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The Comprehensive Guide to Starting a New Website for Your Business

Author: Mario Diaz

Starting a New Website for Your Business

Posted on by Mario Diaz

The Comprehensive Guide to Starting a New Website for Your Business

In today’s digital era, having a strong online presence is crucial for any business’s success. One of the first steps in establishing your brand on the internet is creating a website. This guide will provide you with a comprehensive overview of the process of starting a new website for your business. From planning to implementation, we will cover the essential steps to ensure your website launch is a success. 👍

 

1. Define Your Website’s Purpose and Goals
Before diving into the technical aspects, it’s vital to define the purpose and goals of your website. Determine what you want to achieve through your online presence. Are you looking to sell products, generate leads, provide information, or establish credibility? Clarifying your objectives will help shape the design and content of your website.

2. Research and Choose a Domain Name
A domain name is your website’s address on the internet. Research potential domain names that align with your brand, are easy to remember, and reflect your business. Once you’ve settled on a name, register it with a reputable domain registrar. When it comes to domain names, the shorter the better!

3. Select a Reliable Web Hosting Provider
A web hosting provider stores your website’s files and makes it accessible on the internet. Look for a reputable hosting provider that offers reliability, security, scalability, and excellent customer support. Consider factors like server uptime, bandwidth, storage, and pricing when making your decision. Not familiar with these terms?  We can register your domain name and set you up with hosting.

4. Plan Your Website Structure and Content
Create a sitemap to outline the structure of your website. Determine the main pages, subpages, and their interlinking. Consider user experience and ease of navigation. Additionally, plan the content for each page, ensuring it is engaging, informative, and optimized for search engines.  Be sure and plan the flow from page to page, dropping in a call-to-action where you think customers might need it.

5. Choose a Content Management System (CMS)
A CMS simplifies the process of creating and managing your website’s content. Popular options include WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. Assess their features, ease of use, flexibility, and availability of plugins or themes that align with your needs. Select a CMS that suits your technical skills and future growth plans. The most popular is WordPress, using this CMS should make it easier to find support.

6. Design Your Website
Your website’s design plays a vital role in attracting and engaging visitors. If you lack design skills, consider hiring a professional web designer or using pre-designed templates. Ensure your design reflects your brand’s identity, is visually appealing, and provides a seamless user experience across devices. In order for your customers to take you seriously, you must have a professional online presence, contact us for an all-inclusive package.

7. Develop and Optimize Your Content
Create compelling and relevant content for each page. Incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to improve your website’s visibility in search engine rankings. Optimize your content by using relevant keywords, meta tags, headings, and descriptive URLs. Additionally, ensure your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly.

8. Integrate Essential Functionalities
Enhance your website’s functionality by incorporating essential features, such as contact forms, social media integration, analytics tracking, and e-commerce capabilities, depending on your business requirements. Consider user feedback and provide interactive elements to increase engagement.

9. Test and Optimize Your Website
Thoroughly test your website on different browsers, devices, and operating systems to ensure it functions properly and appears as intended. Identify and fix any bugs, broken links, or formatting issues. Continuously monitor your website’s performance using analytics tools and make data-driven optimizations to improve user experience and conversion rates.

10. Launch and Promote Your Website
Once you’re satisfied with your website, it’s time to launch it. Ensure all necessary SEO elements, such as XML sitemaps and robots.txt, are in place. Submit your website to search engines and promote it through various channels, including social media, email marketing, and online advertising. Regularly update your website with fresh content to keep visitors engaged.

 

Starting a new website for your business requires careful planning, attention to detail and follow-through.  We can help you every step of the way, contact us for a free consultation.

Why you should update WordPress and plugins

Posted on by Mario Diaz

WordPress is an open-source platform developed by a community of developers. With each new release, they fix bugs, add new features, improve performance and enhance existing features.  If you do not update your WordPress site (and plugins), you are risking your website security and missing out on new features and improvements.  If your website falls victim to a malicious attack, your entire site can get infected and you can lose everything.

Still not convinced? Let’s take a look at some of the benefits.

1. Security

Security is probably, without a doubt, the most important reason to keep your WordPress website updated.

WordPress currently powers about 25% of all websites in the world!  Due to this overwhelming popularity, it’s a popular target for hackers, malicious code distributors, data thieves and people up to no good.

Since WordPress is open source, anyone can study the source code to make improvements, unfortunately evil-doers can also find its weaknesses and exploit them.

Similarly, plugins can also be studied and exploited, or even authored for the very purpose of gaining access to your site and data.

Our WordPress security service scans a vulnerability database for your plugins to alert you of any known issues.

2. New Features

WordPress releases updates on a regular basis, their major updates usually have new features and some changes to the software.  When WordPress 4.0 came out, plugin installation was improved, 4.1 introduced inline image editing, and so forth.

If you search for help online, the help forum contributors usually assume you are using the latest version, so help guides may not match with what you are seeing on your outdated version.

3. More Speed, Scotty!

Developers are constantly looking to make things more efficient and fast, WordPress developers are no different.  With every release of WordPress you can usually expect to have it be running faster and more efficient than before.  They are constantly trying to give more warp speed, captain!

Improved page speed isn’t just something cool, it’s functional as well.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking is dependent on page speed, if you have a slow site your rankings can be affected.

4. Bug Fixes

Despite programmers’ best efforts, sometimes bugs find a way to slip through the cracks.  This is why there are smaller updates from WordPress known as minor releases, there are the ones with x.x.x, such as 4.9.5 which fixed 28 bugs.

If you are having issues, one piece advice you will often get first is to update WordPress and all plugins to the latest version as that may resolve your issue.

5. Compatibility, or IN-compatibility

Some plugin developers, the better ones, coordinate their own updates with the major releases of WordPress to ensure they are taking advantage of the new features, or to ensure their plugins are still compatible.

When this does not happen, updating your WordPress to the latest version could “break” your existing plugins.  With our Safe Update feature, we are able to recover from a broken site or incompatibility be rolling your site back to a previous backup, taken minutes before the update!

 

Take a look at our WordPress security and update service to learn how we can help you keep your site updated.

 

Things you need to know about GDPR

Posted on by Mario Diaz

Are you unsure if GDPR will impact your website (it probably does!)?  GDPR is short for General Data Protection Regulation, a European Union law that took effect May 25, 2018.  First off, we should mention we aren’t lawyers; nothing on this website should be considered legal advice.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union law that gives EU citizens control over their personal data and changes the data privacy approach of organizations across the world. You have likely gotten dozens of emails from companies like Google, Microsoft, Instagram, Constant Contact, et cetera, et cetera, regarding changes to their privacy policies and other “legal stuff”, because the EU has put in place hefty penalties for companies not in compliance. Fines to the tune of 4% of a company’s annual global revenue, or €20 million, whichever is greater! They will start with a warning, then a reprimand, and eventually the fines will come.

You might be thinking… OK, so does GDPR apply to my website?

The short answer is, YES.  It applies to every business around the world, small to large. If your website has visitors from EU countries, and it probably does, or could, then this law applies to you.

Not to fret, here’s a short guide to help you out.

What’s required by GDPR?

The goal is to protect users’ personally identifying information (PII) and hold businesses to a higher standard for how they collect, store and use the data. PII data includes name, email address, physical address, IP address, health information, income, cultural information, etc.

Explicit Consent – if you collect data then you need to get explicit consent that is unambiguous. You can’t send spam to people just because they gave you their business card. When filling out a form you cannot pre-check the opt-in box and it needs to be separate from other terms.

Rights to Data – you must inform users where, why, and how their data is processed/stored (usually in your non-existent Privacy Policy).  An individual has the right to download their personal data and an individual also has the right to be forgotten (deleted).

Breach Notification – companies must report certain types of data breaches to relevant authorities within 72 hours, unless the breach is considered harmless and poses no risk to individual data.

Data Protection Officers – if you are a public company or process large amounts of personal information, then you must appoint a data protection officer.  If you’re a small business this likely does not apply to you.

WordPress (as of v 4.9.6) now comes with a built-in privacy policy generator. It offers a pre-made privacy policy template and tips on what else to add, so you can be more transparent with users in regards to what data you store and how you handle their data.

As a website owner, you might be using various plugins that store or process data like contact forms, analytics, email marketing, online store, etc.  Look to your plugin vendors for GDPR compliant updates and workarounds.

In some cases, like with Google Analytics, to be GDPR compliant, you need to do one of the following:

  • Anonymize the data before storage and processing begins
  • Add an overlay to the site that gives notice of cookies and ask users for consent prior to tracking, and/or offer a way to have their tracking data deleted.

 

Ready or Not

GDPR took effect on May 25, 2018. If your website is not already compliant, don’t panic. Just continue to work towards compliance and get it done as soon as possible. After all, the EU’s website says you’ll receive a warning first, then a reprimand, and then… fines.

 

Need help making these changes?

If you aren’t a web developer, these changes can be overwhelming to get implemented.  Contact us for a free estimate.