As we approach 2023, it's important to start thinking about how to prepare your website for the new year. Updating your website to take advantage of recent adjustments and updates in the business world is crucial to staying competitive and on top of your game. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to get your website ready for 2023.
Take the time to analyze your competitors' websites and strategies from the past year. Look for pages that helped them gain organic traffic and analyze whether these strategies are relevant to your business. Don't just copy your competitors – adapt and apply what works for your own business.
Content creation often gets pushed to the back burner when things get busy, but it's crucial to plan it in advance. Take the time to review customer queries and pain points from the past year and use that information to create relevant and engaging content that addresses their needs.
Don't overlook technical SEO issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and missing alt text. These issues can harm your website's performance and should be addressed as soon as possible. Take the time to budget for technical SEO and fix any issues before moving on.
Running SEO is a free website SEO analyzer crucial to preparing your website for the new year. Use the latest SEO updates and strategies to gain more traffic and customers. Use Running SEO to optimize your website for success.
Preparing your website for the new year is essential to staying competitive and achieving success in 2023. Use this comprehensive guide to analyze your competitors, create relevant content, fix technical SEO issues, and optimize your website with Running SEO. With these steps, you'll be well on your way to a prosperous new year.
Are you a nonprofit communication professional looking for the best possible content management system (CMS) to manage your organization's website? Look no further than WordPress. Whether you are looking to create a new nonprofit website or redesign your existing one, WordPress for nonprofits is a no-brainer.
Here are five reasons why the WordPress CMS is the go-to solution for nonprofit websites:
WordPress is designed with simplicity in mind, making it easy for anyone to learn and use. Nonprofits often have limited resources and staff, so a user-friendly CMS is crucial. With WordPress, you don't need any special technical skills or coding knowledge to create a professional website.
WordPress offers endless customization options, allowing you to design and tailor your website to fit the needs and goals of your organization. You can choose from a wide range of themes and plugins to add features and functionality to your site. Whether you need an event calendar, donation form, or social media integration, there's a WordPress plugin for that.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any website, but especially for nonprofits that rely on donations and support from the community. WordPress is SEO-friendly, meaning it's easier for search engines like Google to crawl and index your site. Additionally, WordPress automatically optimizes your site for mobile devices, ensuring it looks great and functions properly on all screens.
Security is a top concern for any website, and WordPress takes it seriously. They regularly release updates to fix vulnerabilities and improve security measures. Plus, there are many security plugins available to add an extra layer of protection to your site. With WordPress, you can trust that your site is secure and reliable.
One of the biggest benefits of WordPress is that it's free to use. You'll only need to pay for hosting, a domain name, and any premium themes or plugins you choose to use. This makes it an affordable option for nonprofits that may have limited budgets.
It's user-friendly, customizable, SEO-friendly, secure, and cost-effective. Take the first step towards improving your organization's online presence and get a free website consultation with Key Medium today. Let us help you design and implement a new WordPress website redesign that meets the needs of your nonprofit and its mission. You may also explore our nonprofit website design portfolio examples, or get our proven website structures for nonprofit organizations for free.
Have you decided to embark on a new website design or a website redesign and don’t really know how to start? Are you ready to embark on your transformational journey to creating a mission-aligned website design that shows your offers, who you are, and what unique differentiator you need to highlight to reach current and prospective customers or donors?
You’re not alone. These are some of the most common website design objectives out there and many organizations can relate. That means you could be missing out on valuable customers who simply cannot experience the absolute best experience your brand has to offer. These challenges are easy when you know how and when you have the right team of people on your side.
We have compiled a list of the 'top 3 web design companies' and 'top 3 web development firms' in your area. This list contains those agencies that are the highest-rated web design companies in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. These professional web design and website development services companies will help boost your website above your competitors, as well as better tell your brand’s story. Each company is vetted by a Senior Web Designer and experts and is a company we have worked with either directly or a company that has received an accolade or comes highly recommended in the local area by those in the know.
Local web design and development companies understand issues that are important to those who live in Pittsburgh. Furthermore, this agency can help you create a mission-aligned website platform, with integrated web analytics, mobile-first strategy, and even local SEO by better understanding you. They can help you understand your key demographics and audience because they are part of your community too. Don’t choose a big, nameless faceless corporation that considers you one in hundreds; go with someone who considers your business valuable to them personally, someone whose goals and vision align with your own.
Here are some resources you may find helpful.
Get in touch with our strategic partner, Key Medium, to find out more about website design professionals in the Philadelphia area.
The introduction of the mobile device has had a tremendous impact on brands, society, and life. The biggest opportunity brands have today is to connect consumers with relevant and helpful experiences. Fully utilizing this opportunity can be achieved through a user-first design.
Designing experience for humans is essential, and the mobile experience is becoming (and in many cases, has already become) the norm. A user-first orientation is more important than channels as some traditional ad agencies would have you believe. Mobile is the main platform for searches and even online purchases. People spend more than 3.5 hours a day on their mobile devices. Fifty-three percent of users will leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
Not only are people often choosing mobile over desktop experiences, but Google has also announced that they have begun switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting in March 2018 (after 1.5 years of experimentation). Google’s algorithms, following many core algorithm updates, now rank the pages of a site based on the content available on mobile. The snippets that appear on search results will come from the mobile version of a website. Another relevant change is that Google will use mobile content to make sense of structured data—machine-readable information that Googlebot utilizes in its knowledge graph and results in general. Now, with both Google and users prioritizing mobile because of it’s inherent user-first attributes, it is clear that that user-first design is the way of the future and needs to be your organization’s top priority.
Nobody wants a bad experience, but all too often we don’t offer our users what they want: best-in-class experience. We need internal alignment. It’s extremely important that we deliver what the user needs in a way that makes sense to them. Consumers think in values and outcomes. For example, a consumer thinks: “I need to complete task X,” which could be “I need to order a plane ticket.” It’s our job to make sure our UX is designed to make it as easy as possible for users to achieve their outcomes.
There are several barriers to prioritizing user-first design. Securing leadership buy-in may be one hurdle you are facing. Leaders have to be confident in their vision for their product. They need to know what they want to do and what their priorities are. Leadership buy-in is important because company leaders set the tone and might dismiss prioritizing user-first experience if they don’t understand its value.
A second obstacle to user-first design occurs when a company’s teams are so isolated in their silos that they do not harmonize with each other. When communication across silos is weak, teams can actually be at odds with each other in producing a user-first design, resulting in a less-than-stellar UX.
One more important hurdle is when a company has ambiguous goals. Teams need to work toward reaching and aligning on shared goals. KPIs should be formalized and should prioritize user-first design.
Product marketing helps translate user insights and narrative. Also, product marketing helps translate the technology and engineering in terms of how it comes to market. This helps prioritize making products relevant based on the company’s strategic objectives.
Another opportunity that will help prioritize a user-first focus is running more experiments and collecting more data. After running 460,000 experiments, Google made 3,600 improvements to Google Search. These improvements directly improved the user experience. Developing a culture of test and iterate is extremely important. Collecting shared data points drastically improves our understanding of user interactions before and after the changes.
Ultimately, it’s extremely important to keep the user’s needs in mind. Focus on understanding consumer expectations, what consumers are going through, and how you can help them in your own unique way.
Be resourceful: understand how factors are changing human behavior and learn about how technology is changing to meet people’s needs. Analyze this understanding in the context of what it means for your brand and how you’ll shape your UX moving forward.
Take the opportunity to focus on the long-run. To be successful, focus on what you bring to the table, because that’s how people are going to uniquely value you. Think about your past successes and your innate talents, and consider how they might help users meet their needs.
Balancing data with empathy is the key to developing user-first experiences. Companies need to take steps to verify that their mobile sites work flawlessly and respond to user needs. Prioritizing a user-first design will ensure that your company will grow with users’ changing needs.
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When re-designing a website, it's a common pitfall to underestimate the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Many companies finish re-designing their websites and slap SEO on like a bandaid once they're done with the site. It is a common pitfall, but no less disastrous for your business.
In fact, it is absolutely crucial to factor in SEO before you go ahead with any kind of design work on your site. Sure, I get it: design is much more interesting than sitting down and figuring out things like ranking, SEO, or on-page content strategies that will keep your site's SEO ranking for a long time to come.
But as easy as it is to jump into the re-design, it's not the way to do it if you want to keep your website where it will benefit you: high up in the search engines' listings.
SEO needs to be part of the web design process, not an afterthought. Below we've outlined a few of the ways SEO can be an integral part of re-designing your website.
When structuring your site, keep user experience high on your priority list. User experience is an important Google ranking factor, so anything that has to do with site navigation and site structure, like navigation bars and internal links needs to be kept in mind as being as user-friendly as possible. Use tools like XML sitemaps, your primary navigation, and internal links to help search engines discover more pages on your site.
And while you're at it, don't forget the URL structure when updating your page. Google ranking prefers the sites requiring as few steps as possible, so simplified URLs will definitely help. Having URLs with words that search engines and people can understand, instead of using numbers or abbreviations goes a long way towards keeping your site towards the top.
It's also important for SEO to be as intentional as you can about the keywords you use on your site as you are re-designing. Look for keywords that will fit core aspects or services your company offers, and look over the keywords you have already been using to see if they are giving good results, or if they can be improved upon. Decide on the main keywords that will accomplish what your company wants to achieve.
In order to keep your old page's ranking, you will have to be smart about re-directing. Always, make sure you upload re-directs from your old pages to your new pages. If you don't, you risk losing the Google ranking you've spent months, or years, attaining when you easily could have kept it.
When you automatically re-direct all traffic from an old URL to a new one, you improve the user experience since users will be able to find your new page through the old links, and avoid hitting dead ends and 404 errors.
The other thing that happens when you re-direct traffic from your old page is that Google lets you keep the ranking from your old page, which is clearly very important.
When you decide on the most important keywords for your company, make sure these words have their own well-written pages, including Latent Semantic Indexing keywords to boost relevancy for your chosen keywords.
Keep in mind that for your site to be properly indexed by a search engine, it needs to be mainly text-based. Search engines have trouble indexing sites that are mainly flash or video-based. Because of this, it is essential that you write out clearly what your company is offering, and that your website is text-based so that the search engines will have no trouble indexing your page, and you can show up in those search results.
Search Engine Optimization is a topic much too big to cover in just one blog post. But the most important thing to take away from this post is that while SEO is many things, it can't just be slapped on at a later date. Do yourself a favor and integrate SEO from the moment you start re-designing your website. You will be happy you did!
Key Medium can help with a free website consultation and affordable expert SEO services.
Connect with us today to learn more and take your website to the next level.
