Sorry, but there are no magical solutions that will increase the size of anybody’s traffic. But there are a few things you can do that can definitely improve your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Here are a few you can easily do yourself:
Setup Google Analytics for your website
Google Analytics gives you comprehensive information on how people found your website, how they explored it, how long they stayed on it and a myriad of useful reports. With this information, you can improve your website return on investment, increase conversions and make more money on the web.
A Google XML Sitemap can be a very useful tool in your overall SEO strategy. It's a file listing all the pages in your website that you can submit to Google, helping it index your website faster and more efficiently, and ultimately bring in more traffic.
Once Google Analytics starts tracking your website, you’ll be able to know which terms people are using to find you. Make sure you update your copy to include them. That doesn’t mean you should stuff your text with useless babble; your primary concern should still be to have copy that makes sense and helps convey your message. The good thing is that it’s really easy to update text in the YWD platform.
Search engines look for headings in order to make sense of your content. Your pages should have a descriptive heading within the page content, formatted in the Heading 1 (H1) style and similar to the page title.
Use titles for your links. When you link content to another page of your website, it can be beneficial for you if the search engine that's crawling your content has some descriptive information about the link itself. Every link that you create can have a "Title" attribute, and you can use it to your advantage.
Use YWD’s Page Properties option to enter a Title and Description for your pages.
The page Title -- also known as the <title> tag -- is considered the second most important element of a page for SEO purposes (the first being the content itself). It should describe the page in 70 characters or less.
The Description is a plain language description of the document, usually consisting of 20-25 words or less. Search engines that support the Meta Description tag will use the information to publish on their search results page, normally displaying below the Title of your site listing.
If you have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. pages setup for your business, make sure you include buttons linked to them on your website design. You can use YWD’s Global content blocks feature to add them to all your pages at once.
But if you don’t have those pages for your business (or even a personal Facebook account, for example) you can still make your website more inviting for people to share it on their own social networks. The Social Networking section of YWD Designer lets you add interactive widgets for all popular networks without programming.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Crowdfunding is a relatively new concept. It’s so new, in fact, that most spell checks don’t even recognize it as a single word. What’s crowdfunding? The Oxford Dictionary describes it as “the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.”
Although people have been using the internet for crowdfunding since the ‘90s, it's only recently become a mainstream way to raise money. Massolution estimates the crowdfunding industry has raised approximately $2.7 billion in 2012 alone. Everyone from startup entrepreneurs to indie artists have engaged in crowdfunding during the last few years. Heck, even Hollywood has tapped into this unique fundraising tool; last month, actor Zach Braff (Scrubs, Garden State) raised a whopping $3 million in four weeks for an upcoming feature film. He did it simply by launching a Kickstarter campaign.
Kickstarter.com is just one of many crowdfunding websites. Here’s a breakdown of some of the most popular sites and their unique features:
When it comes to crowdfunding websites, Kickstarter is the leader of the pack. The site launched less than five years ago and has already engaged more than 4.2 million people. These millions of backers have pledged approximately $655 million to more than 43,000 products. Kickstarter uses a donation-based fundraising model. That means that project creators maintain 100 per cent ownership of their work. What’s in it for backers? They get different rewards depending on how much they pledge. Kickstarter has proven to be extremely popular with musicians, filmmakers, writers and other creative types. However, there’s a sizable tech community that uses the site as well.
Indiegogo is another major player in the crowdfunding space. Projects generally fit into three main categories: Creative (things like art, theatre, music, film), Cause (animal, education, community, environment, etc.) and Entrepreneurial (food, small business, sports and technology). The cool thing about Indiegogo is that users can easily search projects based in major cities -- including Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Indiegogo attracts a number of international users to its site. It even allows donations in Canadian dollars.
While Kickstarter and Indiegogo attract legions of artists, Crowdfunder draws in more of a business crowd. The site is particularly popular among small businesses, social entrepreneurs, tech companies and investors with an eye on startups. It's one of the few crowdfunding sites that lets people donate and invest in projects. Through its CROWDFUNDx initiative, the company has helped investors connect with local entrepreneurs.
If you’re looking to support a homegrown startup, look into SoKap. It’s not nearly as popular as the previous three sites, but it’s been getting some buzz. The Vancouver-based company differers from other crowdfunding sites in one key way: It allows people to pre-buy rights to products. Users can, for example, buy the rights to a movie in a particular community. That means they’ll receive royalties from the money the film generates in that area. The site has attracted a number of different products, including food, music, films and books.
Ilan Mester is a Toronto-based journalist and copywriter. His work has been featured in portals like USA Today, The Huffington Post Canada, AOL Music and Sharp Magazine.
If you have a small business and update your own website or blog, you may not be familiar with the best practices in terms of text formatting for the web. Here are a few simple principles you can use to make your business website look more professional.
Break big chunks into headings and paragraphs
Long stretches of text are hard to read and intimidating for most people, like in the example below.
Text needs some space to “breathe”. Add full carriage returns between paragraphs to separate them and create a visual hierarchy:
It'll be more legible, clearer and less boring. Also, remember that you can use up to 6 levels of headings. Use them consistently and your text will look much better.
Don’t underline text
Assuming that you’re using a website management system like Your Web Department, links will already be underlined for you (or not, depending on the design preferences of the website). So you don’t need to underline any of them by hand. And never, never underline things like headings. People will think they’re links.
Don’t manually “colourize” individual words
Sorry, but you really shouldn't manually change the colour of individual words. It won’t look good and will only confuse people. Manually colouring either the words themselves or their background should only be used in really rare occasions, if at all. Consistency is key.
Don’t capitalize big chunks of text
It’s a common misconception that text in all caps is easier to read. It definitely isn’t. Also, people associate all caps with “shouting”. Only short text -- like headings -- can be capitalized, never long stretches of copy.
Don’t center big chunks
We scan text from top to bottom and left to right. By centering several lines of text we actually make it much harder to read, because we need to “find” the first letter each time we move to the next line. It’s much easier to read when text is left-justified. On the other hand, having it also right-justified doesn’t help. Why? Because then all text looks like a single block, and it’s hard to find where you are within the copy.
Don’t bold them either!
I know you’d like to draw your audience’s attention as much as possible to your page. But bolding large amounts of text will not only make the page look bad; it’ll be very confusing. And again, harder to read. Use bold text sparingly.
Use larger font sizes for mobile
Your Web Department lets you create a mobile-optimized version of any website. You should take advantage of the ability it gives you to customize text specifically for mobile. You can tweak both the font size and the line spacing for regular text as well as each of the 6 levels of headings.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
So you’ve got your new website done and you’re ready to go live it. Congratulations! Sometimes however people -- small business owners, for example -- may get a bit intimidated if they don’t know anything about domain registration, name servers, etc. And why should they have to deal with those things, anyway? Here are the steps to get your new website live smoothly and painlessly.
In any case, any Your Web Department package includes your new domain registration. All that’s left is for you to do is press the 'Publish' button for any pages that are ready to go live. People will start seeing them.
Scenario B: You already had a website and are now transferring it to Your Web Department
Hey, we get that a lot. From disgruntled business owners who had one of their employees “in charge” of the website and then leaving the company, to those who finally gave up on their “free” WordPress website for which they had no support or had to pay a lot of money anytime they needed to change something or upload a file, the fact is that people switch to us.
In that case, once you’re new website is ready it’s time to point your domain to it, instead of the old website. If you’re familiar with domain registration, you may simply follow the steps below. But if you’re not, send them to your registrar, and they’ll make the changes for you:
Confirm that the NameServices are set to the registrar's local nameservers
Delete the A Record pointing to an IP address (unless the @ A Record can be pointed to the local IP)
Add a C Name alias of your domain (www)
Point it to goto.yourwebdepartment.com
NOTE: Some systems make this a two-step process whereby you need to create a 'www' C Name and point it to goto.yourwebdepartment.com and additionally create a '@' C Name and also point it to goto.yourwebdepartment.com
Finally, select the Forwarding option and forward "nameofsite.com" to "www.nameofsite.com"
If your domain registrar is hard to reach for some reason or you’d rather have us doing it for you, we can help. If you provide us with your login information, we can do the above on your behalf.
Now, remember: your domain name belongs to you/your business. It’s neither the property of the person to built the website for you nor the company that was hosting it before. And it doesn't become our property when you switch to Your Web Department either; it remains yours.
301 Redirects
If your website was hosted somewhere else before, we can temporarily enable a feature called "301 Redirects". It allows you to automatically redirect specific URLs (page addresses) from your old website to the new one in YWD. This way iold links can still "work". More information on 301 Redirects on this Help page.
How about email accounts?
Good point (no wonder, I made it). You can choose whether you'd like to keep your existing email acounts where they are (adequate in many cases) or transfer your email management to Your Web Department too. All YWD packages include a certain number of emal accounts.
If you're transferring an existing website to YWD, we recommend that you contact us a few days before going live to let us know how you'd like to deal with any existing email accounts.
Finally, keep in mind that our team can help you with any email-related issues as well.
Oh, and success on your new website!
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Your Web Department now provides 3 easy methods for you to display your Twitter feed on any page of your website.
1. Using the Twitter Feed tool, “Plain list” display style
Any YWD website comes with the Twitter Feed tool. You simply add it to a page, enter your Twitter account/username and specify the number of tweets that should be included. The new default display style is called “Plain list” and will show your most recent tweets as a plain vanilla list. The text and links colours will inherit your website’s by default, but you can override them if you want.
Also, the text will expand to the maximum width of its container (e.g. the Main column of your page) but you can limit it to a width. And you can also apply an autoformat to the content block if you’d like to have a border or padding around it, for instance.
This style is great if you’d like your Twitter feed to integrate seamlessly with the rest of your website.
2. Using the Twitter Feed tool, “Stylized box” display style
This style will place your tweets inside a scrollable box, with a thumbnail of your profile photo, links to your Twitter page and more. You have a few options in terms of customizing its look and feel, like the shell background colour, the tweets area background colour, the shell text. You can also choose whether you’d like the box width to auto-expand or not.
This style is indicated if you’d like to show your Twitter feed very prominently, especially if your YWD website package doesn’t include the Embed Code tool.
If your YWD website package includes the Embed Code tool then it's just a matter of grabbing the code Twitter generates and pasting it into an Embed Code content block.
For more information on Your Web Department’s Twitter Tool, visit this Help page.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Some of the most prolific people utilizing our website management platform are designers who previously had little or no experience creating websites. If you’re print designer and in the past have avoided accepting Web work for whatever reason, I think you should reconsider.
Why the Web is for you
You’re already in business The mere fact that you have a business -- whether it’s struggling or not -- gives you an edge over geeky programmers. I bet you have much better people skills, can understand a budget and adhere to deadlines. They often can't.
It’s much easier now
You don't need to buy giant those think and confusing tomes on how to learn Flash, PHP, Joomla, etc. A website management system like Your Web Department lets you build a website yourself for free for your clients, no programming required.
You’re better qualified than anyone
The same overall design principles that you’re familiar with can and should be applied to the Web. It’s just a matter of making some adaptations. After all you’re a communications professional and can understand your client’s needs in that respect better than anyone.
Your clients expect you to do it
Gone are the days of clients spending thousands of dollars on a simple website, unless it has some really specific functionality. Most expect that in addition to their branding or printed material, you’ll also be doing their website and that they'll be able to update it on their own. In the past, you might have hired someone to "program it" for you. That’s not required anymore.
Simple tips
Design your websites and images at 72dpi
Work on your concepts at 72 dpi, not 300 dpi. High resolution images won’t look any better on monitors and only make everything load much slower.
Use RGB
Monitors work in RGB, not CMYK.
Scrolling is fine!
The days of tiny Flash websites loading in fixed-height rectangles with tiny type are over. Flash itself is dead. While you should keep critical information and calls to action above the fold, it’s perfectly OK for people to scroll down on long pages.
Web fonts
In the past you had to stick to the so called “web safe” fonts like Verdana, Arial, etc. But Your Web Department platform loads fonts on the fly now. So in addition to a few dozen built-in fonts, you can also select from amongst thousands of fonts from Adobe Typekit or the Google Web Fonts (free) library. And by the way, don’t use bitmapped/rasterized text for your headings and the like. Use live, editable (and searchable!) text.
So there you have it. Next week I’ll be introducing you to a studio that has successfully incorporated website building into their practice. In the meantime, you may want to check out Gustavo's related post about why a designer switched to YWD.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Sorry, but there are no magical solutions that will increase the size of anybody’s traffic. But there are a few things you can do that can definitely improve your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Here are a few you can easily do yourself:
Let’s say you’re just starting a business, and you didn’t even have a domain name for your website (like www.cakesbysandradean.com for instance). You may have 
