20 Things to Do Before Hitting the Publish Button on Your Site
3
Min Read Time
Joseph Mullins
Choquer Creative Copywriter
Cross Your T’s & Dot Your I’s: While this may sound basic, it is incredibly important to proofread and spell check your content. Finding unflattering typos can repel people from your brand and its messaging. If you’re a small business that cannot afford to hire a content manager for your site, you’ll probably have to deal with the leg work. But thank god for Grammarly. If you need well-crafted content, you may seek out a freelance writer on one of the several writers for hire boards all over the internet.
Check On Your Favicons - At the top of your search bar, by each tab, you’ll notice the tiny icons that are usually logos or images about that website. They’re quite essential but they’re also one of the finer details that most people can sometimes overlook. Having fun seasonal, on-brand favicons is a great little detail to make your website stand out.
Design A Custom 404 Page - A 404 error page shouldn’t be an inconvenience when it’s got the potential to be an awesome navigation tool. Encourage your viewers to stick around by having useful navigation buttons. It can make or break user experience so stop what you’re doing and get that done pronto if you haven’t!
Design A Custom Mobile Menu - Mobile design is a BIG deal. Read our article about responsive design and nose dive into the wonderful world of breakpoints. Long story short, a great menu can be a massive asset. If your viewer can’t navigate between.
Custom Social Media Previews - Your website is an essential part of your company’s digital trail and if a viewer wants to share your work, make that possible by all means. Ensure you create custom Facebook and Twitter previews as well. Oh, and don’t forget social images that are inviting and appealing.
Create a Good Privacy Policy - If you’re offering newsletters or asking people for data to sign up for services, it is advised to have a well-rounded policy. While most people don’t read through T&C’s, people who know anything about GDPR will know that your site is just a gutsy DIY. While there’s nothing wrong with that either, it’s best to cover your bases and avoid setbacks.
Don’t Forget Contact Info: While most websites have a contact us tab, its best to have a quick mention at the footer of your website. Don’t make contacting you a chore.
Set Up Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a great free resource that can give you valuable insights on your website’s performance. You’ll be able to track the growth of your website and its online traction. While WordPress has a handy plug-in that sets up analytics, Squarespace has integrated analytics tools that can come in very handy.
Check your links and CTA’s: Leave no stone unturned and leave no links broken. Ironing out your website before it goes live is crucial as it greatly affects user experience and search engines are quick to notice when users have a hard time on a certain website.
Double-check your images: Test out webpages and see to it that your images translate well on all the platforms you’ve designed for. Optimize images on your website by avoiding BMP or TIFF images and stick to JPEGs. Make sure your images aren’t too bulky since that also affects load time. And we all know what happens when a page takes too long to load, you leave it to watch videos of cats on Instagram.
Ensure You Have Alt-Texts In Place: Alt text lets a search engine know what your images are all about. This helps your site’s SEO massively. So gather your images and have it ready to go with alt texts that include relevant keywords. PS. You don’t have to write alt text for images that serve a design’s purpose. Pictures of your products or blog post images can benefit from alt text.
Review Your Widgets: With all the crazy widgets you can add to your website on WordPress, Squarespace, etc, it's easy to get carried away. Remember that they take up a fair amount of real estate on your website. So you might want to reconsider having your twitter feed on your website when you only really tweet once a month. Get rid of random widgets and always make sure the ones you stick with serve a purpose.
Leave Out The Fluff: People want clear, honest messaging. Nobody has the time for meandering content that serves no purpose. Place all your cards on the table and let them know from the get-go what your services and products are without it being gimmicky. Don’t bother sounding salesy. If you’re making claims about your product, nail down the facts, and provide relevant statistics or reinforcing proof to back it up. Your brand is loved by the locals? Add testimonials that stand out.
Check Your Homepage’s Relevance: Your Homepage is the online face of your brand. First impressions are everything. Hence, you have to see to it that the content on your homepage is relevant and not stuffed with too many sections that overwhelm your visitor.
Keep Your Contact Forms Simple: Nobody likes filling out lengthy forms especially when you’re on an unfamiliar website. Keep it minimal because with more information you ask for, the more you repel your visitor. They don’t trust you well enough to hand you that info. So don’t expect them to. Allow them to have a hassle-free experience with very few, nonthreatening fields to fill out.
Formulate Your Unique Selling Point and Put It On Display: When people land on your website, they need to know instantly what makes you different from other companies before they scurry off into the internet’s abyss full of competition.
Plan Your Outreach Before Launch: You have to get the word out there once your website launches. Grab hold of your friends and family to check out your website. If there’s something wrong, mother dearest would point it out instead of a ticked off customer/viewer. Additionally, look up bloggers and writers and organize pre-launch interviews. They can help you create great backlinks and buzz about your website.
Set Up An Advertising Budget: Lay down these fundamental digital marketing practices and organize your ad schedules and budgets. Will you be doing pay-per-click campaigns? Paid Reviews? Youtube Ads? It’s best to make sure you have all of that planned out for when you launch.
Set Up Your Marketing Arsenal: Ensure you have handy tools like Hootsuite, Mailchimp, or equivalent. Keeping track of your leads and ensuring timely communication is key in customer relationship management. MAnaging your brand does not stop at launching your website. This is only just the beginning.
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8.22.22
Top 4 Reasons to use the Webflow Website Builder instead of Wix Website Maker
There’s an old saying that goes: if it ‘ain't broke, don’t fix it. But what if we told you that old phrase does not always apply to websites?
We argue this point because there are so many elements to a website, like SEO and image optimization, that it’s difficult to tell if it’s broken on the surface.
One of Wix’s main shortcomings is its poor SEO foundation. You may or may not be aware of SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is the level at which your website is found by search engines like Google.
If the internet were a library, search engines would be the librarians. Google crawls, indexes and ranks your website on the search engine results page (or SERP).
It gets more complicated than that, but Wix, unfortunately, doesn’t allow Google to read your site easily. Websites are built with code and the Wix website builder uses unneeded web code.
It’d be like a librarian checking a book with numerous small words on its back and cover. How would they know what the story is about, what it’s called or who it’s written by?
The same concept applies to websites. Google doesn’t always care about how good your design looks, but more about how the website is constructed. If your website’s code looks messy to Google, it won’t be sorted properly. This correlates to not ranking in search results and fewer people finding your website.
Your Brand Seems Frugal & Unprofessional
Wix is affordable but using it can result in a low-grade website. The Wix website builder is marketed to people who need a free or extremely cheap website. While creating your website on Wix, you limit yourself to a collection of website templates which lack customization. You’ll also be provided with a generic URL with yourbussiessname.wix.com. You can connect your website to remove the Wix name from your domain, but you’ll have to pay for it.
Migrating Your Wix Site is Problematic
Business owners like the idea of starting for free and then moving over their content later. This is possible however, it isn’t easy with the Wix website builder. The method that Wix allows you to build your website makes it impossible to simply export the website and migrate it to a better platform. Unfortunately, if this is the case for you, you’ll likely have to start again from scratch with your website.
Pro Tip: If you start with a website development agency, you can avoid this trap altogether.
Hidden Costs With The Wix Website Maker
Wix attracts customers by marketing a free website maker option. And it’s true; it’s a decent website option for beginners or a mockup site because of the free offering. But as expected, there are quite a few limitations to the free Wix website builder. The largest costs incurred tend to be hidden charges.
Paid Packages Offer Only So Much
Some of the package offerings have hidden costs as your site traffic grows. The first paid package does display Wix ads and comes with only 500MB storage and 1GB bandwidth. To put those numbers into perspective, if you get 500 visitors a day and they open 1-2 pages, you’ll need about 30GB of bandwidth.
So when your customer numbers scale, you’ll have to pay additional amounts for larger packages. Additional monthly website charges will increase for eCommerce, booking and shopping features.
Sluggish Web Speed
Another caveat is the Wix website builder makes sites sluggish. Web pages that take only 1 second longer to load can see conversion rates plummet by 70%. Slow speeds hurt the performance of your website and your search engine rankings. Google penalizes slow-responding websites, giving them poor SEO results.
It’s known that Wix websites have some of the lowest FCP (First Contentful Paint) compared to other platforms such as Webflow. In summary, slow loading pages using a Wix website builder will simultaneously harm your user experience and your Google rankings.
Missing out on potential sales is the number one hidden cost of the free Wix website builder. Ask yourself, how many more sales do you think you’d make if you appeared in the top 10 of a search result in Google?
Invest in Your Website From the Beginning
Understanding the drawbacks of the Wix website maker will allow you to make an informed decision when creating your website. If your organization does intend to grow and thrive, then investing in your website will help you and your current and potential customers.
Webflow is an exceptional platform used by us at Choquer Creative. We prefer this tool because it makes clients' websites unique with plenty of customization options, mobile device friendliness, and rapid loading times compared to other popular platforms.
If your business is interested in creating or migrating to the Webflow website builder, be sure to visit our packages section for more information.
Read More
Web Development
7.15.22
The Benefits of Working With a Webflow Design Agency
The most enduring part of any digital space is a website.
It houses all of the key information and updates your audience is searching for. From any company press releases to product announcements, your content needs a stable place to live. A Webflow Design Agency offers you all of this.
Sure, social media is a great marketing tool, and it serves many benefits like building trust; however, it doesn't provide you with autonomy in navigation and user experience. As an organization, you need full control of the user interface and experience. Websites are the only, entirely customizable part of the online world.
Websites have been around for decades; so what's next? Nothing can really beat the power of a website, however, there are opportunities to elevate the experience that you offer your users. One of the most popular and effective ways to improve your website is to make it responsive across all screen sizes, platforms, and devices.
Web Design Process Collaboration Made Easy
In any collaborative effort, there are fears of miscommunication and tricky software that doesn't adapt to multiple users online at the same time. For this reason, a Webflow site development strategy is required to create a scalable Webflow project. Therefore, a Webflow web development agency enables you to share feedback during the development process.
It is important that you have control over your business strategy. Many Agencies offer you website templates that are not fully editable, while a Webflow agency with Webflow experts can make any custom design that you want. Before start building, the team will craft some custom designs so you can choose one to begin crafting your site and its landing pages.
Once the website gets to the staging phase, the agency is able to curate the website's editing so that clients can voice their comments and see real-time updates. You won't miss anything during the Webflow design process!
Thanks to Webflow's different editing modes, we can provide our clients with Editor access to create and edit content directly on the website. This is far easier than the traditional WordPress flow, which requires more back and forth between the agency and the client. For help deciding if WordPress or Webflow is better for your business, read our head-to-head comparison.
Craft A Unique Webflow Website Development, One-Of-A-Kind Experience For Your Audience
Staying modern matters more than anything in the online space. It's not about reinventing the wheel, as much as it is about refining the current experience to be seamless and optimized for the user.
User experience is critical for conversion. If your website fails to intrigue your audience, you won't receive much attention. Not only that, but your website needs to function similarly across all platforms, screen sizes, and devices. Slow loading speeds, misaligned layouts and hidden text can be all the difference between a prospective consumer reaching out or leaving the website.
It may look simple but it involves many things to make a website successful. Starting from the site plan to the design phase, it takes ages to build a website without an agency. Besides this, you need to develop your brand presence, something that few agencies will do for you.
With a team of expert developers and marketing specialists, an agency can take your vision and make it a reality when designing your user experience. Animations and design offer different avenues for communicating your brand. With our team and your ideas, we can create a one-of-a-kind experience for your audience.
CRO and SEO
A Webflow Website requires digital marketing services and optimization. Before choosing a web development and SEO agency, there are two important additional things to know; one of them is called CRO (conversion rate optimization) and the second is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
You can get a beautiful Webflow site, but that's not the only thing you want, you also need traffic and sales going to it. At Choquer Creative Webflow Agency, you will get not just a beautiful site, but also a Web design that converts into sales.
For example, our website stands out by being user-friendly and mobile responsive. Webflow gives us the opportunity to provide an amazing customer service experience without saying a word.
Our CRO delivers results in a short period of time. The best thing about this is that you don't have to hire different agencies to do the CRO and SEO work, we will include all of this within the same monthly packages.
Besides this, our clients are constantly growing their Google rankings. Our SEO strategy can push measurable results.
With Expertise, The Opportunities Are Endless
Other web design platforms, such as WordPress, require a lot of technical fixes and updates to keep the website running properly. Webflow offers a stable and fast experience with great responsiveness without the need for coding. Webflow also has the ability to integrate the website with multiple platforms such as ZapierZapierZapierZapierZapierZapierZapierZapierZapierZapierZapierZapierZapierZapierapieraapi.
Even though a Webflow design seems to be easier, it still requires some technical skills and marketing knowledge to create something attractive for customers. Here is where a Webflow development company will help you to scale and accomplish your company business goals.
No one service can fit all of your expectations. That's why it's important that you work with an agency that has the knowledge and expertise with third-party applications like Zapier, which can greatly automate your internal processes.
Third-party programs add a layer of unique features to Webflow, which can greatly benefit your internal team in their marketing and registration processes. Through Zapier, you can automate several processes so that you're being given all of the information that you need, with form submissions, email newsletter signups, and file downloads. Webflow and Zapier are powerful when paired together.
You can review more about the different integrations and options that you have with Webflow. Our developers can make any of these integrations functional.
Streamlined Project Planning
A Webflow plan sets out the roadmap for design and development. Utilizing a platform that is consistently evolving provides a web design agency with the tools to create monthly, quarterly and yearly roadmap expectations for our clients.
Our team of designers will create quality options before we begin your Webflow development. This will allow you to use your budget efficiently and bring more ideas for our designers to the table.
There are almost no agencies that provide a full service for your site. It is important to have one single place that will do everything for you, from building your design idea to retaining and attracting new customers.
You can check out the Webflow expert's showcase and also some of the packages.
Webflow Increases Accessibility Options
In recent years, we've seen much more of an emphasis on accessible design, particularly in colours, text sizing, and alt descriptions. Users like customizability with their web experience and e-commerce functionality. What you see on your desktop is not exactly what you'd expect to see on your mobile device. It doesn't stop there, compliances are major for any organization looking to collect user data of any sort. We're able to add GDPR consent to your site so that you are safely operating under the legislation.
We have built different projects from scratch, integrating multiple tools to optimize and improve website performance. Most Webflow agencies will ask you to pay for the whole project upfront; however, our Webflow agency has created different affordable subscription packages. You will see your website grow while paying monthly, and besides that, we will do all your marketing too.
In short: We aim to get the best out of your investment.
Scalable Webflow Project with Search Engine Optimization
Webflow is a clean no code builder. This allows search engines to crawl your website easily preventing indexing issues and slow page access. Therefore, you don't have to worry about fixing technical issues all the time, you only need to keep optimizing your website for search engines.
Webflow development requires a Webflow marketing expert to plan your business growth ahead. It is important to have an agency that knows how to increase your web presence in Webflow. This is not something that anyone can do, it requires experience to make it happen.
On-site Optimization
Webflow landing pages are the main focus of growing your business. At Choquer Creative, we have an experienced marketing team that will increase your website traffic. Each custom domain has a unique plan and approach. Our team has worked with more than 50 different industries to understand how to make a functional marketing strategy for your business.
We create quality and unique content with the ability to rank quickly on Google's first page to increase your web presence. Our Webflow experts will create pages that convert those leads into sales.
We will fully optimize your SEO after your website is completed. This involves all the planning and strategizing to make the site grow within the first three months. You will have monthly reports and quarterly sessions to discuss the website's performance and strategy for the upcoming months.
Our team has more than 5 years of experience growing businesses across the US and Canada. We developed solid SEO strategies for Webflow websites, which gives our clients the confidence they need to take advantage of their online opportunities.
Get Your Business Website Built By A Responsive Web Design Agency Part of the Webflow Community
Choquer Creative specializes in Webflow web design. As a Webflow-certified agency, we have been verified by Webflow as having the expertise necessary to deliver top-tier websites using the platform.
The benefits of Webflow include its seamless collaboration opportunities, the added emphasis on user experience, and stronger security in the process. The Webflow community keeps increasing day by day and is helping businesses grow fast.
There is no one better than the customer to know about their business. Before we launch any website, we ask our customers to review it. We like to connect and make sure everything goes as planned.
We want to become your ideas a reality. We have a full team of experts with the capabilities to make your site not just beautiful but also a great opportunity to make sales.
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