Creating an Effective Online Portfolio

From Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn, the opportunities to create online profiles these days are boundless. Last year, LinkedIn was adding new users at a rate of 1 million a week. Minor numbers compared to Twitter and Facebook, but nonetheless, evidence of the growing trend.  However, with all of the distractions, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact you should be focusing some of that energy on perfecting your professional online presence—this is especially important for creative professionals who rely on portfolios to show off their previous work.

While it is still beneficial to maintain a physical representation of your work to take to meetings, interviews and tradeshows, it’s becoming all the more important to have an online representation of yourself. It makes you more accessible, plus it’s user friendly in that it gives potential clients, employers and markets instant access to your work. That being said, it’s important you ensure whatever you publish is carefully selected and put together to ensure you put your best foot forward. Below are some things to consider when creating your online portfolio. (more…)

Why WordPress Is The Best Website Platform

There are many different ways of creating a website, you can purchase industry standard software like Dreamweaver and take courses to understand how to use it, or you can use content management software such as WordPress that allows you to quickly and easily get a website live within minutes. This is one of the many reasons why WordPress is the best website platform for beginners and professionals alike. (more…)

Easily Increase Your WordPress Site Traffic With These Social Media Plugins!

I first heard of WordPress a long time ago, but not that long! I was sceptical and thought that it was just another fad that would pass with time. However, within a very short time of trying it out, I was hooked and haven’t looked back. Today, if you asked me what I thought of WordPress, I would simply tell you that it’s the best content management system available. In fact, I would go on to add that it will continue to be the best in future. (more…)

Top 5 Call to Action Features for a Website

If you have a commercial website, you need visually interesting, graphically rich calls to prompt visitors to make a purchase or request a service. But different types of websites need different types of calls to action. For example, if you sell products on your website, you want to place an emphasis on pictures and making it easy to buy your most popular, best selling products with the highest margins.

Below is our top 5 calls to action for a website list below is geared more for service related website. Though many may seem like simple solutions, by including these features on your website, you may see higher conversation rates and more profits, which can make all the difference in today’s competitive online sales environment. (more…)

Alternatives to Google Analytics – Can Any of These Free Web Tools Compete?

Launched back in 2005, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Google Analytics was the ‘daddy’ of web monitoring tools. A popular choice with online marketers and website owners the world over, Google Analytics generates powerful, accurate and detailed statistics about your websites visitors.

With 57% of the world’s 10,000 most popular websites tracking their online success with GA, it would seem like the obvious choice for marketers of all abilities. But is it?

• Some website owners don’t like the ‘all-seeing’ aspect of Google and prefer to keep their websites statistics quiet
• GA’s interface has often been criticised for being complicated and hard to understand
• GA can’t track how long people stay on your site unless they move to a second page
• If you happen to be practicing black-hat SEO (search engine optimisation), Google can crack down on your site (more…)

Why Page Load Times Matter So Much and How You Can Reduce Them

How fast a website loads is one of the first impressions you can give your visitors and potential customers. Make a bad first impression and things can start going wrong fast. Page load time is important for a number of reasons but the user experience is one of the most important. If people are frustrated that your site is slow for them they are much less likely to buy from you or trust your site in general. Its a hard thing to measure but it is something that is very real. A couple stats from kissmetrics blog puts some perspective on just how important it can be:

“A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.”

“If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.”

Not everyone has an e-commerce site making $100k a day but it does help put things in a different light. For some people 7% can make or break your business and even if that is not the case most everyone would agree that improving your conversions by ANY amount is a positive thing. (more…)

How to Reduce Your Bounce Rate Like A Pro!

Analytics are an incredibly useful tool! They give you a peek into what visitors are doing and looking at on your website, which in turn shows you what you can do to improve your website. Bounce rates are just one of the many statistics that Google makes available in their analytics suite. Most people intrinsically understand that a high bounce rate is probably a bad thing. But what is a bounce rate exactly ? Google’s definition is this:

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.“

As you can see, it is a pretty basic concept. Visitors land on your page and then decide to go elsewhere on the web or close the browser before going to another page on your site. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For example many single page lead generation pages will have an extremely high bounce rate even if they are converting traffic well. In that case your bounce rate is a meaningless number. Now that we know a little bit about what a bounce rate is we can look at some steps you can take to lower it. (more…)

4 SEO Plugins Your WordPress Website Must Have

So your company decided that it’s finally time to take the plunge into the blogging world. Congrats! It’s an integral part of any Internet marketing plan, and it’s a great thing that you have finally gotten started! Static websites don’t get nearly as much traffic as those that are continually updated. This is where blogging comes in, because each new blog post is fresh new content and another reason for someone to visit your website and browse around. Those intriguing blog posts wont matter too much if your blog isn’t formatted correctly for SEO. To make sure that you are maximizing your visibility, I have  listed 4 SEO Plugings for your WordPress Website.  (more…)

WordPress Websites Rock and here are 6 reasons why

These days a lot of people start off using WordPress by signing up for an account on WordPress.com for their personal blogs, others install WordPress on their own domain. You start off with a small simple blog and then you start customizing it a bit. A plugin here, a sidebar widget there and now your blog is really rockin’. Within a few weeks you have added a couple of pages and a few more plugins and widgets and your little blog is looking more and more like a full fledged website! (more…)

5 SEO Tips for WordPress

If you’re serious about blogging these days, you have your own webpage URL and a hosting membership. You’re also most likely using WordPress as your content management system based on its ease and ability to be customized virtually anyway you like. But are people actually reading your blogs? Are your posts SEO optimized so that search engines and other people can find them? If you’re not sure you probably need to get some type of analytics to see what kind of traffic you have. If your traffic is not ideal I suggest you read these 5 SEO Tips for WordPress, in order to gain more traffic to your pages. (more…)