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12 Online Copywriting Tips to Improve Your Website

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Hosting

The post 12 Online Copywriting Tips to Improve Your Website appeared first on HostGator Blog . An impressive online presence matters. It’s the difference between visitors learning more about you or losing interest in your brand. To grab your target audience’s attention, upgrade your copywriting skills to engage with visitors. Effective copy helps your business sell more products, boost brand awareness, and dominate the competition. But, several factors influence how you write online. From the specific audience to your existing content, you must weigh what will work best for each piece. It also doesn’t hurt to add your unique personality to the work. Ready to level up your writing skills? Try these online copywriting tips to create a memorable visitor experience. 1. Research Your Audience According to CoSchedule, “successful marketers are 242% more likely to report conducting audience research at least once per quarter. And 56% of the most elite marketers conduct research once or more per month.” Bloggers can break the mold in their writing by becoming better researchers. Knowing about your audience gives you the intel to cater to their interests and maintain their attention. Research comes in many different forms. You can survey your existing audience and ask them particular questions on what topics they would enjoy reading. You could review your Google Analytics reports to assess the type of blog posts people visit the most. Tools like Social Mention also can help you discover new insights. This social media search and analysis platform tracks and measures what people are saying about any topic across social channels. While researching, your goal is to identify themes and patterns. You want to pinpoint ideas that will debunk myths and offer inspiration. Take the time to learn about your audience. Understanding their wants, needs, and behaviors helps your write better content. 2. Write in an Easy-to-Read Format The reading habits of an online visitor varies from a person offline. Research shows that site visitors read 20% of the text on the average web page. Your readers’ intentions are only to scan your content. Some individuals are too busy to read every word. Others just want to get the high-level concepts and move to the next topic. No matter the reasoning, be prepared to adjust your content. Best-selling author Jeff Goins offers his thoughts: “Sure, people can read. They just choose not to. You need to learn how to communicate to people who are functionally illiterate. Or perhaps, more appropriately, aliterate—that is, they’re able to read, but just choose not to do so.” You can make your writing easy to scan by using shorter paragraphs—limiting them to no more than four sentences. You can create scannable chunks by adding multiple subheadings throughout your blog posts. Draw the reader’s attention to important information with numbered lists and bullet points. It’s also wise to use bold and italic formatting to give your words more emphasis. There’s no doubt that your readers will scan your content. It’s up to you to assemble it in an easy-to-read format. 3. Insert Specific Keywords Organic search is the lifeblood of generating traffic to sites. If people can’t find your blog on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, it’s difficult to get new visitors. Keywords make it possible for potential readers to land on your site. When a person types phrases in a search engine, they get directed to content related to those keywords. Consumers are searching for specific terms with a particular intent. Impact reports that “50% of search queries are four words or longer.” Bloggers must match the searchers’ intent with remarkable content that solves their problems or answers their questions. As a result, readers will locate your blog and discover relevant information. Google Trends analyzes the popularity of top search queries in its search engine. That way, you can observe what people want to learn and write content that fits their needs. It’s not necessary to overload your blog posts with keywords. Stick to the basic search engine optimization guidelines, like adding keywords to your headers and meta descriptions. Writing for the web means getting your content seen. It all begins with including specific keywords in your work. 4. Highlight Notable Experts We’re often taught that writing is a standalone activity. When you’re ready to write, you should go in your perfect writing space and begin jotting down as many of your own words as possible. However, writing doesn’t have to be a lonely process. Writing for the web is also about collaboration. Your audience wants to hear new perspectives from other industry experts. The good news is that you can introduce them to notable people through your blog posts. John O’Nolan , founder and CEO at Ghost, agrees: “Is your brain tired? Borrow someone else’s! Who do you look up to in your industry who your readers might be interested in? Drop them an email and ask if you can do an interview. Your only challenge is to come up with some interesting questions which will get your subject talking.” Choose experts that your audience respects. When formulating interview questions, it’s important that you touch on different topics not present on other blogs. Exceptional questions will provide a fresh perspective to your post. Don’t limit your writing to just your ideas. When you feature thought leaders, it’s a special treat for your readers. 5. Provide Actionable Steps Web writing shouldn’t conclude like a suspense novel with a cliffhanger ending. Your audience wants actionable steps on how to move forward. Whether it’s leading them to a YouTube video or the checkout cart, it’s your responsibility to guide them to that goal. As an expert blogger, it’s easy to forget that your reader lacks the knowledge you possess. So, you may slip up and write with jargon or skip important details. That’s perfectly fine for your first draft. But, in the editing stage, you’ll want to scan for specific words or complex procedures that may hinder your readers from taking action. i am a food blog is a powerful example of how to showcase actionable steps in online writing. The instructions to prepare the dish are straightforward. Any reader can easily scroll to this section of the website and immediately begin cooking. Website design also is essential when writing for the web. You can include your steps in a colorful graphic to gain more attention from readers. What next steps can you offer your audience? Give them a reason to turn your words into productive action. 6. Write Targeted Copy Your website is an opportunity to establish your brand in the market. When people arrive to your site, they want to know what you do and what you stand for. Use your site copy to reflect a clear vision of your business. Rather than offering unnecessary details, select a primary goal that your copy will accomplish. “It’s important to give every piece of copy you write a single objective…Focusing on one objective at a time minimizes confusion and prevents you from including extraneous text,” writes  Sujan Patel , co-founder of Web Profits. Targeted copy will pinpoint the solution you offer visitors. You’re not just a food blogger or a website designer. People want to know how you can help them with their problems. In the image below,  The Art of Sculpting  tells you exactly how they serve their potential customers—taking their fitness to a new level. 7. Make the Visitor the Hero Let’s set the record straight: your copy isn’t about you, your business’s achievements, or even your latest TV appearance. If your desire is to transform visitors into leads (or customers), your copy must focus on your audience and their needs. All the copy should center around helping the visitor. It starts with telling a great story and creating a journey that involves the visitor. Much like the movies, the copy will discuss the challenges and the triumphs of the hero. Copy isn’t always about getting someone to take action. It’s also about etching a unique memory into their minds. That emotion will stay with them after they leave your site. 8. Express Your Value Visitors are interested in knowing how you can change their lives. What value will you provide to customers to improve their outcomes? This value will separate you  from the competition . In-home care startup  Honor  establishes value quickly on its homepage. Their team offers services to help seniors live better, while offering families peace of mind. Be descriptive in your language and avoid the over-the-top tone. It’s perfectly fine to boast about the benefits of your product. However, you don’t want to over-exaggerate. “People don’t want to be sold to. Tone down the hype and write your web copy like you’re talking with your ideal customer face-to-face. Your audience can tell the difference, and will be more likely to participate,” says  Christina Walker , a professional freelance web copywriter. To show your value, highlight the results of your services. Get people engaged in doing things differently with your business. 9. Craft a Compelling Call to Action Effective copy leads visitors to your desired next step, and that’s where your  call to action comes in. Your website consists of several pages with different purposes. If you’ve worked with marketers, they may have suggested creating pages consistent with your sales funnel. For instance, with new visitors, your goal may be to turn them into qualified leads. The call to action might convince your audience to sign up for a free ebook or checklist. While for your returning visitors who already possess interest in your products, the call to action would be a 10% coupon or a bonus gift after an initial purchase. No matter the call to action, it should speak to the audience’s needs and desires. They should be eager to receive your offering and ready to move down the sales funnel. 10. Add Social Proof Your brand centers around perception. It’s about credibility in the eyes of your future customers. They want to know that your products and services are worth their hard-earned money. Moreover, visitors are curious about whether or not they should associate themselves with your brand. With so much competition in the marketplace, sometimes the only differentiator is the prestige and external validation of your brand. People want to be affiliated with success. We buy cars to transport us from one place to another. So why would anyone want to purchase a Lamborghini or a Tesla? Because customers also seek vehicles to represent their status in society. Leverage social proof, like  customer testimonials , to influence your audience. “ Check out this example from  Backlinko . Brian Dean backs up his expertise with quotes from industry influencers. 11. Avoid Jargon Have you ever sat in a meeting where you didn’t understand anything? Everyone was talking in your native language, but every word seemed foreign. You probably felt confused or as if you didn’t belong. It’s an overwhelming feeling that just makes you want to stand up and exit the room. That’s a similar feeling your visitors experience when landing on a site stuffed with jargon. They don’t understand the content, so in a split second, they decide that this brand isn’t for them. To keep your target audience interested, you must speak their language. Instead of using unfamiliar terms, stick to words your audience knows. Pay attention to the words your current customers use to describe your business. Use social media to learn how your audience talks about your brand. With this insight, you can create copy that invites them into your website experience. 12. Experiment With Different Versions Your first draft of copy isn’t your last. Just like other aspects of business, the best way to learn if something works is to test it. So try not to fall in love with your copy. Remember that every word on the page is to help visitors understand you better. It’s important to keep that principle in mind when  A/B testing your copy . Experts suggest changing only one variable in your experiments. You might test the headline, then the call to action. If you test everything at once, you’ll lose sight of what your visitors actually like about your copy. Below is an example of an A/B test on the call-to-action-button text. The new variation focused on what the company’s offer provided the visitor. Be willing to experiment with your copy. It’s the best way to learn what connects with your visitors. Smart Copywriting that Conveys Your Brand Message Online When visitors land on your site, your goal is to gain their interest and establish trust quickly. Copywriting is a critical component to telling your story to your audience. Write compelling copy that makes every visitor the hero, and use social proof to add to your credibility. Improve your website with better copywriting. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Creating a Website: How To Create a Beautiful Site

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Hosting

The post Creating a Website: How To Create a Beautiful Site appeared first on HostGator Blog . When creating a website, aesthetics aren’t everything – but they definitely matter. Have you ever visited a website that was cluttered, had colors that clashed, or a design that made it hard to read and navigate? Your response was probably to click away and go looking for another website to visit in its place. If you don’t know anything about web design, but you know it’s time to start that website you keep thinking about, you’re probably wondering to how to make a website that will both look good and accomplish your goals. For aspiring website owners that don’t know how to code and don’t have the budget to hire a designer (or would simply rather not spend that money), the best answer is to use an online website builder . Why Create a Website with a Website Builder? Website builders are a fast and easy way to get started with a new website or blog. And this is one case where taking the easy route doesn’t mean sacrificing quality. You can create a truly beautiful and effective website with the right website builder. Here are three benefits to using a website builder . 1. You can use website templates designed by professional designers. Any good website builder you consider will include a number of attractive templates that have been designed by skilled web designers. That means you get to take advantage of their skills without paying top dollar, like you would if you hired them on your own. In most cases, the designers that create templates for website builders will have knowledge of web design best practices and incorporate them into the templates they create. Even if you don’t have a good eye for visuals or website UX (user experience), you can trust that the people who created the template you start with do. By starting with a good template, it’s easy to build a website that looks beautiful and makes a good impression on your visitors. 2. You don’t have to learn how to code. Coding languages are complicated and intimidating to anyone that doesn’t already know them. And even some people who know how to code find it challenging. But you can skip over dealing with all that completely.   Choosing the best website builder for your business or site saves you from having to learn to code . And notably, it means you’ll also never have to deal with coding when making later updates. People that hire a designer to build their website will still have to struggle with HTML down the line when they need to make additions and changes. With a website builder, every future update will be simple.   3. You can make the website your own. The templates are a good starting point, but you don’t want your website to look just like all the other websites created from the template you chose. Don’t worry. You still have room to add your own style and make sure the end results look beautiful to you, while still being intuitive for your visitors. You can change out colors, add and remove different elements of the page, and move things around with simple drag-and-drop website builder functionality. Starting with a template provides a good shortcut, but from there it’s entirely up to you what you choose to do with it. How to Create a Website with a Website Builder If you’re sold on the idea of using a website builder, then it’s time to get started. These are the steps to building a beautiful website using a website builder. 1. Choose your website builder. First things first, you need to choose which website builder to go with. You have a number of options to choose from, and making the right choice now matters. Many website builders make it hard to keep your website if you move to a new product down the line. When looking for the best website builder for you, consider: Ease of use – You don’t want to spend hours learning how to use your new website builder, and you shouldn’t have to. Many website builders provide intuitive editing tools and resources to help you get familiar with the product right away. In particular, look for drag-and-drop functionality which makes editing easy for anyone, no matter the level of skill. Cost – Some drag-and-drop website builder options are free, but most that offer the kind of functionality you’ll need will cost somewhere in the range of $5 to $40 a month—and that’s an ongoing cost, you’ll be paying for as long as you keep your website up. Make sure you choose an affordable website builder you can pay for now and in the months and years to come. Mobile compatibility – Many of your visitors will be coming from mobile devices, so your website needs to look as good on a small screen as it does on a computer. Make sure your website builder provides easy options for making your website mobile friendly, such as responsive templates. Number of templates –  When you start from a template that comes pretty close to what you want your website to look like, the job of customizing it will be easier. The more options you have, the easier picking the right template will be. Media features – If you ever hope to include video or audio on your website, consider what options a website builder offers for adding them. SEO features – Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important tactic for making sure people are able to find your site. While there’s a lot to doing SEO effectively, a good starting point is having a website builder that offers SEO features that make on-site optimization easier. Image library – Finding good images is a big part of creating a website that looks great. A website builder that provides an image library can make the process much faster and easier whether that be for your small business or personal blog. Analytics – Easy access to website analytics will help you track the success of your website over time. Consider what analytics options your website builder offers. Figure out what your main priorities are in a website builder and find one that provides everything you need. 2. Select your favorite template. Creating a website with a website builder starts with a template. Look through the different options available to find one that’s a close match to what you have in mind for your site. Don’t just think about the one you like the look of the best—you can easily change a lot of the visual elements of the template you choose. Think about which one has the closest structure  and layout to the website you want to create. That will make bringing it in line with your unique vision easier. 3. Choose your color scheme. So much of creating a beautiful website as a business owner or blogger will depend on the colors you choose. You want to be consistent with the colors you use across the website—if someone clicks from a page that’s green and blue to one that’s red and black, it creates a confusing experience. And you want to make sure you stick with colors that look good together. Creating a color scheme as one of your first steps will help you achieve both those goals. You’ll know which colors to stick with for your backgrounds, fonts, images, and various page elements. If you don’t really know how to select colors that look good together, you can find a number of free resources online to help. Browse sites like Design Seeds and Color Hunt for inspiration. And the tool Coolers lets you pick a color you like, and see a wide variety of automatically generated color schemes that include it until you find one you like. All of these resources helpfully provide the color codes for each number, so you can easily find them in the editing tools of your website builder as you work. 4. Create a style guide for your site. As with your color scheme, creating a style guide for your website early on will help you make sure your style is consistent across the site and everything looks the way you want it to. This doesn’t have to be anything too long or complicated. It can be a basic list of notes on the stylistic choices you want to use on your site. Consider things like whether you want your elements and buttons to have rounded corners or sharp ones. Do you want all the pages on your website to maintain the same basic layout? What coloring do you want to use for backgrounds, text, links, and buttons? What font do you want to use, and if you want to use more than one, what contexts should you use each in? You can get some inspiration by looking at examples of other style guides , but yours can be much simpler than anything the big brands put together. It should simply serve as a guide you can revisit anytime you’re working on a new page and need a reminder of how to keep it stylistically in line with the rest of the site. 5. Define your website’s goals. While this part doesn’t have to do with making your website beautiful, it’s an important step in creating a website that’s effective. Everyone that creates a website has something they want to accomplish. In order to do so, you need to be strategic in creating a website designed to meet your goals. Spend some time clearly defining what those goals are. You’ll definitely have one overarching goal—for a business owner, that will be making new sales, for a personal website it could be connecting with people through blog posts ho care about the same things you do. In addition to that, you’ll likely have a number of smaller goals that contribute to your primary one: getting noticed by the right people, gaining traffic, and building an email list are a few possible examples. When you approach your website design with clear goals in mind, you’ll do a better job of making a website that’s in line with what you want it to be and do. And you’ll know how to track its success after it goes live. 6. Clarify your messaging. We’ve talked a lot about visual design so far, but the wording you choose will be just as important to accomplishing your goals as the visual aesthetic. The written content you include on your website (called copy in marketing parlance) has to do the heavy lifting of telling your visitors what the website is about and why they should care. You may find this easier if you take a little time to look at similar websites and see how they describe themselves. They can serve as inspiration to help you clarify your own messaging, while also making clear what’s already being done. Ideally, you want to differentiate yourself from other websites and communicate to visitors what makes yours unique. Write out your unique value proposition (UVP), a line or two that describes what your website has to offer and how it’s different from any other site. You can put the UVP directly on your website’s homepage, and it will also help guide you in the copy you create for the rest of the site. 7. Decide on your website’s pages and organization. Another important factor in keeping your website effective is making sure it’s intuitive. You don’t want to overload your visitors with too much information on one page—that’s both confusing and bad for SEO. So figure out how to divide everything you want to share into a number of pages that are each devoted to a manageable amount of information. When you have an idea of the different pages you’ll create, think about how to best organize them in a way that will make it easy for your visitors to find what they’re interested in. Figure out a few main categories your different pages fit into. These will probably be your main menu items. If your website will be fairly simple and only have a few pages, this step shouldn’t be too complicated. If you expect your website to grow into something much larger that has dozens or hundreds of pages, then it’s even more important to define a clear website architecture now that you’ll stick with moving forward.   8. Get to work creating your site. Now that you’ve done all the advance prep to figure out what you want your website to look like and say, pull up your template and start making the necessary changes. Make sure you stick with your style guide, color scheme, messaging, and organization plan as you work. It can be easy to get carried away with making changes that look good in isolation, especially when a personal or business website builder makes each little tweak so easy. But you did all the work in those steps for a reason and your website will be more user friendly, beautiful, and effective if you follow the guidelines you created for yourself. 9. Run it by someone else to get a second opinion. When you spend time working on a website, you get too close to it to see it the way someone else will. Before you push it out into the larger world, find a friend you trust to be a set of fresh eyes for you. They may be able to spot minor errors or let you know if the navigation is a little confusing. Listen to their feedback and make any changes they recommend that you trust will make the website better. Unleash Your Beautiful Website After all that work, your website is ready for a larger audience. Secure website hosting (if you haven’t already) and publish it to the web. Creating a website is exciting. Seeing something beautiful you created yourself (even if with the help of a solid template to start) is certain to instill pride and give you a sense of accomplishment. Now you can start reaching people with your message and working toward your goals. If you’re ready to sign up for a hosting service and create your own website, please contact HostGator today. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Get More Views on Product Videos for Your Online Store

Posted on March 1, 2019 by Hosting

The post How to Get More Views on Product Videos for Your Online Store appeared first on HostGator Blog . In a chaotic world where everything from technology and fashion to weather patterns seems to be in a constant state of rapid change, one statement will always be true: You need product videos for your online store. Why? Properly tagged and marked up videos can improve your site’s SEO , cause shoppers to spend more time on your site, and, yes, boost your conversions . Producing videos is easier now than it’s ever been, but production is just one step in the process. If you want more people to watch your videos, share them, and buy what they’re seeing, there are a few more steps you’ll need to take. Know Your Numbers Start by knowing how many views your product videos get now in a typical day, week, or month. It’s one thing to say you want more views, but your efforts will be more effective if you set a goal based on your current views in a set time period. Also, think about where people are seeing your product videos. If the only place they’re available is on your site, it’s easy to track view counts, but your potential audience is limited. Add your product videos to your social media marketing mix if you haven’t already – just make sure you track views on each platform as well as on your site.   Be Your Own Toughest Video Critic Set aside some time to re-watch your product videos and see how they perform on this checklist.   1. First impression Does your adorable video of a puppy playing with your custom chew toys have an adorable thumbnail image, or is it just a blurred frame? Most platforms will automatically pick a thumbnail image for you, but you can usually change it if you need a clearer shot of your product. After you’ve uploaded your video, go into the editing tools for your post and you should find an option to choose a new thumbnail image. People are much more likely to click on a puppy than a blur.   2. Background Is the background for your product videos a neutral color and free of clutter? This can be as simple as a white wall, to keep viewers’ focus on your goods and not the stuff around them, especially if your products are small items or highly detailed. If there are hands in the video modeling jewelry or showing how something works, are they clean and well-manicured? This bag demo video shows how to keep the focus on the features , without distractions.   3. Clarity Background aside, is your product easy to see, with proper focus, steady camera work, and good lighting? Remember that your video has to stand in for customers getting to touch the product before they buy, so make sure there are close-ups and lots of angles.   4. Length Most people won’t watch more than 60 seconds of a video, and that’s Instagram’s video limit anyway, so don’t go over the minute mark unless you have a very good reason. Also, don’t feel like you need to fill 60 seconds just because. This video for an eyeshadow palette runs 17 seconds and does what it needs to do by showing off the colors.   5. Orientation Does your product video display in portrait (vertical) format on phones? While most platforms, like YouTube, still favor landscape orientation, vertical is becoming the preferred format for mobile users. Mobile is now where most videos get watched , so go ahead and cater to that preference on your site and on platforms that favor vertical video, like Instagram. In fact, IGTV is building its brand on the fact that all its video content is vertical , so this trend seems durable.   Once your videos get two thumbs up on this checklist for watchability, it’s time to check some technical things that can affect your videos’ searchability and reach.   Make Your Videos Easy to Watch and Find Use the right video format. There are so many video file formats out there, but the only one you need to concern yourself with for product videos is MP4. That’s the preferred format for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and pretty much every other social media platform. If your current videos aren’t in MP4 format, there’s a whole slew of free online video conversion tools you can use to convert them to MP4 for easier social sharing. Many of them also allow you to add watermarks and compress your videos to upload faster and start playing for viewers as quickly as possible.   Mark up your videos for SEO. You already know to tag your videos in your social media posts so people can find them, but you’ll also want to make sure you’re using the meta tags on your site to tell search engine crawlers what your videos are about. Meta tags are important for SEO, and so is schema markup, which is a library of user-friendly code snippets that categorize content for Google. Kristen Hicks has covered everything you need to know about getting started with schema markup for better video results in Google searches, like featured videos and video thumbnails.   Once your videos are critiqued, improved, tagged, and formatted, it’s time to start sharing them more widely. Again, make note of your views, click-throughs, and conversions now so you can track your improvement over time.   Where and How to Share Your Product Videos Besides your store’s product pages and blog posts, there are lots of places to share your videos. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter all let you upload video directly, and you can pin YouTube videos on Pinterest. That doesn’t mean you need to post on all of these sites, though. Focus on the platforms where your customers and people like them spend their time, and don’t worry about the rest. You can also include product videos in your marketing emails. If you do this, it’s important to make sure that you code those emails correctly . That way, if the recipient’s email client doesn’t automatically load the video, they’ll see something other than blank space. If you sell or cross-list on a marketplace like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy, you can upload your product videos there as well.   More Video Views, More Sales Over time, you’ll get a clearer picture of which videos do best and which channels deliver the most views, click-throughs, and conversions. You can use that data to keep improving your videos, delivering videos that your customers like, and making more sales. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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What to Look for in a Website Builder

Posted on November 2, 2018 by Hosting

The post What to Look for in a Website Builder appeared first on HostGator Blog . You know you need a website, but you don’t know the first thing about how to build one. Without any coding or design skills, you’re not really sure where to start. But these days, you don’t need a complex set of skills to design a website, you just need a good website builder. Website builders make creating and customizing a website easy enough for anybody to do it—no coding required. When you start looking into which website builder to use for your new website, you’ll notice that there are a lot of options to choose from. Trying to figure out which one to go with can be intimidating, especially if you don’t know enough to even know what to look for. Top 10 Features to Look for in a Website Builder When choosing the right website builder for you, there are ten main factors you should consider.   1. Ease of use A website builder is supposed to make the process of building a website easy (that’s kind of the whole point). When you’re considering what website builder to go with, make sure you find one that has an intuitive editing tool so you can easily shape your website to look and feel how you want it to. Drag-and-drop functionality is a good feature to look for, since it means you can move components of the page around with your mouse—something anyone can do, regardless of their level of web design experience. And the editing tool should have features that enable you to change out colors, add new elements to the page, and upload any media you want to add without having to learn any new skills.   2. Lots of templates The first step to creating a website with a website builder is choosing your template . The template provides a design and structure for you to start with, so you’re not having to build your site from scratch. From there, it’s easy to make changes to the template to make your website better represent your unique brand. Building your website will be easier if you’re able to select a template that comes close to what you have in mind for your site. So make sure the website builder you go with supplies a good number of templates for you to choose from.   3. Responsive options People now browse the web on their mobile devices more than their computers. For your website to work well for the majority of visitors, it needs to be mobile friendly. The best way to do that is to build a website that’s responsive. Responsive websites have all the same elements and content no matter what device you visit them on, but they’re automatically arranged in the way that makes them look good on whatever screen size a visitor views them on. The website builder you go with should offer an easy way for you to make your website responsive. Offering responsive templates is a good option, since you won’t have to do anything extra to make your website mobile friendly—you’ll start out with it that way.   4. Customization options Templates are great for making the website creation process easier, but you want to be sure you can turn that template into something unique. A good website builder should provide plenty of options for customizing your website. You should be able to change out colors, add new pages, load your own images, and add icons and buttons in the shapes and sizes you desire. You don’t want a website that looks just like everybody else’s, the whole point is to create something that represents your specific brand. Go with a website builder that gives you plenty of room to customize the template you choose to turn it into something wholly yours.   5. SEO features With so many websites already out there, getting people to find yours will be a challenge. A website builder that has SEO features can give you a little head start by helping you optimize your website’s pages for visibility in the search engines. Adding relevant keywords to each web page’s URL, meta description , and image tags communicates to Google what your website is about so they’re more likely to include you in searches for that term. A good website builder will make that easy to do.   6. Social share features Once your website’s up, you want to promote it! And ideally, you want visitors that like your site to promote it too. Social share features can help on both fronts. You can easily push out new content to your social networks to let your followers know about it, and you can make it easy for visitors to share your web pages with their followers with one click as well.   7. Affordability You probably don’t have a ton of money to spend on your website. And website builders generally bill on a subscription model, so you have to consider the long-term costs as well as what you can afford at this moment. Choose a website builder that falls within your ongoing budget for your website. Most website builders cost somewhere in the range of $4-$40 a month. In some cases, the cost includes features or services you would otherwise have to spend more for, so make sure you consider everything that’s included in the price instead of just going with the cheapest option.   8. Image library All websites need images, they’re a key part of how people will experience the site. Unless you’re a photographer or illustrator, finding good images to populate your site with can be difficult and time consuming. A website builder that includes an image library can save you a lot of trouble, make your website look great, and help you get your website up and running faster,   9. Educational resources While ideally, the website builder you use will be easy to figure out, you still want access to helpful resources that lay out what all the features are and how to use them. Check if the website builder you consider offers tutorials on how to use it. You’ll get more out of your website builder if you’re able to get a full understanding of everything it can do for you and how to make use of it all.   10. Good customer support If you face any issues while creating your website, or worse, once it’s up, you want to trust you can get ahold of someone to help fast. Look for a website builder that offers 24/7 support and has a reputation for being helpful when customers need it. Hopefully you won’t ever need customer support, but it’s important to know it’s there and reliable if you ever do. A website builder should make your life easier and enable you to put together a website that does everything you want it to. But it’s important to find one that offers everything you need.   Meet the HostGator Website Builder HostGator offers a website builder that does everything on the list and comes with web hosting included. You can save a little money by investing in both things at once, and get started creating the website you’ve been wanting. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Sound Design Tutorial: How To Create A Delay Effect w/ Reaktor – Native Instruments

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Hosting

More info: http://bit.ly/ZpmeYw In this video tutorial focusing on programming in Native Instruments’ Reaktor, Dubspot’s sound design course designer and ins… Continue reading → Continue reading →

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