5 Free ways to improve your website
Posted by michellebuckley in 
5 Free ways to improve your website
Your website needs improving. Really though, everyone’s website needs improving. Websites are like living, breathing creatures. If you don’t put anytime into nurturing them they will die. Below are 5 Free ways to improve your website. Even if you only do one of these items on the list it is a step in the right direction.
1. Update your site content
Start with a single page like your Home page. Invest in some copy writing help or photography, a little will go a long way. Write a new blog post. Anything you can do to update your website content will not only let users see that your website is indeed active but it also helps in search engine optimization.
2. Analytics
Get an overview of your website traffic with Google Analytics (it’s free). If you already have Google Analytics, spend time each month looking at them. What are your most popular referral sources? What search engine words are people using to find you? If you find Analytics too confusing you can always ask a professional for help.
3. Add Social Media to your site
Do you have a Facebook fan page yet? If not here’s how to create a fan page. If you do make sure you have a link to it on your website. I like to keep my links to Facebook and Twitter in the header or footer of websites I design so that they will show up on any page a user happens to be on.
4. Revamp your existing copy
Make sure that the copy you have on your website is in small, digestible chunks. No one likes to read a ton of text on websites. Use headings, bulleted lists and white space to help readers scan the page quickly.
5. Navigation that makes sense
Look at your navigation. No really look at it like you are just coming to the site for the first time. Does your navigation make sense? Do you really need to have every item listed or could you put items in a drop down menu? Does the actual text in the links make sense to users? Should you be more specific? Don’t make users think when it comes to navigation or they will just leave.
That should give you enough to work on for now. Do you have any other tips for improving websites for free? Comment below.
Custom WordPress Theme | Natural Health and Wellness
Custom WordPress Theme – Natural Health and Wellness – 2011
This was a redesign of this website. The original was built with Intuit but had a poor design and coding that was not up to standards. Built a custom WordPress theme to make it easy for the client to update the site on their own and to help with SEO.
Help With Designing HTML emails
Help With Designing HTML emails
I do want to go into more detail about designing HTML emails in the near future but came across a couple of awesome resources that I just wnated to get up right away.
Emailology is a website that guides designers and developers to use good cross-client compatibility code. It is very well-commented, includes hacks and gets you off the ground quickly. There are also tips and tricks categorized for each e-mail client.
This is going to save me and other designers a ton of time in testing.
Fractal is a web application (beta) for validating HTML-CSS code across 24 most-popular e-mail clients. It not only tells you what is wrong with your code, it also suggests fixes too. It works by pasting the code into the application and running the validator.
Two new resources in the battle for HTML email design. Anyone else try these or are there even better ones out there? Let me know.
5 SEO Tips for WordPress Websites
SEO Tips for WordPress
In a previous post I covered 5 SEO tips for beginners. Those tips still apply to SEO and WordPress so make sure you check out that post as well. So in no particular order here are 5 SEO Tips for WordPress websites.
Use Images in Your Posts
Using images serves multiple purposes:
Write Compelling Titles
The title of your page or post should contain the keywords that you want to rank highly for. Once you get your content to rank well in Google or other search engines you also have to get the user to actually click through to your website. Look at the titles of other similar websites in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Which ones are getting you to click through? Ranking high will get you nothing if nobody actually clicks on your link.
Use Tags for Extra Keywords
After WordPress 2.3 was released you have the option of including tags. This allows you to assign keywords to your blog posts. Each tag gets its own webpage so you’ll be generating your own keyword-oriented internal backlink pages.
Install the WordPress SEO Plugin
This plugin by Joost de Valk is just awesome. It really makes Search Engine Optimization super easy.
Once installed the plugin:
Use “Pretty Permalinks”
Pretty permalinks changes the default file structure of WordPress from numbers in your URL to basically keyword URLs and it’s super easy to do.
To enable or change them, first login to your WordPress website, then go to Options > Permalinks.
Never have them set to “Default” or “Numeric”. You should set them as either:
SEO is a huge topic so I will be covering it some more in the future. If you have another tips you’d like to share please feel free to comment on this post.
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