A website, like most things will age over time and will need to be updated in order to keep it secure, on par with the competition and what your customers want. You can often add new functionality to a website and upgrade certain elements but there may come a time when you need to start a fresh.

Often you can keep certain elements of the site the same and you should try and not change everything otherwise your customers may doubt that it is the same company. If you are using this as an opportunity to rebrand then a quick note to say that you have had a facelift and that your level of service remains the same but your website may look different, is often enough to give your customers peace of mind.

Make sure that you repoint any old URL’s to new pages in order to not lose rankings and to avoid visitor disappointment by going to a broken link.

SEO is harder to track than some of the other online marketing techniques or products such as Google Adwords. This is because it can take months to see the benefit and unless you are tracking the positioning of a good number of keywords and phrases and/or traffic to your site, it can be almost impossible to see if it is working well.

You need to ensure that you check where your website is prior to starting any SEO work to give you a true view of the improvements that it is making once it has started. There are many different tracking software packages available and often you can only establish which one is most accurate by trailing them. Most will offer a free trial for a short period to allow you to do this.

You also need to be able to check how many visitors you are getting to the website and where these visitors are coming from i.e. Google organic, Adowrds, Bing etc. This will then give you a good starting point to work from.

Online marketing is a great way to boost your business. It may be that you want to build up your brand name and get your logo recognised or maybe you are looking to increase footfall in to your local premises or increase traffic through to your website. Whatever you’re reason for doing online marketing, you should always spend some time analysing the results to see what has worked and what hasn’t worked.

If you are trying to increase the traffic through to your site then you can quite easily check if it is improving by looking at your stats package. Most servers have a stats package set up on there to show you information such as visitors, pages viewed and time spent on site etc, but if you don’t have access to this then you could install Google Analytics.

Once you have a way of tracking how your marketing is helping you to achieve your goals you can then check to see if it is worthwhile continuing with that marketing avenue.

It may be that you have quite a good amount of traffic going to your website but not many of these are converting in to enquiries or sales. This can happen for a number of reasons but often it is that you are targeting the wrong audience.

When working on marketing strategies, some companies think it is best to go for volume, so they will try and attract as many visitors as possible hoping that a percentage of them will then convert in to sales. This is a risky strategy as you may find that you are spending a large amount of your marketing budget on visitors that have no intention of purchasing a product or service from you. This is especially true of you are targeting them via Adwords or other Pay per Click programs.

Ideally you want to ensure that the terms in which your website is showing up on the search engines for, is something that you can offer, regardless of it is through Pay per Click or organic.

If not, then your customers will leave and often not return having been disappointed with what they were shown when they clicked on your link.

It is easy to leave a website for months or even years without doing anything to it, assuming that it will just tick along. This is often not the case and if you do this you can be asking for trouble. Not only may you be missing out on technical advances within your industry that you should be including in your site such as online calculators but you can also finding yourself moving down the search engine rankings at a fast pace.

Recovering from a loss in rankings can be tricky and can take a lot of time, mean while you could be missing out on a large amount of potential customers. Ideally a website should be updated at least once a week with fresh content and any new products / service you offer. This will give your customers the best experience on your site whilst also improving your search engine rankings on sites such as Google and Bing.

A website developer can play an important role in marketing your business. It may be that you are looking to invest in a website for the first time or that you are wanting to upgrade your current site, taking it to the next level.

When choosing which web developer to use, one of the most important points to consider is do you have confidence in their ability? This can be anything from their time management skills and sticking to deadlines, professionalism or technical knowledge and skills. Ideally you want to find a programmer that has been recommended to you by others or one that can show you clear examples of their work and even allow you to contact some of their current clients to get feedback from.

It is vital that you have a good relationship with your web developer in order to take your business to the next step. They need to understand where you are now and where you wish to take your online business – whether it be allowing people to buy your services or products online or obtaining more enquiries.

Just like fashion, web development is changing rapidly with new fads and tends coming and going. When it comes to development of a website with a professional impression, you must keep everything updated and on the trend. Here are some tips to develop a professional website.

Keep in clutter free and clean

The modern world is a bit cluttered and the internet is no exception. Banners, icons, Ads, signs and buttons can get quite heavy. So you need to safe your site visitors from all the clutter and noise. The most effective way is to embrace things like white space and flat design. This will give your visitors great experience as they navigate your website. Keep your site simple with the most crucial content spotlighted.

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With hackers becoming more and more wise to vulnerabilities within websites it is vital to try and protect your website from an attack. Websites need to be updated not only on the front end (visualy) but also the code behind the website. There are new programming techniques and standards being released on a frequent basis and if you do not take action to ensure that your site is programmed in the correct way, you could find yourself open to being hacked.

If you have an e-commerce website where visitors can purchase products or services online then the effects could be detrimental for not only your business but also your customers, as you may find personal details such as payment card details have been accessed. If you are concerned about any aspect of security when it comes to your site, then talk to your web design company who will be able to run checks and confirm if the code needs updating.

Being a website programmer can be a very stressful job at times. Often you have tight deadlines looming and very demanding clients and just when you think you have finished the site something stops working. With all these challenges it is very easy to find all your time taken up with working on client’s websites and forgetting to look after your own.
Making sure that your website and online marketing is kept up to date is not only important in terms of improving or maintaining your search engine rankings but also from a portfolio point of view. If a potential client lands on your website, they will want to see examples of previous work you may have done and information about yourself or company. This information needs to be as up to date and as relevant as possible. If it looks like you have not had a new project in the last 12 months they may go elsewhere assuming that you are no longer trading.

Any good website programmer should thoroughly test the website they have built before passing it back over to the client. Although this is the correct procedure, unfortunate this does not always happen or it does but the programmer may have missed something (often they are a little too close to the project). If you are the client having a website created then I would strongly urge you to test the site yourself and if possible also have a few other people test it that maybe have not seen it before.

Setting a website live that has problems, doesn’t work properly or broken links can be detrimental to a new business and not only lose you instant custom but future business. If you do come across any issues note them down. Once you have a complete list, then pass them on to the programmer to fix. Ideally you want to try and give them all the issues in one go as it will be quicker for them to fix them all in one go.