Tag Archives: design

5 Best Infographics & Illustrations to Try on Your Small Business Website

Posted on August 26, 2019 by Hosting

The post 5 Best Infographics & Illustrations to Try on Your Small Business Website appeared first on HostGator Blog . Visual content plays an integral role in your small business website. It can either grasp your visitors’ attention or repel them in the opposite direction. To spice up your site, you can add infographics and illustrations to your site. These visuals help tell your brand story and convey key information to your audience.  But everything shouldn’t be transformed into a visual. Here are 5 of the best opportunities to use infographics and illustrations on your site.  1. Display Statistics  Visual content attracts visitors to your site. According to Demand Gen Report , infographics can increase web traffic by 12%. Use this opportunity to highlight your brand and to engage with consumers.  Statistics are an effective way to persuade your audience. People like interpreting complex details into simple numbers. However, stats alone can easily bore your site visitors. You can refresh your data with a dynamic infographic. You can add charts, graphs, and symbols to tell the full story of your statistics. It will quickly draw people’s eyes to specific sections and encourage them to learn more. Jobvite focuses on stats related to the United States employment. The infographic below uses line and bar graphs plus a map to paint a vivid picture of the economy. Avoid overcrowding your infographics with a bunch of stats. It will confuse the visitor and deter them from the visual experience. Instead, only pick the stats that will bolster the purpose of your infographic. If the stat doesn’t support the overall topic, you can leave it out. 2. Explain a Process It’s better to show, rather than tell. This principle holds true when you want to explain a convoluted process.  Illustrations work as a guide for your audience. If they don’t understand something, the graphic can add context. James Brockbank , an experienced SEO and content marketer, agrees: “Data has a bad name for being boring…however, when you visualize it, it can take a new form and attract those who likely wouldn’t read it when presented in another format.” Think of an infographic as a visual journey. Your goal is to lead visitors through a complete story, from the introduction to the conclusion. This approach will hold people’s attention, and they will engage with the entire infographic. Fix takes its readers through the process of avoiding (and curing) a hangover. Each section of the infographic matches data with an appealing illustration.  A pro tip is to map out your infographic before talking with your designer. That way, you know exactly what graphics and copy you want included in the visual. 3. Showcase Products & Services Before consumers buy anything, they want to see what you’re selling. So, it’s your responsibility to showcase your products. Take accurate photos of your products. Give your audience the chance to experience every angle as if they were purchasing it in the store. If your small business sells services on your website, you still want to invest in an illustration. It should represent the outcome of the service. For instance, hair salons may post a happy woman with a gorgeous haircut. Some brands take the easy route and post various stock photos on their websites. Yet, this shortcut isn’t always receptive to your audience. When asked about the best performing visuals, 41.5% of marketers said that original graphics, such as infographics and illustrations, performed best. So, you’ll want to engage your consumers with one-of-a-kind graphics. You’ll also want to create a consistent brand style with your infographics and illustrations. Check out the example below from Learn Joomla Fast . The company uses bright colors and expressive icons to match its tone and style. Be bold in your design when spotlighting your products. It attracts consumers and keeps them coming back for more. 4. Make Comparisons Apples or oranges. Cars or trucks. Beyonce or Rihanna. Today’s culture likes comparing things. It’s easier for people to understand. Plus, it can build a competitive nature of picking sides.  Comparisons can show similarities between two concepts as well as emphasize their differences. A side-by-side visual makes it useful for your visitors to retain the information.  With this type of illustration, you can tell a compelling narrative. Jack Knopfler , lead content editor at Mammoth Infographics, explains: “Without a powerful narrative, you will end up with a bunch of disconnected data points and a confused audience. A narrative enables your readers to go on a journey through the infographic and leave feeling enhanced.” University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital makes a comparison with the simple illustration below. The graphic designer created sugar cubes and silhouettes of popular brand bottles. With one glance, someone can understand the meaning of the image. From a design perspective, use white space to make your infographic easily scannable. Too much clutter can distract your visitors and move their attention away from your visual. 5. Present a Sequence of Events Timelines work beautifully to display a sequence of events. It adds order to what could be chaos if you just listed a bunch of activities.  If you want to give the history of a topic, a timeline is one of the best options. Your audience can clearly see the progression from one time period to the next. So, make sure your dates are accurate. Rather than displaying the month, day, and year, you can keep it simple by only using the year.  Also, consider the layout of your timeline infographic. A vertical design is practical if you have lots of text and images. A horizontal design is well-suited for timelines with a few dates. Coca-Cola takes its audience down memory lane with a timeline infographic. You learn about the background of the beverage through text and images of the actual bottles. Don’t forget to share your infographic, too. You can add it to your blog content and post it on social media. Get people talking about your work! Get Creative With Visual Content on Your Small Business Website Infographics and illustrations serve as a bridge to connect your audience with your brand. Use these visuals to display statistics, explain a process, or showcase products. Ready to create a professional website? Check out HostGator’s Web Design Services .   Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Product Pages Matter More Than Ever. Here’s How to Make Yours Better

Posted on July 1, 2019 by Hosting

The post Product Pages Matter More Than Ever. Here’s How to Make Yours Better appeared first on HostGator Blog . Pop quiz: Which matters more, your website’s homepage or your product pages? Thanks to the way most people search and shop now, one of your product pages will probably be their first contact with your store. In fact, they may never see your homepage at all. That’s okay–it means people are landing on your product pages when they’re ready to buy. But will they buy from you? It depends on how effective that product page is. Here are some ways to make yours convert. Use SEO to Help Shoppers Find Your Products SEO can be intimidating to new store owners because there are a lot of elements to consider, and best practices change when search engines like Google update the way they index and rank sites. It’s a good idea for any new eCommerce entrepreneur to master the basics of SEO and keep learning. To start, these are some of the elements you’ll want to optimize on your product pages: Page speed There are two things to keep in mind as you check how long it takes your product pages to load. One, this page may be a visitor’s first experience with your store. Two, if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less on their phone, they’re probably going to leave. How can you get a page full of high-resolution product photos and demo videos to load fast? Start with a host that delivers fast load times, like HostGator’s managed WordPress hosting. Choose a theme for your store like Astra or Schema Lite that’s lightweight and doesn’t slow down load times. And follow our recommendations for selecting image formats, sizes, and indexing for better SEO and, yep, faster page loads. Keywords and unique copy You might be tempted to save time by copy-pasting manufacturer descriptions or descriptions from other pages on your site, but this can ding your search rankings. Every product page needs its own unique description that includes the keywords shoppers use to search for that type of item. Go beyond basic keywords like “boys sandals” to so-called long-tail keywords that help people find exactly what they want to buy: “boys soccer sandals” or “toddler boys suede sandals.” This takes time, but it will help your product pages rank higher in the kinds of specific searches people do when they’re ready to make a purchase. Behind-the-scenes SEO Meta tags and schema markup are two elements that customers don’t see, but search engine crawlers do. The meta tags and descriptions on each page tell crawler bots what’s on the page, so make sure those robots can tell it’s a page for a “red enameled tea kettle” or “small martingale dog collar” for better click-through rates. You can also add schema markup to your product pages to generate rich results in Google searches. The easiest way to do this is with Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper . Enter your page URLs and start tagging. Create a Good Customer Experience with Smart Web Design and Copy Google’s UX playbook for eCommerce is full of research-based recommendations for product page improvements. For example, each product page should include a value proposition —a free shipping deal, a coupon code, or something customers can’t get anywhere else.   Don’t be shy about putting product prices up front. Customers prefer it, and if they must hunt for the price they may move on to another store. Google recommends displaying prices above the fold (before a user has to scroll down) on product pages. Make your descriptions easy to read Google suggests bulleted lists, and I agree. No one wants to read a paragraph full of product details on their phone. Customers are more likely to buy if they get the details at a glance. Include customers’ product reviews This is important for any kind of eCommerce site, but it’s absolutely critical if your store has many similar products. This helps shoppers decide which option is right for them without having to leave your store to find reviews. Bonus: customer reviews can help with SEO. First, add reviews to your product pages. Then, use schema markup (see Behind-the-scenes SEO, above) to format your reviews for rich search results. Add secondary calls to action “Add to cart” is the most important CTA on every product page, but not every shopper is ready to buy right now. Maybe they’re on their phone and don’t want to enter credit card data on a tiny screen. Maybe they’re at work and their break is coming to an end. Secondary CTAs like “add to wishlist,” “save for later,” and “add to favorites” encourage your customers to come back later to complete their purchase. Test, Adjust, Repeat How will you know if your product pages are working well? Test them! Marketers use A/B testing to compare the effectiveness of two different versions of one element—an image, a headline, a call-to-action button, even the color of your page background. Once you know whether version A or version B gets better results (more click-throughs, more sales), you know which one to stick with. For an in-depth example of A/B testing, you can read how we A/B tested 300 million emails to find the best design elements. To begin A/B testing elements on your pages, you can register for a free Google Optimize account . Optimize integrates with your site’s Google Analytics, and it walks you step-by-step through the process of optimizing your online store. The very first step? Create an A/B test. You’ll get a tutorial that shows you what to test, how set it up, how long your test should run, and how to manage and get reports on your tests. Ready to start setting up your online store? Choose one of HostGator’s managed WordPress hosting plans for fast load times, easy set-up, and free SSL certificates for site security. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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7 Tips to Choose a Website Design That Converts Customers

Posted on June 7, 2019 by Hosting

The post 7 Tips to Choose a Website Design That Converts Customers appeared first on HostGator Blog . Your website design has a lot of work to do. It should look professional, make it easy for visitors to find what they need, and show visitors why you’re the person to do business with. But the most important thing a good design does is help to close the deal. How can your website’s design help convert visitors into customers? Here are 7 must-know tips to get you started. 1. Start with SSL SSL certificates aren’t part of your website’s design, but I’m including them here because your site’s SSL status is often the first thing visitors notice. It can be the element that determines whether they stay or flee. When you have an SSL certificate for your site, your domain name starts with https instead of http. And the green padlock symbol will show up next to your URL in visitor’s browser bars. People trust the padlock. SSL is important for three reasons: Most browsers flag sites without SSL as “not secure”. Sometimes that warning scares visitors off. SSL matters for SEO. Google has used SSL status as a ranking signal since 2014, and in a search-result ranking tie between one site with https and one with http, https wins. SSL encrypts the data your customers enter on your website. That stops hackers and data thieves from stealing personal and payment information. This protects your customers and your business reputation. Did you know? All HostGator plans come with a free SSL certificate . 2. Mobile Formatting Matters Your website must display beautifully on a mobile screen. Mobile-first design is the cornerstone of modern websites because so many of us spend so much time browsing on our phones. You can find mobile friendly templates for WordPress websites or you can hire a designer with a strong portfolio of mobile-first designs. 3. Make a Great First Impression With Your Product Pages This doesn’t mean you have to throw all your company information on every product page, but it’s important to remember that any of your product pages maybe the first impression a visitor has of your website. Let’s say you sell gear and supplies for exotic birds. You may have a fantastic home page, but maybe visitors are arriving at your site through searches for cuttlebones or parakeet playgrounds or parrot perches—and they go right to those product pages from their search results. Each of those pages needs to include your company name, a brief summary of your shipping and returns policies, pricing, and a navigation menu that lets them quickly explore the rest of your website without having to hunt around. 4. Invite Visitors to Linger with Category Landing Pages We’ve blogged before about the importance of structuring your product categories so they’re easy for search engines and human beings to navigate. And each category page is prime real estate for product photos, keywords, and informative content that can help your customers decide what to buy. Back to our exotic bird website example. Let’s say your product categories are food, treats, grooming, health, habitats, and toys. Your habitat category page should include photos of your most popular cages, perches, and playscapes, along with descriptive text that includes the keywords people use to find your products. This is the ideal place for a guide explaining how to choose the right enclosure or a checklist of must-have elements in a bird enclosure. All this content, if it’s tagged and written properly, can help boost your SEO and show customers that you’re a resource for information as well as products. 5. Make Your Calls-to-Action Count Every page on your site should include a call to action (CTA). A CTA is a short statement telling your visitors what you’d like them to do next. For example, on your exotic bird habitat category landing page, your CTA is “find your bird’s new roost now.” On product pages, the CTA is “add to cart.” You can also have a secondary CTA for people who aren’t quite ready to take the plunge—”add to wish list” or “save for later.” On the cart page, the CTA is “checkout.” At every step of the way, your CTA gives customers a little nudge to take the next step toward conversion. That’s sales psychology 101. It’s also super important in an age where most of us have a bunch of browser tabs and apps open at once and our attention is highly fragmented. 6. Create a Low-Friction Checkout Experience So, you have a parrot parent visiting your site, reading your content, choosing a new enclosure, adding it to their cart, and hitting the checkout button. This next part of the website must be designed properly to keep that customer from abandoning their cart. Between 70 and 85% of all e-commerce carts get ditched before customers complete their purchases. Part of the reason is bad checkout design that makes customers work too hard to give stores their money. Design your checkout so it requires as little effort from your customers as possible, while remaining secure and protecting you from potential fraud. Let your customers auto-fill their name and address information. Don’t make them create an account to check out. Let them use an online payment service like Square or PayPal so they don’t have to fish around for a credit card. Design it right, and your customers are more likely to convert.   7. Consider Outsourcing Your Website Design to Experts There are plenty of resources for designing your own website, especially if you’re using WordPress, because there are so many templates you can buy or use for free. If you’re not confident in your design skills or would rather focus on other aspects of your business, you can hire a design service with experience building mobile-friendly websites. Ready to get started? Sign up for professional website design services from HostGator and outsource that process today. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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4 Free or Inexpensive Resources to Help You Start Your Online Business

Posted on May 22, 2019 by Hosting

The post 4 Free or Inexpensive Resources to Help You Start Your Online Business appeared first on HostGator Blog . There’s a lot to learn before (and after) you start your own business, and if you don’t have a business degree or previous experience running an online business, your exciting plans can feel a bit overwhelming. So can sorting through all the advice and information out there for new and would-be business owners. To help you get off to a strong start on a small budget, here are some reliable free and low-cost resources to help you plan, launch, and grow your new business. 1. Mentoring from Experienced Professionals Want answers to specific business questions or insights from someone who’s been there and done that? SCORE is a nonprofit supported by the US Small Business Administration that provides free, confidential mentoring for entrepreneurs in person, online, and by phone. With more than 10,000 volunteers providing advice nationwide, the odds are good that you can connect with someone in your niche. You can enter your location on SCORE’s Find a Mentor page to see all the SCORE volunteer mentors near you, search for mentors by industry or keyword, and find the closest SCORE office. The SCORE website also has a resource library full of blog posts, webinars, podcasts, videos, and templates on thousands of topics. Some of the webinars charge a small fee but most of the resources are free.    2. Courses to Build Your Business Skills Khan Academy has a group of videos in its Careers section that feature different small business owners and freelancers talking about what they do, how much they earn, how they work, and how they got started. The range of careers covered is relatively small, but even if your niche isn’t included, there’s good advice on running a business in several of the presentations, and you can get an idea of all the tasks that go into being your own boss. If you’re ready to tackle business topics at the college level, check out OpenCourseWare from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The site provides free access to the materials for most of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate-level courses. You can search by academic department for classes on accounting, marketing, and other business topics. Or you can explore OpenCourseWare’s Entrepreneurship portal , which includes dozens of classes covering planning, pricing, finance and accounting, marketing, patents, sales, operations, and much more. The only catch? It’s up to you to download and work through the course materials on your own. Coursera also offers college-level instruction, and it provides graded assignments and feedback in courses from universities around the world. Unlike traditional distance-learning classes, Coursera courses don’t come with a traditional tuition price tag. Some courses can be audited for free, and if you want to earn a certificate or access all the course features, a subscription plan runs about $50 per month. One Coursera option for budding business owners is Michigan State University’s 6-course specialization program called How to Start Your Own Business , which is designed to walk students through the process of starting their own businesses as they launch it. The classes you may need will depend on the type of business you want to run. Planning an e-commerce business? OpenCourseWare’s undergrad-level Economics and E-Commerce course materials cover pricing, sales taxes, different types of e-commerce, advertising, and search. One recommendation from me: If you’re planning a service business like freelance design or writing, event planning, or repairs, it’s a good idea to learn as much as you can about negotiation before you begin, both to earn what you’re worth and to build good relationships with good clients. Becoming a good negotiator can help you in many areas of your business, from setting rates and writing bids to working with vendors and hammering out the fine print in contracts. Coursera offers more than 50 negotiation courses, and MIT OpenCourseWare offers materials for several negotiation classes from the Sloan School of Management’s curriculum. Whatever you decide to study now, remember that successful business owners are always learning. Free and low-cost courses are a low-stress way to keep up with trends and innovations in your niche. 3. Guidance for Building a User-Friendly eCommerce Website In late 2018, Google published its UX Playbook for Retail : Collection of best practices to delight your users. Google reviewed hundreds of retail sites to come up with its recommendations, and the result is probably the best free resource you’re going to find for learning what to include on your site and why to include it. The free-to-download playbook uses Sephora, Warby Parker, Boots, ThredUp and other best-in-class e-commerce sites to show you exactly what works for six key areas: the homepage or landing page, menus and navigation, search, products and categories, conversion, and forms. For each area, there are details on what to include and what to avoid, to help you create a site that looks professional and is frustration-free for shoppers. There are also charts showing the ease of implementation, impact, and key metrics to track for each suggestion in the playbook. Don’t let the playbook’s 108-page length discourage you from diving in. The guide’s design—lots of screenshots, checklists, and charts—makes it a fast, informative read you can consult as you plan each section of your site. 4. Easy Tools to Create Your Website DIY website design used to be reserved for hardy amateurs who enjoy coding and don’t mind spending time tinkering and consulting support forums. For the rest of us, website builders have opened up high-quality site design to anyone who can drag and drop. Site builders like Gator Website Builder make setting up a small business website or even an online store fast and easy by packaging everything you need to get started and making the design process a snap. For example, every Gator plan includes site hosting, domain name registration, an SSL certificate to protect your data and your customers, analytics to help you measure and improve your site’s performance, and support. You also get unlimited pages, storage, and bandwidth so there’s no limit to how much your site can grow as you add products, services, and testimonials from your best customers. You can also upgrade to Gator Premium for priority support or to Gator eCommerce for priority support plus online store functionality. Ready to get started? Choose your Gator Website Builder plan now . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How and Why to Keep Your Website Fresh

Posted on May 9, 2019 by Hosting

The post How and Why to Keep Your Website Fresh appeared first on HostGator Blog . Want to keep visitors coming back to your site? Keep it fresh. Stale content, outdated site technology, and passé design can cause visitors to move on in search of more timely information, a faster-loading site, or a site that doesn’t look like a time capsule from a bygone era. Freshness can help you earn new visitors, too. Frequently updated content gets crawled more often by search-engine bots, so your site is less likely to get buried by newer items in search results. Keeping up with the latest technical standards, like fast-loading pages and mobile-friendly design, can help your site’s search results performance, too. 1. Keep Website Content Fresh with a Content Calendar Content is what visitors come to your site for, whether it’s new blog posts, photos, videos, or products. If you don’t already have a content calendar—a schedule for creating and adding new content to your site—start by making one. Your content calendar can be as simple as reminders in your existing Google calendar or as comprehensive as a WordPress plugin like Editorial Calendar that lets you schedule, edit, and publish your WordPress posts easily. 2. Bring Older Content Up to Date Of course, the more new content you publish, the bigger your archive of older content will be. Don’t let that material get stale. You can get more views for your older content by linking to it in some of your new posts. You can also use the related content feature in the free version of the Jetpack WordPress plugin to find and display related posts at the bottom of each new post you create. Your older content may need updating to keep it reliable and relevant. Information changes, links get broken, and you may have new insights to add to your previous posts. If your archived posts number in the hundreds or thousands, keeping it all updated may seem like an impossible task. That’s why it’s a best practice to start your update program with what’s called your “cornerstone content”—the best performing and most relevant articles on your site. Build reminders into your content calendar to update these pieces every 6 to 12 months. Once you’ve got that cornerstone content up to date, add reviews and updates to your content calendar for your non-blog content, too, like your About and Contact pages. 3. Repurpose Your Older Content Let’s say your foodie blog has an old post about sous vide cooking basics. Now that sous vide cooking is trendy, think about how you can repackage the information in that old post to grow your audience. You could turn the basic steps into an infographic or slide deck to share on social media. You could also create a video based on your post to share on social media and YouTube. Got a bunch of short posts about sous vide tips and tools? Try combining them into one big new post. Or maybe now’s the time to put all that information into an eBook that your visitors can download if they sign up for your newsletter. 4. Keep an Eye on Keyword Data Check your Google Search Console data to see what keywords are bringing visitors to your site. If your content doesn’t already contain the most popular keywords your site visitors are using, it’s time to revise some of your posts to include those keywords—where they’re a natural fit. You can also use those keywords as a list of potential topics for new content. 5. Update Your Web Design It’s not only your content that you want to keep fresh and interesting. The appearance of your site will get stale over time, too—especially to frequent visitors. It may also be time for a web design makeover if: Your site doesn’t look good on mobile browsers. This is huge. If your site is hard to read or navigate on a smartphone screen, you need to make finding a mobile-friendly theme your top priority. You’re rebranding your blog or business and have a new logo, tagline, and colors. You’re adding a lot of new functionality to your site (a blog, an online store, online courses) and you want to visually cue visitors in to the fact that you’ve made big changes. The easiest way to update the look of your site is with a new theme. You can buy a theme or find one for free. HostGator’s managed WordPress hosting and Gator Website Builder plans include access to free themes. And we’ve recommended some of our favorite WordPress themes here on the blog. Before you make any live changes to your site theme, install a few themes and preview them to see how they look with your content. Before you activate your new theme, back up your site in case you need to revert to your old theme while you make some adjustments to the new one. 6. Upgrade Your Website Functionality We’ve already mentioned mobile-friendliness as a website must-have. As a site owner, you also get to stay on top of SEO best practices, tools like schema.org markup for rich results in search, and your site’s performance compared to the benchmarks set by Google, so your site doesn’t get left in the dust by newer, faster alternatives. Yoast SEO is a popular SEO plugin for WordPress sites , because it delivers frequent updates and provides lots of user education. To help you format rich search results for your content, All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets lets you build markups without coding and then preview the results before you publish. As for speed, it’s smart to regularly test your most important pages for mobile and desktop speed using Google’s Test My Site and Page Speed Insights tools. Each test will give you a score and detailed suggestions on how to speed up your site if you need to make improvements. Is It Time to Update Your Website? Together, these regular updates and checks will help you keep up with your visitors’ expectations for up-to-date content, visual interest, and a site that meets current performance standards. When did you last freshen up your site? What do you plan to update next? Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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