Make Your Website Great Again

::Please read this first paragraph in your presidential voice:: Do you have a crappy website? Are you in denial about the state your website? What you need is some tough love and a new fresh outlook. You need to see the future and what it holds for the world wide web. Your online business could be in jeopardy, but we’re talking about bringing back sales. We’re talking about building firewalls to keep the illegal activities off of your server. We don’t want low word count articles. No. We want 1000+ word articles, with only the highest quality images. We want to work together and inner link posts within your site. We want to share this information, as everyone is entitled to it. We want to Make Your Website Great Again!

First off, you will need to look in the mirror. Find out what is wrong with your site. Be honest with yourself. Look around at other sites in your niche. How does your compare?

When was your website designed?

If it has been over 4-5 years you probably need a new site. Go with a complete redesign. Check out some sites in your niche. You should go with a full width layout and modern type of look. Something that is clean and simple. It doesn’t mean you have to get rid of any text. The format should be easy to read and organized. Your site should be clear and concise and not have any old graphics. If you have flash on your website you are living in the past.

Is your content relevant?

If it has been a few years since your content was written then you will want to update your content. Most likely somethings have changed in your business. Update your content to reflect these changes. Use your current content and competitors content as a blueprint. This alone will make your site seem fresh and up to date.

Do you have security plugins installed?

If you have a site made pre-WordPress then you probably don’t know what a plugin is. Security plugins are definitely a must in this day and age. Wordfence automatically alerts me when some illegal activity is going down on my site. The last thing I want is some illegal activity killing my website, not good bro.

How old are your stock images?

I have seen some really bad stock images. If yours look like a 1980’s hairstyle, then you will want to get those changed. Stay up to date. Make sure your images don’t have that grayish film on them. And please check out the hair styles on your images, this is a dead give away on how old your site is.

Is your website mobile friendly and responsive?

D’oh! Please don’t get me started on this. Your site better be mobile friendly and responsive. If not, then you need to immediately check yourself, because you have already wrecked yourself. You have already most likely lost more business than a new website cost. Don’t worry though, just go out and get a new WordPress website. I need to calm down.

Do you have a logo?

Some people just consider a there site name in Times New Roman font a logo. Sorry, but that is not a logo. If you do have a logo, is it clean and simple? Don’t hit me with a thousand colors and swooshes all over the place. Something that is nice and fits today’s era. If you don’t have a logo, get one. You need a logo so you can start branding yourself. People we become familiar with your logo and colors and associate your brand with what you are doing. You can make a pretty easy text logo in Photoshop.

Now that we covered some of the basics that you need to be looking for. How do you really make your website great again?

Start by using a CMS platform like WordPress

If you are making your website the easiest and best solution for you is probably going to be WordPress. When you do this make sure that you are doing it right. Don’t cheap out. Don’t try and do everything for nothing, get a premium theme. Spend some green. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars (if you’re doing it yourself). Depending on how big your site is and what your niche is. WordPress has room for expansion later on if you need it.

Use YouTube for Videos

If you have videos, using YouTube allows you to embed your videos and not slow your site down as hosting them on your site would. Anyway’s YouTube is the second biggest search engine, of course Google is the first. YouTube videos do come up in the search and can draw people to your site.

Change the copyright on the bottom

So many sites I see now still have the WordPress copyright or default theme copyright. If you use a premium WordPress theme you can most likely go somewhere in the settings and change this. If you are using a free theme then you will probably need to go into footer.php and find where to edit. Yikes! Make sure you have a child theme installed. If you don’t know how to do it, don’t. Find a tutorial or someone who knows what they are doing. Just one of the reason I would 100% recommend a premium theme.

Add social media feeds

One way to make your website more up to date is adding social media feeds like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Show that your connected to the outside world. These look like they take a lot of work, but they are relatively easy to setup. Check out the Twitter one I have on my sidebar. Depending on what premium WordPress theme you are using you can stylize and present them in a number of different ways. Some styles are unique only to a particular premium theme.

Use high quality images

Now high quality images can mean a couple of different things. You can buy stock images. I use 123rf.com, they have good images and are cheaper than the other big time stock image sites. You can also take your own. The ones that you take should be taken with a good camera. It doesn’t have to be one with a three foot lens. If you use a phone camera use one of the newer ones, like the iPhone 6s. Surprisingly, the iPhone produces pretty high quality images. You can even use an iPhone lens kit if you wanted.

Don’t be one of those people that wait forever to upgrade you site, do that site now. You’ve already lost sales if you haven’t. Look around at your competition, see what their doing, if they have an updated site take some notes. If they don’t then you will have one up on them, cha-ching.

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