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How can I build a professional website

Female small business owner is leaning over a table in her clothes studio to reach her laptop. She is building a professional website with Go Sitebuilder.

Just seconds after clicking on a website, you’ve already made an irrevocable first impression. 75% of users admit to making judgements on a company’s reputation based on the website design. So, how can you wow your users in the first few seconds of landing on your homepage?

What makes a website professional?

A website is often the first experience a user has with your company. Before they even interact with what your product offers, they will be impressed with a good design and good user experience. 

High-quality designs often use high-resolution images with overlaid text. The average user spends just seconds on your website homepage, so it’s important to make it simple and clear; what do you want the user to do? A call to action on the first page lets the user know what you provide and how they can access this service. 

The website can’t just look great though, it needs to feel great. Make sure the site navigates smoothly, that the links make sense and most importantly, that the pages don’t take too long to load. According to a Google study, 53% of users will stop engaging with a site if it takes over 3 seconds to load, which could result in a massive bounce rate for your site. 

Another thing to bear in mind is the growing importance of mobile capability for a website. According to Broadband Search, mobile internet usage has increased 222% in the past 5 years, and this trend is set to continue. Digital marketing site SWEOR also revealed that 85% of adults think that a company’s mobile website should be as good or better than their desktop one, so having this capability will increase both your company’s reach and credibility.

How to make your own

Your success depends on your website design, but how can you get a stylish and professional look when you’ve never made a website before? You can spend thousands of pounds on a custom-designed website, or you can use one of the many website creator tools available, as long as you create that will grab your users in that all-important first couple of seconds. 

With Go Sitebuilder, you can choose from a huge selection of professional and beautiful themes and personalise it to your company, safe in the knowledge that whatever you choose will work just as seamlessly on mobile and desktop. Take advantage of the 14-day free trial (no credit card needed) to try it out for yourself!

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What you need to start building your website

Caucasian female working from home in her kitchen. The kitchen is white with a dark wood surface. She is wearing a casual denim shirt and has notebooks, pens and a camera on the desk next to her

Thinking of building a website for your company but don’t know where to start? It’s easy to get bogged down in the details of what you do and don’t need, but we’ve compiled a handy list of key things you should think about to create a great website in line with your brand. 

Web hosting

First things first; you need to find somewhere to host your website. The best options provide a personalised domain name and multiple business email addresses, but there are three other areas to bear in mind; website speed, uptime reliability and customer service.

A website with a fast connection will rank better in SEO and increase your conversion rate, so avoid shared hosting and know that the cheaper you go, the slower the connection may be. 

Uptime reliability is also extremely important, as if the host isn’t working properly, your users won’t be able to access your website from any server. Look for a host with a 100% uptime guarantee, so that if your site does go down for any reason, you are likely to get some form of compensation. 

You might not think that customer service deserves a place on this list, but let’s face it, things go wrong. If this is your first time building a website, it’s much easier to quickly talk to an expert who can fix the issue in moments rather than spending precious hours trying to find a solution yourself. 

Design and Content

Not a designer? Don’t worry, most website creators have their own pre-loaded designs and themes ready to use and optimised for the type of service you provide, but check that they also have mobile capability. You can always try a few out before you decide on a final one, but make sure it aligns with your brand and your logo. 

When you’ve got your web-hosting site and themes set up, it’s time to start adding content to your website! Optimising blog posts for SEO is a great way to help your website rank better on Google and stand out as a relevant resource for your prospective clients. 

Creating a beautiful and effective website shouldn’t be a hassle. If you want all the features mentioned in this article and more, why not sign up for a free 14-day trial with Go SiteBuilder? Let us know how it goes, and contact our team of experts if you have any questions!

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How to go about launching a digital product

Male wearing a blue, white and red checkered shirt is standing in his kitchen looking at his phone and making a coffee

To launch a digital product, it’s very helpful to have a digital presence. You can create this digital presence in one of several ways. You can do it through social media, online advertising, or you can do it by publishing a blog. But the thing that underpins all of these methods and makes it easy for interested parties to be aware of your digital presence is a website. A website is a place to tie it all together and express yourself with your customers.

Your website is your digital presence

A digital product is an online representation of a product or a service in the virtual world. Or in easier terms, this us what you do or sell – but online. Launching that digital product or service is all about raising awareness of its existence. But if you first use blogs and online advertising through social media or virtual directories to awaken public interest, in order to receive and action orders for whatever it is you are offering, you will need a website. A website helps you finish it all up, make payments and more!

To launch a digital product successfully, creating a website has to be your starting point. A website is your digital presence. It announces your existence to the virtual world and shows potential customers where to go.

How to create your first website

You could hire a bespoke website designer to create a website for you from scratch, but most product launches start off in a small way through a small business. Small business owners need to keep their costs down and hiring the services of a dedicated website designer can be an expensive undertaking.

So, to help entrepreneurs to get started affordably, we here at Go Sitebuilder came up with the modular website design concept. It empowers users to create their own professional websites a section at a time. Most importantly, you don’t need any website building experience. It works just as well for novices as it does for geeks.

By building your website in sections, you can make it as small or large as you require and add or subtract from it as your needs change. But whatever you do, thanks to the user-friendly programmable templates we have, you can customise your own unique website with ease. It will look and perform as good if not better than if you had employed the services of a bespoke website designer at many times the cost.

The complete website package

All of the websites you can create through Go Sitebuilder are available with a personalised domain name chosen by you, and five unique, business email addresses. The websites are compatible for mobile use, and you can access them via any device from anywhere to modify the site, process orders or do any other sort of maintenance as you see fit.

Ready for launch

With your website up and running, you will then be in a position to launch your digital product or service. You now have that all-important anchor point and can set about updating social media outlets, publishing blogs and instigating email marketing campaigns.

Anyone who wants to know more about the product(s) you are offering or who wants to go ahead and make a purchase will know where to go. You are on your way.

Having a website is crucial for every business. If you haven’t created yours yet, why don’t you check out Go Sitebuilder? Create your website from anywhere without the need for any technical skills. Try Go Sitebuilder free for 14-days to see just how easy it is to get your business online.

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Launching a new website – should I use .com or .co.uk?

should I use .com or new .co.uk

Where are your clients from? This question will help you get to the answer quickly. All .co.uk websites show that the business deals with customers based in the United Kingdom. All .com websites show that a company deals with customers on a global scale; therefore, they may lack tailor-made services for local customers. Sites with country codes like .co.uk command the market in their respective countries but have little to no effect in others. This article is here to break down whether you should use a .com or .co.uk domain extension.

Pros of using a .com extension

A .com domain extension is the most widely used website extension. Its market is wide as it does not incline to users from a specific area. Therefore, a business that wants to reach the global market can use the .com extension. In the worldwide market, a .com website extension seems more authentic and legitimate. Potential customers from diverse areas feel that the information or services offered are tailored to a global audience. Therefore, your website can reach more people globally if you choose .com as your website’s extension.

Pros of using a .co.uk extension

Knowing your target market is the first step in realizing the best website extension for your website. All website extensions with country codes are best for businesses that operate within that specific country. Therefore, the most clicked websites in the UK have the .co.uk extension. 

Having a website with a country code like .co.uk proves to be more authentic in the United Kingdom when compared with other extensions. If your site has a country code in its address, its legitimacy may only be recognized in the specific country. Long story short, if you’re a local business with your clients close to you, such as a plumber, tutor, painter, etc., this is the way to go. 

Finding the right extension for you

Using the pros and cons we have listed above, you can now make an educated decision on which extension is the best for your business. If you are a small to medium-sized company located in the United Kingdom, then it would make sense for you to use .co.uk. If you’re wanting to draw in a larger audience, then choose .com, as it is recognized worldwide. Alternatively, you can purchase both domains, but you’ll need to make sure they direct to one single place for search engine optimisation.

Decided on the right domain extension for you? At Go Sitebuilder, you can create a stylish website with a unique domain and up to five email addresses with no previous knowledge in web design. Try out our 14-day free trial today and see just how easy it is to get your business online.

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Core Features to Look For in a website builder

Core Features to Look For in a Site Builder

When you launch your website, you are sending it out into the world wide web to be seen by your audience, and new ones too! Go Sitebuilder helps you build your confidence in site launching, even if you are not a professional site designer. We’ve put together a comprehensive list of what core features to look for in a website builder!

Making your website look appealing

Go Sitebuilder offers several professional designs and a library of beautifully designed sections and themes, all of which are fully customisable. There is a wide range of layout possibilities with the numerous pre-built sections offered. You can style each section of your site individually or even change the whole layout in just a click. These layouts are very responsive to your commands, making it easy to operate your site on smartphones, tablets and larger screens. A beautiful website will make all of the difference. 

Editing images

With the built-in image editor you can re-size, crop, scale, reduce red-eye and even add filters or stickers to your images. This will help you make your photos pop!

Increasing activity on your social media platforms

By adding your social platforms to your site, it becomes easier for site visitors to view your profile and latest posts. Make sure you’re creating content on your social media accounts as well. 

Ensuring communication with customers

When you include contact forms on your site, you’re helping your customers! Following submission of the form, you receive an email on the same in a matter of seconds.

Uploading files

Upload files and PDFs to your site so that customers can easily view, download and print them. We love this feature, especially for restaurant menus.

Embedding external content

You can add relevant outside content from other sites such as YouTube and Pinterest to your site.

SEO

Ensure your site gets fully indexed on search engines by adding site-level and page-level SEO tags and content.

Creating a gallery

Incorporate an appealing multi-image gallery on your site for visitors to view, expand and zoom in. You can import images from your Facebook page or from the Go Sitebuilder stock image gallery to your site. Additionally, you can set these images in a slide-show that transitions both manually and automatically.

Previewing your site

Before you publish, see a preview of how your site will appear on any device in both portrait and landscape layouts. In this way, you can add products and updates from anywhere.

Mapping domains

Do you have multiple domains that you wish to make available on your site? Go Sitebuilder offers a simplified domain mapping page for this.

Analysing customer insights

By incorporating the Google Analytics tracking code into your site, you can see what your audience thinks of your site. This can help you in a number of ways in the future, we’ll touch more on this in a future post.

Website personalisation

Add personal content into your website including videos, audios, text and maps to increase site traffic.

Creating a product store

With Go Sitebuilder, you can create a store with assorted products and stock as much as you wish. Additionally, you get to integrate various payment options such as PayPal and major credit cards and also create customised offers, just-arrived items, discount vouchers or redeemable points for customers. You can create a preset stock level that gives you alerts when certain products fall below that level.

With Go Sitebuilder, you can choose from a huge selection of professional and beautiful themes and personalise it to your company, safe in the knowledge that whatever you choose will work just as seamlessly on mobile and desktop. Take advantage of our 14-day free trial (no credit card needed) to see just how easy it is.

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What is the best day to launch a new website?

Male business owner reviewing some paper work in a stylish, light office with exposed brick work

Launching your new website is a grand event. Some people choose a day that resonates with them while others maybe don’t have any idea at all. However, if the website aims at targeting increased traffic, the day of the week matters a lot. When setting the launching day of your site, you need to be aware of the schedule of your clients. In most cases, sites depend on employed people. Therefore, you have to understand their common behaviour in terms of workload, personal time, and attitudes towards the days of the week.

Monday

Launching a website on a busy day for your customers is an ultimate miss. The potential clients are not just about to stop their busy schedules to look at your site. Mondays are known to be very slow days; most people are yet to adjust to the working environment from a fun and busy weekend. The workload is very high when employees deal with stalled tasks from the previous week. On Mondays, people do not have time even to visit their social media pages, and therefore it is hard for them to visit a newly launched website.

The weekend

For most people, weekends are there to be enjoyed. It is during this time that they move out of town to refresh. Most people have physical conversations with friends and families. With the current trends of technology taking over human connections, some people prefer to keep off from the internet. On the weekend, there are very few people to share with the trending issues as families do not have the best environment to discuss emerging issues. Weekends are not the best time to launch a new website as it may not get optimum traffic.

Mid-week

Most people who recommend news are workmates and colleagues. However, this happens when they have some free time. Employees are trapped in their jobs over the weekdays, and this is the best time to launch your new website. However, Mondays are extremely busy and dull for people to have free time. Similarly, Fridays are extremely hyper as employees look forward to the weekend. In this regard, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the days with a conducive environment for the launch of a new website. If a website goes live on Tuesday, people have all day to not only discuss it but visit. For the people who fail to know about the new website, there is Wednesday and Thursday for the word to spread. Before the end of the week, the website will have become popular with many potential clients.

Having a website is crucial for every business. If you haven’t created yours yet, why don’t you check out Go Sitebuilder? Create your website from anywhere without the need for any technical skills. Try Go Sitebuilder free for 14-days to see just how easy it is to get your business online.

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How can I achieve success in digital marketing?

Achieving success in digital marketing

Digital Marketing is important in today’s world, but it needn’t be daunting. There are some simple ways to use it to make your products and services more successful. People love a good story, so use a website to tell the story behind your business. Be personal and talk about how you were inspired to start up, people will feel they can understand and relate.

Pictures that tell a story

Images are a great way to share your journey, particularly if there’s an interesting reason behind how your business started. Social media can be great for this and allows you to add hashtags to reach people who may be interested. While it’s important to let people know what you have to offer them, it helps not to be too “salesy”. And even on occasion, allow them to see a little of yourself or your company; such as social outings as a team or celebrating a colleague’s milestone birthday.

Adding personality to your brand

Potential customers like to feel that they know your brand or at least understand why they might need what you’re selling. Simply posting an image of your product and a link to buy, isn’t good enough. It offers no reason for people to part with their hard-earned money and it gets caught up in a sea of other adverts all doing the same thing. Describe your products well and add an ‘About page’ to your website so your customers can get to know the brand they’re buying from.

Reaching your customers the right way

A website that is memorable and includes something which sums up what you do is a fantastic way of ensuring people can find you. Linking your social media accounts to your website also makes it easier for people to get in touch and follow your progress and successes. To appear more professional, add forms to your website so people can reach out directly. Including a news section or adding a blog is useful for keeping people informed and engaged with your business.

Optimising your content

To ensure you attract the right people to your website, SEO can important and so is the ability to incorporate social media and YouTube videos. Many people respond better to videos. They are a great way to keep people’s attention for a longer span of time. As mentioned, you’ll also want to add contact forms to your website. This makes it easier for customers to get in touch, as not everyone finds using email or social media to be an easy task.

If you haven’t started building your website yet, or you’re still looking for the right tool for you, check out our free trial of Go Sitebuilder. Go Sitebuilder has been created with busy small business owners in mind so you won’t need any previous website building experience. Try it today and see just how easy it is!

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How do I promote my electrician business website?

Female electrician working on a construction site.

Every small business should have its own website. It’s a powerful way to attract new customers while still enable existing ones to find you. A quality website makes you look professional and builds trust for your business. In today’s world websites can be your first impression, and with a beautiful and sleek website, you’re sure to make a good one. Once you have built your website, you’ll want to promote it in order to attract more customers to your electrician business. Here are some expert tips that will help you get some more exposure.

Search Engine Optimisation

We offer easy to use SEO tools at Go Sitebuilder to help ensure your website is indexed with Google. These tools make something that might sound a little intimidating a breeze to get done and gets them done correctly. You’ll also want to make sure the content on your site fully optimised. There are endless resources available to help you learn about SEO online, or you could work with a specialist to help optimise your content quickly! Whichever way you do it, there will be a bit of trial and error. But with the process, you’ll be growing your skills at the same time you’re growing your business. If you’re new to the world of SEO, check out our beginners guide over on our blog.

Trade directories

There are plenty of online trade directories where you can list your business. Most of these listings will include the option to add your website URL. This kind of placement could land you a lot of visits from local customers looking for electricians – so, get listed on as many directories as you can. Remember, you’ll need a unique domain name if you want to stand out from the crowd!

Social media

There are many businesses who have managed to turn their social media accounts into powerful sources of organic traffic. It’s not necessarily simple to get people excited about a trade on social media, but with a little creativity you could come up with a clever way to attract attention. Just remember to be yourself and to add your personality into everything you do. Remind everyone about what is unique about you and your business and have fun with it.

Paid Advertising

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads on Google and social media can be a great way to attract the right sort of customer to your website. There are tons of how-to’s online along with articles directly from Google Ads to help you get these campaigns running towards success. An electrician business is a good candidate for attracting customers this way since most people will be using search engines to find what they’re looking for.

The bottom line

These are just some of the simplest ways to promote your electrician website. There are lots of others, and it’s worth picking a few that you think will work and giving them your attention to get some success. People will always need electricians, so you simply need to find a way to help local customers find your website. Don’t be afraid to be a little creative to stand out from the competition.

If you haven’t got your business online yet, or your existing website isn’t working for you, check out our free 14-day trial with Go Sitebuilder. Sign up today and start building the website that will make your business a success. You won’t need to hire an expert and you won’t need any previous website building knowledge – you can even start building on your mobile phone!

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Should I be worried about launching my new website without protecting the idea behind it?

Should I be worried about launching my new website without protecting the idea behind it

Innovation is important if you want to get a new business off the ground or grow an existing one. This means a great deal of time, effort and expense can go into ‘Research and Development’ to find the next big thing. However, it leads to one of the biggest worries for owner-managers and executives. ‘What if someone steals my business idea?’

This can be a particular concern for start-up enterprises. Having found a great niche or product, you will definitely need a website to promote it. Once the website goes live, your competitors and any potential ‘copiers’ can instantly see what it’s all about.

Business and intellectual property rights

If your innovation is particularly groundbreaking – or protecting your business ideas is essential for your success – then seeking legal advice is often best. Specialists in such matters as patenting and copyright can help you to attach protections to your ideas, including Trademarks to ensure no one can replicate your brand identity too closely. 

All of this costs money though, and budgeting to protect ideas to this extent should be part of your initial business plan.

Be prepared!

If you feel the above is unnecessary or too expensive, there are still things you can do to help protect your ideas. For example, it’s important to be ready to start trading before your website goes live. Get your business operations as far along as possible, before you reveal any of the detail online.

You could always design and build your website with Go Sitebuilder in the meantime, as a prototype, and then make it public when the time is right. The beauty of this is, you can start selling and making connections before anyone else can use your website information to mimic you! It keeps you ahead of the competition!

Care in website wording

Tips for protecting new business ideas include being careful with your website content. You need to say enough to grab and hold the attention of potential customers, without revealing sensitive corporate information. For example, you may not want to reveal your supplier details, or even announce tie-ups with clients! It’s the sort of intel rivals can use to undermine you. Also, the thinking process behind your start-up or its products may be something you keep ‘close to your chest’.

Getting your house in order

To some extent, your website could be the easiest way to control information about your new company, product or service. Especially when you create it yourself using Go Sitebuilder.

To protect your ideas you should also consider such things as non-disclosure agreements with suppliers, clients and staff. Also, data compliance and control is not just about meeting your legal obligations. Cybersecurity measures can make sure that important business information remains private within your new venture.

If you haven’t started building your website yet or you’re still looking for the right tool for you, check out our free trial of Go Sitebuilder. You won’t need any previous technical knowledge as Go Sitebuilder has been created with busy small business owners in mind – you can even build it on your mobile phone!

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Important first steps to make a new website SEO-friendly

Female small business owner sat on her sofa at home with a hot coffee planning her SEO strategy on her laptop. She is casually dressed and smiling

If you’re a new website owner, the whole world of SEO can feel intimidating. You don’t want to get lost in the buzzwords, conflicting advice, and confusing link-building strategies – it doesn’t have to be that hard! With a little bit of advice and planning, you’ll be an SEO in no time. We’ve put together a few simple key points to make your new website is SEO friendly, and we promise it’s easier than you think!

1. Produce good quality, highly relevant content

Your visitors are probably coming to your site to learn or buy something. You’re the expert at what you do after all. You have to make sure that what they see when they visit your site solves their problem. Google rewards relevant, information-filled content. So, produce plenty of highly relevant content such as blogs and articles, and you’ll see the SEO benefits quickly!

2. Keep images as small as possible

Site speed is a key feature of how well a website performs in an SEO audit. If the images on your site are too big (in terms of file size), it can slow a site down and see it rank lower than a faster site. Try to avoid uploading large file sizes, or shrink the images where possible – make sure they are still good quality, but keep them as small as you can get away with.

3. Keep the site design minimal

Websites are becoming more minimalist in design. Minimal design means the content stands out, the site will be easier to read for the visitor and more importantly, the site will load quickly, which is a big SEO benefit. The temptation could be to over-complicate your website design. Keep things clean and simple and your visitors will benefit. Our powerful website builder allows you to create simple, beautiful sites without the need for an expensive web designer or any technical skills.

4. Link strategically

Do you have friends in your industry who could provide a backlink to your site? Relevant backlinks are a big SEO boost, so speak to customers, friends, industry colleagues, etc and see if they’d be willing to give your new website a helping hand with a backlink from their site to yours! If a site has backlinks from relevant sources, it’s a big help.

5. Use relevant keywords in your content

This is very important – you have to write about what you want to be found for. An example could be an electrician wanting to be found by potential customers. They’d make sure they write about the services they offer and the locations they offer them in. Writing articles on previous jobs they’ve done or and where the jobs took place are relevant, keyword-dense content.

You don’t need to be perfect from the start, but it’s important to be consistent. Plenty of content, plenty of information and a few helpful links will all help! If you’re at the start of your website and SEO journey, why not take a look at a 14-day free trial with Go Sitebuilder? Our expert team are always on-hand if you have any questions – so, what’s stopping you from getting your business online?