Is your web designer right for you?

Is your web designer frustrating you?

Take this simple quiz.

  • Is your web designer offering you a custom design?
    Some web designers charge you like you’re getting a custom web design, then give you a template. There is a huge difference in price and quality, if you are getting a template design the price should reflect that.
  • Does your web designer create web standards compliant code?
    Designing your website to meet current web standards ensures that your site not only looks good on current web browsers, but will most likely continue to look great on future web browsers too.
  • Will your web designer’s code be search engine friendly?
    Not the same as search engine optimization, but in some ways more important. Search engine friendly code means your website is built in such a way that search engines are able to easily index your site and can determine what it’s about.
  • Will your web designer stand behind the website for the long term?
    Like any piece of software, many problems with a website may not crop up until after you take delivery. Will your web designer continue to provide support for any code they wrote? For how long afterwards? At what cost?

We would be happy to talk with you about these or any other web design related questions, free of charge. We never charge for consultations or just friendly conversation about our industry and what you should expect.

What’s Under Your Hood? A Website Performance Check

use our website performance check to get your website screaming

Your website may look great but how is its performance? A website can be compared to a car in this way, it is important for it to look good but the real test is in its performance, where the rubber meets the road so to speak. If your website is not out there bringing in new business then you’re broken down on the information superhighway.

The problem is that business persons who pay to have a website developed often don’t know how to judge their website’s performance initially beyond its looks. In the long term they will notice if it is not getting new business but even then they are often not sure what specifically is wrong or how to fix it. You need an easy way to give it a website performance check.

If your website is sputtering we recommend a 10 point website performance check of all moving parts. Here’s the rundown of what’s involved.

You should check:

  1. HTML code formatting: Is your basic HTML code broken? If it is this could be holding you back. Clean, standards compliant code will work better in search engines, be easier to maintain and is more likely to look great across a range of browsers and devices.
  2. Download time: Long download times can discourage visitors from viewing your site and can even hurt your search engine performance since Google give preference to the faster loading websites. Remember that mobile devices are often browsing at much lower speeds.
  3. Image optimization: This is related to the last point, but images don’t just need to be the smallest file size possible, they also need to look good, not blurry or pixelated.
  4. Browser compatibility: How does your website look on all the most common web browsers? How about mobile devices? You need to look good to all potential customers.
  5. Web hosting: Your web hosting can have a huge impact on your website’s performance. Is your hosting company’s servers responsive and fast or sluggish and unresponsive?
  6. Keyword density: How frequently do the keywords you hope to compete with show up in your content? This is an important metric to how you will perform in the search engines.
  7. Keyword popularity: While we are on the subject of keywords. Just how popular are the keywords you are using? You should carefully pick the keywords you will use.
  8. Inbound links: More inbound links will help you improve your search engine rank. But be careful, links from low quality or spammy site can hurt your ranking.
  9. Outbound links: Your outbound links are also important, but just like inbound be careful to only link to high-quality websites.
  10. Google PageRank: This is a number between 1 and 10 that represents how important Google thinks a website is. The higher the number, the better you are doing.

Once you have completed this website performance check and got those 10 critical points tuned up, your site will be purring like a kitten and ready to tear up the road.

If you need help, iLab New Media can run your website up on the lift, check it out, and provide you our honest appraisal of what it needs free of charge. You will also get a written report of the results of our tests to keep and bring to your own web guy if you want. No obligation and no hard-sell. Just for your free website performance check.