Importance of updating a Website

Featured client: Shred Pro  

The web is evolving, dramatically.  You may already have a website, however, when is the last time it was updated, or even looked at? Do you even know how many visitors its getting?

If the answer to any of the above is “I’m not sure”, then it may be time to put it to some good use perhaps?

A Website can act as your portfolio or a gateway for your clients, it can open new doors.

Our featured client, Shred Pro Ltd, they provide a first class shredding service in the UK, has had an Internet presence since 2007, they are currently on their third build. (Take a sneak peak at the new site below).

As the web evolves your competitors will grow with it, this is why it’s important to have an internet presence and to continue to update and maintain your web presence.

If you would like an independent review of your current site, please leave a comment below or get in touch by clicking HERE.

We’ve mentioned PPC (Pay Per Click), this can be a slightly costly route in gaining relevant traffic,  PPC or better known as Google AdWords, where you pay to be on the sponsored listings, and each time someone clicks on your site you get charged..

Don’t want to pay thousands on clicks each month to get listed on page 1?

The success story…

HTS; Our favourite client from Ombersley near Worcester, are professional screen and projector installers, they’ve done jobs for clients as large as Bosch, BUPA, Telewest and National Grid etc.. HTS approached us for a bespoke website build to attract new customers, through our research we immediatley discovered that the search term “Screen Installation” was very popular although very competative, we took on the challenge on gaining page one Google rankings. Due to the masses of competition SERP’s or Search Engine Result Pages, it varies significantly, typically between 125,000,000 to 220,000,000 results!!

How did we do?

Take a look at this screen grab – recorded on 10 June 2011

Are you looking for page 1 rankings? Get in touch with us – Contact Us

Your friends are on there, your family is on there, and don’t forget the kids, the kids seem to spend more time on Facebook than studying!

It’s the place which costs businesses around the world millions by distracted workers! A real pain we know… however, hold on family ‘n’ friends, it’s not all too bad, Facebook and other social interactive sites such as Twitter can have some real benefits for you or your business, if used properly you can utilize these world popular sites and use them as advertising tools; what we call “viral marketing”.

Viral marketing or viral advertising, is a fantastic way of generating some quick and painless business; so how does it work and how can you take advantage of today’s social media buzz?

Step 1. Set up a ‘business’ facebook account and link it to twitter (it’s free) AND once linked to Twitter you can update the two simultaneously, saving you time!

Step 2. Invite some friends, that will be interested in your business or product, talk about your product, get people excited about it.

Unsure how to create a Facebook / Twitter account? Panic Not!

Want us to design a professional Facebook theme and set up your account? So you can stand out from the crowd.
Drop us a line.

There are various reasons why your site is not making the amount of money you expected from it. We have summarised the basic rules of web design to help you avoid the mistakes that 95% of current web site owners do. These are only guidelines and they will not bring you immediate cash. However, if you follow these guidelines, they will put you ahead of your potential competitors.

1 – Build a website with your customers in mind…

Your site shoul be designed for your customers. And your customers are only interested in the information, service or product they are looking for. Telling your customers how you started your business and how long you have been in the game answer their qustions or fulfill their needs.

2 – Get your message accross immediately…

The moment a customer enters your site, you have less than 5 second to give them the answer they are looking for. Don’t forget your customers are busy just like you. They will not spend too long on your site trying to find the answer they are looking for. So get your message accross immediately before they go else where.

3 – Is your Navigation easy to use?

Is your site like a puzzle that takes hours to solve? Can your customers find their way around your site easily? If your customers feel lost whilst trying to find the infomation on your site, it is likely they will leave and not come back again!

It is very important to guide your customers through the site by offering them an easy to understand navigation system. Building a solid navigation system on your site can take time. However, once built it will help your customers stay and crawl deeper into your site.

4 – Let your customers buy…

There are many web sites falling for this mistake. They give too much information up front about a product and hide the “Buy Button” to the bottom of the page. If you bore your customers with too much information, they may not bother looking for the “Buy Button”.

Don’t forget, some customers may already know about the product and just want to buy it, so try placing your “Buy button” near the top of page or somewhere they can see!

5 – Don’t forget Offline Marketing…

Unless you are solely an online business, do not cut off your current offline advertising campaings. Wether you advertise on magazines, newspapers or radio, try to keep your existing advertising avenues.

Although it is more cost effective doing business online, you should never rely on your website to generate all the revenue. It may cost you in the future if you experience long term problems with your web site for any reason.

If you have an e-commerce website and want more transactions through your site you have to take online security serious. You can start with asking your self this simple question: “Do i trust this site with my credit card details?” If the answer is yes, you are half the way there.

Trade Online Safely and Securely

Today, online security is becoming more important as e-commerce is increasing at an explosive rate. Your responsibility also increases as a site owner to provide a safer customer experience on your site. Minimising the online threats is a challenging task. However, you do not have to be a security guru to know how to handle sensitive customer information. There are simple security measures you can take to create a safer environment for your customers.

As a website owner, you can trade online safely in the knowledge that the SSL secure connection will make sure all important information is kept out of reach from prying eyes. Having an SSL certificate will keep your visitors coming back time and time again, safe in the knowledge you provide a secure service.

What is SSL?

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browsers remain private and integral. SSL is an industry standard and is used by millions of websites in the protection of their online transactions with their customers.

Benefits of SSL

Some of the benefits of having an SSL certificate installed on your website:

• Increase conversions
• Enhanced reputation
• Store information securely
• Business Validation

How much do SSL Certificates cost and how to get one?

You can find out more about the SSL prices and their types on our SSL Certificates page.

Welcome to the new K2 Site and Blog!

You’ll find some exciting new stuff going on around here, we can promise you that.

What are we up to?

We’re working on a several different projects at the moment, some of them are really exciting, we like to think of our clients as friends, we build trust and loyalty from the start. This allows us to create a strong and lasting business relationship which serves best for both parties.

Tim Bone – Bonacc | Online Accounting Software

We’re currently working with Tim, on an exciting new Website and SEO project to boost his search engine rankings, Tim is a local Worcester based Chartered Accountant, with over 20 years of accounting experience. Tim has some great contacts and really knows his stuff when it comes to Accounting, if you want to save on tax or need some advice on accountancy, he’s your man! Check out the new site – www.bonacconlineaccountants.co.uk

As always, we look forward to your feedback!

Have you been thinking about selling on eBay but you’ve been putting it off? Have you been intimidated, thinking there’s no way you’ll be able to figure out how to sell? Every day countless people put off selling on eBay for these reasons and more.

I was there once. I remember all the excuses I made up in my mind and how long I put off listing my first auction. I was paralyzed with fear – fear that I would make mistakes and that nobody would bid on my auction. Heck, I even remember how nervous I was when I placed a bid on the first thing I bought on eBay. Well, the one thing I was missing back then was solid, easy-to-follow information designed for people who were just beginning their selling endeavors on eBay. If I had access to that information, things would have been a lot different for me. I would have started selling a lot sooner and I wouldn’t have had to learn through trial and error.

“How to Get Started Selling on eBay” is the exact manual I wish I had back then. It gives precisely the right information needed for those who haven’t started selling on eBay or for those who have just started. It walks you through from setting up an account on eBay to listing and managing your auctions.

Now is the time for the novice, the new guy, to step up and finally start making some money by selling on eBay in no time at all. Don’t waste your time and energy trying to figure out how to do this on your own. “How to Get Started Selling on eBay” has shown me the key to eBay selling success. I suggest you do not let any more time go by.

Let “How to Get Started Selling on eBay” be your guide.

To your success,

K2 Designers

Cascading Style Sheets are the second layer of a web page and deal with the presentational side of the page (page layout, font size, font colour, margins, padding, images…).

In the same vain as discussed above, there are a couple of approaches to using CSS; placing the CSS in the HTML file or using an external CSS file.

Why use an external CSS file?

• Quicker page load times
• Share the same file across multiple pages
• One update applies to all those pages

This guide will focus on implementing CSS to your site using an external CSS file

Creating your external CSS file

CSS syntax is made up of three parts:

Selector{
Property: Value;
}

Although it may seem complicated at first, once you get started it will all fall in to place. All this means is that for each element (e.g. <p>) you determine how a certain aspect of it (e.g. the font) should be presented (e.g. Arial). For example:

P {
Font-family: Arial;
}

h1 {
Font-size: 14pt;
Color: red;
li {list-style: disc;
margin-left: 10px;
}

Here I have stated that any text within a <p> tag should be displayed using the Arial font, my <h1> headers should be 14pt and red, and any bullet lists items (<li>) should use a filled in circle (called a ‘disc’) and there should be a 10px margin to the left.

Note: Your CSS won’t work without the curly brackets and a semi-colon to separate the properties and their values, so don’t forget to add them

Two paragraphs, two styles

In the example code above we have two paragraphs and at the moment they have the same attributes. To mix things up we can give them different styles. We do this using the ‘class selector’.

In your CSS file we state that it is a ‘class’ by using a full stop and naming the class whatever you want. It is best to describe what the class does rather than what is currently is as this may change in time. E.g. name it ‘highlight’ rather than ‘green’, as in the future you may want to use the colour red.

.highlight {
color: green;
}

Now when we want to highlight any text we can apply it to the HTML like this…

<html>
<body>
<h1> Here is my first title </h1>
<p> This is my first paragraph to help me test different types of styles using CSS with my HTML</p>
<h2>This is my second title</h2>
<p class=”highlight”>Here is a second paragraph to see how I can have different styles for the same tag on the same page </p>
<ol>
<li>List item 1</li>
<li>List item 2</li>
<li>List item 3</li>
<li>List item 4</li>
</ol>
</body>
</html>

Class Vs id

There are two ways of specifying and naming attributes; ‘class’ and ‘id’.The difference between the two is the id must be unique within the HTML document and a class can be used as many times as you want. To create an id use a hash:

#highlight {
color: green;
}

(End of Part 4)

<html>
<body>
<h1>Here is my first title </h1>
<p>This is my first paragraph to help me test different types of styles using CSS with my HTML</p>
<h2>This is my second title</h2>
<p>Here is a second paragraph to see how I can have different styles for the same tag on the same page </p>

<ol>
<li>List item 1</li>
<li>List item 2</li>
<li>List item 3</li>
<li>List item 4</li>
</ol>
</body>
</html>

Save the file as index.html (this is the name web browsers and search engines want to see so they know which page is the home page)

What do they mean?

• <html> Tells the web browser to expect an HTML file
• <body> Tells it that the main body of the page is coming.Important: Every HTML web page must have those two tags (opened and closed).
• <h1> The biggest heading
• <h2> The 2nd biggest heading
• <p> A paragraph
• <ol> An ordered list (e.g. 1,2,3 etc)
• <li> A list item for the ordered list<a href=”…”> Creates a link.

(End of Part 3)

When a visitor arrives on your site and the web page is displayed on their browser quite a lot has gone on behind the scenes to make this happen. A couple of terms you may come across are ‘client side coding’ and ‘server side coding’.

Client side code (which covers HTML, CSS and JavaScript) is script executed by the user’s web browser whereas server side coding (which covers PHP & MySQL, Perl and ASP/ ASP.NET) is script first executed by the server before being shown to the visitor.

Client-side

A web page has three layers which you build up as the site progresses. First you start with your content (HTML) which is essentially the website’s blue print. You then move on to how it looks by adding components such as colour, images and spacing (CSS) and finally you add interactive and behavioural elements to the page (JavaScript).

The 3 layers of a web page:

Keep them all separate

Initially web developers put all of these scripts on to one page however they soon realized how time consuming and labour intensive this approach was, especially when any changes were required. Today best practice using HTML, CSS and JavaScript dictates you use separate files for each.

• Easier to re-use code across multiple pages or even sites
• Reduces the amount of duplicate code
• Easier to find and fix problems
• Makes a site more accessible (e.g. browsers with JavaScript disabled can still show the HTML/ CSS files)

This guide will focus on introducing you to HTML and CSS.

File structure

A web site is basically a collection of inter connected files kept within directories. Keeping your files well structured and logically named helps you administer the site as it grows and from an Search Engine Optimisation perspective.

File structure and SEO

Search engine optimisation is the process of increasing a websites organic position in a search engine. Keyword analysis is a major part of a search engine’s ranking factors, be it in the domain name, the <title> tag, in the text etc. This also goes for your file names which make up the page’s URL.

Bad: http://www.super-sport.com/range2/catgeorty4.html
Good: http://www.super-sport.com/trainers/basketball

Below is an example of a typical file structure for a site. Index (the home page), ‘about’, ‘FAQs’ and ‘products’ are all in the parent directory. ‘Apples’, ‘Oranges’ and ‘Pears’ are in the ‘Products’ directory and ‘conference pears’ and ‘dessert pears’ are in the ‘Pears’ directory:

- Index
- About
- FAQs
- Products
+ Apples
+ Oranges
+ Pears
++ Conference Pears
++ Dessert Pears

If I wanted to link to the ‘About’ page I would do the following
<a href=”/about”>Text goes here</a>

If I wanted to link to the ‘Oranges’ page I would do the following
<a href=”…/products/oranges”>Text goes here</a>

If I wanted to link to the ‘Dessert Pears’ page I would do the following
<a href=”…/products/pears/dessert pears”>Text goes here</a>

(end of Part 2)