Why You Should be Using a Responsive Website

As the use of mobile devices continues to overtake that of traditional computers, the need for a mobile ready version of a website has become a common sense mandate for all companies (Phoenix area businesses such as yours included). But simply having two separate versions—a mobile and a desktop version—is not enough. For businesses in Phoenix, web design should be much more than this. You need to have a responsive website.

What is a “responsive” website?

When you hear the term “responsive website,” a website that reacts quickly to a user’s click likely comes to mind. While that is one plausible definition for the term, it is not what we are talking about—your Phoenix web design company should have taken care of this in the first place. Instead, the aforementioned term defines a website that is capable of adapting to any screen, regardless of size or resolution. Now that you know what a responsive website is, let’s consider five important reasons why your Phoenix web design company should develop your website with this in mind.

People don’t use a single platform

Increased mobile use does not mean that people are tossing their laptop and desktop computers into the garbage as soon as they upgrade to the latest, greatest six-inch screen toting smartphone. Instead, they are using mobile devices such as these while they are on the go and then shifting to their not so mobile computers while at home or in the office. This means that they could visit your website both while out and about and when they get home.

They may switch platforms in the hopes of having access to the same features after they change devices. The problem with mobile versions of websites, however, is that they strip the site of features that could be critical for the user’s experience.

People will leave if load times are too long

Another frustrating problem with visiting a website with both a mobile and desktop version is the load time. Oftentimes, these websites have a distinctive pause as it determines what type of device someone is using and then redirects as necessary. This is especially problematic for mobile devices, whose experience can be hampered by sometimes slow cellular networks.

Since a responsive website design removes the need for device identification and redirect, load times are not harmed.

A user experience is a customer experience

The more feature-packed and intuitive your website is, the better the user experience will be. Since your website is often the first impression, a good user experience translates into a positive customer experience (and vice versa). A website with multiple versions harms the user/customer experience by changing layouts, removing or unnecessarily adding features and generally frustrating visitors.

A responsive website also makes it easier for your Phoenix web design company to build a website that includes everything that your users/customers need, regardless of their device of choice.
A unified website makes SEO easier

SEO is key to getting people to visit your website in the first place, whether it is responsive, mobile/desktop split, or otherwise. Although your Phoenix SEO firm will do everything that it can to bring sales leads in the area (and beyond) to your website, you can help by making your website a responsive one. This is due to the fact that you are making the jobs of search engine bots much easier, since they are less confused about what web address should be added to their results lists (dual mobile/desktop websites include multiple URLs).

The future demands a responsive website

Traditional mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones are not the only devices outside of regular computers that can browse the internet. The list of devices is growing—everything from televisions to sunglasses are gaining the ability to browse the web. As such, your website needs to be able to adapt to their unique interfaces, and a mobile, desktop, television, ect. interface just won’t cut it. Having your Phoenix web design company build responsive website alleviates you form the burden of worrying about these changes.


A responsive website prepares you for the present and the future

Your website needs to be prepared to interact with any type of user—without compromising their experience. Responsive web design gives you this capability. People (your customers) in Phoenix like web design that meets their needs without getting in the way. If you would like to learn more about how to use your website to generate more business in Phoenix, for web design, SEO or otherwise, feel free to contact us.

3 Effective Local SEO Campaign Strategies 2014

A successful SEO campaign will include the execution of come hugely beneficial strategies that are designed to make search engines like your site more. You don’t need many strategies to help your Phoenix business get noticed either. Today, we are going to discuss three invaluable strategies that can take your local Phoenix SEO campaign to the next level.

1. Make your website SEO ready

For SEO, your website is a great place to start. Let’s take a look at how to make your site SEO ready:

In-site blog
A good blog will receive countless links by virtue of being shared by visitors. By having your Phoenix web design company add a blog page to your actual website, you can reap the benefits of these links where you need them most.

Images
Good images add a whole new dimension to your website’s SEO capabilities. This is due to the fact that once you start adding pictures, your site will be picked up by the image searches on the search engines. A simple view of a picture on Google can quickly lead to a visitor, and quite possibly a sales lead.

Make sure that the images that you add are actually yours. We aren’t just talking about stealing pictures from other places either. Stock photos (pre-made images that can be obtained for free or for a small fee) are plaguing the web like a pandemic. Many of them are simply awful, but even if you manage to dig up some decent stock photos, chances are that someone else is using them as well; this can result in your page being completely ignored, since a searcher has already seen the same photo elsewhere.

Keywords
Keywords are great ways to emphasize your site’s relevance to searches, so you should include them in your content whenever it makes sense.
Be sure, however, that you don’t get too keyword happy, because this will ruin the quality of your content. Thanks to a few algorithm tweaks by Google, content quality is more important than keywords, so spamming is out.

Landing pages
A landing page is like a backdoor into your website for relevant searcher who weren’t necessarily looking for your company. In other words, they boost your Phoenix SEO results by allowing your site to pop up in searches that it might not otherwise have.

2. Prepare for mobile

The internet revolution ended years ago with one clear winner: the worldwide web. We are now in the midst of a mobile revolution that is transforming the way that people interact with the web—and mobile is winning big. As such, you need to get in on the action—to the benefit of your Phoenix SEO campaign. Here is how:

Incorporate a responsive web design: Having a web design company in Phoenix construct or rebuild your website with a responsive web design (a unified web design that requires no mobile page) will not only make your website more enjoyable for visitors, but it will also greatly benefit your Phoenix SEO efforts. This is because it eliminates the double effort and confusion that goes along with a mobile/desktop web design. Google has even publicly proclaimed its preference for responsive design for those very reasons.

phoenix web design

3. Connect with the rest of the web

The internet itself—outside of your website—is where much of the SEO action will occur. As such, you need have a strategy to reach out and connect with the web. Here are a few ways to do so:

External blog
Running an external blog allows you to create a steady stream of citations and links back to your site; both of these are necessities for your Phoenix SEO campaign.

Guest blog posts
An occasional blog post on another site provides you with both links and citations. These are often even more beneficial than those that you receive from an external blog, since you can choose to post for blogs or other entities with a much stronger online reputation than a blog that you recently launched.

Social media
Social media can boost your Phoenix SEO results in just about every way. For example, if you are using tem properly, all social networks increase your citation and link volume. Social networks like Google’s Google + allow you to claim and manage your company’s name online.

 Incorporating the three strategies above will allow you to successfully execute your SEO campaign. To learn more, feel free to contact us.

Blog Source:  http://hireawizllc.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/3-effective-local-seo-campaign-strategies/

7 Reasons Your Website is Not Delivering

When a website deliver’s results it can be one of the most profitable investments your business can make. A website can act as a salesman that works twenty four hours a day seven days a week three hundred sixty five days a year. A good website will not only look give your business brand recognition but it will convert. What happens when you invest all that money in a website that isn’t converting? What is the reasons for it? Did you hire a web design company that does a poor job? Is it your content or products and or services? These are all valid questions. That is why our professional Phoenix web design team came up with 7 of the most common reasons why websites simply does not deliver. If your website is not delivering these 7 steps are the first things you should check.

Does Not Appeal to Your Target Audience - Many business owners have the web design company do everything. You may think that is what you are paying them for however, the problem with this is that you know your target audience better than anyone else. By letting your web design company design your website with little or no input from you it is likely going to be a design that is not best for your target audience. If  a website doesn’t appeal to your target audience you are going to have a difficult time ever converting.

Navigation is Confusing and Frustrating - When a visitor comes to your website they expect it to be easy to find what is that they are looking for. If they get to your website and are having trouble navigating it they likely will not spend a whole lot of time trying to figure it out. They will most likely leave your site and go to one of your competitor’s website that is much easier to use. People do not have the patience that they used to when the internet was run by dial up connections. Now people expect a certain level of quality and an easy to use navigation system is definitely one of those things.

Content - Content is so important and not just for search engine optimization. Your website needs to have updated and relevant content that your visitors want to read. The issue that you are beginning to see on many websites is that they are writing their content strictly for the search engines and this may be great for your SEO campaign however it is not what your visitors are wanting to read. Having content that is that interesting so that your visitors want to read it is critical to the success of your website. I would suggest that you go through and read the content on your website so that you can make sure it is something that your website visitors want to read.

Slow Loading Times - Again, if we were still in the time of dial up this may not be as big of issue but we are not and this is a huge issue. Some of the things that will slow your website down are; uploading images that are too large, server issues, bad code, etc. Whatever the reason your website is slow you must contact your web design team to make sure that it is fixed. If this was the issue then once you fix it you should notice your conversion rate is going up.
   
No Call To Action Buttons - Call to action buttons are key to any conversion rate. People like to be told what to do and where to go. By simply using call to action buttons you can lead visitors through your website and directly to the conversion pages. This is one of the issues we see all to often. This may not be something as a business owner you are aware of but your web design team should point this out to you.

Shopping Cart Does Not Work Properly - This should never ever be an issue however we see this time and time again. If you get somebody to your shopping cart ready to check out the deal should almost always go through. However, if there are issues on your shopping cart issues it may cause potential customers to leave your site frustrated or cause them not to trust your website. Many times if they lose trust not only do you lose the sale but you will lose the customer for good. One of the more common issues that we find happen on the checkout page is having an SSL issue. This will leave a no security error message which will scare many of your customers off for good. You do not want to lose the customers that you worked so hard to get.

Not Mobile Friendly - I have said this time and time again. Mobile users are passing the amount of people surfing the web from desktop and laptops. This has made a mobile friendly website almost as important as just simply having a website. If your website is not mobile friendly then there is likely a large portion of visitors that are leaving. Why would you want to spend all the money on a new website and then only target half of your visitors? This does not make any sense that is why if you want to increase your conversion rate you must get a mobile friendly website. We would suggest going with a responsive design and not going with a mobile website. There are many reasons for this but a couple important reasons are that a responsive website is one website and doesn’t have to be updated twice and secondly is that a responsive website will update based upon the device that you are using.

These are 7 common issues that we see on websites that cause a website not to deliver. Some of these issues are quick fixes and some of them will take a little more time. In either instance they are issues that need to be fixed if you expect your website to be successful.

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Choosing the Right Phoenix Web Design Company

Your website is important. In this increasingly virtual world it is the first impression that consumers will receive of your business and it should be your primary lead generation machine. In order to ensure that your web page does this, it needs to be optimized for just that task. Unless you are a web design expert, you will need the help of a professional for this. As it is with all industries, all Phoenix web design companies are not equal, so you need to be prudent with your choice therein. To help you with this, we are going to take a look at five factors that you should take into consideration when choosing a Phoenix web design company.

Make sure that they ask you what your goals are

 The construction if your company’s website is not a vanity project. While a nice looking website is great, it should also serve the business functions that you need it to. If a Phoenix web design company does not ask you what business functions you need for your site, walk away, because it is highly unlikely that they will design a site that serves your marketing, customer service or other business needs.

Make sure that their software platform is accessible to someone outside of their firm

Sometimes the computer programs that a Phoenix web design firm will use to build a site is so proprietarily esoteric that only members of their design team can access it. This means that nobody can modify your website but the web design company that built it. Unless you don’t mind being forever beholden to the same web design company for all of your future web design needs, find a Phoenix web design company that uses a program accessible by someone outside of their office.

Find out what they do—or don’t—do for you after the web design process is finished

The initial web design is only the first step in using the internet as the ultimate business resource. You still need to manage and update it. If you have a member of your team who is well-versed in that area, then you are fine and should skip the next three sentences.

If you are like most Phoenix companies, however, you do not have an in-house techie who can handle your website on their own once it is launched. This means that you should find out how the Phoenix web design company plans on handing the website over to you. Some will wash their hands of all involvement, some will tutor you before they hand the site over, some will do some temporary handholding while you learn how to manage the site yourself, and some will offer full-blown website management services.

Check their background

As with any service-based company, you should check the Phoenix web design firm’s background to make sure their services are as good as they are touting them to be. Following up on references from previous clients is an efficient way to do just that; whether someone has received great or terrible service, they will gladly tell you about it.

Although this is where you should start, a good reference is not the only way to determine how good a Phoenix web design company will be. If a design firm lacks references due to the lack of a substantial client base, do not count them out yet. Find out what the qualifications (education, experience, ect.) of their team are and consider the other three factors that we discussed above.

Create an intelligent balance between cost and services rendered

Every quote for Phoenix web design services is not the same—even if the prices are. Once you have a realistic budget in mind, you can start to consider the quotes being submitted by various Phoenix web design companies.

In order to gain the best services for web design Phoenix has for you, make sure that cost isn’t the only factor you consider. Look at each quote line item and using all of the factors discussed above, determine which service you must have, and which ones you can do without. This will allow you to optimize the cost of the web design without cutting corners (that will harm your website’s ability to generate revenue) for the sake of temporary savings.

Your website will take your Phoenix area business to the next level—if you get the design right

Choosing the right Phoenix web design company is a critical business decision. To procure the best services for web design Phoenix has for you, carefully consider the factors above and decide what you do and don’t need. For more information about choosing the right Phoenix web design firm, feel free to post a comment or question below, or contact us directly.

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