As a business, you probably have some sort of website (hopefully), if not you are really missing out on reaching potential customers. If you do have a website, you most likely fall into one of these three categories: your website working for you (yay!) , you working for your website (that’s no fun) , or your website working against all of your hard work (saboteur!). In this blog, I’ll tell you the five signs of a good website that converts users and works for you, and tell you if your website needs some updating. 

via GIPHY

Before we really get started, we need to define what a “good” website is. A good website is one that works as an extension of yourself when you aren’t there to talk to customers. In essence, it should be the best employee that you have on your team. It should represent your brand perfectly, give customers the information they desire/need, and ultimately lead to new clients/ customers to help grow your business. It should be intentional and well thought out from beginning to end. It should grow as your business grows and never become a stagnant page living somewhere in the depths of the internet. A good website works for you, not against you. Let’s take a look at 5 easy ways to tell if your website is getting the job done. 

1. Branding

via GIPHY

Branding is key to a well functioning website. Without proper branding, your customer honestly might not even know where they are and if they can really trust the information on your website. When you think of branding, your mind probably goes straight to logo, but branding is way more than that. Branding is who you are as a business. Sure, it is your logo, color scheme, and fonts, but it is also your tone of voice, how your photographs look, the quality of your service, and how you interact with your customers. Does your website look like your business? Does it sound like you and portray the quality of service you provide? Or is it just a stagnant landing page with your operating hours and address? Again, your website is your best employee, would you want your employees to come in wearing the competitors colors and talking about their service? Or would you want them to live and breathe your product/service in every way possible? 

2. Dedicated Landing Pages

Many self-made websites are just one page with all of the businesses products/services listed, the hours of operation, and an address. While this is an easy way to get your information out there, it probably isn’t the best way to advertise your services to the internet. In order to show up better in search results, you should have individual pages for your products/services. So if your business offers three primary services: accounting services, clerical services, and office organization - then you should have separate pages for each of these services. This way if someone searches for one, it shows up instead of being lost underneath an unrelated page. This also helps customers navigate your website once they are there and find exactly what they are looking for. 

3. Clear Call To Action

A clear call to action helps your customers know what action they should take on your website in order to get what they need, or what action you want them to take. Example: “Call Now” or “Get a Quote Today” In order to set a call to action, you need to know the overall goal of your website. Some examples of goals are: to sell a product or service online, to lead individuals to your brick and mortar, or to provide information. 

Let’s say you run a roof repair company called Ready Roof Repair and the main goal of your website is to get customers to schedule a free roof inspection. Your call to action should probably be more than just “get a quote” because everyone does that and you want to stand out from the crowd. A better call to action might be “Call us to get your free Ready Roof inspection today!” or “Fill out our Ready Repair questionnaire for your free quote!” Feel free to have some fun with it. The less generic, the better. 

You also don’t want confusing call to actions or call to actions living in the wrong place.  For example, Ready Roof Repair may also sell roofing materials and do attic repairs, too. So it would be really confusing if you had a Roof Inspection call to action on the page that talks about attic repairs and vice versa. Your Call to Actions need to be intentional and well placed as they are a driving force of conversions for your website.

4. Load Time & Functionality 

via GIPHY

How fast your website loads and how well it works is pivotal in order to keep customers on your website. If a website takes longer than 1 second to load, many people give up and leave the website. 1 second! Which is why you need to make sure your website is optimized for the best speed. The easiest way you can do this by making sure your images are no larger than 1920x1080 pixels. You can check your site speed and run some diagnostics by going to Google Page Speed. If your website loads quickly, great! 

Now you have to make sure it has good functionality. Can people access all of your pages without having to search around your website like a maze? It is answering the most commonly asked questions about your business? Do all of the links and buttons work? Is it helping you accomplish your business goals? These are just a few things that can make a huge difference in the functionality of your website. 

5. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO ( or search engine optimization) is the behind the scenes part of your website that makes sure you are showing up in search engine results, like Google. Setting up good SEO helps your website show up more, and show up better than it would without taking any action. Many people will go through an agency to set up a professional SEO, but there are a few easy steps you can take yourself to enhance your website’s SEO. First, make sure you have content that is easy to read. If a person has trouble understanding your website's content, a robot certainly will too. Set up some main keywords that you think people will use when they search for you on the internet. Once you have a list of keywords, go through your content and make sure those words are sprinkled throughout in the right places. You can also set up a Google Search Console account for your website to help show you what you are doing well, and where you need to improve your SEO. It is free and a very powerful tool for your business! 

How To Tell If You Need A New Website

A new website may seem like a daunting task, but a poorly set up site does more harm than good to your business. It not only makes you hard to find on the internet, it also harms your business reputation. It only takes users about 50 milliseconds to determine if they want to stay on your website, so a good site just might be the deciding factor between you and your competitors for your customers. Here are a few signs you need a new or improved website: (You can also take our free website audit quiz below)

• Your website doesn’t have any branding
• Your branding is there, but it’s outdated or weak
• You aren’t getting any traffic on your website (try out Google Analytics to see if you are getting traffic) 
• There are no clear calls to action on your website or your calls to action are confusing 
• You have poorly written content 
• Your website has no goal 
• All of your products/services are listed on one page and have no dedicated landing pages
• Your website runs slow 
• Your website does not function smoothly 
• Your website isn’t a proper representation of your business 

To sum it all up, if you don’t have a good website, you are hurting your business. Your website should be the best employee you have and be there to guide customers and answer questions when you can’t be. You should have the same trust in your website as you do in yourself, and if you don’t, then it’s time to get a new website that works for you and not against you. 

We hear questions about websites all the time! Here's our quick 30 second tip on how to see how your website is performing.

If you ever need to get a quick snapshot of how your website is performing - this is an easy way to get started.

1 - Open Chrome

2 - Click the three dots on the top right side of the screen.

3 - Click "More Tools" then "Developer Tools"

4 - Make sure that the "Audits" Tab is selected. 

5 - Select the correct settings for the audit you want to run before clicking "Run Audits."

6 - You are looking for all green scores. The closer to 100, the better!

If your scores aren't quite in the green, generally there are easy things we can implement to help you improve your score. Make sure to reach out if you have questions.

Attackers Love When You Use Open WiFi

- The #1 Rule for Accessing Open WiFi

I see it time and time again. People logging into their admin panel on their websites, social media and just about anything else with complete abandon on public, open WiFi in coffee shops, airports, hotel lobbies, and just about anywhere else. I attend between 5-10 web design conferences per year and EVEN with all those tech savvy people, they will still gladly hook into the free wi-fi at the conference and login.
I’ve performed security audits on countless small businesses that were previously hacked. Most of the time it’s weak passwords, but the #2 culprit is, “Oh, yeah - I did login to {that site} from a Starbucks just before the hack.”

Attackers Love When You Use Open WiFi

Hackers like to use sniffers to lift your data and credentials when you log in through open WiFi connections. A sniffer looks just like a router, and what it can do is not only act as a rogue wireless access point, but it can also spoof real, existing access points. Small sniffers can easily fit within somebody’s pants pocket, maybe even a shirt breast pocket.

Let’s see what the bad guy sees when he logs into one of these guys. When the attacker logs in, he gets a dashboard letting him know how many clients have connected. It also shows the spoofed wireless access point.

The attacker has the ability to name that wireless access point anything that he or she pleases. Obviously they’re going to use something that’s going to try to be as intriguing or as enticing as possible to get you to click on it. And of course it’s going to be an open SSID -- a Service Set Identifier. The SSID is the name given to a WiFi network.
After connecting to the attacker’s SSID, I can surf the internet however I see fit. The attacker could be anywhere within the building or outside in the parking lot and see pretty much exactly what you’re browsing. It goes way beyond that, though. It also records the cookies, which could be used to hijack sessions later on, long after the person is gone.
It’s not just people be able to see what you’re doing. It’s what you leave behind that’s important.

It works just as easily on a phone or mobile device as it does on a laptop.

The #1 for Accessing Open WiFi

If you find yourself in a situation where you absolutely, positively have to use an open, public WiFi and you have to login to something, make sure that you’ve got the green lock in the address bar, and that it’s an HTTPS website.

Be conscientious of the lock, it is very important. But the bad guys are gonna continue to try to push the envelope. There is a thing called SSL split, which is a way of stripping out the “S” in the HTTP.
Some of the world’s biggest websites, like Twitter, won’t have anything to do with it. It basically isn’t even fazed by it.
Other websites might be aware of the fact that something weird is going on and is going to give you a warning.

This example is a little bit different, but if you click on there you can see that the connection is not secure.

The tools that the bad guys use get more and more sophisticated. You need to be more and more sophisticated in defending yourself. 50% of all websites will NOT give you a clear warning at all, so you still need to be very aware, even if you THINK you are visiting an HTTPS website.
After a scrubber sits for a couple minutes, this thing will actually start to replicate the other wireless access points in the area. What that means is that it will send out a beacon as if it were the wireless access point. If somebody accidentally attaches to one of these spoofed access points, everything from above still applies.

You could use a VPN, which is a virtual private network. There are some free ones out there but the better ones you pay for. Essentially what this does is it allows you to change your IP address to pretty much anywhere in the world. All the information that was pouring out earlier, the scrubber isn’t getting.
The other thing about using a VPN, it gives you a certain amount of anonymity on the internet.
That about wraps it up. Just remember if you’re on an open WiFi in a coffee shop or anywhere else like an airport or hotel -- you are a target. It is very, very, very easy to sniff out and steal credentials. If they can get credentials to one of your logins, there’s a very high likelihood that they’ll be able to run those credentials through a database and try to login to every bank and financial institution in the world and do more damage that way. This is essentially what a lot of them do.
So be smart, stay safe, check that lock for SSL and use a VPN if you can when accessing open WiFi.

If you’re having a new website built, you’ll probably hear the term “SSL certificate” or “SSL encryption” at some point.  And if you’re like most, you probably have a vague idea of what it means, but don’t know exactly how important SSL encryption is to your website.

So what is this three-letter acronym, and what makes it such a vital part of website building?

What does SSL mean?

SSL, short for Secure Sockets Layer, is a level of protection for your website that will help keep your website, and its users, safe and secure.  It makes website hacking more difficult for those who would harm it, and ensures that easy-to-steal data is being kept safe.

When you have an SSL certificate on your website, it acts like a digital agent, reaching out to make safe contact with users via a “handshake”.  The “handshake” is actually a connection that is automatically made between the server and the user’s browser, telling both of them that this is a secure process.  

How does an SSL certificate help your website?

SSL certificates protect credit card numbers, user log-ins and passwords, and other personal information from being able to be accessed by anyone other than the authorized viewer.  This not only makes your website safer and informs users that their information is secure, it establishes a layer of trust with users that they otherwise may not have had.

It’s also good for Google rankings.  The search engine giants made it known in 2013 that SSL certificates pushed a website higher than websites without one.  Other search engines, like Yahoo or Bing, also look for SSL certificates - we all want to be safer online!

What if I don’t have a SSL certificate?

For one thing, you’ll be open to hackers who might wish to highjack important information on your website.  That would not only significantly damage your business through loss of possible sales, but could also cause your website to no longer become trustworthy.

This is bad news, because Chrome doesn’t like untrustworthy websites.  In fact, customers who visit your website while using Google Chrome as their browser will see a pop up when they attempt to go to your page, telling them that the site is unsafe.  This warning will scare potential clients away before they actually see your website - A hacker could damage their computer, or could walk away with private information

You can also lose your ranking on Google, and overall see a drop in SEO.  That means that you won’t be on the first page, and allows for your competitors to take their chance.

With all the protection offered by a SSL Certificate, it makes perfect sense to have this added to your website during its build.  

You have a business, and now that business needs a website.  So you settle on a domain name (like abccompany.com) you like, but don’t know how to build a website.  You find someone who can do that for you, and boom – your business is online!

It’s a pretty easy cycle, or at least it seems that way.  We know that dealing with websites can be scary territory if you’re not familiar with all the nitty-gritty details.  Leaving those details in the hands of your web designer makes it simple for you to get on with the business you know.

But there’s one thing that you won’t want to leave to your website providers.  When it comes to the domain name, you want to make sure that it stays within your control.  We want to address why you need to do that, and how such a tiny detail can affect your business.

Domain Name Ownership

Believe it or not, it’s super easy to buy your own domain name.  For instance, we use Hover.com when we're looking at new domain names.  Their process is simple and easy to follow – Find the domain name you want, add it to your cart, purchase it, and that’s it.  The process is easier than buying something on most retailer websites, and they even offer free WHOIS protection, keeping ownership information private and out of view.

Leaving it up to your web provider can cause some serious issues.  Mainly, one issue – that domain name doesn’t truly belong to you. Sure, typing the domain into your internet browser will bring up your website.  But if for some reason your relationship with your website provider deteriorates, that domain name will be long gone. In some cases, they may work with you long enough to transfer ownership to you, but even then the process is completely on their terms.

And yeah, you can buy a new domain name, but that can have negative effects on your business that you didn’t anticipate.

What Can Go Wrong?

We believe in addressing the most obvious problem first:  Letting someone else purchase your domain name gives them complete control over it.  While you and your provider are in sync, issues usually won’t arise. However, if you begin attempting to move away from them, they could very well move that domain name anywhere they want or worse, they are technically the owner listed for the domain and can choose not to move it. Not to get morbid here but if they were to die or disappear and they bought the domain name and registered it in their name, you will be facing a tedious battle to try and retain that domain name.

This leads into the second downside:  Not only would you immediately need a similar-enough domain to continue building your business, but you’d lose on any marketing already done with that domain name.  This includes SEO. All the hard work put into ensuring your domain popped up right where you needed it to is wiped away, meaning that you’ll see a huge loss in traffic.  This would all be on top of the wait for a new website to be developed and built, putting a further dent in your web traffic.

While all of that is bad enough, they intersect in the perfect storm of lost web business:  Your new website would be in direct competition with your old one. The two domains would be seen next to each other while you attempt to rebuild on your SEO strategies, which could cause confusion for customers while at the same time weakening all the work you’ve already done for your business online.

What to Do About It

It’s easy:  Buy your own domain name!  Google it, research it, and get it before you work on building your website.  Don’t leave this seemingly tiny task in the hands of your website provider. You want to control your website, and the only way to be absolutely sure of that is to own the domain name.

Are you ready to take on the most important part of building your website?  You can buy your domain name with ease and efficiency at Hover.com. I vouch for them, since I use them myself – and that actually knocks a little off the price!

Here’s how:

Go to Hover.com

Search for your domain name (like abccompany.com) and then create an account, pay the registration fee, then point it to your web hosting.

Taking these super easy steps will give you lots of peace of mind knowing that one of your most valuable business assets has been secured using your info and credit card. You control it and pay for it, and it’s yours as long as you pay your yearly renewal.

PRO TIP- I always tell my clients to add this event as an event on their personal and business calendars. Hover is particularly great about sending reminders to renew, but I never want to 100% count on someone else’s system to ensure my interests. Do it when you complete your registration and sleep like a baby.