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10 Ways to Get Your Website in Shape for the New Year in 2019

Posted on November 12, 2018 by Hosting

The post 10 Ways to Get Your Website in Shape for the New Year in 2019 appeared first on HostGator Blog . A New Year should come with new goals for your business . As you work through your end-of-year to do list – reevaluating your finances, hiring new employees, and deciding which tactics to embrace or toss aside in the year to come – it’s important that you make plans to maintain your website along with your larger business. Your website is the main way a lot of people interact with your brand, after all. “One of the most often overlooked components—yet one of the most critical—to any successful website strategy is ongoing maintenance. While the initial website project is critical to creating the right foundation, the ongoing maintenance and upkeep is where you’ll really see your website shine,” writes Don Cranford , principal and director of technology at Katalyst Solutions. If you’ve tended to let general maintenance of your website slide over the years, make it one of your goals moving into the New Year to correct that. Here are a few action items to add to your to-do list now to get your website in shape for 2019. 1. Evaluate your analytics. Analytics are the ultimate tool for examining the health of your website traffic . It’s vital for your team to understand how your visitors and qualified leads find your business. Knowing whether people come to your website from organic search, paid search, or Facebook tells you a lot about how your online marketing efforts are working. And keeping an eye on your analytics as part of regular website maintenance can save you trouble down the line. Kim Garst , founder and CEO of Boom! Social, offers the following suggestion, “Compile a bunch of blog posts on a particular topic, and promote them as a multi-day e-course. Each day, send one email (blog post) to your new subscribers to help them accomplish whatever goal you have promised to help them achieve.” Don’t be afraid to revisit your content archives and promote your old content anew. Your audience that’s been with you for a while may appreciate the refresher, and your new audience will get to see some of your old hits for the first time.   5. Revamp your homepage. Your website’s homepage will be the first impression you make on many visitors – you’d better make it a good one. Your homepage should accomplish a few main goals:   Clearly communicate your brand’s positioning (why should a customer choose you?)   Look professional (you don’t want to scare new visitors off by looking like you’re still in the 90s )   Answer the main questions people may have (where you’re located, contact information, etc.)   Make it easy for people to know where to go next Update your design by tweaking the navigation of your site. Anticipate where consumers will click and provide clear calls-to-action to help them locate what they need. Eliminate any wording that doesn’t benefit the visitor. Too many words can distract customers from their intended reason for checking out your site. In the example below, HostGator customer  Hiatus Spa + Retreat  uses their site to say more with less. The website looks clean and professional, has a clear CTA, and provides an intuitive menu for those who want to find more information. A few words and vivid imagery can go a long way. Make the best first impression by showcasing a modern, uncluttered homepage. It’ll give clarity and accessibility to your visitors.   6. Review and improve your calls-to-action (CTAs). Every page on your website should be designed with a clear goal in mind. You should always know what you want your visitor to do next, and it should be obvious to them how to do it. The CTAs you include on each page have an important job to do , but you shouldn’t just assume they’re all doing that job. Check your analytics to see how often the people who visit your pages are taking the action you most want them to. Then do some experimenting. Work up different variations on your CTAs – try different visual designs, different wording, and different locations on the page. Try out different CTAs on different pages to see if some work better when paired with specific content. Do A/B testing to confirm which of the CTAs you try work best. The more data you have, the more you can refine your website so that people are more likely to take the steps you want them to.   7. Fix any checkout process issues. Everything else you design your website to accomplish leads back to the main end goal of sales. If you’re not driving revenue, you won’t last. To meet your sales goals, your checkout process must be frictionless. Jeremy Said . If you discover that customers hate creating member registrations, one solution is to try a social login. This one-click alternative will help consumers move through the checkout process faster. If you’ve noticed the checkout seems to stop at the moment the customer sees the cost of shipping , think about offering flat-rate shipping or free shipping for qualifying orders. Anything that stops the sale from happening is bad for business. Figure out what roadblocks are in your customer’s pathway and remove them.   8. Make sure your security’s up-to-date. Every time a story about a data breach makes waves, people get a little more nervous about handing their credit card information over to businesses. You can’t help what happens in the news, but you can take steps to keep your own website secure and ensure all the private information your customers give you is protected. Go through our web security checklist and make sure your security measures are up to date. There are some easy ways to reduce vulnerabilities in your website to make your customer data safer. You owe it to your customers to do your part in protecting them.   9. Check your domain registration. This is a simple step to take, but one you have to remember to do every year. Contact your hosting provider to learn when your registration will expire. If it’s due soon, go ahead and pay for the renewal, and consider signing up for auto-renewals for future registrations. And remember to update any contact information—business name, address, and phone number. It also may be time to purchase a new domain for upcoming brand changes . So, ask your provider for details about availability and prices. Sometimes the smallest things in your business are overlooked. Make sure your domain registration continues so you can offer uninterrupted service to your customers 10. Reinvest in your brand community. This is less something that you do to your website, and more something that you do for it. As your business grows, it’s essential to keep your brand community engaged. Make a plan this year to give your consumers the engagement they deserve. Respond promptly to comments left on your blog posts. Take time to say thanks in response to positive reviews and ensure that no complaint goes unanswered. Interact with users on social media – plan to be quick and polite at least, but if your social media manager is up to it, try to be clever or entertaining as well. Experiment with starting a new loyalty program or making improvements to the one you have. Brand ambassadors serve as an extension of your company. If they’re not satisfied, you may expose your business to unwanted negative publicity. Get reacquainted with your target audience. A dedicated community opens the door to business opportunities.   A New Year, A Better Website It’s time to roll up your sleeves. The New Year is a time to reflect and reassess your business’s needs, and that includes your website. A better website is part of running a better business. A few tweaks now could garner you better results in the year to come and ensure your website can continue to do the important job it does for your business. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Web Design Best Practices: A Helpful Guide

Posted on October 26, 2018 by Hosting

The post Web Design Best Practices: A Helpful Guide appeared first on HostGator Blog . Your website is the main face of your brand online. And building your website with best practices in mind will ensure your brand is putting its best foot forward. What people see when they visit it influences how they see your brand – online and off. And your web design largely defines how people experience your website. In short, web design is important. A bad web design can make your website layout look unprofessional, lose visitors’ trust, or make it difficult for them to find what they’re looking for (and therefore increasing instead of reducing your bounce rates ). A good website design shows your visitors you know what you’re doing and that it’s worth sticking around and interacting with your brand. Whether you’re working on a building new website or launching a re-design for the one you already have, there are a few important web design best practices you should honor. 1. Make Your Site Navigation Intuitive. Part of the design process is figuring out how to organize all the pages and what to include in your website menus . Getting your site organization right is both important for your website architecture and because it determines how easy navigating your website is for visitors. When deciding what pages, categories, and subcategories to include in your website’s menus, think first about your visitors. What will make it easier for the average visitor to find what they’re looking for? But also decide what the most important pages you want them to find are. Strive to organize your website in a way that will make it just as intuitive to a first-time visitor as it is to someone who knows it well.   2. Maintain a Consistent Style. If you visited a website that had a specific style on the home page but changed to something completely different on the next page you linked on, you’d find the change confusing. You might wonder if you were in the right place at all or had somehow navigated away from the site you thought you were on. You don’t want your site visitors to deal with that kind of confusion. Early on in the design process, sit down to develop a web design style guide . A style guide is a useful web design tool that will help you make sure all the pages on your website visually match well enough to let visitors know they’re all related to each other as well as to your brand. Make sure it includes: The website’s color scheme The logo design to use (and any variations on it in terms of size and shape you’ll use throughout the site) The font(s) The visual style (for example, do you want a minimalist feel? A playful one?) As you move into the particulars of designing the site, your style guide will be a helpful resource to keep you on track.   3. Design Each Page With a Goal in Mind. You’re not just designing a website for fun, you want it to accomplish something. And even if you have one overarching goal for the whole website, different web pages will need to have more specific goals. For example, an eCommerce website will primarily be designed to get people to make purchases. But in order to do that, some pages will be focused on getting people to visit the website to begin with, so they’ll have the primary goal of improving search engine optimization  or encouraging social shares. Other pages will more directly try to get people to click that “Buy” button. Clearly define the specific goal you want and  to accomplish this and make sure your design for it centers the goal.   4. Keep Each Page Focused. Another good web design tip that goes hand in hand with having a specific goal for each web page is to make sure your pages have a clear focus. Don’t try to do too much on any one webpage. You don’t want your web pages to look cluttered – that not only makes it look bad (which makes visitors more likely to click away), but it also presents too many distractions. How will people know the next best step to take, if your page is filled with so many links and images and text that they can’t figure out what to focus on? If you realize a particular web page has too much going on, split it up into multiple pages. Having separate pages that each has a more clear focus will be good for user experience and improve your opportunities to optimize for SEO.   5. Make Your Website Responsive. Mobile use now surpasses computer use ,  and every year the amount of time people spend on the web on mobile devices only grows. For website owners, that means your web design has to prioritize the mobile friendly experience . In most cases, the best option for creating a website that works well both on desktop and mobile devices is to build a responsive website. Responsive web design involves identifying breakpoints on the page where the page can be cut off and everything to the side moved below the breakpoint without the experience losing anything. That’s why mobile devices often display the same images and text, but with all elements of the page that appear alongside each other on the desktop showing up as stacked above and below each other. When designing each page on your website, you need to define at least three breakpoints to ensure your pages work well on each of the three main device sizes (although many designers prefer to use more). To a large degree, responsive websites have become common enough that most web design tools or designers you turn to will automatically employ best practices for responsive web design. As just one example, all of the templates offered with HostGator’s website builder are responsive, so even newbie website owners that don’t know anything about HTML or other coding languages can easily create a website that’s responsive. No matter what web design tools you use though, make sure you design your website with mobile in mind and use responsive design best practices.   6. Use Fluid Images. Fluid images  can aid in responsive web design and improve user experience on your website. You can make any of the images you use fluid with the right HTML code. If you add “max-width: 100%” to the source code for the image, you’re letting browsers know to resize the image to fit the page on every device. As an example, the full code would look like: This will keep your images from blocking text or other parts of the page on devices where they outgrow the section of the page you want them to stay contained within.   7. Make Clickable Elements Large Enough for Mobile. Another important component of good mobile-friendly website design is thinking about how people use their mobile devices. Clicking a small button on a computer is easy with the pointer that you have total control over and that can get very specific in what it points to. On a mobile device though, you have to be able to “click” that same button by touching it with your finger. If a link or button is too small, or worse, if you have different links located too close together, your users will struggle to get the links to work. When designing your web pages, make sure you test each one out on a small mobile device to confirm that all the links and buttons are easy to use.   8. Use Visual Hierarchies. This relates back to the goals you developed for each page of your website. Every page will include the most important information that you want people to notice, as well as additional information and design elements that matter, but aren’t of the same level of importance. In order to make sure that every visitor on every device sees the most important parts of the page before moving on, develop a visual hierarchy for each web page. The most important elements need to go at the top so they show up for everybody, and the other parts of the page can fall further down for the people interested enough to keep scrolling to see the whole page.   9. Make Your Site Accessible. Your visitors don’t all interact with the web in the same way. While that’s useful to consider in general, it’s an even more important point to remember when designing for people with different types of disabilities. An important web design tip to keep in mind during the design process is, therefore, to aim for inclusivity and accessibility. The Web Accessibility Initiative has outlined a number of Accessibility Principles for web designers to honor when creating their websites. The people who benefit most from accessible web design may be in the minority, but some are very likely in your target audience. By building an accessible website, you open your brand up to a wider audience and can build goodwill with a community that’s often underserved.   10. Stick to Design Standards. Have you ever been confused by a website that has its menu in a different spot than you’re used to? Or had a hard time closing a pop up that had the X in a weird spot? While web designers can often benefit from finding ways to be creative or unique, there are certain  web design standards that  define how people interact with websites and what they expect to find. When you move away from these norms, you risk creating confusion and a negative experience for your customers. A few of the main standards it’s a best practice to stick with include:     Putting your logo in the top left     Putting contact information in the top right     Having your main menu stretch across the top of the screen     Putting your value proposition high up on the home page     Including a CTA high up on the home page     Adding a search feature to the header When you think about it, everything on that list is probably exactly what you expect to see when you visit a website. If you’re going to venture away from these standards, make sure you think thoughtfully about why and make sure you’re not creating unnecessary confusion in the process.   A Good Design Makes for a Good Website Your web design determines how your website will look and feel to the people that visit it. Getting it right is paramount to the success of your website . Take some time to understand the main web design best practices and create a website that people will find useful and intuitive. 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Top 15 Web Design Trends 2018

Posted on September 12, 2018 by Hosting

The post Top 15 Web Design Trends 2018 appeared first on HostGator Blog . Your average internet user may not notice it day by day, but web design trends are always changing. We can all agree that what looked good to visitors in the 90’s certainly wouldn’t play well today, but noticing the more subtle changes in design that happen each year is harder. The shifts in web design norms are slow, but they’re worth paying attention to. Even if you’re not a great web designer and your skills begin and end with what you can do in a website builder , you can avoid waking up one day to realize your website is hopelessly outdated by reading up on the web design trends of 2018. 1. Responsive Design Responsive websites are not a new web design trend in 2018, but they’re an important enough one to still include here. As mobile usage only seems to keep going up – it first surpassed desktop a couple of years ago – making sure your website works at least as well on mobile devices as it does on bigger screens is crucial. Visitors quite simply won’t stick around if your website provides a disappointing mobile experience, and it’s bad for SEO on top of everything else. While you could create a separate version of your website that works well on mobile devices from the one people see on desktop, for most businesses the better option is to make one website that’s responsive. On a responsive website, each page has all the same copy, images, and elements no matter what device you view it on, but they’re arranged differently based on the size of the screen. An image that shows up next to the text on your desktop may show up below it on a smaller screen, for instance. Making your website responsive ensures that your mobile users get all the same information and value from your website, while still having a user friendly experience. As an added tip, if creating a responsive website sounds intimidating, consider a website builder that offers responsive templates. Most of the work will already be done for you. 2. Chatbots You’ve probably noticed in your own internet surfing that a lot of business websites now have a little window pop up at the bottom right side of the screen when you land on the website, giving you the chance to chat with a representative. Adding a chat window like this to your website means any visitor with a question can have it answered immediately. But for many websites, having someone available to answer those questions in real time is too much of a challenge. One possible solution:  utilizing a  chatbot . You can program a chatbot to answer the most common questions your customers have so that most visitors still get their answer right away. For questions the chatbot doesn’t know, you can at least program it to provide details on how best to get in touch with a live representative so your visitor still knows what to do next. Chatbots don’t make sense for every type of website , but if you have a business website and you frequently hear a few main questions from your visitors, they can save your staff time while still providing your visitors with a good experience.   3. Animation Autoplay videos are very much out, but that doesn’t mean your website has to be completely static. You can add some movement to your web design with some simple animations. A growing number of websites are working animations into the background or images of web pages. A good animation will draw the eye and capture a visitor’s interest, without distracting from the main information you want them to see on the page. It’s a web design trend that makes your website a little more engaging and adds some personality. 4. Microinteractions Microinteractions take animation one step further in terms of user engagement. These are animations that respond to what the user does on the page. If you notice a website changing when you mouse over a particular spot, or an animation that’s triggered by scrolling down – those are microinteractions. These create a positive user experience because they hand visitors power over what they see as they interact with the site. Knowing your actions shape the design in front of you is a good feeling, even if it’s only in minor ways. Microinteractions are becoming more common around the web, making them a good web design trend to have on your radar in 2018.   5. Original Illustrations Stock photography’s easy, but it doesn’t add any personality to your website. That’s why many website owners are now turning to original illustrations for the images on their pages. Custom illustrations do come at a cost – artists must be paid – but they can transform the style of your website and create an entirely unique experience. Custom illustrations often feel playful, while still doing the work of communicating something about your brand. You get to choose the colors you want to include and can craft imagery that might be hard to stage in a photo. If you can find a good artist for your website, they’re a good way to inject some extra personality into the website experience.   6. Including Social Proof So far, most of these website design trends come with a fairly hefty price tag that may be out of reach for small businesses or websites devoted to passions rather than profit. This one is much more affordable. Social proof is a way to convince new visitors that you’re awesome by showing evidence of your success with other visitors. For a business, it could be logos of companies you work with or testimonials from other customers. For a blog, it could be publishing the number of email subscribers you have. You can (and should) tell other people how awesome your website is in your copy, but your words aren’t going to mean as much to visitors as proof that other people like them think you’re awesome. Find a way to work social proof into the design of your website to better highlight your value to new visitors. 7. Hamburger Menus This is a controversial web design trend that’s commonly used on apps and mobile websites because it’s an easy way to provide a menu that takes up very little space. The hamburger icon itself is very small, and it opens up your main menu when you click on it.  As it’s become more familiar to internet users with the growth of mobile, its use has started to spill over into the design of desktop websites as well. A hamburger menu removes the list of pages in your main menu from all the pages of your website and puts them behind the hamburger icon. If you want a website that has a very clean design, it allows you to include fewer elements on each page while still providing the navigation items your visitors need. As mentioned though, it is a controversial web design trend. It may not be right for your audience. This is a trend you should be very intentional about considering – only use it if you have a good reason.   8. Rounder Edges For a while buttons, windows, and containers on websites tended to have sharp corners. Recently more web designers are starting to shift their website designs toward softer, rounder edges. This is a web design trend you can see in buttons and chat windows around the web. Plenty of websites still maintain their sharp edges, and some use a mix of both. This isn’t a trend that’s outright replaced the former way of doing things. But if you want to keep the shapes on your website a little softer, you’ll be in line with one of the web design trends of 2018.   9. Tactile Design Another common trend of the past was keeping web design flat. Many websites are now starting to buck the old trend by adding more shadowing and depth to the images on their pages. Tactile design can bring the images on your website more to life for your visitors. In addition, it provides a way to add emphasis to your images. The difference is often subtle, but it changes the user experience of your website and adds a little more realism.   10. Unique Fonts Choosing a unique font is an easy way to add some personality to your website and make it stand out a bit more. Fonts are part of a website that many visitors don’t really notice, but you can use your font choice to add some additional style to your website and draw more attention to important words. Make sure that any font you choose is easy for your visitors to read. Style shouldn’t trump clarity here. But as long as you keep the text on your website legible for all your visitors, you can use your font choice as a way to add some extra personality to your site.   11. Asymmetry A bold choice that’s showing up on some websites now is asymmetric design. Using asymmetry in your web design provides a unique experience for your visitors, especially as it’s still not a particularly common design choice at this stage. This web design option definitely isn’t for everybody. Because it’s uncommon and unexpected, it might be less intuitive for some visitors. And it can complicate a website’s ability to remain responsive. But if you want to provide a website experience that’s outside of the box, going asymmetrical can do that.   12. Accessible Design If you don’t have any disabilities yourself, you’ve probably approached web design in the past without thinking about how people with disabilities will experience your website. That’s unfortunately normal – many web designers just haven’t had accessibility top of mind in the past. But that’s beginning to change. One of the web design trends of 2018 is working to make websites more accessible for everyone. Design magazines and blogs have started to provide tips for more accessible web design. Designing an accessible website requires broadening your perspective and doing a little work, but when you commit to it, you open up your site to an audience that was left out before.   13. Data Visualization “Big data” has been a buzzword for a few years now and businesses in all industries have seen the growing influence of data on the tools and latest trends that shape how we do business. Perhaps it was only a matter of time until the influence of data made its way to web design as well. Many websites are now incorporating data visualization into their design. In some cases it becomes a part of the main website, in others they launch a separate site to highlight valuable data they’ve created. In either case, data visualization becomes a part of the story the brand tells and the visual identity they have on the web.   14. Bold Colors A lot of the web design trends for 2018 are about standing out and this is no exception. Many websites are employing color schemes that are bright and bold. Bright colors provide a distinctive experience that make your website more memorable. You can use your color choices strategically to draw attention to parts of the website you most want people to see. This is another website design trend that isn’t for everyone. Some brands will be better served with more subtle colors, but if you’re looking for a way to make your website stand out and really get attention, making bold color choices could do the trick.   15. Floating Navigation Most of the websites you visit have their navigation in the same place: across the top of the website. Some websites are experimenting with different options though. We already talked about the hamburger menu option, but another possibility is floating navigation.   Floating navigation stays visible even as you scroll down the page. It provides a unique experience, but also offers the practical benefit of keeping all the navigation options present and visible no matter where your visitor is on the page. You can see an example of what that looks like on the Anchor and Orbit website . As yet, it’s not a particularly common web design trend. But for any website owner looking for another way to stand out, it makes your website a little more distinctive.   Staying on Trend in 2018 As in any year, in 2018 make sure that everything about your website design puts the user first. Trying out something new that you think looks cool or interesting is fine, but only if you’re confident your target audience will respond to it as well. Following website design trends can often be worth it, but paying attention to your visitors is always more important. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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What’s a Progressive Web App, and Does Your Site Need One?

Posted on May 22, 2018 by Hosting

The post What’s a Progressive Web App, and Does Your Site Need One? appeared first on HostGator Blog . Why So Many Sites Are Building Progressive Web Apps Remember a couple of years ago when everyone was telling site owners to implement responsive design for smartphone users? Responsive design still matters, but the mobile-usability goalposts are moving toward progressive web apps (PWAs) . What are PWAs? PWAs occupy the space between desktopssites with responsive mobile display and full-blown mobile apps that users have to download and install. PWAs load fast, get right to the point, use minimal data, work offline, send push notifications and put icons on users’ homescreens, all without the development investment in an app. Is a PWA right for your site? If so, how can you build one? Let’s take a look. Google has the definitive list of PWA criteria , but in very simple terms, PWAs are web sites that act like apps. PWAs are at least twice as fast as responsive websites, which means that even if you have a responsive template to make your site as mobile-friendly as possible , a progressive web app may still offer some specific advantages, depending on what your site does and what your goals are.   What are the advantages of PWAs? Progressive web apps can benefit retailers, information providers, NGOs, and their users.   1. PWAs can boost sales Many retailers who add PWAs report mobile sales growth, because PWAs help overcome some of the issues that cause mobile shoppers to bail out before buying, such as difficult navigation, slow load times, and fussy data-entry at checkout. After launching its progressive web app, cosmetics company Lancome saw a 17% increase in mobile revenue in the US market. AliExpress, the China-based merchant marketplace, saw conversion rates rise by 104% after its PWA went live . Clearly, customers are happy to make purchases on their phones as long as the process is easy, and PWAs can make it so. 2. PWAs load fast and use less data Most smartphone users will wait 3 seconds tops for your site to load. After that, they’re gone. A PWA speeds up load times, which is good for all users, whether they’re impatient city dwellers who are multitasking at top speed or people in rural, backcountry, or developing areas who want to make the most of their limited connectivity. A good non-retail example of a PWA is the UN’s ReliefWeb. The huge humanitarian-crisis information portal has a full site (below, left) with maps, slideshows, a Twitter feed, and more. The site loads fast for people using the type of internet connection common in major Western cities. But for aid workers in remote locations and disaster zones, it’s not as useful as ReliefWeb’s “lite” site (below, right), which debuted in December 2017 . The PWA distills the content to easy-to-scroll headlines and a small navigation menu. Continue reading →

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QuickBooks Desktop Sync

Posted on May 15, 2018 by Hosting

Don’t have QuickBooks Online? No problem. Use our easy QuickBooks Desktop Sync module to export any WHMCS data into an IIF file for easy imp… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1711413&goto=newpost Continue reading →

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