PSPINC Official Company Blog

5 Frightening Web Design Mistakes

Oct

31

image source: pixabay.com

Happy Halloween! To honor this frightfully fun day, we thought it would be a good idea to continue our website tips by giving a list of frightening design mistakes you should avoid. Let’s begin:

1. Confusing message. If your customers can’t tell who you are and what you do within the first few seconds visiting your site, why would they stick around? Make it clear right away what you do and what you sell.

2. Too much text. Okay too much of anything is bad. You can have too much text, too much white space, too many images, too many fonts, too many colors. This is where templates come in handy. A template can guide you in the fonts and spacing; you just need to add some high-quality content and imagery.

3. Hidden contact info. Your email, phone, address, or a contact form should be easy to find and readily available to people. If not, you may lose their trust.

4. Not mobile-friendly. A responsive design is a must-have. Your website should be easily viewable on all devices. Don’t expect that people are only searching and viewing your website from a PC.

5. No privacy policy. People may not take the time to read it, but for many of them, it’s a comfort just to know you have a plan in place for keeping their data secure. Get a GDPR approved privacy policy on your site asap.

Hopefully you’ve come away this month with some great ideas for designing or refreshing your company’s website. If you’d like to talk to the professionals, give us a call at PSPinc about customizing a site to your needs. We are here to make sure you have a great experience and come away with a BOO-tiful website!

#Blog #BusinessTips #ENnews #PSPinc #SmallBusiness #Technology #WebDesign #WebHosting #Website

Your Website: More Improvement Tips

Oct

24

image source: pixabay.com

All month long we’ve been giving tips on how to improve the look, feel and functionality of your website. The end goal is to create a site customers feel comfortable navigating.

If your business is brand new, this might be a good time to consider getting a professionally-designed logo. Logo design comes in several forms for several budgets, depending on the extent of what you need. You can hire a graphic designer to quickly create something, or you can hire a branding expert to not only design your logo, but really analyze your brand as whole.

Logo design isn’t just for startup companies. Perhaps your business has been around a long time and your logo could use an update. Just like images should be crystal clear and high quality, so should your logo.

The next thing to consider is website layout. We have templates you can choose from, which takes all the guesswork out of layout and fonts and white space and the things mentioned in our previous blog post. Customizing a template website is a great way to create a professional, organized website for your business. Learn more about WebdeXpress today.

Finally, people won’t stay on your website very long if they don’t think it’s secure. Make sure your website is secured by a Secure Socket Layer (SSL or TLS) certificate. A secure website with encryption technology is marked by a little lock icon in the URL. If the lock isn’t there, the URL line will advertise “Not secure,” and you can be sure to lose visitors really fast.

#Blog #BusinessTips #ENnews #PSPinc #SmallBusiness #Technology #WebDesign #WebHosting #Website

5 Tips for Responsive Websites

May

30

image source: pixabay.com

If you’re in the position to have a responsive website designed for your business, here are 5 things to consider that will make it worthwhile.

1. Minimize

A website that is displayed on a mobile device has a smaller screen and less real estate than a desktop monitor. Look over each of your pages and decide what information is absolutely necessary. Design your pages with minimal content to keep them from appearing too busy and messy.

2. Hide Content

Another useful technique for minimizing the amount of content on a single page is to hide it. You can do this by simply deleting content or by using dropdown buttons that expand text or images.

3. Scalable Images and Graphics

Visiting mobile websites with extra large or too tiny images can be frustrating. If possible, use a responsive image or graphic that can respond to the screen size. If you can’t, or don’t know how to make an image responsive, try using two different sized images for desktop and mobile.

4. Clickable Buttons

Take a few minutes to think about the layout of your website. Are the buttons displayed large enough on mobile? Is it hard to click on a link, image, or button with your thumbs? Give users plenty of space in-between clickable objects.

5. Fonts

Fonts go hand-in-hand with creating clickable buttons. Because of the smaller screen you should consider how your fonts would be displayed on mobile devices. Clear and easy to read fonts will be greatly appreciated by your site visitors.

Bonus Tip:

When users browse your website on mobile devices they have different features than when they browse on their desktop. The main one being that they can make calls directly from websites.

#Blog #BusinessTips #ENnews #MobileWebsites #PSPinc #ResponsiveWebsites #SmallBusiness #Technology #WebDesign #Websites

What is Responsive Web Design?

May

28

image source: pixabay.com

Responsive design is a technique used by web designers where the pages of a website “respond” and reconfigure to a mobile-friendly view on whatever device is being used. Not too long ago, designers had to create one website for desktop and a separate one for mobile. The mobile website was usually a watered-down version of the main site – but times have changed.

Even before Google announced mobile-first indexing, web designers were already transitioning to a single website that worked across all devices. They do this by using fluid and proportion-based grids that adjust their size by a percentage relative to the display size.

This type of web design has become the standard for how websites are built today. And this is because of the increase in smartphone and tablet users, which now make up over half of all website visitors.

One major issue that designers have to deal with when designing responsive websites is mouse vs. touch. A website displayed on a desktop is navigated using a mouse but mobile devices use our thumbs. Designers have to build a website that responds and adapts to the display size while still making the site easy to navigate.

According to a Pew study, 77% of Americans now own a smartphone, which is more than double the number of smartphone owners in 2011. If you track your website traffic, look at the devices that your website visitors are coming from. You’ll probably be surprised at the amount of mobile users. If you don’t have a responsive website you should consider building one to make the best use of it.

For more information about responsive web design watch our video below:

#Blog #BusinessTips #ENnews #PSPinc #ResponsiveWebsites #SmallBusiness #Technology #WebDesign #Website

Overview of Content Management Systems (CMS)

May

21

What is a CMS?

A content management system, or CMS, is a software application designed to add, edit, and delete digital content – usually associated with a website.

For instance, our CMS is called WebdeXpress and it allows you to add pages to your website, edit text and image content, update your blog, add plugins, and manage your website settings.

The nice thing about content management systems is that they let you edit the content of your website separate from the design. WebdeXpress offers professional templates that make it easy to continually update and change content without messing around with the design.

Most CMS are great for SEO because they give you the ability to customize your page titles, URLs, image names, metadata and more, which help with your search engine ranking. Plugins are another feature that can help with design, content, or SEO by letting you expand the functionality of a CMS with third-party tools.

WebdeXpress and Wordpress are both considered a CMS but have very different levels of usability. WebdeXpress is very easy to use for people without web design or coding experience. Wordpress offers a lot of plugins and themes but can be very difficult to learn and is often hard to keep updated with each new security patch.

When looking at a CMS you should consider your website and management needs along with your skill level. If you have questions regarding WebdeXpress you can call us at 800-232-3989 or email sales@pspinc.com

#Blog #BusinessTips #CMS #ContentManagementSystem #ENnews #PSPinc #SmallBusiness #Technology #WebDesign #WebHosting #Websites

Why is my Company's Facebook Reach Declining?

Mar

21

image source: pixabay.com

Facebook had a rough year in 2018 and it’s hasn’t gotten any better so far in 2019. They acknowledged their mistakes and rolled out some changes to the news feed.

Like Google, Facebook determines how posts rank and which ones show up first in your news feed. In an effort to ‘save Facebook’ Mark Zuckerberg has implemented changes that cut back on showing posts that aren't from users' friends and family.

Since Facebook is now scoring personal posts above business posts, the change has been costly to companies trying to increase customer engagement. They've seen a significant drop in organic Facebook reach throughout the year.

What does this mean for your business?

Essentially, your company’s Facebook posts will (on average) be shown to only 2 - 5% of your audience. If you have 1,000 followers, that means only 20 - 50 of them will see your post. Our company has seen a stark drop in engagement this past year on our own social pages.

Companies will be looking for ways to get those numbers back and the fastest way to do that is paying for ads. We expect ad prices to start going up as more companies look to broaden their reach in non-organic ways. The good news is there are still ways to grow your organic reach:

1. Focus on the quality of your content instead of the quantity.
2. Facebook is putting more focus on ‘meaningful discussion’ so get engaged with users, reply to comments, rather than simply liking posts or comments.
3. Don’t oversaturate your page by posting too often. At most, you should post once a day but studies have shown that posting less than that doesn’t hurt your reach.

On top of everything, Facebook continues to deal with pressing issues like questions from congress over user privacy and an outage last week that lasted over 12 hours. Facebook is home to over 1 billion users and we don’t see that changing anytime soon. But the social media landscape is quickly changing and companies will have to adapt and work harder in order to get the same results that came so easily only a few years ago.

#Advertising #B2B #Blog #ENnews #Facebook #Marketing #OfficeTips #PSPinc #SEO #SmallBusiness #SocialMedia #WebDesign #WebsiteBuilder

How to Upload Pictures to WebdeXpress

Feb

26

image source: dreamersi.com

If you’ve read our last two blogs, you now have great pictures and are ready to upload them! If you haven’t read them, here they are:

How to Take Better Pictures for your Business

Make your Pictures SEO Friendly

Now that your pictures are ready to go, let’s get them uploaded.

First, you need to login to your Dreamersi account, then click on WebdeXpress in the “Content Management System” menu on the top of the page. Once you’re on the WebdeXpress dashboard you’ll want to look at the grey menu on the left of the screen.

Click on the files tab, which should be fourth from the top. From here, a dropdown menu will appear with two tabs for “List Files” and “Upload Files.” Click on the “Upload Files” tab.

A new page will appear that will tell you which files are supported and give further instructions on how to upload them. To upload files click on the “Add files…” button in the middle of the page. If you have large files or if you want to further compress files, make sure you check the box that reads “Compress images upon upload.”