PSPINC Official Company Blog

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 147 “Search Engine Optimization”

Dec

22

One of the best ways to get potential customers to see your business website is through search engines like Google. With so many websites out there, it can be hard to rank higher in search results. But that’s why it’s important to optimize your site for search engines. The way search engines work is they’ll scour the web for content and rank them based on relevancy according to their algorithm. The more relevant the algorithm deems your site, the higher it’ll appear in the search engine results.

If you’re unsure if your site’s well-optimized, there are plenty of free search engine optimization (SEO) tools available online. And most of them will even give you tips on how to improve your overall SEO score, as it’s usually called. If your score is low, it may have to do with your website’s content or how long it takes site pages to load. But fixing these problems will not only help you rank your site higher in search engine results pages, but also more website traffic, and hopefully revenue. PSPINC also provides support for SEO. Please feel free to contact us.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #business #businesstips #businesstools #ecommerce #google #marketing #marketingtips #pacificsoftwarepublishing #pspinc #pspincwhatsnewnewsletter #searchengineoptimization #seo #smallbusiness #tech #technology #webdevelopment #websites #webtools

How Voice Assistants Are Changing Marketing

Aug

9

Are you one of the many people who use a voice assistant like Siri, Amazon Alexa, or Google Assistant? Insider Intelligence predicts that 123.5 million adults will use a voice assistant at least once a month in the U.S. this year. While this technology isn’t particularly new anymore, it is still rife with opportunities from a marketing perspective that many are unaware of as well as not taking advantage of.

For example, people largely use voice assistants to get quick answers to their questions. Voice assistants, as a result, emphasize what’s called featured snippets. If you type a question into a search engine, you’ll get an immediate answer. And that’s because, at the top, there will be some bolded text that should answer your question. But that text is pulled from a specific website. That whole section is the featured snippet. And for voice assistants, that’s where they pull their answers from. And website owners, in turn, will get a bump in website traffic.

How It Affects Marketing

From a marketing standpoint, this only enforces the need for great search engine optimization (SEO) for your site. If your site is well optimized, it’s more likely it’ll pop up as the first search result, making it the most relevant to Google’s algorithm. If you’ve optimized your site well enough, it’ll show at the top when users search certain queries and you’ll receive better results. And luckily, we here at PSPINC have a lot of experience helping customers with their website SEO.

But voice assistants have more marketing potential for business as well. For example, did you know you can order a pizza from Domino’s using Amazon’s Alexa? Well, you can. And with it being an Amazon product, you can also order products off of Amazon with just your voice. The biggest benefit that voice assistants offer is convenience. And it's a convenience that’s just unmatched when compared to other platforms.

So, while voice assistants have gained popularity over the years, it still isn’t used as a marketing tool on a wide scale just yet. But those who are, reap the benefits they provide. And advertisers predict this will change in the next few years. While it doesn’t exist yet, voice assistants could integrate sponsored ads by having advertisers pay to be mentioned first when users ask a question like, “what Italian restaurants are near me?”. With Spotify already personalizing its ads based on what users listen to, it’s not too big of a stretch.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#advertising #amazon #amazonalexa #blog #business #businesstips #cortana #digitalmarketing #google #googlehome #marketing #searchengineoptimization #seo #siri #smallbusiness #tech #technology #voice #voiceassistants #web #website #websites #webtools

How to Market Your E-Commerce Site

Jul

5

If your business sells online, a great e-commerce site isn’t the only thing you need to be successful. Like every sold offering, you also need to market your e-commerce site. After all, what good is an e-commerce site if no one knows about it? According to DataReportal, about 58.4% of internet users buy something online every week. And that figure will only continue rising. To reach those users, they need to know that you offer what they want or need. To do that, you’ll need to market your site effectively.

Optimize for Search Engines

a laptop open to google with a travel mug on the table

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is a process that will help your site and your products come up on relevant searches. This process involves finding and optimizing your site for keywords related to your business and what you’re selling. And throughout the process, you’ll want to focus on making sure your site is mobile-friendly and doesn’t take too long to load. All this combined will give users a better overall shopping experience, encouraging them to purchase from you.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

letter tiles spelling out pay per click on a desk with a computer keyboard in the top left corner and an iphone in the bottom right corner

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising refers to a paid marketing strategy that helps increase your site’s overall exposure. Specifically to people actively interested or looking for what you have to offer. As the name suggests, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. These ads refer to paid search, display, or shopping ads, all run on Google’s display network. And because of how popular Google is, you’re almost guaranteed brand awareness. However, you’ll need to use relevant keywords to reach the right people.

Email Marketing

the google, mail, and phone apps close up on an iphone

Another great tactic to promote your e-commerce site is email marketing. On your e-commerce site, you can add a pop-up form where visitors can opt-in with their emails. With this, you can send personalized emails to your customers and/or potential customers about upcoming sales and overall company news. And with email marketing tools like NewsMAIL, creating an effective email marketing campaign is easy. People who sign up for these emails send the message that they’re interested in what you have to offer, increasing the likelihood that they’ll convert into paying customers. You can also use this tactic to personalize offers depending on their interests, send surveys to learn more about your customers, and even recapture those who abandoned their cart.

Social Media Marketing

Then, there’s social media marketing, which can be helpful for all things business-related. Like all the other marketing tactics on this list, it will help increase your brand’s awareness. Plus, it'll encourage people to engage with your content. To better market your e-commerce website, your social media content should not only promote special deals but also spark conversation. And when users engage with your posts, reply to them to build that relationship with them. Over time, they'll convert them from social media spectators to potential customers.

Optimize for Conversions

The focus of an e-commerce business is to generate sales and earn conversions. But sometimes, you might not be converting as much as you’d like to. This is where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in. What this entails is making sure that the checkout process is as seamless as possible. The checkout process should be streamlined, with clear and actionable call-to-action (CTA) buttons and attractive visuals of your offerings.

Overall, an e-commerce business needs a good marketing strategy to be successful. But before you can do that, your e-commerce site needs to be in the best shape possible. Luckily, PSPINC has a stellar e-commerce hosting solution, YourHost. And our ShopSite plans are currently on sale for new customers. For the first two years, you can start your e-commerce site starting at just $15/month.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #business #businesstips #businesstools #conversions #digitalmarketing #ecommerce #emailmarketing #google #internet #marketing #marketingdigital #newsmail #ppc #seo #shopsite #smallbusiness #socialmediamarketing #technology #websites #yourhost

How to Improve Your Site's SEO Through Content

Mar

22

For anyone who’s ever helped develop a website, search engine optimization (SEO) is very important. Optimizing your site for SEO helps better position your website and its pages in organic search results. For people who use website builders, many of those plans include an SEO tool. The best one, in our opinion, is the Yoast SEO plugin from WordPress, but there are many others out there. And it’s partly why PSPINC offers an easy WordPress install with both our Dreamersi, YourHost Neo, and Parcom web hosting plans. However, users can only use those tools with paid plans. So, here’s some SEO advice you should keep in mind when building and creating content for your site.

Adding Effective Keywords

people sitting together at a conference table, some of which are on laptops as they all work together

When you think about SEO, you might think about keywords first. Keywords are just words and phrases that users will enter into their search engines. So, choose your focus keyword wisely. You want it to be a word you know you’ll use a lot because it’ll be what you want a page to rank for most. But you also want to make sure it’s one that people will search for. An easy way to figure this out is to make a quick Google search with the keyword you want to use and see how many results come up. If it comes back with thousands or even millions of search results, you’re on the right track.

The same process goes with your keyphrase, which is like your focus keyword. The only difference is that it’s a phrase instead of just one word. To better optimize your content for SEO, try to use your keyphrase in your subheadings whenever possible. When you repeatedly use your focus keyword and keyphrase within your web content, it tells Google that you’re using relevant keywords. Google then rewards you by pushing your page higher up in the organic search results.

Improving Readability

a woman typing a document on a laptop while she sits on the couch

This should go without saying, but if your content isn’t written well, people won’t want to read it. Besides the obvious revisions in capitalization, grammar, and overall syntax, there are a few other things to be wary of when creating written content for online users. For starters, try to avoid using passive voice. Instead, use active voice. Passive voice happens when the subject of the sentence is acted upon whereas, in active voice, the subject completes an action. For example, instead of saying “The speech will be made by the mayor tomorrow”, say “The mayor will make a speech tomorrow”. If it’s a situation that can’t be avoided, use the passive voice. Just try to keep it to a minimum.

Additionally, avoid consecutive sentences (starting sentences with the same word) and limit your sentence and paragraph length. Sentences shouldn’t have more than 20 words each while paragraphs shouldn’t exceed 200 words. Between paragraphs, you should also distribute some subheadings and perhaps some images to break up blocks of text. Because no one wants to read paragraph upon paragraph without a break. At least not when they’re reading something online. Also, make sure to link some of your text to other pages on your website as well as other websites.

So, when you’re building and creating content for a website, there are two things to keep in mind in terms of SEO. Firstly, you’ll want to make sure you’re using effective keywords so your web pages will rank higher in Google’s organic search results. While Google Ads guarantees a top spot in the search results, using the right keywords will be vital in determining where on the list your site lands after that. Lastly, your content needs to be well-written, keeping in mind that it’ll be seen by internet users. The language should be conversational but still grammatically correct. Do all that and your site will be in pretty good shape for SEO. And as helpful as paid tools like Yoast SEO are, they’re unnecessary if you already know what to look out for.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #digitalmarketing #dreamersi #google #googlesearch #keywords #marketing #marketingdigital #organicsearchresults #parcom #searchengineoptimization #searchengineresultspage #searchresults #seo #serp #webhosting #wordpress #yoastseo

Basic HTML and CSS Everyone Should Know

Feb

15

Whether you’re a coder or not, some basic HTML and CSS knowledge is always a plus. While there are multiple website builders out there now that do all the heavy lifting, they’re not always perfect. Every once in a while, you’ll find a broken image. Or you’ll realize you want to re-format some text so that it’s centered on your homepage, but you don’t want it to apply to all the other images on the page. As far as web design goes, website builders generally work within templates.

From a user’s perspective, it means that when you change one thing, odds are it’ll also change other aspects of the webpage. For example, if you decide you want a header to be blue instead of black, the website builder you’re using will probably make all headers on your website blue. So having some very basic HTML and CSS knowledge will be helpful moving on. Plus, it’ll look good on your resume.

Header Tags

When building out the content on any of your website pages, you’ll need to have some headings. An easy way to do that with HTML is using what’s called header tags. There are six header tags, going from H1 to H6. The lower the number, the larger the font size. As a general rule, H1 tags should only be used once on a page, so it’s generally reserved for the page name. The reason why is because using more than one H1 tag can come across as spam to Google. So, it’s considered best practice to just use one. As for the rest of the header tags, you can use whatever size you think fits best for your page.

What Header Tags Look Like in HTML

Image Tags

When inserting an image with HTML and CSS, there are a few things to keep in mind. For starters, you might want to use stock photos that are free to use. If you’re creating your company website, the last thing you want is to run into some copyright issues. Secondly, you’ll probably want to place it in a specific position (left, center, or right) and resize it so that it won’t be a tiny image on the page or take up the whole width of your webpage. When putting an image in HTML, you’ll want to use what’s called image tags, which will require you to add a source code.

As complicated as it sounds, it’s actually quite easy to do. In simplistic terms, it means that the HTML code needs to pull the image from somewhere, whether it’s a file stored somewhere on your site, or the image link if it’s an image you found online. Additionally, you’ll want to add alt and class tags to help improve the page’s overall search engine optimization (SEO) and make it clear which element you’re editing when you move over to CSS. For this example, I’ve found a picture of a mountain on Pexels, a free stock photo site. So I’ve inserted the link to the image as the source and entered the word mountain in the alt tag and because I want to change the picture’s position later, I’ve named the class center.

image css tags

To change the image’s overall position and size, you’ll have to add some code into CSS. Say you put your mountain image into HTML but you soon realize it’s too big and not centered. What you’ll want to do next is enter “.center {“ in CSS to start the process. After that, you’ll want to resize your image through percentages (rather than pixels or inches). That way, it’ll still be responsive when you look at the page on a mobile device. For this example, let’s make the image height half of what it originally is and the height 70%. To center it, you’ll want to set the left and right margins to auto and make it a block element with the display tag. And lastly, you’ll want to remember to close it with a “}” symbol.

Paragraph Tags

So say after you put your headings and images, you want to add some body text. In HTML, they’re called paragraph tags and it’s perhaps the easiest HTML you can learn, comparatively. All you have to do is start with a paragraph tag, insert whatever written content you want in there, and then close the tag. Simple as that. For the example above, I’ve just inserted some Lorem Ipsum (dummy text).
paragraph tags in css

If you want to change the position of that text, you’ll do something similar to what you did with the image tags in CSS. Say you want it to not take up the entire width of the page so that there’s some white space on both sides. To do this, you’ll want to add some padding on both sides so that the text won’t take up the full width of the page. To do that, you’ll add the padding-left and padding-right tags to your CSS and add a percentage. For this example, I’ve set them both to 20%.

If you want to put in some extra HTML and CSS practice, CodePen is the perfect site to do just that. Plus, you can find some cool designs on there too with the full HTML and CSS for you to use on your own site. After that, you can add it into your own site, which most website builders support. In fact, PSPINC’s web building tool, WebdeXpress, as well as PSPINC’s blogging platform, Bloguru, supports HTML and CSS.

The last thing I’ll leave you with is this: always to close your HTML and CSS tags. For HTML it’s adding </> to the corresponding tag. For CSS, it’s simply adding “}” after all your tags for each element. If you don't have the time to inspect and add to your website's code or if you find it all too technical, consider letting PSPINC help by requesting a quote.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #bloguru #bodytext #business #businesstips #coding #css #headers #html #images #paragraph #web #webdev #webdeveloper #webdevelopment #webdexpress #websitebuilders #websitedesign

PSPINC What's New Newsletter Vol. 100 "Attracting Customers with your Website"

Jan

27

I want to attract people to my website. There are many ways to do that like advertising online or optimizing the site for search engine optimization (SEO), but have you thought about something more basic? Before you think about how to better attract people towards you site, have you ever thought about why you go to a website? What website acts as your homepage and what pages do you visit the most often?

In 2021, the most visited websites were:

someone on their phone open to the TikTok app

TikTok

Google

Facebook

Microsoft

Apple

Amazon

Netflix

YouTube

Twitter

WhatsApp

As you can see, these sites are designed to attract people. Their content is updated every hour, every minute, and every second of every day. However, you’re focused on getting users to come to your company’s website, more specifically, your homepage. Moreover, your goal is to get traffic that is comparable to these sites.

a look at website traffico n a tablet

Even if the amount of website traffic towards your site is small, you need to update the content on your site frequently if you want to see that number increase. It’s important to give your customers a reason to come back to your site time and time again. And you can do that by regularly posting new information that is important to them.

Next, it’s also important to promote your site through mediums other than your own website. This includes eliciting reviews of your products and/or services and publicizing your activities on social media. A website that’s left unwritten won’t attract people. If you want more people to see your website, it goes without saying that you need to provide them a reason to see it.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#amazon #apple #business #businesstips #content #facebook #google #homepage #microsoft #netflix #smallbusiness #socialmedia #tiktok #twitter #upates #webcontent #webdevelopment #website #websitecontent #websitedevelopment #whatsapp #youtube

Things to consider when deleting web pages

Nov

16

Web builder tools like WordPress and WebdeXpress are powerful. They grant website owners the power to make website updates themselves without the need of a Web Developer. As a great man once said - “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Adding or editing content and pages is one thing, but what happens when you need to remove pages from your website? You just press the delete button and poof it's gone - right?

Yes, but did you consider the consequences of removing content?

Remember, SEO (search engine optimization) is based on providing good quality content. Search engines are actively crawling websites and web pages for new content to serve users who make specific searches.

When you remove web pages, you have now removed a valid link to useful content on your website. What this means for users, is they won’t be provided with content relevant to their search. For search engines, they see that you are serving them a broken link, which will hinder your SEO efforts.

What should you do when you need to remove content from your website?

Deleting pages from your website is fine, and inevitable over time as you look to update and make changes. A website is never “finished,” it’s an ongoing and evolving element, like your business itself. To properly remove pages from your website you should set up 301 redirects.

According to Wikipedia, a 301 redirect is defined as follows:

The HTTP response status code 301 Moved Permanently is used for permanent redirecting, meaning that links or records returning this response should be updated. The new URL should be provided in the Location field, included with the response.

To summarize, when you remove a web page, you must update a configuration file on your webserver to ‘permanently redirect’ any traffic that comes to the removed page to a different relevant page. Over time, as search engines continue to crawl your website, they will recognize that a page has been removed, and no longer provide it as a search result.

While the exact format of your redirect will vary from site to site and server to server, the principle will remain the same. You can always consult the Web Developer for your website should you have questions.

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If you have a website that needs updating and you don’t know where to start, let us know. We have experience not only in designing and developing websites, but we can help make sure the changes made are SEO-friendly.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#SEO #WebDevelopment #WebsiteUpdates #Websites

SEM for your business website

Sep

21

You have heard us talk a lot about SEO (search engine optimization). However, there is another acronym you may have heard called SEM.

What is SEM?

SEM stands for “Search Engine Marketing”.

Where SEO is focused 100% on optimizing your website to rank high on SERPs (search engine result pages), SEM is about generating traffic and brand visibility through organic and PPC (pay per click) campaigns.

You can think of SEM as the umbrella that SEO and PPC campaigns fall under.

Benefits of an SEM mindset

While SEO should never be neglected, it is a piece of the SEM puzzle. The PPC element will help the speed at which your site can rank higher on search results.

Search engines like Google place PPC ads above organic search results. Meaning you can pay to have your ad potentially seen above highly ranked organic results. A huge benefit for new websites, looking to dramatically increase their brand awareness.

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Focusing solely on SEO is a great place to start when you have a limited (or non-existent) advertising budget. You won’t necessarily see a dramatic return on investment quickly, as SEO takes months and sometimes years based on competition in the space.

However, if you have a consistent advertising budget, the ability to launch landing pages, and can manage a Google ads account - PPC is a great way to bring exposure to your amazing products and services.

If you are considering leveling up your SEO to SEM and are looking for assistance in getting started please let us know, we would love to speak with you about your goals and how we can help!

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#BusinessWebsite #GoogleAds #PPC #PaidAds #SEM #SEO

What is a Virtual Private Server?

Aug

17

A virtual private server (referred to as a VPS) is the location where data and web files are stored that run a website. If we are using a housing comparison, consider your domain your address, your web files your house, and the VPS is the piece of land you are building on.

Shared Hosting vs Virtual Private Server Hosting

At PSPINC we talk a lot about shared hosting, probably because we have been offering some of the most reliable shared web hosting in the industry for 25 years.

Shared hosting is probably the most common form of web hosting. Essentially it is a server where resources are shared with other users hosted on the same server. Things like RAM, CPU, and hard drive space are allocated to those users on that server.

When discussing a VPS, your web files are hosted on the same physical hardware as other users. However, what differs is that you are separated to your own ‘virtual space’ on that server. It means that you can have your own dedicated storage space, CPU, specific operating system, RAM, and custom bandwidth limits.

Going back to the housing analogy - shared hosting is like an apartment or condo, where you have your own unit (website) but you occupy the sam piece of land. A VPS is like having a house on your own property.

We didn’t really touch on dedicated hosting, which is much like a VPS but it means you have your own hardware. This is a more costly approach than using a VPS, but there are definitely specific situations where this could be necessary. We can help with that too, contact us for a quote.

2 Reasons to Consider a Virtual Private Server

For the average website, a shared hosting space is more than enough in terms of specs and fit most customer’s budgets. However, there are times when using a virtual private server is recommended.

Enhanced Security & Monitoring: If you need to generate and create backups on a specific schedule, need enhanced security, or want to monitor the performance of your system more closely.

Performance Concerns: A blessing and a curse, if your website is extremely popular and sees high levels of traffic or experiences spikes in traffic at various times, you could experience speed issues. Speed issues not only hurts the experience of your customers, but also could hurt your SEO (search engine optimization). A VPS allows you have custom specs geared towards your specific business needs.

Do you need VPS Hosting?

If you are convinced that your website needs a VPS custom tailored to your business needs, let us know. We have the a team that will do the heavy lifting to get your VPS online quickly and conveniently. In addition, we have a team monitoring our VPS hosted customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Check out our VPS plans

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#dreamersi #pspinc #securehosting #seo #vps #vpshosting #webhosting #website

Technical Terms to Know When Hiring a Web Developer

Jul

20

Building a business website can be a daunting task to some. If you are building it yourself, finding the right web builder tool is a job unto itself. You then need to factor in the time it takes to learn how to use the tool and actually build the website.

It’s at this point in the process many decide that they would just rather hire a professional to get the job done. There is so much to learn when it comes to building a website, our Web Developers have spent years learning all of the techniques necessary to build beautiful modern websites.

While the Web Developers will handle the heavy lifting, there are a number of terms and processes that you should be familiar with to help you make educated decisions and assessments of the work being done for you.

Today we are going to talk about a few technical terms you should know when you are having your website re-designed.

Responsive Design: It is the approach to web design where the website built scaled gracefully and dynamically on any device or screen resolution. If your Web Developer builds a website that is really tiny on a mobile device where you need to pinch, zoom, or horizontally scroll to see everything, the site is not responsive. Consider that a huge red flag.

Mobile-first: In the web design world this is the process of designing a website specifically for mobile devices and then make adjustments as screen space/resolution increases. In 2020, approximately 61% of websites were viewed on mobile devices. With that being said, it is easy to see why mobile consideration is certainly important.

CMS: This stands for “content management system”, which is the system behind the scenes that allows you to update your website without having to write a bunch of code. There are tons of different CMS tools out there. WordPress is the most popular and widely known one, which has its own pros and cons. We also have our own secure in-house system called WebdeXpress that comes free to all of our Dreamersi web hosting customers.

301 Redirect: When you hear this term, this refers to a HTTP code that tells search engines that a web page is ‘moved permanently’ to a different URL. This is important when you remove pages or change the URL to an existing page. When this isn’t done, search engines will have links to a lot of broken pages once you start making changes changes which is bad for your SEO. So make sure your Web Developer is adding in those 301 redirects when setting up a new website or web page for you.

Cache: Web cache is a way to optimize a website for the web. A cache is a way of telling a web browser to remember images and other files from your website so it will load faster on future visits. Users can always clear their cache manually if they want, but you should make sure that your website caches common resources that never change to ensure your website loads fast when they return.

Call-to-Action: A “call-to-action” (CTA) is an element on a web page that is meant to encourage an action from the visitor. Every page on your website should have a purpose, especially if you are looking to generate leads, convert a sale, etc. If you have web pages that are more than just informational have a focus and a CTA to get the most out of your website.

Crawl: Crawling in the world of web development refers to search engines systematically reviewing and indexing websites. It is imperative that your websites can be crawled by search engines and you include relevant keywords and phrases you expect your visitors to use when searching to find your website.

SSL Certificate: When you look at your web browser if you see a little lock icon or the website URL begins with “https”, that means you have an SSL certificate. Which is a data file hosted in a website’s server that makes SSl/TLS encryption possible. In short, it makes your site more secure and more appealing to search engines, which help with your website rank. So make sure you have one!

Page Speed: This refers to how long it takes for your web page to fully load when a user enters your URL or clicks a link to your website. Making sure your website is well optimized to load quickly will help your websites see your content faster. The longer your page takes to load, the more opportunities you are giving your visitor to leave. Which in turn will hurt your search engine optimization. Make sure your Developer is optimizing your website by compressing images, using light resources, and making as much of it text-based as possible.

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Knowledge is power, and knowing the above terms will help to make sure your getting the most out of your Web Developer when it comes time to build your website. If you are still looking for a Web Developer, please let us know. We are constantly taking the above into consideration with every custom website we build for our customers.

You can contact us online, by email at contact@pspinc.com, or by phone at 1-800-232-3989.

Also, check out what we have done for customers just like you!

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

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