April 2015 News

Term 2 starts today, the kids are back at school, and everyone can now focus on the most important event of the year: Google is doing a major search engine upgrade tomorrow... 

In this issue of Website Builder news:

  • Google Mobile Search Upgrade
  • What to do if your site failes the mobile friendly test. 
  • Recent issues with background colours, 
  • What we have done for mobile mode
  • Mobile design editing tips
  • Get a mobile design professional update
  • Getting Found On Google
  • Better Broadband
  • 0800 telephone numbers
  • Affiliate discounts
  • Start your own business - reseller options
  • Cool links/system links
  • Websites of the month

Tomorrow (April 21st) Google Mobile Search Upgrade

What google say:

"Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices."

To clarify, this means that your website will still rank ordinarily on desktop, but depending on your mobile friendliness, your listing may be excluded from the top of the search results on mobile devices only. This makes sense, because when you are on your mobile device, it's a real pain when you get taken to sites which are not mobile friendly.

Learn more from the official Google Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.nz/2015/02/finding-more-mobile-friendly-search.html

Or take the tes: Google Mobile Friendly Test

What to do if your site fails the mobile-friendly test? 

  • If you have previously disabled "mobile mode", please re-enable it in the design settings tab, then mobile templates.
  • If you have not published in a while, please login to the CMS and publish your website to make sure you have all the latest mobile responsive features in your published site. 
  • If you have complex content on your home page, with lots of customised fonts, font sizes, colours and tables, then you will want to consider cleaning that content up to be more vanilla, with simple headings and paragraphs. Or, consider using our mobile home page override feature, in design settings tab, then mobile templates. 
  • Please note that website builder is not responsible for your site failing the mobile friendly test. All our default websites and default content should pass the mobile friendly test. But please let us know if you have any feedback on a particular standard feature failing the test.  
  • If you want us to help make your website more mobile friendly we can help, but it will incur a professional design fee.

Recent issues with Background Colours and other Mobile Colour Settings. 

  • It's a hard job to keep our CMS up to date with all the latest website trends, and the focus on Mobile for the last few years has been important as more and more web traffic is via mobile now 
  • In our design settings, colours and backgrounds area, you will notice that we have included a preview of your desktop and mobile versions. This preview mode does it's best to emulate your mobile design, but different mobile devices will render differently with different screen resolutions and browser rules. 
  • We received some complaints that our very early version mobile templates were a bit boring, lacking colour and imagery. Over the last 2 years we have added logos, banners and more recently, they now share the colour settings from your desktop design over to the mobile design.
  • However, this update has caused some issues for some users. Depending on what template and/or customised colours you had, the customised colours may now override your default template colours. You can quickly fix this problem by either deleting your custom colours, or setting your custom colours to match your base template colours. If you need help with this, please contact support. You will not notice this issue unless you have published in the last month, so please publish first in order to test. 

What we have done for mobile mode. 

  • All website builder templates default to a separate mobile template for mobile mode, which is fast to load and simple to navigate. 
  • All shopping carts, lists, galleries, forms, etc have been made mobile responsive. This means that multi column layouts are reduced to a single column, and form fields are easier to tap and enter. 
  • We have improved the colour control settings across both modes. 
  • We have given web designers greater control over the CSS, meta tags and HTML settings for mobile templates. 
  • Our focus on designing mobile templates was to make them super fast to download while on a slow rural connection. Unlike common installations of WordPress, that install dozens of unnecessary include files, our templates only include what they need to run on a mobile. You don't need to be downloading slideshows and news tickers from your desktop template that are not even visible in mobile mode, nor the 100k include files that drive it. Our mobile templates only download about 10% more than your content and photos, versus a typical WordPress website that is 90% fluff, and 10% content. It might not be an issue on a 4G connection in the city, but if your customers are looking you while in rural New Zealand, you'll be pleased it only takes them a few seconds to find your phone number, physical address, link to google map, or even to buy a product, rather than waiting 1 minute per page refresh on other website platforms. 
  • We ensure that URLs are the same on mobile and desktop versions, this means that if you share a link in mobile mode with someone on a desktop, they will get the desktop version, and vice versa.. 

Mobile Design Content Editing Tips

  • Avoid the use of tables or panels in your pages, unless a web designer has specifically optimised them for mobile responsive
  • Use simple headings and paragraphs to format your textual content.
  • Avoid changing text colour, fonts etc within the CMS editor toolbar. These features do not always render well in mobile. 
  • Break tables into vertical rows, with css settings like table,tr,td {display:block}
  • Use a popup menu template for shorter menus. 
  • Using a smaller view port, or default zoom, will render the text larger and easier to read... however, some content may cause the template to push wider than the screen. 
  • Other Tips
    • Avoid the use of 3rd party services like dudamobile, as they only increase complexity and cause trouble when forms and other advanced features don't work. 
    • Avoid the use of a dedicated 3rd party mobile website provider. You are far better having the same URLS, content and sitemap across all devices... 

Get a Mobile Design Professional Upgrade

Our web designers are proficient at customizing your website for mobile mode. 

  • Using an even smaller default view port, your website can be even easier to read on mobile
  • Our professional team can make subtle changes to make your website look even more awesome in mobile mode. 
  • We can add additional finger buttons to the top menu bar for shopping carts and search etc, or change the icon of the existing items. 
  • We can completely change the layout, to remove/add logo/banner imagery, etc

/webapps/d/21/347206/web-designers-specializing-in-our-cms

Need one-on-one Website Builder Training?

If you require personalised training, please contact one of our consultants, who are based all over NZ. Many of our Auckland team can also provide over the phone training at a scheduled time. 

We would encourage all customers to get at least one hour of training at the early stages of building their website, and one more review prior to going live, just to give your website that professional critique, and quick tidy up of the rough bits.

Training topics include:

  • How to use website builder and shopping cart

  • How to design websites

  • How to crop and tidy up photos

  • How to optimise to get your website higher on google and other search engines

  • How to setup a facebook page, or other social media account

  • How to send newsletters

  • How to use any other feature we offer.

Book personalised training here

Clearing your Browser Cache and Publishing

Caching speeds up your computer, but it also causes confusion when viewing changes to your website.  Every web master needs to become familiar with this concept. Almost a third of all our support tickets relate to mis understandings about caching. We can't change the nature of the internet, we only educate.

  • Pressing publish button is neccesary even before you go live. Pressing the publish button allows you to navigate your trial website. When you navigate your trial website, you are actually navigating the published pages in many cases. Only the first page to preview in preview mode usually shows your recent changes. 
  • Your web browser is not aware that you are currently editing your website. The web browser does not undersstand any connection between our website builder CMS, and your website with a completely different URL. You typically need to press REFRESH on your browser to see recent updates. Or you may even need to clear your browser cache.

Learn more about Clearing your browser cache

Professional Web Design Services and Training

If you require training or professional help getting started with your website, please review their portfolios, specials etc and contact a local consultant. We have authorised all our resellers and design consultants to engage with you directly, and bill you directly for their time.

You can see all the available consultants at the following link from all across NZ.

/webapps/d/21/347206/web-designers-specializing-in-our-cms

 

Getting Found On Google

  • A website to begin with, is like a new shop down a dark alleyway, that no one knows about. Google wont know about your page until you tell google about it either. 
  • First you need some links to your website.
    • You can get a link from our customer directory in the SEO tab inside website builder. 
    • You can submit your URL to google in the same place
    • You should add your URL to any other online business directory you can find
    • Ask your suppliers to list you on their outlets page. 
    • Ask bloggers to blog about you. 
  • It can take a few weeks or even a few months for google to find you, and then once they have, the focus is on keywords and ranking. 
  • Every page of your website should be optimised for a different "key phrase". A keyphrase is a combination of 2-5 words that describes your business, product or service in some way. eg "red running shoes" or "grey lynn bed and breakfast"
  • Don't put the same phrase on every page, the trick is to use different phrases on different pages. This way, google will take users to the right page for the right phrase. This is proven to be much more effective that trying to put all phrases on one page. These pages are referred to as "landing pages" being the first page a searcher will land on. From there, they may continue to your about us page, contact us page or shopping cart page.
  • In the SEO tab you can quickly optimise lots of pages, categories, blogs and products. You should focus your biggest effort on the meta title and the SEO filename. get your keyphrases into both of those... The SEO filename is the green URL part of the google search results. The SEO meta title is the search result title for your page... So these are very powerful ways to signal to google what page is most relevant for a phrase. 
  • Geography is important. Google doesn't make sense of phrases like "nationwide" or "everywhere". But google really cares about suburbs, towns and cities.  So if your business is targeted at a gepgraphical region, please be specific. You might even include surrounding suburbs for accommodation or a cafe... However, if you are selling bouncy castles, it's probably more suited to a city or region name. For online sales, geography is not so improtant, but saying you are from NZ is. Google also doesn't relate your contact us page to the rest of your website, so if geography is important, it should be in the first paragraph of any relevant landing page. 
  • Often google shows results including your phone number and address that may be out of date. You can update your details here: http://www.google.com/business/

Learn more about SEO here

Better Broadband

We have teamed up with the awesome 2talk team to offer you some great broadband options. If you have become disgruntled with your current isp, now is the time to get a great bundled broadband offering.  

/webapps/l/21/347206/nz-broadband-providers

0800 Numbers and Cheaper Tolls

Do you need an 0800 number for your business? We think 2talk provide a really awesome service, and it's who we use. For example, you have an 0800 number call your landline first, then your mobile, then your 2IC's mobile to ensure that somone will take the call. Their rates are cheap, and all the value added services can be managed via a web page control panel, so you don't need to wait on hold for any call centers. You can manage your lines fully yourself. 

/webapps/l/21/347206/2talk

Receive a 20% discount off your web hosting, for life, by referring a friend 

Did you know that if you refer a friend to use our awesome website builder service, you get a 20% discount off your hosting? If you refer 5 friends, then you will essentially get your web hosting for free! Not only that, but your friends will also get their 2nd month web hosting absolutely free. That's a nice little encouragement for them to check our service out and gives us the opportunity to setup your discount. Both discounts apply for your  2nd and subsequent websites also. It doesn't matter if it is yours, a friend, family or a stranger. Discounts begin once both websites are live. Please make sure you or your friend communicates the referral at the earliest opportunity. 

More information about affiliates here

Reseller Options 

We have an awesome new offer for web designers and awesome business networkers. We can setup any web designer who is interested with all they need to get started as a web designer at no cost:

  • There are no setup fees, no contracts to sign.
  • You will earn $2+ on every domain name sold (based on RRP $19 per year). 
  • You will earn (20%-50%) commission on hosting 
  • You can manage all your customers content, domains, emails etc, easily from just 1 login.
  • We take care of all the billing arrangements, so no administrative hassle. 
If you know of anyone who might be interested, point them at our reseller page. We'll offer a $100 finders fee commission for any existing customer who finds us a new reseller who set's up 3+ live websites. Offer expires 28th Feb 2014.

More information on reselling here

Need Help! is at hand...

There are several places you can find answers to questions about how to build your website and add features (which, there are a lot of) and its free for you to look:

If you can't find the answer you need - then get professional help

Contact - Web Designers or lodge a Support ticket

In 99% of cases the answer to a problem is covered in one (or more) of these places. We always fix bugs fast, with all the users we have we get notified very fast of any real bug -  they are not common, so if you are having an issue operating the CMS consider some online training with us - you'll always take something away worth value. In all other cases we are happy to do anything you are having trouble doing yourself for a small fee starting from $20 for 10 minutes. 

Cool links

All those links and more at our new toolbox page: More Toolbox / Links

Websites of the month

Here's a selection of some of our recent Go Lives.  

And view more examples of websites powered by website builder

Please contact us for more information. 

From the Team @ Web Widgets Ltd - Free Website Builder

www.websitebuilder.nz

Posted: Tue 21 Apr 2015

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