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E V O R P M I YOUR E T I S B E W W
QUALITY ASSURED How to get the best FREE content TOP MONEYSAVING TIPS Cheapest ways to improve your site
O T S AY
SEARCH PARTY Win the SEO battle & get more traffic
STOP, THIEF! Boost your site’s security now! BEST AUDITING PRACTICES Learn strengths & weaknesses from analytics
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CONTENTS 05 Editor’s Letter
The TechRadar Pro editor speaks about how to improve your website
06 The reasons why you should
audit your website
The best tips about keeping your website up to spec
10 How a good design can really
help your website
Making sure a solid layout will keep users and contributors coming back to your site
14 How to win the SEO battle and drive more traffic to your website
Learn the secret methods to gain more visitors to your site - constantly
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Top tools for improving your website at little or no cost The easy and most efficient ways to upgrade and update your website
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100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
20 How to optimize the
performance of your website Ensuring the speed and load times of your website matches the industry standards
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How to get quality content on your website for free Find those little tricks that will help benefit your site and keep users engaged
28 The importance of branding for
your website
Nothing speaks louder than the branding of your site - well, unless your site is bright yellow
32 How to evaluate and improve your website’s security
Invest in some quality security to protect yourself and those who regularly visit your site
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TechRadar is the ultimate source of tech buying advice. It is the market-leading authority on all things technology, and for good reason. TechRadar is the first place to visit if you want to find out about the latest rumours, and the final click when making the ultimate buying decision. Packed with breaking news, expert in-depth reviews, fantastic features and easy to follow how-to guides, TechRadar is for anyone unashamedly obsessed with tech.
Future is an award-winning international media group and leading digital business. We reach more than 49 million international consumers a month, and create world-class content and advertising for passionate consumers online, on tablet and smartphone, and in print.
All contents copyright Š 2018 Future Publishing Limited or published under licence.
Future plc is a public company quoted on the London Stock Exchange (symbol: FUtr). www.futureplc.com
Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. Registered office: registered office: Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA.
Chief Executive Zillah Byng-Thorne Non-Executive Chairman Peter Allen Chief Financial Officer Penny Ladkin-Brand Tel +44 (0)20 7042 4000 (London) Tel +44 (0)1225 442244 (Bath) EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Desire Athow ACCOUNT DIRECTOR Amanda Burns ART & DESIGN www.olivermedia.co.uk PROJECT MANAGER Patris Gordon LICENSING Matt Ellis matt.ellis@futurenet.com
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All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced, stored, transmitted or used in any way without the prior written permission of the publisher.
All information contained in this publication is for information only and is, as far as we are aware, correct at the time of going to press. Future cannot accept any responsibility for errors or inaccuracies in such information. You are advised to contact manufacturers and retailers directly with regard to the price and other details of products or services referred to in this publication. Apps and websites mentioned in this publication are not under our control. We are not responsible for their contents or any changes or updates to them.
100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
EDITOR’S LETTER Y
Désiré Athow Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro
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ou built your website, you published it online but visitors are failing to turn up. All appropriate steps have been followed to the dot when you commissioned and got it created. You firmly believe that your site is the best online for your particular niche so why isn’t it gathering pace? Well, publishing a website online is not the end of the trip. A website requires time, attention and dedication just like a brick-and-mortar shop needs a refurb or a spring cleaning from time to time. Accept that online, your small business competes with the whole world. And while there’s a plethora of books that will explain how to create your first website, few will actually tell you how to keep your head above the water when it comes to improving your website. Websites have their own individualities, which is why “100 ways to improve your website” doesn’t aim to pigeonhole any. Instead you get a list of tips and tricks nicely organised into logical chapters that you can flick through at leisure, in any order. There’s no right or wrong and definitely no blueprint to stick to. From SEO to good design via the holy grail of quality content, our experts will help you maximise your online investment and keep your website at the top of its game. We’ve even included a list of tools for improving your website if you want to take it to the next level, that’s the least we can wish to readers of this bookazine.
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THE REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD
AUDIT YOUR WEBSITE
Analyze your site to reveal its weaknesses and strengths. Websites aren’t successful by default – they need to be tended much like a garden.
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veryone knows a person who has a car but refuses to ever look at the engine oil or even the water levels. Deep down they know at some point their vehicle will go wrong, probably from something minor that was left to fester, but they prefer to live in
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perpetual automotive ignorance. Taking the same approach with a website is equally a very bad plan. But with the new and rapidly changing topology of the web landscape, a site could run into difficulties more rapidly than you might ever imagine.
100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
All sites should have a regular audit, at least once a year, to identify any potential weaknesses, and also to look for improvements even in those areas which seem to be fine.
Analysis There are plenty of websites and applications that offer to analyze a web location and then deliver a list of action points with regards to how the site might be improved. What these tools generally do is look at the site, its structure and contents, then further examine search engine page rankings from the most popular engines. By comparing the two, and possibly referring to other websites ranked higher in the same searches as the analyzed site, it is possible to produce
should also find the answers to these questions: • Is the site mobile friendly? • Are there any broken links on the site? • Is the Meta information valid? • How quickly do pages load? • Are the graphics too large? • How many backlinks exist? • Do you have a schema? • Is the URL structure too complicated? There are many other details that should also be checked, but these represent the critical ones that must be right for a website to succeed. A full audit should include technical analysis of the code and performance of the site with plenty of concurrent
“All sites should have a regular audit, at least once a year, to identify any potential weaknesses” a checklist of where the site is good and equally where it needs to be improved. Google, Bing and Yahoo all have their own methods for ranking: some of the changes suggested will help on all search platforms, and some will be specific to just one search service. But remember, these aren’t the only things that an audit will identify. It
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users. Furthermore, it should deliver a full internal and external link assessment, check into social media visibility, and critically, assess how the site performs on search engines. And, once all that information has been collated, a ‘hit list’ of changes and enhancements can be created to address any issues.
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You must document all changes so that anyone working on the site (or site content) has updated information to hand
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The feedback loop You did the analysis, followed the advice, but how do you know that you’ve made things better and not worse? What you need to do is track your page rankings, and hopefully see that after all these adjustments, the page is better ranked across a range of search engines. It’s then a matter of repeating this exercise to hone the site into an optimal state for the current business sector that the website is operating in. This is especially important if you launch a new feature to the site, a new product range, or initiate a fresh marketing exercise – as the analysis might be one of the first indications of how this has impacted site traffic, and
how it might need tweaking to make best use of the resulting higher profile. It is also important to document all changes so that anyone new working on the site (or site content) has this information to hand. By being able to refer to this, they shouldn’t repeat past mistakes, instead building on the success already achieved.
SEO moving target The problem with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is that it is an inherently endless, but very necessary, task. You make some changes and elevate your place in the search results, and then one of your competitors makes similar efforts, pushing you back down again.
100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
“In the end, you must simply make the best of what web resources you have” There are also many invisible factors that can come into play, like a highly popular piece of content you added, which can skew results or get the page to appear on more searches. Furthermore, there are external influences that can’t be predicted, such as a breaking news story that relates to your sector, or an important mention on a high traffic site. In the end, you must simply make the best of what web resources you have, using a decent SEO service provider to do a regular analysis and then add the required keywords and phrases to attract more traffic.
Don’t expect overnight results – instead aim to keep the numbers moving in the right direction, even if the improvement is modest. These facilities don’t cost much to use, and they can make a big difference for a site trying to break into higher page rankings. Those who are serious about page rankings and want to increase the number of visitors to a site need to invest in SEO – and indeed possibly contract an SEO service to manage all this, at least in the early important phases of your drive to get more online attention.
GoDaddy provides the necessary and perfect tools for auditing your website
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HOW A
GOOD DESIGN CAN REALLY HELP YOUR WEBSITE Tips from the top on how to make a suitably streamlined site. Designing a website for ease of use and logical navigation is essential.
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e’ve all experienced websites which are difficult to navigate, and may have led you round in circles, or hid the pages you most wanted to visit. Usability is an important aspect of the design of a site. Because like a mass transport system, if done correctly, it will flow visitors through and on to their intended destination smoothly and efficiently. Conversely, a badly designed website can cause visitors to leave in frustration having not found what they were looking for, possibly never to return. So, what are the tricks that good website designers employ?
Learning from print While websites don’t suffer from the same limitations that restrict printed media, the way that people read a web page is very similar to how they approach a newspaper or magazine. Traditionally, the identity of the site is at the top center, below that are the
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big headlines, and then the stories flow down the page, and possibly to subsequent pages. There is nothing wrong with having a banner story with ‘turn to page 8 to read about it’ beneath, and in that respect having links on a website to content buried deep inside is entirely acceptable. What’s important on the default page that anyone coming to the site will encounter first is to keep things simple and uncluttered, because overloading the visitor with options is a recipe for confusion. Graphics rather than text can be a means to create a simple to follow structure, and take visitors to the subsection they want to find. The objective of the homepage is to create a model and structure that users can understand and follow for their entire visit. Therefore once the model has been defined, never create sub-pages that use a different system of menus and placement of information.
100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
DESIGN DO’S
10 things that any website design should always aim for. 1. Be age aware
6. Consider the disabled
Consider the average age of the readership when picking the font types and sizes. Avoid serif fonts, as their readability is generally poor.
A proportion of all visitors will be disabled, and helping them get the most out of the site is important.
2. Use the logo
Once your website is operational, you can determine the pages most visitors gravitate towards. Count how many clicks from the homepage that requires, and try to reduce the number accordingly.
Every page should have the company logo on it (usually top left), and clicking on it should take you back to the homepage.
7. Count those clicks
8. Show color control Ideally, a site should use the color palette from the company logo, along with a couple of additional shades designed to work alongside those to highlight or contrast. You should check how they’ll impact on someone with a visual impairment or color blindness.
9. Use bigger pictures
A footer that contains ‘About’ and ‘Terms and Conditions’ links – plus any help links – is useful and should be on every page.
Big graphics engage visitors, but they can increase page load times and are also harder to render for those users with less powerful machines. Consider reducing the colors or using monochrome for large images, making them faster to render.
4. Remember mobile users
10. Big buttons
Make tweaks to the mobile version if it doesn’t work well on a phone or tablet. Mobile users might appreciate lower resolution graphics for faster page loading.
Have big ‘Call to Action’ buttons to drive visitors to product pages or the e-commerce section – wherever it makes the most commercial sense to direct them.
3. Use a footer
5. Speed is critical The homepage should load the fastest of all pages, as it is the one place that everyone will visit. Therefore make it as clean and efficient as possible.
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DESIGN DON’TS
10 things that any website design should be avoid at all costs. 1. Avoid some web technologies
7. Don’t be rude
Generally, stay away from complex animated elements that require Flash or JavaScript to work, as they’ll only function on some systems, and these technologies have inherent security issues.
Never ask for a questionnaire to be filled out immediately after a visitor arrives at the homepage. While this is common practice on some sites, it’s rude and ignores the fact that the user came to the site for a purpose. Also, it’s unlikely that they will fill out a questionnaire when they’ve only just walked through the doors.
2. Don’t use sidebars It has become the marketing norm for promotional messages to be placed in sidebars, meaning that tuning them out has become second nature to web surfers.
3. Keep fonts under control Never use more than three fonts, and if you can stick to just a couple. This includes different point sizes or variations (bold, italic, and so forth) of the same font. The more fonts, the more the website will look like the small ads section of a newspaper.
4. Limit scrolling
8. Don’t be long-winded Don’t present content that is greater than 20 words wide, and keep paragraphs suitably short as well, not going much over 50 words ideally. Wide pages and long paragraphs mean poor readability.
9. Never overload a page White space increases readability and enables visitors to digest the content on a page more easily. If a page is cluttered, consider moving some of the content elsewhere and linking to it there.
Don’t design a site that requires each page to scroll to be read. Users may well fail to slide down and read the critical part they wanted to see, especially if they’re not using a mouse to navigate.
5. Never underline text Users will expect it to be a clickable link, and they will be confused when it doesn’t take them to another page.
6. Avoid lengthy forms The more information that you ask people to fill in, the less likely they are to complete the form and click submit. Once you’ve established a channel of communication, you can always follow up and get more information from them.
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10. Avoid auto-run objects Arriving on a site and then being bombarded with music or video you didn’t initiate can be annoying, so avoid doing that to your potential customers.
100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
It is also useful to differentiate each section using color, enabling visitors to, say, associate help with one tint and sales with another. These palettes should be defined in the homepage and maintained throughout.
Final thoughts We’ve all surfed enough websites to know when a design works, and when it fails horribly. But it can be difficult to see a problem – or indeed conceive of a solution – when you know where everything is, and why a page is located in a specific place. Therefore it is very important to ensure that a person who has never seen the website or had any part in its development is involved in testing the site. Invariably, they’ll notice things that someone more familiar with the project will miss, and this type of feedback is vital. For those starting from scratch, the best policy is to take 10 websites that you visit on a regular basis and write a short list of things you like and dislike
about them. At the end of this process you’ll have a neat list of elements you’d like to see in the new design, and also pitfalls to avoid. However, breaking some rules and innovating is also part of the brief, so be prepared to consider doing something not normally seen on the web, as this will differentiate the site and make it memorable. The trick is to challenge the visitor with things they’re not expecting, without confusing or annoying them with visual metaphors they don’t understand or navigation that seems haphazard. It’s also useful to accept that most website designs go through some tweaking early in their life, and very few are optimal from the outset.
You must always think ‘responsive’ or ‘mobile first’ when improving your website’s design and overall look
“The trick is to challenge the visitor with things they’re not expecting”
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DRIVE MORE TRAFFIC
HOW TO WIN THE SEO BATTLE AND
TO YOUR WEBSITE
How SEO-friendly is your website? Here are a few suggestions on how to establish a better relationship with search engines, and get more visitors by doing so.
M
When a website is indexed and ranked, the search engine will look for certain things to activate a page’s listing
ost people who build a website are looking to attract visitors, but achieving that simple objective can be challenging. As the majority of surfers use search engines to locate websites, how your site interacts with Google, Yahoo, Bing and others is critical for success. Success in this relationship will see your site listed higher in the page rankings, and failure might see it not
listed at all. A question that you need to ask is: How SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly is my site? Because if the answer isn’t a positive one, that’s lots of potential traffic bypassing your site.
How to be a better SEO player The subtle ways that search engines crawl a website is at the heart of making a site rank higher. When a website is indexed and ranked, the search engine will look for certain things, and if it doesn’t find them it will invariably rank the site lower.
A moving target The topology of search analysis is forever changing. Tricks and methods that worked well a year ago are mined out, and new SEO strategies have evolved to replace them.
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ENDLESS SEARCH
Here are 7 ways to make your site work better with all search engines, and enable more people to find you easily. 1. Use Robots.txt This file contains a list of the files that the search engine shouldn’t bother crawling, making it faster at indexing the site. And, by definition, it excludes from search those parts of the site that might be for partners or internal use.
2. Use XML Sitemap Another way to help the indexing function is to have a sitemap created in XML for it to digest. Many web building tools will automatically generate these, and it’s also possible to give special pages greater importance within the structure.
3. Perform image optimization Having images that are sized and labelled appropriately is important to the speed of your site, but it also impacts on how the search engines functions. Images should adhere to a naming convention, have ‘Alt’ tags defined, and they should also be in a suitable format (JPG or PNG). If the same image is used in multiple places, don’t duplicate the file.
4. Be careful with keywords Having the best selection of keywords for your business is vital, as they’re often the triggers for search
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connections. However, the excessive inclusion of keywords that aren’t unique to your business or sector can backfire, as the search engines will assume you’re trying to game the system and reduce the page ranking. Using the names of all your competitors can also lead to problems, even if it is a common practice.
5. Use a forum If you have a customer forum, then make sure that someone is responsible for representing the company on that platform. Replying to customers’ questions and interacting with them is an excellent way to create dynamic content that can elevate the page rank.
6. Use short URLs Once you’ve got a visitor to your site,
you can make links to content with relatively long URLs – but don’t do this. The shorter a URL, the quicker a search engine can index it, and the faster that page is likely to be found. Therefore addresses like www. mysite.com/about are good, and ones such as www.mysite.com/All_About_ the_Company are bad. If you must have a multi-word URL, use a hyphen, not underscore.
7. Check all links work Having links that lead nowhere or to pages that have nothing on them is a bad plan, and your site will be penalized accordingly. Also, make sure that you don’t have pages defined that aren’t accessible from any other page, or don’t have a reverse link to the homepage.
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TOP TOOLS FOR
IMPROVING YOUR WEBSITE AT LITTLE OR NO COST Google’s armory of tools can be used for all manner of purposes. Google has developed a wide range of (mostly) free tools to help web developers from a technical standpoint.
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hile some services and software that aim to increase website traffic cost money, there are a good number of really useful ones that are mostly free. Undoubtedly the best of these have been created by Google with the intention of indirectly supporting its ad business. But, in the majority of
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cases, they can be equally effective in developing a site even if you don’t intend to run Google adverts or link to the firm’s services. There are many more tools around than we’ve detailed here, but these six are critical to consider for anyone wishing to increase their traffic and improve their page rankings.
100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
“You can allocate a budget, so an overly successful campaign can’t empty your coffers entirely”
1. GOOGLE ADS This one is a paid service, but it does allow for a very surgical assault on the particular sector in which your website is operating. Previously called Google AdWords, Google Ads is a means by which you can bid for an advert to run on Google when a specific word is used to search. When anyone browsing clicks on the ad, you are charged the amount that you bid per click. And you can allocate a budget, so an overly successful campaign can’t empty your coffers entirely. Google also allows the mechanism to work globally or just for geographically local searches, making it even more affordable for small local businesses. As you only pay for results, you can start small, making this one of the easiest ways to get into online ads and target the customers or traffic that you are most looking to attract.
operating on a tight budget. To operate AdSense, you simply insert a small amount of code into the site. Once this code is present, adverts generated by Google will then be displayed in the header, sidebar or content. Depending on the size of the site and the number of visitors it has, the amount of money you can make from AdSense can range from modest to substantial. Unless you have a massively successful site, it is unlikely to be a huge amount, but whatever income you get might be helpful.
3. GOOGLE ANALYTICS While all the other tools mentioned here are useful, this one is a complete necessity for anyone taking their
To operate AdSense, you simply insert a small amount of code into the site to generate adverts around your site
2. GOOGLE ADSENSE Whereas this isn’t ideal for a corporate website, it is a great fit for bloggers or a small site that is
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Google Analytics will tell you what browser your visitors used, where they came from previously and other metrics
website presence seriously. As with AdSense, your Analytics journey starts by adding a small amount of code to your site, which then allows Google to track your visitors from the point where they arrive. Once this is in place, it’s just a matter of time before useful data starts to be extracted, and you can break this down to better understand your visitors. Google Analytics will tell you what browser they used, where they came from previously (a link on another site, or a search), their geographic location and native language. It can also identify what device and operating system they are using. And, critically,
it reveals where most visitors head to on the site, and if they bought anything from you as a result. There are also social media plugins to deploy, and information about how long each visitor spent on the site. To say that this is all important information for a webmaster is an understatement. It tells you everything you need to know about where the site works, and equally where it fails. And it also indicates where you need to make adjustments to get more visitors – and if you have e-commerce, more sales. This service is entirely free, so you don’t have an excuse not to use it.
4. GOOGLE DISPLAY PLANNER The replacement for DoubleClick Ad Planner, Display Planner is the tool specifically built to design an ad campaign by providing lots of ideas based on the information you provide it about your site, and also what it can extract from Google Analytics. Then, when you’ve designed a campaign, it will have an educated guess at how many page impressions it is likely to achieve, and roughly how
“This service is entirely free, so you don’t have an excuse not to use it. ”
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100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
much that is going to cost you in pay-per-click. In most businesses, such a plan and associated expenditure would need some form of senior approval. And to help with this aspect, Google Display Planner can export the plan and also share it with your colleagues. The purpose of this tool is to help you make better choices about where you spend marketing money, so you can get the return on investment that you need.
5. GOOGLE TRENDS Another Google tool that was once called something else, Google Trends is the new name for Google Insights. What this tool facilitates is a profile of any given search term that includes how often it is used, from which geographic location, and if it’s being used more or less over time. This information can be global or country-specific, over a longer time period or just a few hours, and there are also category breakdowns. That could be very valuable information if you are planning an ad campaign using a particular word, or you are looking for trending words to stimulate more traffic in the future. Our only warning about this tool is that a word might have different meanings across the world, such as ‘biscuit’ for example, a word that means different things in the US and UK.
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6. GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS Not everyone comes to the internet with a degree in website design and statistical analysis. In short, most people need some help. Once you’ve signed up to Webmaster Tools by adding a small piece of Google-created HTML to your website allowing you to be verified as the owner, you can access a wide selection of useful tools. These enable you to check the site configuration and its general health, gaining insights on details such as links and crawl errors, external links and traffic sources. It also offers an excellent website optimization tool that will suggest how your site might be better organized and the HTML structurally improved. If you use a site generation application or WordPress, then these pointers might not be that helpful, but those with custom-built sites will find them invaluable. The majority of webmasters need all these tools, and Google also has a Labs section where the company prototypes entirely new functionality.
Google Trends offers an excellent website optimization to suggest how your site might be better organised
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HOW TO
OPTIMIZE THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUR WEBSITE
Get more visitors with faster page loading times. A sluggish website is a problem that can put off many visitors – but you can make your site run faster.
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ook around the internet, and you’ll find plenty of statistics quoted about how little time people are willing to wait for any website to load before losing interest. Those with fixed broadband connections expect a website to
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appear almost instantly, and even mobile users don’t have infinite patience. According to research, the optimal load time for a page is three seconds, though the majority of sites are closer to double that – or more. And if you go
100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
much beyond 10 seconds, the majority of people are likely to abandon the page and go elsewhere. How long a web page takes to appear on a browser depends on factors divided between both the server and the client device on the other end. While it isn’t possible to speed up all users due to things beyond the web designer’s control, it is practical to make a site as efficient as possible, improving performance for the majority of visitors. Enhanced speed can be achieved with a range of different methods, but there are three central pillars to improving site performance. These are enhanced hosting, site optimization, and also platformspecific considerations.
The importance of hosting How much a site spends on web hosting is usually in proportion to the number of visitors expected on any given day, factoring in how long each stays and how many pages they browse. This is the primary reason, along with security concerns, why relatively few companies host sites internally.
Typically, web hosting is ‘virtual’ in that a specific piece of hardware isn’t allocated to the website – rather, it’s shared with other sites through virtualization. The beauty of having this solution is that more resources can easily be allocated to a site in times of high demand, providing the hosting agreement allows for this flexibility. What’s important to decide is the projected traffic you expect to receive, and to elevate your service appropriately. If you have a rapidly growing site, but due to the hosting level it starts to become unresponsive when a flood of visitors turn up, this could undermine your whole project. Therefore plan to start small and then scale when the
GoDaddy offers suitable price and plans for whatever your needs of your website: big or small
“According to research, the optimal load time for a page is three seconds”
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es in py tion e es in
SOURCE CODE Here’s a list of the top seven issues that slow down a site which can easily be addressed. 1. Multi-source pages If a page is made up of elements that come from other locations, including ads, this can dramatically impact on speed. The page becomes dependent on how rapidly those elements from outside the site are being served, compounding performance issues. If you have a page that repeatedly takes too long to load, identify what’s slowing it down and remove it.
2. Widgets and plugins Too many of these components cause much the same problems as multi-source pages, but they’re an issue that affects WordPress sites in particular. The temptation to pre-load pages with all manner of calendars, animated buttons, clocks, and so on is strong, but you must resist. These features require server-side code and client-side code to execute, and will often pause the presentation of other page elements before they finish loading.
3. Scaling graphics Website graphics shouldn’t be scaled unless they are photographs that you wish to be clickable for a full-quality presentation. Having them scaled up is also bad, as this makes them blocky or reveals compression artefacts.
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Ensure you work with a trained developer who understand basic source code Making the graphics the same size as they should be viewed takes the workload off the server and the client browser, and avoids the user downloading larger graphics than needed.
4. Incompatible media There exists a raft of file types that were once popular on the PC, but are now effectively defunct. Mobile users won’t be able to access them, and most desktop users will also have issues unless they’re still running a plugin on an old browser version. As a rule, don’t host video, image or music formats that won’t work by default with Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. It annoys users when the website has elements missing, or comes up with odd errors.
5. Backend code How many times have you seen a neat
feature that can be added to a website with ‘just a short line of code’? There are many of these, and they can be useful. However, they often cause a headache for a much larger piece of code that is running on the server to make the code snippet do something useful. Have too many of these – because you put that code on every page – and the server will become bogged down trying to process these requests rather than serving the site pages. The most common culprits for these things are, ironically, analytics and form processing. But code that tackles other tasks can also have a negative impact on overall performance.
6. Mobile mistakes A classic mistake that impacts mobile users is for the redirect to the mobile version of the site to come only after
100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
site reaches maturity.
Site optimization
most of the desktop-intended homepage renders on the phone or tablet. The result is often a long wait before the browser is whisked away to the mobile site, followed by another delay before that renders. While statistically mobile platforms still lag slightly behind conventional computers in terms of web browsing, mobile surfing is rapidly expanding and will very soon be the dominant way that most users will access the majority of sites. Therefore, attention to the mobile variant of any site is at least as important, if not more so, than the desktop counterpart. Because mobile users are often connecting using 3G or 4G data services without the consistent transfer speeds that wired broadband users might expect, the significance of rapid web page delivery is even greater.
7. Use compression There are numerous ways that it is possible to ensure that the files which make up the site are smaller, and therefore quicker to download for a visitor. There are global server-side technologies like Gzip that can crunch file sizes by as much as 70%, although just picking the right file types and compression levels for JPG files can also bring performance benefits. Gzip will require server activation, and you can check if it’s active on your server by using this site.
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The performance of any website is very dependent on how it was built, and what software technology it uses. Once you have a prototype site, one of the first procedures you need to perform is to score each page on how long it takes to load. There are numerous tools available to measure page performance, and some of them will break down the timings to identify exactly what caused the most delay on any given page. This testing isn’t something that you should only perform once on a single PC, as your visitors will be coming from a diverse number of different locations, with varied broadband connections, and they will be using different types of devices. It’s especially critical that mobile platforms are tested both under Wi-Fi and cellular connections. And, in an ideal world, getting results from remote geographic locations is also valuable information. Once you have collated this performance data, it is time to return to the site and see what alterations you can make to enhance the user experience.
Once you have a prototype site, one of the first procedures is to score each page on how long it takes to load
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HOW TO GET QUALITY CONTENT
ON YOUR WEBSITE FOR FREE
Find free images, videos, music and more on the web. Here are some helpful pointers on finding free content from articles through to graphics, music and videos.
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G
etting a significant web presence can be a costly exercise, especially if you need a significant website creating from the ground up. However, building the site is only the start of all the expenditure. Attracting visitors requires new content to be added on a regular basis. Writing fresh and relevant content for a site is a full-time occupation for many, and it often isn’t realistic for those with other duties to produce weekly postings that might run to a thousand words or more. Luckily there are sources of free content that you can use on a website, although not all sites can make use of them all. Blog sites are best suited to repurpose these resources, but they can also be useful for providing free graphics, text and even music for other types of website. To be clear, the content we’re talking about isn’t something you’d put on the front of your site to draw people in – it’s something to use to fill deeper pages and make the site seem more substantial. Before jumping in we should also point out that using work without permission could have serious legal implications, so make sure that anything you use is genuinely copyright-free. Bearing all that in mind, here are six ways to source free content for your site.
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1. FREE ARTICLES HEADER HERE There are people who are just happy to be published, and they contribute to sites like EzineArticles, where you can find content written about a very wide range of subjects that you can repurpose for free. Currently, the site claims to have just over 500,000 ‘expert authors’ providing a huge selection of work that you can freely use. The content remains on the EzineArticles.com site where you link to it. We tested the service by conducting a search on the topic of ‘surfboard building’ and it came back with 740 surfing-related articles, although none specifically about making boards. Less obscure subjects generated even more potential content, and on occasion, the site found exactly the subject matter which was required. As you might reasonably expect, the quality of these articles often isn’t the best, and they might well appear on multiple other sites that found them before you – but they are free. EzineArticles isn’t the only source for free articles. Here are five others which are popular, although we suspect that some content will be duplicated across these sites.
Amazines – Covers everything from Feng Shui to Food & Beverages Article Sphere – Will generate an RSS feed for any given subject Article City – Plenty of content, and it’s professionally presented Articles Factory – A good selection of technical pieces HubPages – Reviews, hobbies and life tips
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2. FREE GRAPHICS Sourcing suitable graphics which aren’t copyrighted can be difficult. But there are lots of very good resources which allow their images to be used freely without consent. These are just a few of the numerous sites that offer bitmap graphics and photographs which you can use freely. There are many others, too.
PixaBay, Unsplash, Pexels and Negative Space In addition to pixel-based graphics, there are also some sources of copyright-free vector graphics that can be easily rescaled to whatever size you might need. Here are a few to start you off.
Stokio, Vexels, Vectors4Free and Vector Portal
3. FREE VIDEOS A video might seem like a very specific thing to include, but there are lots of clips you can find which are the equivalent of moving stock photos. Those wanting to create an atmosphere or mood might find these very useful, and there are some very high-quality examples to be found. Try these sites if you need a free video for your website.
Pexels Video, Stock Footage 4 Free, Pixabay, Clipstill, Videezy and Videvo
4. COPYRIGHT-FREE MUSIC Adding music to a video makes a big difference to how professional it appears, and using commercial soundtracks can be disturbingly expensive. Luckily there are plenty of free resources that can supply music that doesn’t come with a big price tag, although some might ask for recognition of the artist in the credits or notes. Here are a few links to get you some music you can use without worrying about copyright infringement. Most are either free or cost very little per track.
YouTube Audio Library, Free Stock Music, TeknoAxe, Machinima Sound, Incomptech and Amazon
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5. IDEA GENERATORS Sometimes content is easy enough to write, but coming up with ideas is the challenge. There are some sites out there that you can provide with a selection of keywords, and they subsequently come up with a series of potential titles for those pieces. One of the best is SEOPressor, the Blog Title Generator. All you need to do is put in some words, define if they’re just generic terms or have brand, celebrity or industry relevance, and click the Generate Titles button. We tried ‘repairing classic hats’ and the list of suggestions included:
>> 10 tips to avoid failure in repairing classic hats >> Never mess with repairing classic hats and here’s the reasons why
>> The death of repairing classic hats >> Now is the time for you to know the truth about repairing classic hats
>> The cheapest way to earn your free ticket to repairing classic hats
>> 10 things to know about repairing classic hats >> The 15 common stereotypes when it comes to repairing classic hats
>> 7 reliable sources to learn about repairing classic hats While you still need to write these, of course, they could be exactly the sort of content that will attract readers and also spark the search engines to elevate your page rankings.
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6. JUST ASK This might seem cheeky, but many blog writers are happy for their work to be reused or linked to, as long as you don’t try to represent the work as your own. Search for an article on a given subject, then compose an email to the author asking to reuse or link to the piece. They can only say ‘no’, and if they’re interested in getting more people to read their blog, that’s an unlikely scenario. The only major roadblocks that you can run into is if the site is run by someone who doesn’t think your business is ethical, or it is sponsored by a competitor. Just make sure to clearly communicate what you intend to do with their work, and hope that they’re pleased in your interest. If you send 10 of these emails and get a couple of positive responses, it’s a worthwhile exercise, enabling you to source some very high-quality work without paying for its creation.
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THE IMPORTANCE OF
BRANDING FOR YOUR WEBSITE Dealing with logos, cross-branding and more‌ Here are some tips to deliver a branded website that enhances business opportunities, and doesn’t distract from them.
T
he purpose of branding is to present a unified message about the company and its products. And also wrapped up in this is the need to deliver a story that customers can relate to, in order to establish better connections and loyalty with those people.
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Businesses spend large amounts of money on branding because the impact of having a well-established brand is a very strong one when it comes to sales and repeat business. Digital branding, as presented on a website, is a narrow aspect of the wider possibilities, as web pages are
100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
“For web branding, the size of a logo is important because of the impact on screen space”
mostly viewed in 2D and on a relatively small display. However, the difference between brands online and offline is more subtle than the technical limitations of screens. Whereas offline branding only appears where the company places it – i.e. on business cards, stationery, T-shirts and billboard posters – online branding can appear almost anywhere. That hints at one of the issues with online branding, in that there is a possibility that control over the branding is much less refined, and there’s the danger that a brand could be hijacked by others.
Branding guides Most large companies have a branding guide that has been created by the marketing department and outlines how their brand should be represented. This documentation was doubtless mostly created for print operations so that when they produce posters or promotional material, it looks like everything else that comes from the company. The guide will detail the various
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forms of the company logo, how it is used on dark and light backgrounds, and what fonts and lettering are appropriate alongside it. What isn’t usually covered is exactly how big or small a logo can be, and how large it should be in relationship to other elements of a design. For web branding, the size of a logo is important because of the impact on screen space – and so are the colors that the logo uses. Colors for web representation are approximations and not the Pantone accurate hues that printed materials utilize. All screens have different gamut (color space) scopes, and typically they are not color-calibrated to be perfect. Therefore a branding guide for web use should have logos in set sizes, Hex defined colours (#000000 is black), preferred font names and font sizes. Once this template has been created, and example files stored online for sharing, they can be provided to any web developers working on branded content to maintain a definitive styling.
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WEBSITE BRANDING Let’s take the time to consider 10 important tricks to website branding that you might well benefit from.
Using the GoDaddy builder allows you to carefully craft the perfect logo
4. Use PNG for logos The preferred file format for websites is JPG. However, this format doesn’t support transparency, and the PNG format does. If the logo is a PNG file it can be placed over backgrounds without having to make a special graphically integrated version.
1. Logo size
3. Limiting files
We’ve already mentioned the presentation of the company logo. This is a key issue, and it’s important to decide on the size of the logo and then stick with that scale wherever it is used. Having different sizes of any branding is confusing, and means you can’t reuse the same graphics.
If you can keep all branding elements to a very small number of files, and reuse these throughout the site, this will give you many advantages. Not only will this make the site quicker to load for visitors, but when a rebranding occurs, it will be much easier to change everything.
5. Have a proposition A new visitor wants to know if they’ve arrived at the right site, and also understand what they can expect to find there. Tell them who you are, what you do, and what makes the company or person special.
2. Cross-branding If your site contains other branding, such as sell-through products or businesses that are partners, then make their logos less prominent. Making other company logos the same size or bigger than yours sends entirely the wrong message about your brand’s importance.
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Make your branding as individual and unique as possible
6. Be consistent Using the same logo and colors is good, but this consistency should extend to every aspect of the site, including the personality behind the wording and the placement of commonly utilized elements. Considering a retail equivalent, all signs and carpets should be the same, and promote a clear and concise theme and style.
7. Consider a mascot A mascot doesn’t work in all contexts, but having a mascot animal, robot or character is a strong idea that visitors will recognize even without the company name. But be warned, not all mascots are loved. Just ask Microsoft’s Clippy!
8. Consider social media If you intend to use your brand on social media – and most will – then
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consider the restrictions that this places on graphics, and work with them. Perhaps designing specific logos for social media is a good idea, as you can tweak them to work best in that context.
9. Think about visual scanning When a person reads a website their eyes perform a pattern of movement that starts at the top-left, then moving right and down. That’s why the logo should be in the top-left. Consider where a visitor’s attention will linger, and place branded elements and business messages in those locations.
this problem. One is to make the logo a watermark on the graphic, either lightening or darkening the content underneath and removing all the colors from the logo. Or conversely, make the background image monochrome, so that the logo stands out over it. Either approach will work.
Sometimes the most simple designs are the most effective
10. Watermarks and tints If you have an elaborate logo, placing it over a detailed image won’t work well visually. There are two approaches you can take to resolve
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HOW TO EVALUATE AND
IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE’S SECURITY
Security is a major aspect of any website – particularly e-commerce operations. A good strategy to protect an important website is never to assume that it’s safe, and make sure that you have all the typical avenues of attack covered.
T
here was a time when people and companies chucked up websites with total abandon, simply hoping that nobody would hack the contents or install malware on the site. Those days are long behind us, as the number and frequency of attacks mean there’s a constant threat – and
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the more successful a website is, the greater the danger. So what are the ways in which you can protect your website, and how can you reduce the possibility that the site is hacked and nefariously altered? Before we get to that, though, we
100 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE
need to understand the most basic level of security that is responsible for many hacked sites – even those hosted on secure servers.
The first line of defense Although some companies insist on hosting their own websites, most business domains are located on secure servers contracted for the purpose. When you choose the hosting, you get to define what OS that system is running (Windows Server, Linux or Unix) and that dictates the security protocols which are required. The person or people with the responsibility to administer the site have admin rights to alter the file structures on it, and nobody else. Where this can go wrong from the outset is if too many people know the admin account details, and the password isn’t changed on a regular basis. And it only takes a keylogger to be installed on one of the machines used to do the admin, and the password is revealed to exactly the sort of people you would least want to have it. But being honest, how many people work in an office where passwords are regularly remembered with post-it notes? A few hands went up there, doubtless. Securing these passwords is the first line of defense, and without that, whatever else you do can be easily undone. So, there are two initial lessons to
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be learned about website security, namely that: It’s only as good as the network where the website was constructed Security is rarely made better by writing passwords down, and placing them in a highly visible location
Performing a security audit on a site is a relatively simple exercise usually done by IT staff
Security audit Performing a security audit on a site is a relatively simple exercise that can be done by IT staff using a selection of software tools. Or alternatively you can contract a third-party to perform the scan for you, and provide a list of potential weaknesses to shore up. If you are buying a web hosting service, the provider might also bundle a security tool to make sure that you are reasonably secure from the outset – but not usually on an ongoing basis. Beyond that, many providers also offer a website security package, where they promise a rapid response to threats and mitigation of service denial assaults. Unless you have just a small personal blog, these are a sound investment.
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The price of these services isn’t much when you consider how costly having a site offline for any period of time might be, especially for those offering e-commerce. Whatever approach you take, it’s important that security scans are performed on a regular basis, to identify possible new threats as they emerge, and address them immediately.
Common concerns The most common forms of attack that websites encounter are these: • D istributed Denial of Service (DDoS) – Many remote computers, usually infected with a Trojan, act in unison demanding web pages repeatedly to the point where the servers can’t handle the amount of requests. • Malware infection – Somehow files that contain some nefarious code are placed on the site with the intention to upload it to anyone who visits.
• SQL injection – Malicious code inserted in a form or input that is then executed by the SQL Database on the server. This code could enable customer data to be accessed, or open the machine to external access. • Brute force – Often a flaw in the OS allows a repeat attack to cause a reset that opens a port briefly for a secondary assault. Given the complexity of modern operating systems, new vulnerabilities are found on a regular basis. • Cross-site scripting – A hacking method where a browser can be redirected to another site, or replace content on the victim site without the visitor being aware. • The ‘zero day’ hack – These are new and difficult to stop attacks that use a weakness that isn’t public knowledge. The time between the vulnerability being discovered and patched is critical, and may require some server features being temporarily disabled until a fix is found.
It’s not wrong to be overly cautious when it comes to your website’s security
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Weaknesses by design While many sites operate with the following features active, they are the source of many security issues for numerous reasons: • Forms – Anything that processes input on the server is a potential entry point for malicious code, and it can also be exploited to extract user data. • Forums – The placing of scripts and redirecting users to websites that dispense malware are just a few of the potential issues with usergenerated forums. • Social media sign-in – Using your Facebook or Google account to log into a site is quick and easy, but it could also be a way that these accounts get hacked. • E-commerce – Crime follows the money, and hackers will expend much more effort to hack an e-commerce site. • Unregulated content – If you source news stories and articles from other sites, you are dependent on their security measures, whatever they might be. Obviously, removing all these functions from a website would make it a much less inviting place for visitors. A judgement call needs to be made about what elements you are prepared to use, and how you intend to mitigate the possible security problems associated with them.
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Appropriate protection There is only one way to guarantee that your website is never hacked, and that’s not to have one. Ultimately, website security is a mitigation exercise where you do enough to make it much less worthwhile to try and hack your site, and also ensure that it’s quicker to recover from any incident. The exact level of security effort made is a choice that all companies must wrestle with, but for those involved in online selling, the commitment must be 100% to secure the personal and financial details of those who trade with you. Numerous companies and organizations have had all their customer data stolen and then subsequently used for identity theft scams, with expensive consequences. Whatever level of protection and monitoring you choose, it needs to be fit for purpose. Finally, consider that having better security than you need has a minimal cost implication, but having less could have huge legal and commercial ramifications.
GoDaddy offers website security in a variety of packages, and with prices to suit every budget
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