There are many things to consider when you’re building a website. As a small to medium-sized business with many claims on your time, do you have time to think about all of these? If you are building a website using an automated tool, it does not usually provide all these settings – you need to add them manually.
Custom designs and style
Web templates usually give you the option to change colours and fonts. But if you want something other than the layout provided by the template (whatever site-building tool you’re using), that means adding custom CSS. The only tool that lets you add custom CSS is WordPress.
If you want a site that looks different from the standard templates, I can design one for you.
Search Engine Optimization
Different website building tools have different approaches to SEO.
- In WordPress, there’s an excellent plugin called SiteSEO, which allows you to create search engine keywords and metadata for every page individually.
- In GoDaddy, the SEO tool tries to insert keywords into your page copy (not a good idea).
- Wix has a centralized SEO tool that walks you through what you need to do to improve each page’s SEO.
- Google Sites does not offer any SEO settings.
I can improve your search engine rankings with an SEO tune-up.
Accessibility
There are five reasons you should care about accessibility:
- It helps disabled people access your website.
- Approximately 10% of your visitors are disabled – you don’t want to lose such a big customer segment.
- It’s a legal requirement in most countries of the world.
- It boosts your site in the search engine rankings.
- It makes your site better for everyone.
Accessibility includes adding alternative text for images, captions for videos, and having the ability to skip navigation. I can fix your accessibility issues and make your site legally compliant.
Performance
This is a measure of how fast your webpage loads. If it is slow, users can become frustrated and leave your website. Slow pages can be caused by large images, images without dimensions, large videos, and excessive amounts of JavaScript. I can fix your pages’ performance issues and make recommendations to avoid them in the future.
Usability
Usability is a measure of how easy your website is to use. People need to be able to find key information on your website, such as opening hours, locations, services you offer, prices, and how to contact you. If they cannot find the information they need, they will look elsewhere. I can improve the usability of your website by making sure visitors can find the information they need, and improving the sales funnel.
GEO (AI search optimization)
Fully optimizing your website for AI search requires expert domain knowledge in your field, so this is mostly something that only you can do, but I can offer tips and pointers on what to do, and mark up some of your information with microformats (if you’re using WordPress).
Let us take the strain
I have 25 years’ experience in web development, so these things come naturally to me – but if you don’t want to learn them and spend hours tweaking your website’s settings, then buying one of our web development packages is an excellent investment.