CONGRATULATIONS
Site Launched!
Now that your website is live it’s time to start using it. Your website is not a brochure that sits on a shelf and gathers dust, it’s an active part of your marketing and business strategy.
It’s the hub of your business communication. The more you use it the more you can fine-tune your marketing, your clients, and your industry. This will:
- Save you time
- Cost you less money
- Be more effective in achieving your goals
Let’s Get Your Site Growing!
We want to help you grow your online audience, starting with your website.
First Step
Start Tracking EVERYTHING
- Make Sure Your Google Analytics Is Connected
- Make Sure You Have A Way To Collect Email Addresses
- Do You Use Facebook? Connect Your Facebook Pixel For Tracking Visitors
- Create A Habit of Reviewing Forms, Traffic, And Site Behavior On A Routine Basis
Time To Share
Share Your New Website With Your Circle of Influence
- Clients
- Colleagues
- Network Circles
- Friends and Family
Keep Your Site Fresh
Start With Knowing A Little About How Your Site Works
- Learn How To Make Small Changes Based On Site Behavior
- Add More Content: Blog Posts, Links, Photos, Video Links (embedded), FAQ’s, etc.
- Get Help When Needed REQUEST MAINTENANCE LINK
Some Basics About Your Site Before You Start Making Changes
Protect Your Website Performance
Speed is critical for not only your user experience but also for your Google score. For this reason, you need to be careful of the file size of anything you add to your website media library. Your media library holds all the images and files that are used on your website for esthetics and downloads.
Photos:
When you upload a photo to your website for any purpose, you need to optimize it for the site first. If you load an unoptimized image to your site it can not only slow down the load speed of your site, but can actually cause your website to fail to open.
Unnecessarily large files will also hurt your site’s Google score.
How To Optimize A Photo
- Are you replacing an existing photo? First, go to your media library and click on the image you replacing. Look to see the photo size both dimensions and file size.
- Review the image you are using to replace it. Is the new image the right orientation – vertical (portrait), square, or horizontal (landscape)?
- Can you crop the image to match the right orientation without losing critical imagery?
- Next, optimize the image for the web. To do this you will need to review what program you are using to edit the photo. Most photo editing software has settings for managing the file size and resolution.
- Adjust the dimensions to match the size of the existing photo. Your file size should match the space you are adding it to on the site. If you need a 350pixel x 200pixel space, adjust – don’t use a photo that is 1600pixels x 1000pixels.
- For photo galleries, you only need about an 800×600 pixel image. This will provide a nice size image for viewing on desktop and mobile.
- Adjust the resolution to about 65 – 70% of the original resolution. Some programs will give you a preview of the image resolution effects as you go up and down on the resolution meter. Find a happy medium of clarity and file size.
NEVER ADD A PHOTO STRAIGHT FROM YOUR PHONE OR CAMERA. These photos usually are far too large for any website viewing, even full-width images.
I recommend no images larger than 1260pixels wide in landscape view and 800pixels wide for a vertical view. I recommend no image sizes larger than 400KB. Most images should be in the 80KB to 150KB area.
I Don't Have A Way To Edit Photos
If you don’t have any way to edit photos, we can “batch optimize” photos for you. Send us ONLY the images you are GOING TO USE on your site, we can optimize them for you.
Make Sure You Have Rights To Use Any Image
You cannot grab any image you want to use and publish it on your website. You can only publish images you have the right to use. This means stock art that you’ve paid for and licensed to use on your website. If you made the image, in most cases, you have the right to use it unless it has subjects that have not given you the right to publish their likeness.
If you ignore copyright requirements you will pay dearly. There are attorney firms that make a very good living just by searching the Internet for sites that break this law.
Protect Your Website's Content
How your content looks to users is critical for how they navigate your website. There are some key rules:
- Keep your content simple. Use short concise messages to convey your ideas.
More people have read People Magazine than Moby Dick.
- Keep the content consistent. Don’t try and be creative with your content design.
- Don’t use a bunch of different fonts.
- Don’t use hard-to-read fonts.
- Don’t use a bunch of different colors.
- Don’t use a bunch of different font sizes.
- Use pictures where possible to convey your idea.
- Use video to convey complete thoughts and ideas more effectively.
- Review your content for context.
Don’t paste content from other word processing software.
All word processing software has built-in formatting. When you copy this content and paste it into your website, the formatting from the software will conflict with the formatting of the website’s formatting and cause issues.
To solve this, copy your content from a word processing software to a text editing program that allows you to have “non-formatted” text. Textedit on the Mac is a good program for this. You paste in your content and then under the “Format” tab, select “Make Plain Text”. This usually will erase all the formatting carried over from the word processing software. I say “usually”, because there are some programs that no matter what you do the formatting is still there.
If you have to, you may just want to retype the content. If it is a lot of content you most likely will want to break it up into sections anyway.