When you combine the world’s most popular small business online accounting software program with the most popular email marketing platform, what do you get? You get 4.5 million lucky small business owners who can now automate marketing activities in ways that they once could only imagine.  

Here is a breakdown of the numbers: 

• According to Intuit Investor Day 2019, QuickBooks Online (QBO) base serves 4.5 million global QuickBooks Online customers.
• Mailchimp’s 2020 annual report states it has 14 Million users. 

There are no statistics available, but Mailchimp’s active users will likely include most of the 4.5 million QB online customers. So the opportunity for millions of small business owners is tremendous. 

Mailchimp Introduces QuickBooks Online Integration 

In August 2021, Mailchimp introduced QuickBooks Online for FREE for all its paid plans, including its basic plan at $14.99 per month. As a result, 4.5 Million QuickBooks Online small business users can now create Mailchimp Marketing Automation campaigns to educate and promote products and services to customers during the most critical times to win business.   

Before FREE QuickBooks Online Integration, the paid commercial options for QuickBooks online integration with MailChimp were complicated and required ongoing costs, and they include: 

• OneSaas $19/month – $299 per month
• Automation platforms that charge monthly fees based on transaction volumes, including Automate.io and Zapier, PieSync NV

Customers that use Free Mailchimp QuickBooks Integration can: 

• View detailed contact history
• Automatically tag contacts
• Segment customers based on QuickBooks activity
• Trigger automation from QuickBooks activity

How Mailchimp QuickBooks Integration works

The process of setting up QuickBooks Integration with Mailchimp is easy and takes about 5 minutes. No development skills or coding knowledge are needed. This article will help you connect QuickBooks Online account and sync customer and order data to Mailchimp. To get started with Mailchimp QuickBooks integration, follow the three easy steps below. 

1. Log in to Mailchimp and go to Integrations and search for QuickBooks Online. 
2. Click connect, and Mailchimp guides you through logging into QuickBooks and adding your customer data as an audience in MailChimp.
3. Navigate to your MailChimp audience and view the details of your contact list from QuickBooks. This information includes: a QuickBooks Customer Tag, a record create date, QuickBooks total revenue and Average Order Value, an activity feed of QuickBooks transactions, and customer contact details. 

Watch the video below for detailed instructions.

What can Small Business Owners do once they connect QuickBooks Online to Mailchimp? 

While this new integration feature may not sound impressive at first, the actual benefits are substantial. They can significantly relieve cash-strapped businesses that need marketing support but don’t have a budget to hire a marketing manager. 

Small businesses no longer need to add, update or remove customers in MailChimp manually. Instead, this process is done for them automatically! 

For QuickBooks Online customers, gone are the days where you forget to update your email marketing list. Syncing your QuickBooks customer contact data and transaction history with Mailchimp will save business owners time updating their email subscriber list. This feature has substantial benefits, but on top of this, business owners will be able to create and schedule marketing automation campaigns to reach their customers with the right message at the right place and at the right time.  

Managing the customer journey with marketing automation tools is no longer just for large corporations! 

Small business owners that use QuickBooks online can now use Mailchimp’s Customer Journey builder to map and automate ways to engage customers as they move along their personalized journey. 

MailChimp provides ideas and templates under the Automations tab. For example, you can use the Customer Journey templates for idea generation or select one to prepopulate a custom email marketing campaign that will suit the needs of your business.    

How to use triggers and create customer journey’s in Mailchimp. 

Email marketing automation campaigns start with an event that allows you to engage your customers. In Mailchimp terms, this is called a trigger. Finding the right trigger for an email marketing campaign may differ for each company, but it can be the key to successful email marketing.    

A trigger could be any transaction, event, or behavior that creates an opportunity for customer engagement or reengagement. Immediate behaviors and data collected over time are triggers for marketing campaigns. For example, a trigger can be a date, action, or condition that makes a customer the target for an email marketing campaign. As a result, emails can then be sent based on actions taken (or not) by a customer.   

The following are popular customer journey campaigns that will help you grow your small business:

• Engage New Customers  – When a customer starts doing business with you for the first time, it is the opportunity to begin by introducing them to your team, products, services, or process that sets you apart from the competition. By educating new customers, you set expectations and get them on the right track to become your ideal customer. This first campaign will also allow you to tag them based on their behavior to identify them as potential high-engagement customers.
• Recover lost customers – If a customer stops doing business with you, don’t worry. You have a higher probability of winning back a lost customer than converting a prospect into a first-time buyer. (Forbes) The MailChimp recover lost customer journey template sends two reengagement emails spaced 3 and 7 days apart to shoppers who haven’t purchased in 90 days. You can set the email spacing and rules for reengagement based on the unique business knowledge of your customers and business. 
• Identify high and low engagement customers – Mailchimp provides automation to weed out low-engagement contacts that haven’t done business with you in a while. By tagging customers based on their level of engagement, Mailchimp helps you focus your effort on your high-engagement customers.  
• Promote cross-sell opportunities – Well-trained employees can recognize an opportunity to help customers by making suitable product recommendations. Now Mailchimp can automatically do the job for you. Use the Journey builder to identify opportunities, educate customers to enhance the customer experience with cross-selling and up-selling promotions. You can also tag and remove customers from the automation once they have made the purchase.
• Remind customers to reorder – If your products and services get reordered frequently, then you have the opportunity to be helpful to customers by sending a reorder reminder message to customers. You can trigger reorder reminders off of the last purchase date and make it super convenient to do business with you. This automation works best when you verify the reorder transaction has taken place. 
• Collect customer feedback and encourage online reviews – Social Proof is one of the essential factors in running a successful business. With Mailchimp QuickBooks integration, you can ask customers for feedback on your business at the transaction time or shortly afterward. You can use the campaign to request critical offline feedback and direct positive reviews to Google, Facebook, and Yelp. As a result, your online reputation will improve, and new customers will find and do business with you.  

QuickBooks Online customers should give Mailchimp a second look. 

If you are a QuickBooks Customer and haven’t used MailChimp for your business before, maybe now is the time to give them a second look. The integration of Mailchimp and QuickBooks can add tremendous value to your business. Are you using QuickBooks Online and Mailchimp? Integration can provide valuable insights into your customer accounts and save time following up with customers on orders and service contract renewals. 

Contact us if you need help setting up MailChimp, including integration with QuickBooks, salesforce.com or other CRM, your website, or eCommerce platform. We can also create email templates and automation campaigns to map your customer journey and help you grow your business. 

The post Create Customer Journey Campaigns with Free MailChimp QuickBooks Integration appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.

Google Featured Snippets are search results appearing in top positions above organic search results. Google designed featured snippets to provide quick answers to questions that users ask in searches. As a result, marketing and SEO consultants are continually trying to achieve this position. (Also sometimes referred to as “position zero.”)

How to get your web pages to appear in Featured Snippets.

Since you found this article, you may also be researching Featured Snippets on Google. You probably also found Google’s official answer on how to mark your web pages so that they will appear as a featured snippet.

YOU CAN’T

At least that is what it says in Google’s answer in this webmaster guide. Getting your page to appear in a Featured snippet is done automatically by Google’s algorithm. Therefore only Google’s systems can determine whether a page is an excellent featured snippet. And if your page is snippet worthy, it will rise to the top as Google will make it a featured snippet.

How much traffic will my website get from featured snippets?   

SEO experts recognize the obvious that web pages that display in this coveted position are precious for websites. At the same time, some set out to create studies that measure their value. According to research done by Moz, 24% of search results display a featured snippet.  

How can I recognize when my content will qualify? 

The first thing you can do is review the content that Google is currently ranking as a featured snippet. You will observe some patterns emerging. Featured snippets often display answers from the content of relevant websites in the form of a paragraph, table, or lists. This content is usually concise, well written, and immediately answers the questions asked.  

Is it possible to have the best answers and never become a Featured Snippet? 

The answer is YES! Your web page might have the best answer, but its reputation may not be as trustworthy. People expect Google to deliver solutions from experts that are accurate and trustworthy. Therefore Google must be 100% certain its algorithm is not displaying wrong or spammy answers. Websites that achieve the top position have the best solution, but also have E-A-T. (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).  

Why is E-A-T important, and how can your website get some?  

Quality is so important to Google that it assembled 16,000 quality raters to review content from websites to help identify whether sites are of high quality. Google also created Quality Raters’ Guidelines to help identify experts who write authoritative content that is trustworthy enough to show as Google featured snippets. Google also created a “How Google Fights Disinformation Guide“, that is used across all its platforms, including Google Search, Google News, YouTube, and its advertising platforms.   As a result, these volunteers and guidelines help strengthen Google’s search algorithm and prevent it from displaying low quality and inaccurate results.    

12 Tips to help optimize content for ranking as a Snippet.  

Most SEO consultants agree that there is nothing specific you can do aside from making the best FAQ and content possible. From our experience, Google favors answers that are well written, easy to read, thorough, include images or videos, provide graphic or multimedia representations, and do a great job helping people. 

Getting your pages to display in featured snippets.  

1. Do keyword/phrase research and pick relevant questions that have a high number of searches that are relevant to your target audience. 
2. Before you start writing an answer, Search Google for your question and observe the current featured snippet. 
3. Evaluate the current featured snippets results for your question and pay attention to how they are formatted. Does the format do an excellent job of answering the question? Google uses tables, paragraphs, and lists. Try to use the best approach for your answer. 
   1. Tables can best answer complex comparison related questions 
   2. Paragraphs are the most popular and are great for definitions.
   3. Lists are great for how-to questions.  
4. What is missing with the current Featured Snippet? Can it be improved? Try to make your answers and page better and more complete than the current Featured snippet.  
5. Is it easy to read? Try to write at an 8th grade level with short sentences.
6. Create 100% unique content. Do NOT reuse content from your existing website or other sites online.    
7. Answer multiple questions in one page by grouping related content
8. Create step by step, “how-to” content
9. Use high-quality images and videos.” 
10. Use Headers and break up main points.   
11. Keep sentences concise and to the point 
12. Repeat steps 1-12 above, because the Google Featured snippet changes regularly, so you may need to continue to improve your answers to maintain the top result. 

Your website can appear in Google Featured Snippets if you put in the effort. 

Putting in the effort to create the best content possible will eventually pay off with featured snippets! Study Google’s Quality Raters Guide to learn about E-A-T and apply it to your content. Use our twelve tips above when you create or edit an article for your website. Do this religiously and the next time Google indexes your site, you might find your page has advanced to position 0 as a featured snippet.     

The post How to get your web page to appear in Google Featured Snippets. appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.

Should I create one, or more than one, website? 

If you are seeking advice on the best approach to multilingual search engine optimization as part of web design, start with the decision of whether to create one or more than one website/domain. Many large companies have moved to local-country domains, such as domain.de, domain.co.uk, etc. This implies increased maintenance costs for hosting, registering, and managing the domains. In addition, several International markets view .com as US-centric. Therefore while consolidating your sites into one website like a .com is an option, it may not be an ideal choice.

Google Approved Options for Multilingual SEO and Web Design

You must operate under one of three Google Approved options to multilingual website design described in the table below. These options keep your translated content in a search engine friendly URL structure, making it easy to geotarget your site, or parts of it, to different regions.

Avoid two popular Myths of Multilingual SEO and web design

The following SEO Myths are incorrect and should not guide your decision:

Myth 1 – Your website will get penalized for duplicate content.

Google Does not like duplicate content and will penalize your website if you have the same version of English for both the USA and the UK.    

Fact – There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.

While Google prefers unique content on all websites, there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. Google provides two acceptable methods of indicating when content is duplicate:

• Canonicalization and
• hreflang attributes to explicitly state your language – or region-specific pages

Google realizes that having duplicate content can serve a legitimate business purpose. However, web designers need to use proper coding methods to indicate the reason for duplicate content and which page hosts the original content.

Myth 2 – Multiple domains are less effective due to Low Domain Authority

Creating a separate domain means that you will start from scratch, and the new site (URL) will not receive the benefit of the High Domain Authority of your main corporate website, which has years of experience. One idea in SEO is that sites that accumulate age and links also collect what is called domain authority.

Fact – Google does not rank web pages based on domain authority

This concept of domain authority, although widely used, is a made-up concept with no SEO value. Google has stated that its algorithm does not use domain/site authority for ranking websites. However, this myth continues to creep into blog posts and SEO arguments. For more information on this fact, see John Mueller Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google recently Rebuts Idea that Google Uses Domain Authority Signal.

Should I use ccTLDs? – Pragmatists vs. Idealists 

Pragmatists argue against ccTLDs

Pragmatists point out that the cost to build and maintain multiple websites is cost-prohibitive and not worth the time and effort. They typically argue the Domain Authority myth, that the most linked-to company domain is typically the main corporate website. With it being the oldest domain, it tends to have the most significant number of backlinks and the highest Domain Authority (remember Myth 2). They argue that creating multiple separate domains can “water down” your investment in multilingual SEO. As a result, the content on the new sites will not have the advantage given to it by the company’s main website.

Idealist argue for ccTLDs

Idealists say that PageRank is not the only algorithm used by Google to order search results. There are several publicly known search algorithms used by Google, see Google Penguin, Google Panda, and Google Hummingbird. In other words, Google is more concerned with the quality of your content. Your website’s strategy should not be to maximize backlinks and PageRank; but instead it should give the best possible experience to your customers. Thus your strategy should include using a ccTLD that matches where website visitors are geographically located.

Moz Studies on ccTLDs and SEO 

Idealists can reference this MOZ study describing the advantage of using the (ccTLD) domain for the target country. It shows that people in the UK favor domain.co.uk and people in France prefer www.domain.fr instead of .com or .net. (Although .us has not taken off in the United States as people there have a strong affinity to .coms.)  Therefore the study shows that people usually prefer ccTLDs because they have an affinity for a local experience.

This MOZ study references the use of folders and subdomains vs. ccTLDs and argues that a company needs to conduct an ROI analysis before they can decide on the best approach. Overall, this article does a good job explaining the topic and even takes a stab at break-even analysis of cost for new domains inclusive of the ROI for improved conversions and click-through rates (CTRs). Hence ccTLDs have better CTRs, conversion rates, etc. and perform better in the long run.  

Proper localization is the most effective approach to Multilingual SEO

The Idealist argument is strongest if the company managing the websites respects the unique cultural differences of each target country. For example, a company might have marginal results with a ccTLD strategy if it uses the exact same content to create multiple sites that target Spanish speaking people in Spain (.es), Mexico (.mx), and Argentina (.ar). It can be especially problematic when the translated version is incorrect, out of place, or confusing to the target audience.  However, it could be even worse. The company could attempt to use a singular site (.es) to target all three markets effectively making customers in Mexico and Argentina “shop” in Spain. Imagine if your United States customers were directed to a site that was yourcompany.co.uk or yourcompany.ie? You will definitely lose some sales as a result.

Alternatively, a company might get a higher long term return on its investment if it localizes the website to match the unique needs of the region. As a result, the ccTLD approach may be best for maximizing PageRank opportunities for SEO, since getting links from websites and blogs in the local region is going to be easier if your site is using the ccTLD of that country.  

Is it affordable to set up a Multiple Domain Multilingual Website with one CMS?

There are many affordable options for managing multiple domains from a single CMS (content management system). For example, affordable open-source systems like WordPress or Drupal make it possible to implement this solution with minimal costs. Companies can either use the WordPress Multisite feature to create multiple sites using the same installation. Another option is to use a plugin like WPML to manage the entire translation process. Thus, it is possible to have one content management system that supports multiple domains with different versions of a language like Spanish that target specific countries like Spain (.es) and Mexico (.mx).   

As a result, you can use different Country Code Top-level domains (ccTLDs ) for targeting multiple countries, affordably, using one CMS.   

Proper Multilingual Search Engine Optimization involves Localizing Website Content across Multiple ccTLDs 

Using multiple ccTLDs is an SEO friendly approach. It is easy to implement when using a CMS with multilingual support. The CMS does the work of inserting proper hreflang annotations on translated and local content pages where they are needed. As a result, you could get domains for Mexico www.domain.mx, Spain: www.domain.es, Columbia: www.domain.co, and Argentina: www.domain.ar and show them all the same Spanish version of your website. However, we also know that proper localization requires creating different Spanish content and images based on the legal, cultural, and social differences of that country. Using this localization approach enhances your message and strengthens the connection with your local customers. The results include higher long term click-through and conversion rates when people recognize you as a local company. 

ccTLDs are the Best Approach to Multilingual SEO and Web Design!

Although there is an additional cost, we feel the localization benefits substantially outweigh the costs of having multiple domains. Therefore, we recommend using a Country-specific domain URL structure. As a result, your website visitors can interact with your website the way they would interact with your in-country sales office, as a local company. Therefore the multiple ccTLDs approach can produce the highest ROI if you take the time to properly localize your website. We hope this article helps with the decision making regarding the best approach to multilingual web design. Let us know if we can help you implement a cost-effective strategy for your next multilingual web design project. 

The post What is the best approach for Multilingual SEO and Web Design? appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.

Don’t have time to learn SEO? Please contact us for help. Or you can also skip this article and outsource the job. If you are in our area, you can contact us for more information, or if you are in the Washington, DC area, visit one of our SEO partners Social Market Way SEO Company. By outsourcing SEO work, you can ensure that your website is accessible by the search engine crawlers without a substantial investment of your own time.  

Before you start with the steps for SEO, you should know why it is essential for a website. Ideally, SEO will ensure that the site is ranked high in the search engine result pages. This approach will secure higher visibility of the site and more click-through rates. Hence, making sure the engagement level of the users is high will give you an advantage over your competition. 

Now that you know the need for an SEO today, you can proceed with the steps to know about how to do it. 

Learn how search engines work

By understanding how search engines work, you are taking the first step to practicing effective SEO. You will also learn that SEO will help you a great deal in increasing the visibility of your website in search engines. 

Search engines have a three-stage approach to evaluating your website:

• Crawling a site
  
• Indexing every page of the site and finally
  
• Giving it rank in their result pages. 

The essential element that determines the site rank in the search engine algorithm that tends to change without notification. However, if the level of engagement in a site is high, it is a good sign that search engines will rank your website in search results. 

The Role of SEO in SEM

The next step involves knowing the purpose of SEO in modern digital marketing. SEO is a part of SEM or Search Engine Marketing. The process of SEO includes getting traffic from different search engines. This traffic can be gained organically through proper SEO or by using different paid search ads.

There are different components of Digital Marketing, and SEM is one channel. The other channels in digital marketing include:

• Social media marketing or SMM
  
• Email marketing and
  
• PPC Advertising 

It is important not to mix up SEO with paid advertising as both are different. Therefore it is essential to track and monitor the results of your SEO efforts separately from your SEM and digital marketing activities to get an accurate measure of your effectiveness in each.   

Google and other search engines are transparent that they don’t accept payment to rank your web pages in organic search engine results. However, your digital marketing channels are all related, and the efforts in one area can impact your results in others. Therefore your overall SEO campaign results can get better results if you are active in other areas of Digital Marketing, including PPC, social media, email, and content marketing.  

What is SEO?

The next step involves understanding what exactly SEO is, how it is essential in modern business marketing strategies for any website. As said earlier, the purpose of SEO is to make a site appear at the top of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS). The process of applying SEO techniques involves using a particular set of rules for website design and content marketing as it relates to your target keywords.

The importance of proper SEO is immense. It can help your site appear in the first five positions on the first page of the search results. Or it can improve the number of clicks your website receives as a percentage of the number of times viewed or your website’s Click Through Rate. 

Proper SEO will ensure that your site gets significant traffic not only from Google but other search engines as well. 

Three practice areas for SEO

Now that you have some basic knowledge of SEO and its importance in this modern business world, the next step is to learn about the different SEO practices and processes. 

SEO is a vast topic and has numerous factors that influence SEO ranking. You will need to consider these factors when you want to make your site optimized so that it can rank for Google’s algorithms.

We can break SEO down into practice areas, out of which there are a large number of sub-processes and a variety of SEO rules. The three most important are:

• Technical SEO: This is the process that involves crawling of the site and indexing of the pages.
  
• On-Page SEO: This process consists of optimizing the content of the specific page of a website so that the crawlers of the search the engine can understand it in a better way.
  
• Off-Page SEO: This process involves promoting the site on the internet to gain more links from other websites. 

These links in SEO are considered as the ‘votes of trust’ and therefore have the potential to influence the site rankings in the search results positively.

Use of keywords and keyword research 

By now, you must know that SEO places importance on the keywords. Therefore, you will need to research selecting the best keywords to use according to your industry niche. 

Keywords are the phrases that the users type in a search engine search box during any of their search queries. These keywords vary according to the importance of it for a particular website.

Therefore when doing SEO, you will need to:

• Research for the right type of keywords and 

• Use those words strategically so that your content is not keyword-stuffed.

This process is crucial because all other SEO phases beyond the technical SEO phase are strongly associated with your keyword research. Hence the foundation of your SEO efforts is set through proper keyword research and strategy. You will want to make sure you get it done right.

Measure SEO performance

Next, you will have to measure SEO performance. Tracking your progress is a critical step because you will need to know which KPIs to measure and how they can impact the profitability of your business. 

There are two essential free tools that most webmasters use to evaluate performance: Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

• Google Search Console will let you know how the site is performing and 

• Google Analytics will tell you what the users do when they visit your website. 

If you are using a different platform, you will need to embed unique code in the header of your website. Installing these tools into your site can be a substantial task unless you are an experienced web designer.  

WordPress users can install Google’s latest plugin, called Site Kit, for easy 5-minute setup. The plugin is free and makes it easy to set up all of Google’s SEO and webmaster tools into your website, including Search Console, Analytics, AdSense, page speed insights, Tag Manager, and optimize. 

We hope this article gives you a jumpstart on learning SEO for marketing your business. If you don’t own a business, you can put SEO to work by choosing a topic to start a blog. Make sure that you know about the subject well and passionate about it. 

If you don’t have time to learn SEO, contact our team to schedule an appointment to get started.    

The post Learning SEO Basics: A Simple Guide to SEO for Beginners appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.

Building a website is essential for every business, and any website should look professional. Otherwise, the company would lose its credibility of being a trustworthy organization with which to do business. The question arises, how does a small business owner build a website that is both affordable and professional. Our article will explore the benefits when you hire a WordPress web designer or use WordPress as a platform for building and managing your website.  

WordPress is good for both large and small businesses

If you are using WordPress for building your site, you need to know its salient benefits carefully. Some people often say that open-source web development platforms are only suitable for small organizations. But, the truth is that both large and small companies can get an entirely professional and well-furnished website using WordPress as a web development platform. Our article explores the various benefits or advantages of using WordPress as a platform for creating a website for your businesses.

WordPress is a Cost-effective Choice

WordPress is free to use, and that is the most significant advantage of this platform. You would not get any other platform that comes for free and offer such a wide range of features and options. Furthermore, the WordPress platform continues to create new features and security upgrades regularly. These upgrades are done at no charge to the millions of users. Even paid platforms do not give such wide ranges of features or options. Thus, cost-effectiveness is one of the most significant aspects of using this open-source platform. 

Apart from that, you shall get many other benefits of using this platform. But, primarily, WordPress is an excellent tool for setting up a website without investing a significant amount of money.

Is WordPress Free? 

Although WordPress does not have a fee for using the code, it is not necessarily 100% free to build and maintain a professional website. Investing in a few things would help you to attain better results regarding building your website. For example, you can install WordPress with any of the thousands of free themes or plugins available. Once you have done this, you might recognize that the site does not suit your brand or give you a look you want to have for your business. You may want to reach out and hire a WordPress web designer or developer who can create a custom theme.

Should I use a free theme or hire a WordPress Web Designer to create a custom theme?    

WordPress may be free, but it is a reasonably complex system, and there is no substitute for experience to create a website for your business.   

A seasoned custom WordPress web designer will be able to take your company’s brand and your business requirements and put together a site that matches the goals of your company. The right web design firm is typically working with a toolbox of themes and plugins that are proven and updated regularly.   

Hence for most small businesses, using WordPress to create a do-it-yourself website can be a hit or miss. Common problems include theme and plugin conflicts, security vulnerabilities, hosting resource issues, browser compatibility issues, and many more. The bottom line is there is no substitute for hiring an experienced WordPress web design team. 

Should I consider WordPress Premium Themes 

Premium themes can be a better choice than free ones since they are supported by a WordPress web developer and upgraded when security issues are present. You can then shop around for premium themes for WordPress. Choosing a premium theme is usually better, as you shall get a better web interface. 

Nevertheless, free themes commonly used. Thus, your website will lose its uniqueness when you use a free WordPress theme because everyone else can use it too. Instead of using a free theme, you should consider a premium one to make your website more attractive to visitors.    

Websites are no different than other purchases. You pay for what you get!  

Paid WordPress themes typically include premium widgets and plugins that need to be updated and maintained. You will want to pay extra for ongoing theme support because your theme and plugins need to be kept up to date. Otherwise, your website will crash or lose functionality when you make WordPress or hosting updates. 

Choice of Thousands of WordPress Plugins

Thousands of plugins and themes are there in the offering for the website developers or website owners. We must understand the essence of the usefulness of these plugins. WordPress plugins are most effective when they achieve core business functions for marketing and digital communications.  

Different sites benefit from various WordPress plugins. 

For example, if you run a financial consultancy and debt management business, you need to choose a plugin that is related to this industry. A suitable plugin might one for calculating rates or payment terms on loans.  

This WordPress website offers debt consolidation consultation and other financial services to clients. It has been doing business successfully for a long time. Notably, it has a seamless website that is easy to navigate. Nevertheless, plugins enhance the site with tools that eventually help visitors seek financial advice.

WordPress Plugins, combined with third-party services, can Automate Marketing.  

Plugins make your website more useful for visitors and your business. When you combine usefulness with advertising and marketing automation platforms like Facebook, Google, Twilio, Mailchimp, or Salesforce.com, you will see your business grow rapidly, and your customer loyalty will follow suit. Your website’s popularity will rise, and along with that, your business will gradually improve and flourish. Ultimately, these things will help your business become more successful. 

WordPress has numerous unique SEO Friendly Tools

Successful websites need to follow guidelines for leading search engines like Google and Bing. When your business website creates SEO friendly content, it can easily rank on the first page of Google, the world’s #1 search engine. By doing so, your company will gain vast popularity, and fortunately, WordPress has some top tools for the job.

More than any other platform WordPress comes loaded with Free third party plugins that help a website optimize for performance and search engine ranking. We will mention a couple of tools in this article that we feel are effective, but there are many, many more.  

Yoast SEO a leading WordPress plugin for SEO.

A popular free plugin is Yoast SEO. Not only does Yoast help you make sure you have all your Meta Data appropriately written, but it also identifies when content is easy to read, and if your website is using internal links effectively. Building an SEO friendly website is one of the most significant aspects of using WordPress as a web design platform, and it is also why we feel using any other platform will leave you disappointed.     

Tracking Website Related Data Easily

As a business owner, you have to make your website more user-friendly, and this is a continuous process. The process involves the analysis of data from various sources. Data reports will help you to understand the behavior of your web visitors. Based on the collected data, you may go for specific alterations to your website so that visitors start liking it more than others. 

Without the proper tools, it is not easy to collect data and properly analyze it. You need to have enough technical insight or knowledge of such things. The Google Kit plugin for WordPress makes data collection and analytics an easy process.  

Google Kit is an excellent addition to WordPress! 

Google published a plugin called Site Kit that made it easy to install all of Google’s SEO and webmaster tools into your website. The Site Kit integrates all Google’s tools including Search Console, Analytics, AdSense, page speed insights, Tag Manager, and optimize. Furthermore, you don’t have to leave WordPress to see valuable reports and information on website traffic and how the content of your website is performing at a granular level.   

Therefore with the Google Kit WordPress plugin, you can quickly install all of Google’s analytics tools and start collecting website data and run and view reports in an organized way. Thus, decision making becomes easier for business owners.   

Too many third party WordPress plugins can cause website bloating or toxic soup. 

The strength of WordPress, with thousands of free plugins and themes, can also be the root cause of its weakness. Many plugins and themes are designed poorly and never maintained. Therefore you will want to be selective of what plugins you decide to install and run on your WordPress website.   

How to evaluate a WordPress Plugin

Check out a plugin developer’s WordPress reviews and product details carefully. Visit the plugin developer’s site and make a judgment on their profitability and long term viability as a business. Numerous developers create free plugins and end up not making money on selling support or their paid versions. As a result, plugins get abandoned, and developers go out of business. 

WordPress Manage Hosting is your best option to maintain a website’s health.  

Unless you don’t mind having some downtime, you will want to maintain a staging website to make updates. Actively managing the upgrades of your WordPress website is critical for maintaining an excellent website. We recommend that you hire a WordPress Web Designer or an experienced web design team to manage your WordPress Updates.  

Having the wrong web designer manage your website updates can be detrimental to your business.

Common mistakes for new website owners and novice WordPress web designers include:

• failing to remove unused plugins and themes, 
• failing to upgrade your platform and plugins regularly, 
• using abandoned plugins and
• taking a hands-off approach to maintaining your website.   

WordPress is the best website platform for maintaining a successful website. 

With thousands of plugins and themes and millions of WordPress web developers actively creating websites, WordPress is the best platform for a small business. In fact, WordPress holds a 60% market share for content management systems on sites with a known CMS.   

WordPress can help your business to grow. Just pick the right WordPress web design team and follow best practices for managing your WordPress website. By doing so, you will keep a secure and stable site. If you don’t have the time or money required to maintain your website, you should not own a website. 

Our team has extensive experience in building and maintaining WordPress Websites. Contact us for a consultation.

The post Is WordPress the best platform to build a website? appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.

As you prepare to launch your new cleaning company, you need a marketing plan that answers a few key questions:

• What consumer needs does this service fulfill?
• Fore what customers are your services designed and suited?
• How are your services better than your competitors?
• What are the long term and short term goals of your cleaning company?
• What different ways will you use to promote and market it?
• How much money are you willing to spend on the company’s marketing and promotion?

As we learn how to create an effective marketing plan for a cleaning company, you will see that each stage answers one or more of these questions and many others.

1. Know Your Business: What Consumer Needs The Business WIll Fulfill?

The more you know about your business – its strengths and weaknesses – and the clearer you are about the business objectives, the more comprehensive and goal-oriented your marketing plan can be. Sometimes a marketing plan is about a single goal — for example, the rebrand of your cleaning company logo. Sometimes your logo is more far-reaching, like a marketing plan to launch a brand new cleaning service.

No matter why you need a marketing plan, be clear about its nature, end goals, and objectives.

A well thought out marketing plan is indicative of a business that knows itself. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to layout in terms of figures, numbers, and facts the nature of your business, what your business vision is ten years down the line, and how it helps your consumers.

2. Niche Target Audience: Who Your Business Serves

Who your prime audience is will drive a large part of your marketing plan. For example, the target audience for a car wash service and a house cleaning service might be quite different. The latter will require you to offer a more personalized service, flexible timings, and the ability to deal with last-minute schedule changes. For the former, your approach will need to be much more fast-paced and professional.

Knowing your target audience will also tell you the communication channels to use. Perhaps a lot of your target audience, working mothers for your house cleaning company, are more active on Facebook. If so, you don’t need to design an email marketing campaign to drive your sales or generate leads.

Similarly, to attract customers for your car cleaning service, a personalized email marketing plan may be the thing that works. A marketing plan that has a grasp over who its prime market is distributes efforts more strategically. Your business stands to gain more benefits with seemingly less work.

3. Know Your Rivals: How Your Cleaning Company is Better Than Others

The niche target markets are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and mature. To convince the potential consumers to buy from you and not from your competitor, you have to offer them something of value that your competitor cannot.

To know the limits of your rival company, you need to know their business almost as well as you know your own. You need to know where their weaknesses lie, the areas that they aren’t paying attention to, and discover opportunities that they aren’t.

It takes time, won’t happen overnight. It also takes a lot of work which you should be willing to put in. But once you have this thorough knowledge, you can create a marketing plan that answers the most relevant customer problems and lets you capitalize on your strengths much more effectively.

4. Marketing Objectives: Short-term and Long-term Goals

For a cleaning business marketing plan to work, or any business for that matter, it is crucial to set some objectives, long term and short term goals against which you can gauge how well (or not) the plan is going. Ideally, your cleaning company marketing plan should cover the marketing efforts, activities, and strategies for at least the first year, if not two.

This approach will help you break down your goals in more strategic compartments, and measure your progress in a much more organized way. For example, the first year to offer discounted pricing for households; the second year, reach out to corporate customers; third-year offer bundled packages; and so on. It will also help you detect flaws and pitfalls, and you can modify your path accordingly.

For the short term goals, you can focus on brand awareness and brand recognition. For long term goals, you should perhaps think about establishing a solid brand identity, increasing profits, and future growth.

5. Budget: Set Aside a Realistic Amount

Your marketing budget and the different marketing channels you’ll use to promote the cleaning business are the two factors that hugely influence each other. How much budget you need depends on how many channels you will use for your concentrated marketing plan. Furthermore, what and how many of those channels will you be able to use depends on your budget.

So sit down with your finance team or accountant and determine a realistic amount on which you can all agree. As we talk more about the different marketing channels in the next point, you’ll be able to have an idea of how much marketing budget you’ll need.

6. Communication Channels: Different Ways to Market the Business

Communication channels for a marketing plan include both the traditional marketing platform and a multitude of digital ones. A comprehensive marketing plan for your cleaning company must involve both.

Before you can begin marketing, traditional or digital, you’ll need to hire a web designer to create a professional website. A professional cleaning website will cost between $3,000 and $5,000, so you will want to budget accordingly. Not having a website will limit your growth opportunities and prevent you from reaching your marketing goals, so you will want to make a website your top priority.  Contact one of our Web Designers for a quote.

Depending on your business size, niche market, and budget, your marketing plan should be a balanced mix of promotions through billboards, TV/radio ads, bench marketing, flyers, and the digital channels such as:

• Paid search
• Pay per click ads
• Social media
• Content marketing
• Email marketing, and more.

7. Leverage FREE Directories and Local SEO  

Apart from these, one of the most important aspects of online marketing for small businesses and startups is local SEO. For cleaning businesses, especially which is dependent on the neighborhood, they should use local SEO to get as near and accessible to customers as possible. 

One way to do this is to get your business listed on major directories, including Google My Business, Care.com, HomeAdvisor.com, and Angie’s List. When your company has a listing in such directories, it would be easy for your customers to search for you the next time they need your services. Select the proper service locations for your business including neighboring towns and outlying cities near to your town. Try to get as many online reviews as possible, which will strengthen your reputation and add to your bag of leads for future business. 

There are other tweaks that you need to do to make your online presence felt for which you can hire a local SEO consultant or someone who specializes in home improvement and cleaning business SEO. 

8. Contract with competitors

Another way to make your cleaning business accessible to customers is by contacting and contracting with large cleaning companies and franchises in addition to the direct consumers. It may prove less profitable, but expanding your sources of revenue would ensure that you have a continuous flow of customers as well as a steady stream of income. Franchises can also provide a great reference and name recognition to help you grow your brand as a trusted name in the cleaning industry.

9. Use Free Small Business Resources

Cleaning companies are considered small businesses and typically have just one location. Fortunately, there is a multitude of free and low-cost options for small businesses today. For example, Mailchimp offers a free account for small business owners so you can do professional email marketing to customers for little to no cost. 

10. Measure your success with Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

It is generally is easy to roll out a marketing plan and measure progress with fewer locations to consider. To measure your plan’s success across each of these different channels, you should set some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). It will help you distribute your efforts and resources more effectively and in a more focused way.

11. Promotional Calendar 

Creating an organized marketing plan for your cleaning company will have a higher chance of success only because it produces less confusion among the team, and can be followed through in a gradual process.

Therefore, you will want to create a promotional calendar where the steps of the plan are recorded and presented visually. Documenting your marketing plan in a schedule will help you see whether all the activities you have planned are spread most effectively or not.

12. Launching the Marketing Plan

The launch of the marketing plan is essentially the announcement of your new cleaning business. Therefore, it should be impactful, with a clear message, and must contain your CTA – call to action – asking the customers to take action: to call now and make a housekeeping appointment, or book your cleaning or click on the link to know more.

Make sure that different people responsible for carrying out different parts of the plan are clear about their goals and objectives. Create procedural guidelines, KPIs to follow, and must be consistent in their brand communications, whether they are answering phones, replying to emails, communicating over your Facebook page, or handling your Twitter.

Consistent, and cohesive follow-throughs during each stage of the marketing plan will ensure that your business is a success.

Final thoughts

Creating a marketing plan can be quite daunting and complicated, especially if you’re just getting started. But let us assure you that it can also be some of the most creative, intense, and fun experiences of your job as a marketer.

Very few things speak as vocally as a successful marketing plan in your resume.

Author Bio

Brianna Jensen is a content specialist who curates, writes, and promotes content for online businesses. Connect with her to discover a world of content types, fit for your organizational needs.

The post How to Create a Marketing Plan for a Cleaning Company appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.

However, having a website doesn’t necessarily guarantee more sales or a bigger ROI. With countless similar websites vying for your target audience’s attention, you need to understand how to set your website apart from all the others. At the same time, you should also know how to play by the rules set by Google and other search engines.

Whether you are creating a new website from scratch or having an existing one redesigned, it is imperative that it is responsive. This will help strengthen your search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns.

Importance of Responsive Website Design to SEO

In recent years, there have been numerous changes to the way we consume online content and among them is the way we actually access the internet. Previously, we would visit our favorite websites on our desktop computers. However, due to the popularity of smartphones and tablets, mobile web browsers have overtaken their desktop counterparts as the preferred platform for the majority of online users.

As a consequence, it is now more important than ever to incorporate responsive web design. This will ensure that users will be able to access and navigate your site regardless of the device they are using. In addition, implementing responsive web design has many other benefits, as set out below.

1. Better site usability

Google uses “time on page” as a fundamental indicator to determine a site’s search rankings. The more time visitors spend on your site, the stronger the likelihood that you will rank highly on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

If internet users cannot navigate your site properly, they are likely to leave in double-quick time. This will have a negative impact on your “time on page” stats. By using responsive web design, you will improve your site’s usability. As well as enhancing your “time on page” stats, this will also lead to more conversions and repeat visitors. Moreover, you will be able to satisfy both your target audience and Google.

2. Shorter page loading times

Another benefit of using responsive web design is the shorter page loading times. For many years, Google has emphasized that websites that load faster rank higher on the SERPs than their slower counterparts. In fact, as well as the superior search rankings, having shorter page loading times also improves the overall user experience.

3. Improved social sharing

Responsive website design is much easier to share on social media than one that isn’t. Hence it follows that if your site has responsive web design, it is more likely to be shared on social networking sites. This could help your exposure. With a larger audience, you will have increased traffic, engagement and, more importantly, search demand for your brand.

4. Reduced bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. Having a high bounce rate will harm your SEO because Google will think that the content you are offering isn’t relevant to what users are searching for. As a result, you will rank poorly on the SERPs.

Pairing good content with responsive web design can help reverse a high bounce rate. By reducing your site’s bounce rate, you can improve its search rankings, which in turn can lead to more traffic and ultimately conversions.

5. Prevent duplicate content

You might be thinking, “What if I just create a separate site for mobile users?”. Many SEO experts advise against this practice because it entails you using a separate URL. The problem with this strategy is that, despite the different URLs, the content remains the same. Duplicate content is a big no-no as it can harm your search rankings.

A responsive website design addresses this issue. With a single URL you can avoid duplicate content, regardless of the device being used to view your site.

Strategies for a Responsive Website Design that is SEO-Friendly

If your Responsive Website Design is optimized for mobile devices and search engines, here are some tips on how you can make it more mobile-responsive and SEO-friendly.

1. Ensure that your website is user-friendly

As mentioned earlier, users are more likely to leave your site if they are unable to navigate it easily. Therefore, to ensure that visitors will stay long enough for them to see what you have to offer, you should make sure your responsive website design is easy to use.

If you already have a website, conduct a site audit to determine the areas that require improvement in terms of user experience. If you don’t know how to conduct a site audit, you can ask professional web developers to do it for you.

To reduce your bounce rate and make your website easy on the eyes, go for a cleaner and more organized layout. Also, create a user-friendly navigation system using common words such as “home”, “about”, “blog” and “support”. In this way, visitors will be able to determine where they should click to find the information they require without any trouble at all.

When setting up your site’s navigation system, ensure that there are no dead links and that all internal links point to relevant web pages. If you do wish to use external links, they must open in a new window. This will encourage users to return to your website after they have visited the linked site.

2. Incorporate keywords into your web content

It is a given that your web content should contain relevant keywords so that Google and other search engines can index it better. However, you should not limit the use of keywords or key phrases to just your articles or blog posts. You must also include keywords in headings, title tags, meta descriptions, footer links, internal links, image alt tags, and URLs, among other locations. This approach will strengthen your SEO as it makes it more convenient for Google’s search bots to crawl your site.

3. Minimize page loading times

Make sure that it doesn’t take more than five seconds for your site to load. Otherwise, you are likely to lose visitors and good conversion opportunities.

Since some users may be viewing your website on their mobile devices, you should avoid using excessive graphics, animation, multimedia and other unnecessary page elements that can slow your loading times. Another option is to switch to a new CMS or a better web hosting service. This way, the image and overall web page quality will not be compromised for the sake of page loading speed.

4. Keep your website fresh

As the internet is continuously evolving, it is important to remember that your website should never remain static; you must always keep it fresh and up to date. If you don’t update your site to keep up with the times, your search rankings could suffer.

If you haven’t done so already, add some blog content as this helps to keep your site new and relevant. For example, let’s say you are selling clothes online. To attract new visitors whilst still keeping your existing customers interested, you should write articles about the latest fashion trends as well as other stories relevant to the industry. This will engage your audience whilst at the same time allowing you to stay in line with the standards set by Google.

5. Optimize your website’s typography

Don’t forget to enhance your site’s typography to ensure that your web content will remain readable even on smaller screens. Experts recommend using 16px or 1em for your body copy and then adjusting the size of your headings accordingly.

Furthermore, you should avoid using decorative or script fonts both in your content and your site navigation system. These fonts are difficult to read, especially when viewed on smartphone and tablet screens.

Conclusion

Ensuring that your website is optimized for both mobile devices and search engines is an excellent way of establishing a strong online presence. Fortunately, there are numerous techniques you can use to make your site more responsive and SEO-friendly. If you don’t know how to do this on your own, you can always seek professional help in order to achieve the best results.

Our Author

Sam Sayer is a guest blog contributor for MBA Team, Inc.

The post Creating a user and SEO-Friendly Website appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.

       You hired a web developer that did it all. They registered the domain name, set up hosting, built the website, and set up email for you and your company. You worked together and picked the best domain. It was the exact name of your business. (i.e. your business dot com). This would usually be considered good news but don’t celebrate just yet. 

At some point, you learn that the web developer you hired registered the domain in his name, and not yours. 

You ask the web developer why they registered the domain name in their name. They tell you it was because it was easier to do, fast and affordable. After all, domain registration is “First come first served,” and if no one owns the domain, it is best to grab it up as quickly as possible. What the web developer does not tell you is that putting the domain name in his name also gave them leverage over the entire relationship. This power grab happened before you even hired the web developer, and the web project hadn’t even started.  

How did Hiring a Web Developer get this complicated? 

Here’s what happened next. You paid the developer several thousand dollars, and they started the job. Unfortunately, you didn’t have a detailed scope of work, and now you can’t agree on anything. The web developer is doing a terrible job. You just wanted to say goodbye and start over. But now you realize it’s not that easy to start over because the domain is not in your name. Your developer won’t give the domain name up until the job is done and you make the final payment. 

Now the web developer has full control over your domain and your website and you have not completed the project with them. 

Yes, the lousy web developer has total control over everything; the domain, email, hosting, and your website. You also learn that it is next to impossible to get ownership over a domain name registered in someone else’s name. You may have no proof that the web developer registered the domain for you. Since it was only a small amount of money, the web developer may or may not have even included it in his proposal and contract with you.  

You failed to create an escape hatch in your web developer contract that will go into effect when the relationship with your web developer turns sour. 

This situation is common for small business owners because they don’t have the resources to hire an attorney to review the web design contract. If a web developer hijacked your domain name, the only option you might have now is to get a new domain and start from scratch. What a mess!

Eight steps that can prevent a web developer from getting control over your domain name, email, and website. 

1) If you are working with a web developer to select a domain name, ask them to add your name, email, and contact information as the owner and registrar.  

Typically, a web developer will register it in their name and then put the domain in your name after you have paid them for it. If this happens, you should immediately make the domain name a separate transaction. Pay the web developer for the domain name straight away. Then you should quickly make sure they list you as the owner. 

2) Verify that you are the owner of the domain and not the developer.

You can verify that you own the domain by looking at the domain’s ownership in the public record with almost any domain registrar. ( Except when someone uses private registration, then you can never find out)  

Use this WhoIs search tool to look up the ownership of a domain. Type the domain name you want to look up in the search bar and hit enter. The results will show you the public record of the person or company that owns the domain.    You can also visit GoDaddy.com or networksolutions.com or any domain registrar. Click on the Whois link at the bottom of the page. If you don’t see the results then the domain name might be registered with a private filter on the name of the owner.

3) Transfer the domain name to an account that only you control.

To put the domain name in an account that you control, you will need to open an account with a registrar like Go Daddy, Register.com, or Network Solutions. Once you have an account, you need to set up a domain name transfer.  

Furthermore, you won’t want to trust the web developer or anyone else with the responsibility of renewing your domain. If you do, you might end up waking up one day and seeing you no longer own your domain name. Losing your domain name will impact more than your website; you will no longer have your company email address. Yikes, that’s not good! 

4) Register the domain before you contact a web developer

You can avoid having to go through the trouble of having the domain name transferred if you get the domain name by yourself. After all, if the domain name is the name of your company, you won’t have someone else owning the domain if the relationship turns sour. Therefore be sure to get full ownership, regardless of how the project with your web developer turns out.  

5) If this article is over your head, get a person you can trust to help manage your Domain Name and Domain Name Server (DNS) 

DNS records are the keys to your online security. They control your email, website, and digital security. We recommend keeping your domain name servers (DNS) records with the domain registrar if possible. Don’t transfer your domain or management of your DNS records to your hosting company.  

6) Once you have ownership over your domain name, you will want to set up website hosting, not the web developer.  

After you set up hosting, you can give your web developer enough access to do the job and no more. Some website hosting companies provide the ability to assign web developer guest access. This feature lets website owners assign limited access to a web developer or IT company. This feature allows business owners the ability to maintain ownership and control. As a result, you can have your web developers help you without giving them ownership of your account and the domain name. 

7) Set up your domain name, email, and website hosting with separate companies. 

Sometimes the web developer will get full access to all the email accounts without needing a user name and password. With ownership access to your domain, a web developer can read your email and impersonate every employee in your company. Therefore hosting your email on the same server as your website, may give your web developer too much access.

8) Don’t email your user name and password to anyone, call them on the phone with the password. 

I wish I had a dollar for each time a new customer emailed me the login credentials to their Go Daddy account. The superuser credentials control everything at Go Daddy. Since Go Daddy provides one-stop shopping for domain registration, hosting, and security, they make it easy to do everything with one account. An unethical person with access can do anything they wanted.    

If website technology and security are outside of your comfort zone, get help from someone you can trust.   

It is common for a business owner to be unfamiliar with website security. However, you will need to provide credentials for a web developer to work on your website. Unfortunately, web developers typically get more access then they need, and this can be a problem if you hire the wrong web developer. 

If you are having problems with a web developer, our consultants are here to help. No job is too small for our team if you already hired a developer and want a company to manage the relationship we can do that also. Contact us to schedule a free consultation.

Here is a real story about business owners that got their domain hijacked.

If you liked this article you may want to read this story about Jenna and Robert Lazar, owners of Epoch Trading Company, an Asbury Park business. They hired an overseas web developer online to work on their website almost destroyed their business. The developer redirected domain traffic to a porn site. The couple claim he stole their domain name and faked ownership of the site so digital companies couldn’t give it back to them.   

The post How to hire a web developer without getting hacked appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.

Before you hire a web designer, you should consider what might happen if you hire the wrong person or company. You may be thinking; “does it matter who designs my website? I mean, the neighbor’s kid is good with computers. They could pick a free template and then put your old newspaper ads online, that would be good, right?”

Wrong! Let us stop right there. Don’t do that. It would be bad. We have seen the wreckage after a lousy web design experience, and here are some of the things that can go wrong. Continue reading and learn six steps needed to avoid a bad experience when you hire a web design company. You will also learn what can happen when you make the mistake of hiring the wrong web designer.

After a month of back and forth, I needed to fire my web designer and start from scratch.

The person who made this statement hired a web designer that didn’t spend time learning about the business; it’s brand, customers, and the competition. Now the web designer created a website that:

• doesn’t reflect their vision
• does not fit with their business
• displays graphics that don’t make sense to their customers
• doesn’t include vital information about their company.

Your entire online presence is your website, and a bad one can damage your brand. You have no choice but to cut your losses and start over with a new web designer.

Now that you’ve lost your web design deposit, it is time to think about what went wrong.

How much money did you waste: $1,000.00, $5,000.00, $10,000.00 or more? Now you are wondering if you may have paid too much upfront before they started working for you. What is a reasonable deposit for a web designer anyway? Most web design firms ask for 50% upfront, but it would have helped if your deposit was smaller. As a result, you would have observed the low quality work, saved money, and avoided a disaster.

So, you wasted your time and deposit, or whatever you agreed to pay the web designer to start working. That’s water under the bridge now. I know it is no consolation prize, but at least you learned from the experience. You did have time to think about your needs and the kind of website you don’t want. That is a good starting point for the next web designer.

Trust me, your experience with a web designer could have been worse!

Losing your deposit and hiring a new designer might not have been that bad when you consider what could have happened. We have heard horror stories, where business owners gave the designer access to everything. This unrestricted access included the login credentials to the domain registrar, website login, and full access to hosting services. The security breach resulted in having a website and domain hijacking. There was also a fraudulent activity that included several email accounts. If all the company’s revenue was from online sales, it might even file bankruptcy as a result!

Now here is a real story about how a web designer was hired to design a website and almost destroyed the business.

Jenna and Robert Lazar are owners of Epoch Trading Company, an Asbury Park business. They hired an overseas web developer online to work on their website almost destroyed their business. The developer redirected domain traffic to a porn site. The couple claim he stole their domain name and faked ownership of the site so digital companies couldn’t give it back to them.   Read this article on how a web developer nearly killed the Asbury park small business.    Hence, if you don’t take the right precautions, this could be your business. 

Keep reading our article, and we provide the security protocols that would have prevented Jenna and Robert’s disaster from happening.

How do you stop yourself from hiring a bad web designer?

Before you go out and share this experience with your next web designer, you need a solid plan. Start by documenting your needs and what you want your web designer to do for your business. Here are some questions you need to answer before you hire a web designer:

• Do you need a new website, a redesign, or a stylistic refresh? 
• What about your brand? Do you need someone to create a logo?
• Have you researched the competition and your industry? 
• Want your website to be like a brochure, generate leads from SEO or both?
• Do you have or need a blog?
• Do you need new content? 
• Need a photographer?  
• Will you host the website where it is now, or do you need migration to new hosting?
• Will the website be used as a digital brochure? 
• Do you sell online? 
• Is there a customer login?
• Do you need online advertising and search engine marketing?

After you document what you need, determine if you need help from one or more individuals or an agency. 

Whether you are looking to hire a web designer for a new website or a website redesign, you will need to decide who will do the work. What about creating content? Will this task be done by you, or do you need help with writing? Most web design firms have someone on staff that can do this or have resources for helping with things like creating copy, photography, and logo design.

As a result, knowing the requirements and the kind of services you will need will help determine if you can work with a small web company or an agency. The more services you need, the more likely you will want the approach that an agency can provide.

Six Steps needed to avoid a bad experience when you hire a web design designer:

By following these steps, you can prevent a bad web design experience, tighten security, and lower your financial risks:

1) Create a detailed RFP for hiring the web designer that includes: 

• your requirements, a description of your company and its goals, 
• your competition, and 
• samples of websites that appeal to your target marketing, 
• examples of sites that have a look and feel that is like what you would like to see for your company.  

2) Meet with potential web designers and take the time to educate them about your business.

Don’t expect a web designer to read your mind and know your business. The best designers will ask the right questions during your interview. If they don’t, you will still need to educate them before they create something that doesn’t match your expectations. 

3) Ask for customer references and call them.

Check online reviews and the Better Business Bureau. Buyer beware if reviews are bad or none to be found. Thus, if the web designer is in business for the long term, they’ll care about their reputation and won’t take the risk of getting a bad review. 

4) Make sure the final contract you sign details with your requirements, deliverables, and payment milestones.

Your web design contract should include:

• A complete and detailed scope of work. What will your web designer do for you, and what are the deliverables?
• A section that states what happens if you both need to cancel the agreement. If you need to negotiate a settlement, it will help to have a common understanding before you start.  
• A statement about who owns the final deliverable and intellectual property. Web designers like to control all the code so they can reuse it. Letting them keep the system may not be a good idea if you are concerned about them selling it to a competitor or becoming a competitor. As a result, you will want to protect your brand, your customers, and the intellectual property created from the process of creating your website.
• How and when will you make payments?
• When will you launch the website?

5) Now that you had a bad experience with hiring a web designer, you will want to negotiate a small deposit.

In addition to a small deposit, you should also have several milestones that are manageable and require deliverables and an approval process. It is not a good idea to pay a web designer more than 50% of the project cost. Therefore, you should try to negotiate favorable payment terms and lower your financial risk. 

6) Only provide the credentials that are needed to do the task at hand.

In our experience, web design companies and agencies usually get more access than they need. Sometimes they get full access to manage a company’s domain, DNS, server, and email. As a result, third parties have access to sensitive information, domains can get hijacked, and security compromised. 

Follow these three steps to maximize security and prevent your website from being hijacked by a web designer.

• Create a backup of your website. As a result, you’ll have a fallback if the web designer hacks your website and installs a virus or ransomware.
• Contact your hosting company for help setting up a staging website. Ask them to help you give your web designers ONLY the credentials and access that they need to do their job.   For example, if you have a static site, a web designer only needs sFTP access to your hosting environment to make changes.   If you have a dynamic website with a database, ONLY give them access to sFTP and the database admin.  Hence, you will be giving them everything they need to do their job and no more. 
• Be careful not to provide admin credentials to manage your domain, email or DNS records.  Instead, be sure to reach out to the company that controls your domain or your website hosting company for help launching your website.   As a result, you will be separating access to your domain name and email from the web design project and this will help protect your business from getting hijacked.  

We are here to help with your web design project!

We hope this article has helped you improve your next web design project. Our team is here to help you with your next website design project. Therefore reach out to us for support, security, SEO, or any other topic in this blog. No project is too big or small, and we love to help.

Did you like this article? Read our article, “10 Tips for Working with Your Web Designer” for more tips on hiring a web designer.

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And who could blame them? Email marketing generates one of the highest ROIs, one of 3800% to be exact.

But how did that happen? And how can e-mail marketing be one of the few (if not the only) methods that is still so rewarding, when used correctly?

Email marketing is a chameleon and marketers that use it, constantly come up with new ideas and new features to keep things moving. So, you’ve got new features, automation tools for gorgeous email templates, A/B testing, segmentation and so on and so forth.

But which platform should you go with? And which one can do everything it’s promised? Well, keep reading, as I’ve got more than a couple of suggestions to make.

Moosend Email Marketing

The first suggestion is Moosend, a platform that’s fairly new and comes with a variety of tools.

What do I mean by that? Well, you can manage your mailing lists through that platform, create campaigns quickly and easily and there is no need to implement any coding knowledge when it comes to designing your emails, no matter the campaign, saving you time and improving your conversion rates.

Advanced tracking is another tool this platform can provide, thus helping you with two important things: segmentation and designing the perfect campaign, down the line. Of course, there is also the option of automating any recurring action you want, thus saving time and energy.

Moreover, Moosend can provide their pre-made templates or the opportunity to save an old template and reuse it.

On the pricing model, Moosend offers a pretty affordable plan. The free forever plan would be suitable for you, if you’ve got a list of up to 1000 subscribers, with unlimited features. After that, prices start at $10 per month.

MailChimp Email Marketing

This platform is one of the best-known ones when it comes to email marketing and automation tools, and with good reason. MailChimp is designed so that its customers will be able to deal with everything they need-data, lists, social media, landing pages, literally everything-from one platform alone.

Moreover, MailChimp is full of integrations and tools that can help re-engage lost customers and make product recommendations seem like second nature to your brand. This will happen with pre-built templates, improved segmentation tactics, automation that is easy to use and intuitive tools.

MailChimp also offers real-time analytics for your campaigns and personalized insights, just in case you had no idea what to do.

Some small business owners are shopping for MailChimp alternatives. There is a free forever plan, this much is true, but it’s only for lists of up to 2000 subscribers and offers very limited features, eliminating essential tools such as pre-built templates, A/B testing or even the 24/7 support.

 Its pricing plan can end up being quite expensive, however, its starting price is $10 per month.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a trustworthy marketing platform that offers plenty of integrations and features, one of which, is email marketing and automation tools. With HubSpot, you can attract visitors, sort everything out with its CRM options, use its sales tools and segment your heart away!

But let’s get to the email marketing aspect since this is why you’re here.

HubSpot offers email templates, like most platforms, and a wonderful drag-and-drop editor that will help you customize your templates according to your brand’s tone.

Of course, you can segment and create different email campaigns for different needs, whether you want to go for the age and gender options, or the mobile and desktop options. Same goes, of course, for those of you who want to cross-sell or re-engage your signups.

What is more, with this e-mail marketing and automation platform, you can make sure to send exactly what you want, when you want it. And of course, you’ll get all the necessary tools to segment, A/B test and so on. Oh, and don’t forget to check your live reports, if you decide to use this platform.

As far as the pricing is concerned, HubSpot does offer a free forever plan, however, it is valid only for the CRM platform.

All of the other features can provide a free trial, but the pricing depends on your needs, as there are different options for different needs. The most basic option costs $200 per month, billed annually.

GetResponse

GetResponse is one of the most liked platforms out there, with its pretty email templates and signup forms being one of the best things about it. It’s easy, intuitive and helps designers and entrepreneurs alike when it comes to creating things that will boost conversion and boost your CRO efforts-from emails to landing pages and campaigns.

It can also provide great features that will help you segment and analyze, such as user tracking, analytics, A/B testing features that will help you compare and make data-driven decisions, instead of guessing what could work, thus cutting your work in half. Not to mention that you can also optimize for desktop or mobile, create campaigns that will upsell and cross-sell in seconds and build your list using its tools.

There is also no need to know HTML and code in order to use it, but if you do, then you’re more than welcome to use their HTML tools.

As far as the pricing is concerned, GetResponse offers the option of 30-day free trial that won’t require your credit card, thus enabling the users to see if this platform is a good fit and can support their endeavors. Keep in mind though, that you need a list of up to 1000 contacts, in order to use it.

The pricing is quite flexible, starting at $15 per month.

Campaign Monitor

A very famous and well-liked email marketing and automation platform, Campaign Monitor is one that can help with designing, optimizing, analyzing and, eventually deciding the future of your campaigns.

The software provides you with a drag-and-drop email builder that lets you create branded, personalized emails. It also offers effective list management tools that can help organizations build segmented lists based on their own criteria. Plus, you can easily automate campaigns to ensure the right customers receive the right messages at the right time.

Its email builder is one that is drag-and-drop and easy to use and its tracking features will help you check how effective your campaigns are, real-time.

Of course, beautiful campaigns are not the sole objective, as you need powerful tools that will help you send relevant and personalized content to your customers, as well as automating your campaigns, so that you’ll make sure the machine will do everything for you and make sure that the right email will appear at the right place, the right time.

Lastly, Campaign Monitor’s pricing is one that won’t break the bank, as it starts at $9 per month. However, there is no free plan, apart from a free trial.

Takeaway

Of course, there are far more email marketing platforms that can help with your marketing endeavors and reaching your KPIs, but the whole idea behind this is simple: Email marketing and marketing automation tools are here to stay and help you automate the whole experience.

So, what do you think? Is there a platform that you’ve already used or have been using, in this article? Would you recommend one of these, or something completely different?

Feel free to contact us for help implementing your next digital marketing campaign or new web project.

Author Bio:

Téa is a content writer and blogger. In her free time, she tries to find new ways to stuff more books in her bookcase and content ideas-and cats-to play with.

The post The Top 5 email marketing solutions to use in 2019 appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.