Give Your Website a Tune-Up: Simple Tips for Top Performance

Hey everyone! I'm Jonathan Walls with Infomedia and I'm a developer here. And today we're going to be talking about how to give your website a tune up. The things that you can look at before you give us a call to make sure that your site is up and running as best as it can and effectively as it can. And the things we're going to be looking at today are, like I said, the things that you can do before you give us a call to hopefully help you save some time and money.

So we've got our slides for this presentation up at Slideshare.net/Infomedia.com and you can see that on the screen now. So if you'd like to follow along or take notes about it, you can check it out there and you'll have everything that you're seeing on my screen right now. So, what are we talking about? Like I said, the thing the things that you can do to your own website before you have to go to someone else. Whether it be Infomedia, whether it be your current developer of your website. These are the things that you can do on your own to go in and help your site run better, be more effective as far as reaching out to your clients, and just being more effective overall.

So the first few things that we want to look at is: Why would you want to do this? And it's very simple you want your site to look nice. You know that everyone wants their site to look nice, they want their site to function well, they want it to be a good tool to reach out to their clients and their users, and they want it to be effective. So if your site's running slow, it's not optimized very well, if it's not performing very well, you aren't getting leads from it, then it might be a time for you to take a step back look at your site and decide whether or not you may need a tune-up. And so that's what we're going to be looking at. So, what are some signs that your site needs a tune-up? The first one that you can look at, it's a big one, is your site is it mobile-friendly? And here at Infomedia we've talked about responsiveness a lot. You know having your site responsive, and this is one big sign that it may be time to update your site, that it may need a little freshening up.

If your site isn't viewable on all devices, if you can't look at it on a phone, on the tablet, on the desktop and it look good in every medium, then it might be time to tune up your site. It's very important within this day and age everyone is looking at their sides on the phone. Not everyone is sitting at a computer, at a desk. So making sure that your site is mobile-friendly. If it's not and you pull it up on a phone and things are off the side you can't see everything, then it might be time to tune-up your site. The next one is your company, has maybe changed its brand or its image. You know, maybe your company is not using the same colors anymore, it's not using the same kind of imagery, it's not the same kind of look and feel. Maybe your company has become more modern. So if you look at your site, and it looks old and outdated and doesn't look like it matches your brand anymore, then you may want to take a look at tuning up your site.

The content is out of date. When's the last time you've updated content? When was the last time you've updated your pictures? And maybe you're, you look at your site, and you see that some of the staff hasn't been there in you know three or five years. So you look at the text. Maybe "About Us" text is out of date, your location is not up to date. If you look at your site and you see a lot of things that are out of date, then that's a good sign as well. The site loads slow.This is one that we feel a lot like a lot of our new clients or clients that you know been working with another another developer, another company. Their site just doesn't load very quickly. So you you see the image slowly crawl, you know, down the page as it loads and so you You realize that you know within this Three to five seconds, and I'm on someone's or on our site like I'm not saying anything It's just a white screen, and if you run into that issue a lot of pages loading slow the home page loading slow then that's really a time to Decide whether or not you need to do it.

You know Maybe you're getting complaints from customers that You know the site just isn't performing well for them. Maybe you're not getting leads from the site. No one contact me No, one's calling me. There's no emails coming through Maybe if you know, there's no interaction with your site That's a sign that maybe you need to do a tune up on it, and then the final one Is it just looks old you know we've all seen sites before that they look old and outdated And you can tell them to have it been touched in a while, and if that's the case with your site then That's another good time that you may needs a tune-up so what are the things that you can look at before you give us a call, so Once again, we're [talking] about things that you can do on your arm before you give them some media or someone else a call I want to start by going to those with the first thing being you want to get everything together and this isn't necessarily related to the site itself But this is related to making sure that you have everything in one place At the same time so that whenever you do get started on the site, you can Make sure that you have all of your logins together That you can make sure that you have all of your your usernames or passwords And all that information that you need to be the owner and controller of your site.

You want to make sure that You know you have everything in one place So the first thing is is check your login get all of your logins in one place And I won't go into it too [much] here. We've written blogs in the past before without password management [we've] talked about them and lunch and light in the past But having a good password manager and as you can see on the screen here There's a few there's some of the more popular ones lastpass Dashlane One password these are all programs that allow you to create secure passwords and keep them all in one place So that you know you're not having the right sticky notes everywhere that you're not losing your passwords And so these are good tools to help you keep all that information in one place when you start pulling it together So what kind of logins will you need? The first one is your email login.

We have run into this in the past with Different clients to where we start working on their side we start redesigning their site We take it over from someone else And they don't even have the email address that they use for other main contact so all of their information about their website They may not even have they can you know I haven't used that email over this in years So if you know that there's an email address that your website is tied to that All that information is tied to you want to make sure that you have not only that email address That's password to be able to get into The next login would be your social media logins and those links if you have a twitter page in the Facebook page if you have you know [YouTube] Snapchat and Instagram if you have all these different Mediums for social media you want to make sure that you have all of those logins And those links for it because whenever you're tuning up your site, you want to make sure that We'll talk about that in a minute You want to make [sure] that [all] of that integrated in the site, but if you don't have those links And you don't know how to get people there.

You're going to kind of hit odette in The other [log] [in] that you'll need is your actual website logic if your site has been built to WordPress or something like that you want to make sure that you can actually get into the admin of the site because if you are Starting to see changes that need to be made you know you need to update the content you need to change photos And that's sort of thing if you can't login to the back end then you're not going to be able to change anything so making sure that your You have all your website information and being able to log into it is extremely important and then the last information is your DnS information and this is one of those Things that it can be a little confusing at times to client users And basically the DnS information that you want to keep up with is making sure that you are the owner and the one who can Control your site you want to make [sure] that everything is under your name One quick way to check this is if you go to who dodges so rather than like ooh com org.

It's just who that is And you type in [the] domain and you can do that for any domain? You can look and see when that domain expires You can look and see who owns that domain you can see where that domain is actually hosted at So for example on the screen now. We have in the media's information Just as we ramp or this isn't the full breakdown of everything you'll see if you use this website but it's some of the more important things that you need to pay attention to For the first one I want to talk [about] are the important base Making sure that your domain doesn't expire soon We rent at into that in the past whenever clients would come to us and they would say You know my email them on wed sun, not pulling up, and then we investigated.

We we see that their domain expire and It's very important to make sure that you keep up [with] [this] So that you know your domain doesn't completely expire and then go out to where you know someone else can pick it up So there [you] can see you know when it was registered on you know when it expires and when the last time it was updated so you always want to make sure that you're staying on top of Keeping your domain renewed The next information is the DnS and this is a Login that you would want to have so for instance our website is hosted bit tech links if you look at yours it may be something like godaddy.com and maybe a side ground and maybe bluehost It's basically where your site [list], and this is going to be different from user to user but the thing is is that that is something you want to make sure you have the login for so make sure you have your Godaddy login your blue house login your pSyche ramlogan whichever one it is so that if you need to work on the site, or if you need to hand it off to A company to do this you know in the median or someone else you want to make sure that you have that information so that they can actually get to your side and Then the last thing is extremely important as well, and that's who is the owner of the domain So if we look at this you can see that Info Media Incorporated is the one who own info mediacom.

I'm The only the company itself owns that domain And that's very important that whatever you look at your who the owner of your domain is that it's not necessarily Who's working on your site because you want to make sure that you are the owner of that domain? so if it's not your name or if it's not the name of your company, I'm then you may want [to] get back in touch with whoever is currently working on your site to have a transfer it over to you because you want to make sure that if that person decides to Quit working on your site that that person decides to quit doing websites all together That you don't lose control of that domain we render that time and time [again]. So these are some very important things that You need to have with you you want to make [sure] that you have all your different logins And then you also want to make sure that you are the owner of your site So the next thing that we're going to be moving into is It's going to be Your social Media You know this is getting more into what you can do on your site itself the first part was kind of just getting ready Is the way that you know the way that I equate everything before is that basically? you know having your your car insurance and having your Registration you know one plan on getting in a car wreck and one plan I'm getting pulled over if you want to make sure you have all [of] that stuff to begin with Just in case [something] does come up Now what we're going to be moving into is more what you can actually do on your website itself to start tuning it up So the first thing that we kind of mentioned before was your social Media So some of the questions you can ask yourself Whenever you're looking through your site is You know are your social media accounts up to date? So the first thing is you know are your business hours list if someone landed on your Facebook page? or if someone landed on you know Twitter or Instagram or wherever are they going to be able to figure out a little bit about you, so you know? Once again with like Facebook are your business hours listed? You know is the about us section? Filled out will people be able to tell who you are because sometimes if they [google] you and they're trying to find your business Your social media is going to be one of the first things that they see so you want to make sure that they can you know find as much information about you from your social media as I can't if they land there and Vice versa with your site it all works together create You know a network and you want to make sure that no matter where they land that everything up today? So once again you have our social media accounts up today Sowers listed your bios filled out your contact information listed is your phone number on there your address on there You want to make sure that everything that the person would be needs yeah, it's on there The other thing is is is your social media active Is your content relevant with what [your] with what you're posting? You know are you posting pictures? Or you know videos and texts about like you know your your Vacation that you just went on or what your kids are doing in school And you know for some company that might not be a bad sector.

You're working take care You want to take care? And you know you want to show that? You know are you are engaged in the community which family in? children you may want to show that but if your landscaping company You know that may not be what you necessarily want to show you may want to show something that's more relevant So you know what are the best kind of plants and flowers and things to be? Planting this time of season you know you always want to be thinking about if a user landed on my site What kind of information are they looking for so you want to make sure that your information is relevant to the user The other thing is is that what's getting you want to make sure that your content is up to date so is You know when's the last time you post it? You haven't been over a year or more you know you might want to start asking me questions of okay? well if I haven't used Twitter And you know two years should I even have the Twitter account or should I get? Become more engaged with it should I start trying to? You know post more should I maybe find a copywriter or someone who can start writing for me more regular? So you always want to make sure that everything is kept up to date and that it's active Are you using visual you know are you using pictures of your products are using pictures of events of your services? Are you are you using things that are more eye-catching? Rather than just text a lot of times that can make a huge impact and that's why a lot of people Really like like Instagram or even snapchat because it's much more visual medium.

So are you using visuals not just text? Is Your social media engaging? You know are you doing any kind of disk sure offers or giveaways or coupons or anything like that? Are you asking for feedback from your users is your is your social [media] engaging? and it was kind of Not only keeping that network but trying to grow that network by reaching out to more people and getting them more engaged with your your business And with your social media as you're trying to tune up your site You want to ask yourself am I using the right? Social media you know there's a lot of different choices as far as you know you have Facebook Twitter snapchat Instagram in YouTube and you have all these different platforms for social Media and you want to make sure that You are using the right kind of cool And that's something that we we help with a lot of times with our clients trying to figure out okay? Well, you know for this kind of business.

Maybe you should be using Twitter this kind of business Maybe you should be using Facebook so once again it's one of those things is what's the best way to have engagement whatever you're working with Social Media and Then the last big question when you're tuning up your site is is your social media integrated into the site itself You know is it in the head or somewhere is it in the footer even if it's just a small icon You know you want to make sure that You have your social media on your website because you want to create kind of that two-way street if they land on Social Media And they can get to your website they laid on your website they can get to your social Media so it's very important when you are tuning up the site that Whether it be some wearing your navigation or whether it be you know a Facebook feed in your sidebar But you always have a way that people are able to see your social Media So the next thing that we're going to talk about is your image.

It's all about your image, so Images are extremely important remember it comes to your website You know they say images are worth. You know an image is worth a thousand work, and That really is the truth whatever it comes to your website and trying to engage someone very quickly Typically whenever you know someone comes to your site. They have you know three to five seconds to really get You know engaged in your site? and be interested in your site before you lose their attention and a lot of times with this you know if you Do not have good images if you don't have a [nice-looking] [a] [nice] seal Then that can instantly deter someone from using your site So the first question whenever you're doing this site audit and going through and deciding if you need to tune up your site Or what you can do to tip your site is ask yourself.

You know are your images up to date? so you know are your staff photos up to date are your product images today are your Services update are your locations up to date and then you just some of the things that we ran across from the past You know every site is different every company is different. So you may not have some of these types of images, but You know if you do have a staff section, you know maybe [you] look at it, and you see that okay? Well some of these people haven't been here You [know] three to five years so we may need to take some of those off. Maybe we've hired You know 15 new people we need to take those photos The same with your products. Maybe there's a product on your site that you have it sold in forever or maybe the old product images the product image itself is old sort of like the packaging is not the same and You want to make sure that you know everything is up to date as far as your images you know and even your locations we've seen in the past clients who have come in and Their look their actual physical business location those are out of date You know it's a building that they haven't been in in over a year or six months so it's kind of confusing to people whenever they are trying to find that location and Image online is the assignment you know building that they're seeing when they drive there And then the other thing is making sure that your images aren't broken You know if you're going around the site, and you see you know little broken image tags everywhere And you [see] that a lot of these images aren't loading Then you definitely need to make sure that you turn up the site and make sure that you Go back in and can we add those images or update those images to make sure that they are loading correctly so What do you need to do if you look through your site? And you decided yes, my staff photos around a date my products rather than a mile asians are out of date I need some new images.

So what can you do at that point? well first thing is you can get new images, but please do not steal so don't just go to Google and Start searching for things you know one is not polite and two it is against the wall so you could get into Some major labels trouble whenever it comes to that, but the one thing you could do is you could hire a photographer? if you decide that hey I just don't have time for this and I'll have time to go in here and take all these photos [and] take all these pictures You can find a nice photographer, and that's something that we didn't commit Media do all the time with our clients we have you know a great list of photographers that we've worked with and we can have someone come out set up a few hours to come out there and Take a look at your business and take photos of your staff products, whatever it Is that you need? But a photographer a lot of times in the easiest way to do it because they're going to know how to do it They're going to know how to do it quickly and and they can knock it out in no time The other thing is is you can take your own images? cameras on Phones On most modern phones these days or great cameras, and they're going to be able to take an image that you would Need to take for if it is your staff It is your product if it is your service You know if you're once again landscaping service to protecting photos of the lawn after the you know you've [done] landscaping on it You can take it with your phone the the biggest thing is kind of the next one is having a consistent look and feel so if it is [a] Staff of you want to make sure that you know the Staff member is the same distance from the camera as you know every single one.

You don't want one You know here and then another one. That's for me You know the chest up, and you know from waist up And you want to make sure that it's a consistent look consistent distance from the camera You want to make sure that the background has the same kind of look and filter on it? so whether it be a white wall brick wall or You just want to make sure that that it has the same kind of background or a Complementing background to each one you want to make sure that has been kind of lighting some kind of location you don't want to dark and dingy you know looking for whoever it comes to you know taking pictures of your staff and The same thing with your products if you look at any kind of high-end retail store You can see that most of their products always going to be on a white backdrop it's going to have you know nice white cloth a nice white background and Really nice lighting on the product itself You don't want you know once again.

No darkened in the looking photos It's you know are pixelated or you know just bad quality you want if this is going to be a user's first Initial impression of your product you want it to be a good one? I'm the same with services in your location you know maybe with your location you've Taken a picture whenever it was in the winter everything was dead. So now it's spring You know the flowers are growing in the trees [are] blooming so you want to take a nice updated photo? [and] you know this is our location So once again, just making sure that everything has a nice look a nice consistent feel throughout and Once again, you can take those let me just with your phone, and you won't run into any issues The next thing you could use a stock photo site.

We wrote a blog post about this recently within the past Few weeks about being able to Find these free stock photo sites and they sites are great if you're looking [for] Just some kind of general photo to be able to freshen up your site So going back to the landscaping again if you're looking for a nice beautiful yard, you can go to these sites and look it up And you'll find it. The thing is is once again. You don't want to be too stocky whenever it comes to stock photos you know you don't want to type in two businessmen shaking hands and That sort of thing you want something that's still going to look personal still look like something that you may have taken But with these sites, and then I won't go through all dates, but these sites that are listed here These are all great sites that you can go to you can search for something you know if you own the gym you need a picture of someone exercising their running Those are you know it'd be a great place to look for that.

You know that will have nice quality professional looking photographs that you can use for free so these kind of sites are And once again if there's something you're looking for if you go back to the blog post that we wrote there's some different sites kind of focus on a different kind of audience So these once again these are a great resource to find photos if you don't have time to take them where you don't want to Take the [time] or the money to hire a photographer These are some great sites that you can look at first to see if maybe you can find something And the last thing that you can do when you're trying to tune up your site is optimize your images This right here will help cut down on the load time of your site a lot Because a lot of times we've seen especially on a home page that has you know a slider That's three to five images in it You know those images may be huge and so what happens is it takes forever? Court to load and it takes forever for the page to load And within that amount of [time] that everything is loading you may have already lost the user because you know they're tired of waiting So they've gone somewhere else so Optimizing the images making them smaller.

There's a couple of sites here that I've listed Tiny Png calm compressor I oh and basically the way It works is if you see an image on your site that seems to be taken a long time to load You can go in you can upload this image there, and it will compress this down So make it a smaller file size Which is what you're looking for and then you'll be able to re upload that file And it should hopefully load quicker that And once again if you know if you're in Famiglia clan or you having trouble with this You know feel free to give us a call And this is something that we could essentially take a look at and so yeah, you know your images need to be optimized That's something we can help with So the next thing we want to look at our links Making sure that all the links on your site are up to date and working So the first thing you need to do our is test for broken links And there's a couple of ways you can do.

There's a few ways you can do that the first one is checked my hand and that's essentially the if you have a smaller site You can just go through each page of the website You can you know click on all the different links inside barn the navigation on [the] page? And if you just check and make sure that it's linking to where it needs to link to Maybe you have a website that you are linking to in that website doesn't even exist anymore So you know you want to make sure that all these links are up to date that way whenever someone lands on your site They don't land on a you know 404 page.

You know broken page or maybe it's not linking to the right page That's something you want to check The other thing that you can use there's a few Things listed here, you can use an automated service and basically what it does you put in your domain? it'll go through the site and you will show you any kind of broken links and that sort of thing and Google Webmaster tools is great at this if you have you know Google analytics and Google Webmaster tools on your side it's a it's a great way to be able to go through and check everything at once and And once again, you know if you're having an issue with this you know feel free to give us a call and this is something that we here we have our own programs that we kind of use that we can run the Websites through to check the links and if we see that there's a lot of broken links And that's definitely something that we we can help with The other thing [is] making sure Everything that needs to be linked up is linked up so as you're doing the site on it these are some of the things that you can make sure are linked up and This isn't the case all the time But these are just things that we have seen in the past that people either tend to forget about As I just you know they just don't even think about it.

So the first thing is is your contact info Make sure that your phone number is linked up So that whenever someone taps it and they're on a phone it can automatically start dialing that number Make sure that your email address is Linked up firmware the same reasons that way if they tap on your email address and your phone or on the computer It [can] automatically start trying to email you And then your address this isn't always a standard necessarily But if you want to link up your address you can so that it links out to Google map Or you know some other map service that way if a user once again was on their phone And they're trying to find you I can just have your address and it will immediately you know start searching for that on Google And these are all things that you want to keep in mind with it since Especially nowadays people are using their comps so much more to surf the internet then you know desktops So anything you can think of to make it easier for the user to use on their phone if they're looking for you, especially That's something that you want to do Make sure Mr..

Social media Lee is linked up We talked about that a little bit ago, and making sure [that] it's somewhere on your site They can get to your Facebook Instagram Twitter page You know whatever it may be just make sure it's on your site somewhere Make sure that your if you have an e-commerce site with your products are all linked up that your pricing is lift up your return policy your terms of service Just some of those pages that sometimes get overlooked especially with products because there's so many of them You just want to make sure that you know that it's working All linked up your testimonials making sure that If you have testimonials your site that you know it's linking out the person is linking out to more testimonials making [sure] that you have an faq section a newsletter section to sign up this newsletter section or Even just some kind of email Signup an email capture that's a great way to generate you know leads to your site Making sure that you any outside resources so say that you link out to a lot of different affiliates or a lot of different companies That might be related to your company you want to make sure that all those links are working And that's something we see a lot on other sites that link out to a lot of different things Even those old sites is expired You know the no longer there? So you just want to go in and make sure that it's cleaned up when you're doing this tune up you may want to make Sure, everything is still a live link and make sure that everything linking work should go And then kind of one of the last ones that we see sometimes or the event making sure that your events link out either You know a way to purchase a ticket a way to view the calendar Just making sure that all that information.

There is linked where it needs to go And that sort of brings us into the next section of your site map in your site navigation This is one of those sections once again that some people have a little difficulty understanding So I'm going to try to go through it and explain like what is the difference between a site map. What is the difference between it and the site navigation So the first thing is is that a site map is Kind of a Hierarchy in the structure of your site A site map is where all of your pages in your content will live In basically when you're doing your site map if your site already better, then most likely a lot of your site maps already done but especially if you're doing a new site and when you're doing a tune up a site map is a great way to make sure all of Your pages that you want her there so as an example on this site So we have to home page you see about us The products to staff the blog and then underneath each one of those you can see where you want all this other relevant information To go, so [so] we are our history contact us Why us you all that goes along with the about us page, so that's kind of where it would stay That's why it would kind of live your site navigation Is going to be how you want users to float through those pages? So your site map is going to be all of those pages and your site navigation is going to be how do people move through These pages so here's an example of the site navigation, so this would be something like what you would see in the header You know with drop down and that sort of thing, but you have a home you have about Products contact us blog event and you can see under here, and they're kind of color-Coded You might have multiple pages living in different Dropdowns, so you have why us is under about us, but it's also under products you have product recalls on in the blog But it's also under products so you can see where Those pages have only been created once but you can link to them in multiple areas And this is just kind of a side-by-side comparison of the difference [between] the site map and the site navigation So you can see how in the fact nap the top one those things only appear once whereas in the site navigation Those things can appear multiple times in multiple areas So the reason for this is that you want to First off with your site map.

It makes sure that every piece of content and every page on your site is there So think of it kind of like sticky notes You know if you were to sit down, and you know you're looking at your site, and you're saying okay? Well, I have this page and at this page and say I home contact about it you know those are all kind of those sticking us with you right down to have this page at this page and this page and You want to these are the kind of questions you want to ask yourself when you're working on your site map is are All my pages there Do you need to add any pages? You know whenever you're doing this tune up on your site, and you realize oh well I don't even have our pricing plans.

Let's theater. I don't even have you know our obviously positive policy listed I don't even have an about us section You know maybe you need to add this section, or you need to ask yourself Do you need to remove pages are there pages on your site that people never really use and it will really go to So you want to you know during this tune-up say okay? Well we can cut some of these things out So your sitemap is going to help you think through all that making sure that all those pages are there That you need there, and then your site navigation is going to help you think through How is a user going to move through these pages so basically? How are you going to arrange those speaking groups and maybe you need to duplicate them so maybe on When you're on the about us page you want them to be able to see your products page and the who we are beige You know maybe if you're on the contact us page you want them to be able to see you know sign up for our newsletter And but maybe also wants them to see the products page there, too so The kind of questions that you would be asking or more from the user point of view so if your user could you find all? The pages that you've put in this site If your user is it easy enough for them to navigate you know whether it be through drop down our sidebar Can they move through your site? Where you link? And do you need to link to information in multiple places? Or can you just get away with linking it in one place and the drop down in the header? So once again the site map in the site navigation are very important because you're trying to think through You know one making sure everything's there and then to Making sure that people can get to whatever thing is there and that? Leads us into the next part of the text and content so with the text and continent This is where you're getting into kind of the meat of the site.

You know the text is All the information that you're trying to put out there, but you want people to be able to read about see about your company No matter what it is whether it be your about us products your services You know this is all that information that you wanted people see so the big question no isn't up to date You know it. When's the last time you updated it is your about us really out to date You know as a blog section really out to date is it relevant to your business once again going back to You know are you posting things? Are you putting information out there that your user when they come to your company's website? You know it's something that they're going to get you know use out of it Too long you know if you go to your site when you're doing this tune-up and and you see that you have five Paragraphs all smashed together in one block of text.

You know. Maybe you need [to] cut some of that out maybe you need to break it apart and then the same question of is it too short you know maybe you get to your Services page, and you only got two sentences on there, and you know if someone [were] to come to your site They wouldn't even really be able to tell you know what your services were because there's not [enough] information So you don't want it to be too long you? Don't want to be long-winded, but you also don't want it to be too short you want to be you know clear and concise You have to find sort of that happy medium The next thing is checking your spelling and grammar you know your spelling and grammar can make a huge impact on your user If you have terrible spelling and grammar it can really hurt your image as far as your credibility You know how professional you are so that definitely something you want to take a look at? Does your content have a goal or purpose as you're looking through the site? You should always be thinking about you know when User is on this page.

Do they know where they need to go? Do they know what they need to do am I always? Pushing them you know whether it be buying a product for signing up for service It is my content have a goal purpose. You know kind of a concise sound to it and The next thing is your typography is important so using things like heading using lists bolding things italicize Dancing If you do have that block of paragraph that that block of text. It's five paragraphs long, but I'll smash together If you break it apart it [may] [be] you turn [so] those things into a list you bold some of the worries you talus I some You can really make the page a lot more readable a lot nicer to look at By just doing a few quick things like that and once again That's the thing can we use it comes to your site You want it to be easy on their eyes you want them to be able to reach very easily and thinking from you know phone Standpoint you don't want just a block after block of text, but you know nice little broken down chunks So you know very nice-looking easy-To-read text? And that kind of leads into seo, and I won't go in that too too much I won't go into that too much here but we've talked about seo in the past and [will] be talking about it again very soon as One of our lunch and learns coming up but with Seo those keywords those headings that use H1 Tags H2 tag your list building things Keeping fresh content on the site that will all help with your seo and help your ranking on on Google and other search engines and The big question is when you're looking at the text and all of your content on the site does it make sense overall? Kind of going back [to] they have a goal and a purpose you know someone were to come to your site Would they be able to look at it, and be able to tell you know who your company is and what they're trying to do we render that in the past where we would have new Clients come in and The designer and the Developer would be working with them And they would be looking at their old site, and we would read through their site and have no clue what their company even did Just because of the way it was worded the way to cite flowed It didn't make sense and so we would go back to the client say okay.

These are some of our ideas You know letting or copyright, or look at it and say These are some of the things that you may want to change that makes sense to the normal user Because a lot of these things make sense to everyone in the company But you have to remember that the user has a different mindset than what the people in the company would so Once again having an outsider look at it You taking a look at it taking a step back and looking at it, and say does my content make sense That's a big one, [too] so still following along with the idea of your content in your text you want to check your call to action and These are things that a lot of times people kind of forget about But your call to actions are extremely important because they are those pieces of content whether they be in the sidebar because maybe in a slider Whether they be just some kind of focus area on the page somewhere the header of the footer Your call to actions are the things that call your user to an action when that be Buying you know a bottle of shampoo whether that be signing up for your newsletter whether that be you know getting a product or service Or becoming an employee All of these calls actions are the things that when someone lands on your site? This is what you want me to do and a lot of times people tend to forget about these, so When you're doing [your] site audit when you're you know trying to decide what you can do to tune up your site on your own First off make sure that you do have good call to actions the next kind of question Do you want to ask her are they in a good location on your site can people feed them? Once again going back to the the three to five second rule of you have three to five seconds to engage someone before You know you kind of lose their interest, you know can people see your call to actions whenever they land on your side Or they way down the page And you have to scroll forever to get down to them Your other question that you want to ask does that user know that go over the purpose of your site? It's one of those things once again going back to the content When you're reading through it when they land on your site can they quickly figure out what it is You're trying to sell them.

What what it is. You're trying to get them to do very quickly and the other question is are you tracking them you know called actions or They're kind of useless if you don't have some way of making sure that they're actually working and there's different ways you can do that These are just a few that are listed, but google analytics if you have google analytics on your site You can track you know where your traffic is flowing you can track what they've clicked on how long they stayed How did they get there do they come from some outside link they come from your home page and click? Through a bunch of call to actions there and So the thing is that you want to have some way of tracking it Google Analytics is one of the best, but there's other simpler ways like email address capture Do you have anything on the site to where they can sign up for a newsletter that can sign up for your blog they can? You know somehow can you capture their their email address or are their contact information in some way? To make sure that that call to action that you're wanting to do whether they be a New client on your ecommerce site you know you get them to finally buy a product you know are you engaging them in? a way to where You're able to make contact with them again.

So the same with call. You know your call to actions on your site Are they pushing people to call you if they are and people aren't calling you? Then maybe you need to take a step back and say okay well
Why is that is my phone number visible enough on the side do I need to put it in a different place? Do I need to make it more bold do I need to maybe put some of these call to action? Easier to see place, and I'm not getting any calls from the site not getting any emails from the fight So you want to make sure that? You always have some kind of engagement with your your user You want to be able to create new clients, you know if you realize that well? I'm not really getting any new clients it may not [be] your website That's causing it, but your website if it's one of their first and last depression it could be a huge part of it so if you're not getting any new clients Then you may want to figure out what may be why is that and not only that but if you're not retaining clients? um maybe you have a site that your current clients could use and maybe get resources from And be able to interact with but maybe you're [not] keeping the [comments].

They're leaving their going other places Maybe it's because of your website. Maybe it could be a plethora of different things and So it's one of the things you want to always ask yourself You know all your call to action visible are they useful or is it actually pushing people and not just a call to actions but your site in general of Making [sure] people can get to where they need to go and like we were talking about with the site navigation You know when people end on your site You want to have a purpose in mind wherever they land there? And you want to make sure that they can get there and if they can't be that Then it might be definitely concreted tune up your site and Then one of the big things you can do to Tune up your site to give you a good idea of what you need to tune up with your site.

Let's just use it straight and simple When you're using it or when you're having someone else using it ask yourself once again Does the flow the site make sense you know are people able to find what you want them is line Give them a simple task to perform. You know just sit them them from the computer You don't tell them anything about the site and say I want you to sign up [for] my newsletter Can they find it? can they find where your newsletter is give them just some simple tasks that you want a typical user out in the wild to do and See how hard it is for them to do it see how long it takes them to do it Have that person who's using your site.

You know ask the questions of doesn't have a goal or purpose do your products make sense to them you know maybe you need to update your product description because [it] doesn't make sense exactly what this product does or exactly what this service is So these are all things that he want that person or while you're using it to make sure that You know makes sense and once again this one of the thing with if you're into it, too Deep you [know] your business than anyone else and so a lot of times You need a third person to come in and take a look at [it] because you and makes total sense But everyone else out there it may not make sense If it doesn't make sense to men, and it's probably not going to make sense to ninety percent of the other users out there so you may want to really tune tune that up and Refresh in and take a look at it and say what can we change? about this And what kind of issues are they having these are the kind of question you want to ask you know do they have a hard? Time of navigating I do they run in kind of glitches or bugs or technical issues you know is your cart on your ecommerce site not working you know they could put in a coupon or Maybe all your products aren't loading you You know you go your services page, and you know the images aren't you know showing up, right? And it looks jumbled you know you want to make sure that everything [looks] nice Some of these things you might be able to fix if an image isn't loading You might be able to go in there and re-upload it And it will be fine the text doesn't make sense you can change it, but if it's an actual technical issue Especially for one of our in Famiglia clients, you know Please do not hesitate to give us a call.

We have a great support team It will be more [than] happy to take a [look] at it and say [yeah], you know this needs to be fixed and so kind of a quick recap of Things you can do Kind of on your home before you you really Decide you want to really redo the side or hear you want someone else to take a look at it First thing is is you know your login make sure you have them all together? Make sure that you have everything your Dns information your domains not expiring soon Make sure that you have you on your email login or social media log in oh that in one place So that you have a nice control over it Make sure that you handle all your social media links that you have all your social media log in Make sure that your images look nice, but they're not old do not you know too Dark. Do not Stretch down or two pix elated with your uP-to-date Make sure that you have nice looking images on your site Make sure that your links are all working that they link to where they need to go Make sure that your site map is correct make sure everything you on the site is there and then make sure your site navigation Is on point to where people can find what it is you want them to find? Check your text and content make sure that all of it mixes the grammar is spelling make sure that Everything is easy to read and easy to follow make sure your call to actions nation since make sure that people can Do an easy task? Whenever you asked to make sure that they can figure out exactly what your call to action on the side is what you want them [to] do and then once again, you know make sure you used it make someone make sure someone [else] has used it So that you can kind of identify some of these troublesome areas And then once you've kind of done all that Once you've gone through you know.

There's full list of things that you've done you know What next so what can you do next after you decided on done everything I've done I've updated all the images on my content update everything is there that I need to do you know what can I do? Next thing is you can give us a call. So you can give them some media call to a 5 8 2 3 4 4 40 and You know it may be one of those things that you've [done] everything you can do and then you meet with the meet with us With you know you we let one of our designer and developer. Take a look at it, and we say hey You know we've got a few quick ideas that we can you know maybe do this to rearrange this and we can make this look Really nice. We can go freshen up We can really you know tune this side up, but there may be a time that you know we look at the site We say yeah You know you just need to start fresh this isn't you know 10 year old site is an eight year old site You know we need to take a look at this and maybe start from the ground up And that's something that we will be more than happy to work with you on and Once again, you know if you have any questions about your site as you're going to it and you're trying to do this tune up, and you run across you know any kind of in a Wall or anything like that? It's kind of stopping you And you know you aren't too sure about You know that's definitely something that will be happy to help you with you know just give us a call and These are some of our luncheon learn schedules that are our lunch and learns that are coming up some of the other webinars it will most likely be doing so if you're interested in any of the social Media if you're interested in many of the Analytics and some of those things that we've been talking [about] you know it would be great for you to Take a look at some of those so once again.

Thanks for listening. We hope you have a great day.

As found on YouTube