experience creating mobile friendly websites.

Web design Santee

A web design Santee alone will not help you achieve the success you are looking for in online marketing. This is because the web content is the soul of your website. Yes a great web design will lure visitors in but only great content will keep them on your website and compel them to come back for more. It goes without saying that creating great content is never easy. The purpose of this post is to give you a few tips and guidelines to help craft better web content.

Know your audience
The first step in content creation is identifying the target audience. The only way you will be able to keep visitors on your website and compel them to come back for more is if you offer content they can associate with. Creating content that is engaging is all about tackling topics that your audience will be interested in. A web designer Santee doesn’t need to work on the content by himself. It is always a good idea to outsource the work to the professionals.

Use subheadings
Creating great headings is one of the ways of attracting traffic. However, you must never forget about the subheadings. One thing you need to understand about the readers of today is that they only focus on what is important to them. Online content is often scanned and not read. Subheadings will make your content easy to read and ensure your audiences never miss the important point you want to pass across.

Brevity
Although a good web design Santee will make it easy for readers to consume your content, you have to be as straightforward as possible. Web content is unlike print and other content. You have to always assume that your readers are running short on time. Don’t beat about the bush. Get right to the point. Your content should make use of short paragraphs and focus on the interests of the target audience.

Keyword rich
When writing content for a blog or website, you must make use of the right keywords else the content will never be found. Search engine bots mostly rely on keywords to determine the relevance of content based on a search query. If your content lacks relevant keywords, it will not be indexed and this will hurt your online presence. Keywords are what help you get the content to the right audience.

Provide facts
Last but not least, as you write content, you have to include verifiable facts. The Internet is full of fake information. The last thing you want is for your website to be associated with fake facts. If you cannot verify a fact, don’t include it in your content.

Your objective as a web designer Santee is to create a website that will be viewed and one that will meet its purpose. This will only happen if you add relevant and high quality content.

Web design Santee

Web design Santee keeps on evolving. A while back, the only option you had was to create a website using HTML and refine it with CSS. This is no longer the case. So many advances have been made and one of them is the introduction of WordPress themes. There are millions of themes to pick from on WordPress. This means you don’t need to spend a lot of time designing your website from scratch. But why exactly should you consider the option of WordPress themes?

They are affordable
Working with a web designer Santee to custom build your website from scratch is a bit expensive. Typically, custom built websites cost between $5,000 and $50,000. If you are a non-profit or a startup, this is an impractical investment. To avoid these costs, you can use the premium WordPress themes. These are professionally crafted and are very affordable. They are even cheaper to maintain unlike custom web designs where you have to pay for customer support.

They are customizable
The fear that most people have when it comes to the use of WordPress themes is that they will not be able to tweak the themes to their liking. This is not true. These themes are customizable. You can mold them the way you want to match your content. It is also possible to hire a web design Santee to custom build your personal WordPress theme. You can also change the functions of your website easily by installing WordPress plugins. The actual code of the theme can also be edited.

Easy content management
WordPress has garnered immense popularity because of how it simplifies content management. The platform currently powers more than 58.6% of websites. It offers remarkable support and great themes to make your work easy when creating and managing a website. Posting content is easy because you don’t have to write codes. You can paste videos, photos and text and the coding will be done for you.

Mobile friendly
You want a web design Santee that will run smoothly on both mobile and desktop computers. The WordPress themes give you that option. The themes are all mobile friendly. They use an intelligent code that adjusts the website to fit any screen size. You will not need to have two versions of your website to serve mobile and desktop users.

There are so many more reasons why you should consider using WordPress themes. All you have to do is setup a free WordPress account and you are set to go. However, if you are not sure of what you are doing, make sure you work with an experienced web designer to help with the setup.

Web design Santee

Web designers Santee know that their work is not done after completing the design part. There is a lot of work that needs to be done which include search engine optimization and fixing bugs on their website. One thing you cannot afford to ignore is negative SEO. There are so many people out there trying to bring your ranking down. You have to worry about hackers, spam links, fake social media profiles, plagiarism, and removed backlinks and so on. If you don’t take care of negative SEO, your online reputation will go down and so will your business. Here are important things you need to do when managing negative SEO.

Setup a Google Webmaster Tools for Email Alerts
Google is familiar with negative SEO and has made available tools to help combat this problem. One of the best tools you can use is the Google Webmaster Tools email alerts. This tool will help you know when you have malware on your website, you have received manual Google penalty, your pages are not being indexed and when there are server connectivity problems. Setting up this account is easy. Log in to your Google account and select Webmaster Tools Preferences. Be sure to enable email notifications and save changes.

Track your links
Links are very important for your local SEO ranking. The more high quality links that you have the better. However, you need to note that spam backlinks and removed high quality links is a major problem. Your web design Santee will be tarnished by your competitors who pay porn sites, casinos and other malicious sites to create links that point to your website. Hackers can also be used to remove your best links. Keeping track of your links is the key to managing your online reputation. Be wary of:

• Links from sites written in a foreign language
• Links that trigger malware warnings
• Links from gambling, adult and other illicit topics
• Sites with over 50 links on a single page

There are many tools you can use to monitor your backlink profile. Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs is one of the best tools you can use. You can also use MonitorBacklinks.com.

Keep website secure from malware and hackers
The key to avoiding negative SEO is keeping your website as secure as possible. If hackers cannot get in, you will not have to deal with deleted links. As a web designer Santee, you need to consider doing the following things when securing your website:

• Install Google Authenticator plugin. This provides a 2 step verification login.
• Create stronger passwords and encrypt your login page
• Create backups of your website regularly. This will make it easy to restore it in case it is hacked.
• Install antivirus

Protecting your website from negative SEO is the best thing you can do to keep your business thriving. If you feel overwhelmed, don’t be afraid to seek help from web design agencies. They have the resources to secure your website and protect it from negative SEO.

Web designers Santee

Web designers Santee focus more on aesthetics and functionality. More often than not, they forget about security. If you have been keeping up with the news, you may have read a lot about hacking. Company servers and their websites are being hacked every other day. As a web designer, it is your duty to ensure that your website is not easy to hack. Understanding the top reasons why creating a secure website is important can help rethink your web development strategies.

Affects ranking
Did you know that how secure your website is will impact its ranking? In 2014, Google updated its algorithm so that it favors websites with HTTPS over ones with HTTP. Although this has an impact of about 1%, this is a pretty huge percentage.

Far from the algorithm updates, there are hackers who are only interested in compromising your online reputation. They do so by implementing bad SEO without your knowledge. When you are done working on a web design Santee, you will mostly contact websites that offer related products and ask them to link to you. Hackers know this and they will compromise your online reputation by either deleting these links or adding links that tarnish your business. Hackers can also change your code and content in order to impact your ranking negatively. Ensuring that your website is secure is the key to avoiding undesired drops in your ranking.

Gives a bad reputation
Businesses thrive on good reputation. If your website is known to be insecure, chances are no customer will be willing to disclose any information to you. They will also choose not to do business with you. This happens when you are hacked. Out of fear of their information being leaked, customers will choose not to visit your website.

Ensuring your website never gets hacked in the first place is the key to managing your online reputation. You must work with a web designer Santee who takes web security very seriously. The last thing you want is to lose the trust of your most loyal customers simply because you never created a website that was secure enough. Not addressing web security issues is committing commercial suicide.

Breaches will cost more than just clients
Yes bad reputation will cause you to lose valued customers but it will also open avenues for lawsuits. A simple hack can attract loss of data, fines, collapse of your website or even the end of your business.

Keeping your website secure has to be a top priority. Start by moving from HTTP to HTTPS. You must also make use of SSL connections. The passwords to your admin area must also be stronger. Don’t be afraid to work with a security consultant too.

Web designers Santee

An experienced web designer Santee understands that the security of the website he creates has the ability to impact ranking, reputation as well as the success of the business it is being built for. It is for this reason that a lot of work goes into boosting security. If you are using WordPress as your content management system, there are a couple of things you can do to beef up the security of your website.

Pick a hosting service with care
Server end loopholes are the number one causes of website vulnerabilities. The worst thing is that if the problem is on the server end, you cannot do anything but complain to the hosting company. Choosing a hosting service with care is the key to avoiding most security issues. Don’t focus too much on bandwidth and storage space allocations when deciding on the hosting service to use. Pay attention to how the company responds to security and its reputation on the same. As you work on your web design Santee, you must avoid shared hosting at all times.

Install trusted third-party software
The best thing about WordPress is that it has a huge community. This community has seen the introduction of all manner of themes and plugins. Themes and plugins make it easy for you to fine-tune your website. However, before you install any theme or plugin from a third-party, make sure the publisher has a good reputation. Take a look at when the software was last updated, the level of technical support available, total number of downloads and user ratings. Themes or plugins that have not been updated recently are a high risk. Updates are there to fix loopholes that hackers can exploit. Ensure that you update your plugins regularly. This will only be possible if your web design Santee uses a plugin from a publisher that offers regular updates and great customer support.

Protect your login page
The login page is a major target by hackers. You can protect it by encrypting it with SSL. SSL encrypts data that you send so that the hackers are not able to get your login information. In addition to that, you need to make sure that you use unpredictable passwords. If you have several websites, don’t use the same login details for all of them. The ideal password is alphanumeric and has more than 12 characters. For added security, you can introduce the two step authentication.

WordPress is a great platform for running and managing your website. However, you need to note that being a popular CMS means it is a common target. As a web designer Santee, you must ensure that your login page is as secure as possible and never install just any theme or plugin that you find interesting.

Web designer Santee

For your web design Santee to work properly, you must invest in a good hosting service. Your hosting provider will impact the load speed as well as what you can and cannot do with your website. To increase success, it is imperative that you select a hosting service with care. In this post, we will be taking a look at the top considerations you need to make.

Cost
A service that is too expensive for you will affect your bottom-line. Prior to selecting a hosting service, you need to focus on what you really need. By knowing what is needed, you will be able to avoid selecting services that are irrelevant. Make sure you understand what is included in a package prior to paying. As a web designer Santee, you need a service that will not limit you in any way. You must also ensure that you don’t spend too much on hosting. Your budget will help narrow down on the best service.

Support
With price out of the way, you need to consider the level of customer service that is made available. Regardless of your experience using hosting services, it is imperative that you ensure you pick a service that affords you the best level of support. The last thing you want is for your website to be offline simply because the hosting provider has no reliable technical team to fix a simple issue. Take some time to listen to what people are saying about the quality of services offered by the hosting company you are considering. Only get the services from companies that have been in the business the longest.

Scale
Will the hosting provider be able to accommodate your website needs as it grows? This is a vital question you need to ask before selecting a hosting service. Your needs in web design Santee will change with time. You will need a more advanced service as your business grows. One thing you don’t want is to have to move from one hosting service to another simply because your current host cannot accommodate your needs. Choose a company that can grow with you.

Security
The hosting service provider is the one hosting your whole website’s data. If his servers are compromised in any way, your website will be compromised too. The company you select must give priority to security.

Speed
Last but not least, consider the speeds that you can get. If the servers of the hosting company are unresponsive, your website will be sluggish too. Take a look at the guarantees of the provider in regards to optimal speed.

These simple points will help you get the best possible service from a hosting company. Refrain from selecting a company simply because it is cheap. Pick a hosting company for the quality of services it offers.

Web design Santee

A web designer Santee understands that the hosting service he selects has an impact on the performance and features of his website. That is why a lot of time goes into research before picking a hosting company. As a matter of fact, prior to picking a hosting company, a web designer takes a look at his proposed website needs. This allows him to narrow down the search. When selecting a cloud hosting service for multiple websites, there are a few important things you need to look at.

Storage
The purpose of hosting service is to accommodate your website’s data and guarantee its smooth running. Considering all your data will be stored on the servers of the hosting company, you need to make sure that you get adequate storage space. The bigger your website will be the more storage you will need. You also have to consider the fact that the data for your current web design Santee will increase with time. Select a service that will give you more storage space when you need it.

As much as picking a hosting company that allows room for future expansion is great, you need to consider the fact that not all companies will accommodate your growing needs well. With some, an increase in storage space means significant hike in the hosting cost. Make sure you understand the terms of service before committing.

Bandwidth
This is what impacts the speed of your website and the amount of traffic it can handle. When visiting a website, information is retrieved from your website server then sent to the computer of a visitor. The space occupied by this transfer is what is referred to as bandwidth. If you expect a lot of visitors, you need a bigger bandwidth. The case is the same if as a web designer Santee you are working on websites that rely on running applications and video streaming. Stay away from shared hosting.

Support
There will come a time when you experience technical issues. When this time comes, you don’t want to wait days for the issue to be fixed. That is why you must always pick a hosting company that offers remarkable customer support services. You need a service where you will have access to a team that is knowledgeable and willing to handle your technical issues within the shortest time possible. Avoid hosting companies that outsource customer support.

Price is not the only thing you need to consider when deciding on a hosting service. The key is to match the services being offered to what you really need. Picking the right hosting service at the start of web development will save you a lot of money and stress.

Web designer Santee

Web design Santee should be planned with social media in mind. The majority of the people you are trying to reach are on the social network and it is your duty to reach out to them using their preferred channels. One great step you should consider making as a web designer this year is integrating Instagram feeds in your web design.

Integrating Instagram
Adding Twitter and Facebook on a website is not something new to an experienced web designer Santee. This is a practice that has been around for quite some time. The reason why this strategy has become popular is because it eliminates the need to setup a news page or a blog for your website. Recently, thanks to advancements in mobile technology, you can now add Instagram onto your site. The beauty of this option is that the images bring your website to live; it looks more connected. This is a remarkable strategy if you update your Instagram profile regularly. By integrating Instagram in your website, the feeds on your site will be both fresh and dynamic. That is provided you post regularly on Instagram.

Images to display
One very important point you need to remember before integrating Instagram is to ensure that the images that are featured on your website are relevant to what your site offers. This means the images you display should be based on hashtags that are relevant to your business.

Another thing you should consider doing is to only display images that you have added to your feed. This is safer than everything being displayed on your website without your intervention. The last thing you want is for someone to hashtag and irrelevant image and for it to be displayed on your website. You need to ensure you only install a plugin to your web design Santee that gives you control over the feeds from social media.

Best tools for embedding
It is obvious you can’t manage all the feeds manually. You need to automate the process. This is made possible by embedding tools that you use for Instagram integration. There are so many options out there. Some of the best ones include:

• Instagram official embedding
• Instush
• Snapwidget

To avoid installing too many plugins on your site, pick a tool that offers a wide range of features. The tool you install must also give you full control over what is displayed on your website from your Instagram feeds.

Web design Santee

Web design Santee is mainly considered in terms of aesthetics. A lot of work goes into making a website as attractive as possible. For the inexperienced web designer, it is easy to forget about functionality when working on a remarkable web design. The important point you need to remember at all times is that your web design will have an impact on the overall bottom line of your site. How? You might ask. Here are some of the ways the layout of your site will affect its success.

User experience
Every web designer Santee understands that it is the web design that impacts user-experience. This is for the simple reason that the design of a site is what captures the audience’s attention as well as breaks up content and guides the visitor’s eye around the website. The web design is also what makes a website look professional, builds trust and also the part that increases functionality. These are the main things that mandate that you give priority to the web design.

To create a successful website, you must ensure that your web design is mobile friendly, improves readability and boosts the overall user experience. If you have a bad web design, you will notice high bounce rates. These will lead to poor search engine ranking.

Still on web design Santee, you need to think about annoying features such as popups and music or videos that auto play. They are annoying and they will push clients away. Your website must also make use of whitespaces, have a clear call-to-action and make use of a sitemap that is intuitive.

SEO
While putting your visitors first when working on a web design, you must never forget about the search engines. Most of your visitors will find your blog or website through search engines. Your web design must be SEO friendly. This means search engine crawlers should be able to sniff through it without any problem. Poor navigation can make it hard for search engine crawlers to go through your site. This will lead to poor or no indexing. In the long run, your search engine ranking will be poor. What is more is that your web design has to be mobile friendly. Google gives ranking priority to websites with responsive web designs.

Load speed
Your web design will have an impact on the load speed of your website. Needless to say, the longer it takes for your site to load up the higher the bounce rate will be. As a web designer Santee, you must only add the relevant elements and resize the images. The best hosting service must also be used. Don’t clutter your website. Simplicity has always been the ultimate sophistication.

The above are just some of the main ways your web design will impact the success of your website or blog. A web design doesn’t need to be sophisticated to be professional. It just needs to be well designed with the target users in mind. Hire a professional if you ever feel stuck.

Web design Santee