In order for a website to have a significant value, it has to have a few things. The website’s overall value will be determined  by what is on it. However, there is one thing that must be figured out before you even begin creating the website, and that is its purpose.

A Thought out Purpose

The purpose of a website will vary greatly based upon what you want out of it and what it is for. A good way to find out some basics about this is just by asking yourself who or what this website is for. Is the website for a business? Is it for a library? Is it an entertainment website? You have to shape the website accordingly based on who or what it is for. Sticking with an above example, if the website is for a business, it would be a good idea to have contact information and hours of operation on there as well as what the business actually does. Thinking of the website’s purpose is the foundation for its success.

What Kind of Information Does It Have?

The actual information on the website is the second most important part of a website’s value. The information should always be up to date and complete. You want to make sure that it is either sourced or at the very least verifiable.

An Intelligent Design

A website’s design is important because it is in actuality the website.  The design means that it’s what the user sees on their screen. The design is how they navigate the website. They will search for a piece of information on the website through the design. Every physical interaction that user has with the website will occur via the website’s design. You want a design that isn’t difficult to understand and is easy to manage. Make your design suitable for the purpose of your website. A website for a business wouldn’t have the same design as a website made for entertainment. The best design for a website is very situational. However, a simple design is often a great choice.

Full Potential

If you truly want your website to have a significant value, you’re going to want to make sure that it is doing everything that it is capable of. The easiest way to evaluate this is by asking questions about your website. Think about what users will be coming to your website for. How can you improve their experience when they’re using your website?

Knowing the Limitations

At the same time, websites can sometimes fall victim to trying to do too many things without enough resources behind it. For example, you wouldn’t want to turn a simple informative website on one topic into an encyclopedia.

The underlying theme here is that you want to make sure that you know what you want out of your website. The best way to maximize what is talked about here is by going back through your website on your own after its creation and testing it.

First off, I am very happy to announce our newly designed website!

We launched the site on March 1st, 2013 which I hope you will find much easier to navigate than our previous site along with a more modern look and a feel of being on a tropical beach with white sands and clear blue water.  The message we are trying to convey is that your experience with Cybershore will be creative, innovative, calm, peaceful and fun.  Everything your ISP should be!

Expanded Support

Our new Support section includes how-to videos for setting up your email (for Outlook, iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc.) and how to use the “Plesk Panel” to manage your website and email.  If you have an eCommerce site, there are also many videos describing how to use Magento (our eCommerce solution of choice).

More Plans Offered

We’ve also expanded the number and types of web hosting plans offered.  Our new “Lite” hosting plan costs only $4.16/month.  You can check out all our plans and what they provide by going to our site, selecting the Services menu, then choosing “Web Hosting / eCommerce”.  If you would like to make a switch to your plan, please contact us and we’ll take care of it right away.

New Billing Software

Another important development is our use of a more modern and customer friendly billing system.  Our old billing system served us well for many years, but the software developer went out of business, so we took the opportunity to move to a more modern and well established solution for ISP’s.

More importantly, our new website provides much better access to your account through this new billing software.  Look for the “Customer Login” link at the top of our site to gain access to your account so you can view your plans, make changes, update credit card information, etc.

Note that beginning with the April 1st billing period, your statement (both mailed and emailed) will have a new look which is easier to read.

Here is an example of what your new statement will look like:
Click Image to Enlarge It

Your Ideas & Business Always Appreciated

If you have any suggestions for how we can improve your experience with our site or your account access, please don’t hesitate to contact me.  Your ideas and suggestions are critical for your success and ours as well.  We want to be the ISP you feel good about and recommend to your friends and business associates.  You can contact me via email 24/7/365 at: chris@cshore.com or leave a comment below.

And of course, if we can help you with re-designing your site or creating a new one, please don’t hesitate to contact us.  I am hopeful that when you see what we’ve accomplished with our own site, you will have confidence that we can design an equally impressive site for you.

I also want to take a moment to sincerely thank you for your business.  You have many choices when it comes to your company’s internet needs, and I appreciate that you chose the local web pro’s at Cybershore to help you!

The SURF’S UP at Cybershore!

It is all about traffic. More visitors generally means more money and a blog which receives tens of thousands of visits per day has the potential to make a few thousand dollars per month. Before you can hope to succeed though, you should start optimizing your blog for Google, since this is where most people start when they arrive at your site for the first time.

Make Your Content SEO-Friendly

SEO, or search engine optimization can be difficult, particularly because it is a constantly changing area. A few years ago, Internet marketers talked on and on about things like keyword density, article marketing and completely artificial forms of link building.

Today, with Google’s improved algorithm changes, the lower-quality websites which place a higher emphasis on SEO than quality content have disappeared towards the end of the search results. On the other hand, higher-quality sites have moved towards the front page. Google constantly strives to deliver better quality content in its results and this is exactly why most of the content mills, producing thousands upon thousands of low-quality articles, have simply disappeared in recent years.

In spite of all this, SEO is still important and, done correctly, it can greatly help your site. The first step is to choose the right key phrases. These should be phrases which do not have a lot of competition, yet still receive a decent number of searches per month. You can start by using the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool for your research. Do not rely on it entirely, however. It is also important to actually search for your preferred key phrases on Google Search to see what you’re really up against regarding competition.

Your chosen key phrases should be subtly included in the content on your website. Your site should have some primary key phrases and one or two separate ones for each blog post where appropriate.

 Use SEO Plug-ins and Suitable Themes

WordPress is a highly versatile blogging platform and this is what makes it by far the most popular one out there. You can greatly extend the functionality of your blog through the use of some of the many hundreds of plug-ins available for it. Of these plug-ins, there are a great many which help you to make your blog SEO-friendly. Among the most popular is the All-in-One SEO Pack. This plug-in takes care of a lot of the SEO work for you and allows you to add a Meta title and description and your keywords. Another highly popular SEO plugin is WordPress SEO by Yoast.

As any WordPress blog owner knows, there are literally hundreds of themes available for the platform. Often customizable, these themes allow you to give your website a unique and personalized touch. However, many of them are not very SEO-friendly and will give the search engine crawlers quite a hard time when it comes to analysing and cataloguing your site. Simpler themes tend to be more SEO-friendly, but there are many great SEO-friendly themes out there to choose from. Some of the best, however, can cost a modest fee.

Share Your Content

Another major factor in what makes Google decide which sites to display on the first pages of the search results is social networking. If others enjoy a page on your blog and share it with their friends, then you get a plus point as far as Google is concerned. Whereas in the earlier days of Internet marketing, it was all about link building by placing links to your site on low quality websites, it is now about real people enjoying your content and telling their friends about it.

The first step is to make your content sharable. There are many plug-ins for WordPress which allow you to easily add social networking buttons automatically to every post on your blog. This allows your viewers to share content they like on their favourite social networking site with just one click. It is thanks to this highly effective form of Internet marketing that great content goes viral, receiving countless hits per day.

It is also a good idea to have accounts on major social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook where you can post new updates and links to new articles. This also provides you with a platform where you can interact with your visitors and find out more about them and what they like about your blog. It all counts as valuable market research and towards getting your site better recognized by Google.

There are many mistakes that can cost you both traffic and search engine ranking. Check these ten common faux pas to determine whether your website needs a makeover:

Number One: Your Website is too Slow: The more Flash applications, videos, and high-resolution images you use, the longer your pages will take to load. While your regular visitors might be willing to wait around for a while, most first-timers will run off to a faster-loading website. A sizable number of visitors access the Internet from a slow connection, so you’re automatically preventing them from viewing your pages. Use speed-sucking elements sparingly so that you don’t compromise your website’s accessibility

Number Two: No mobile version: A huge pool of traffic comes from people who are on the go, connecting to the Internet through their smartphones. To them, your regular website looks like a bulky, hard-to-navigate page that takes ages to load. Make their life easier –and your website better– by creating a mobile version

Number Three: Awkward Color Combinations: When it comes to web design, some colors just don’t match. It’s not because they don’t look good together; it’s just that they make your content practically illegible. For example, red and black may look great on a piece of clothing, but trying to read a red typeface against a black background is a completely different story.

Number Four Over-optimization: If you’ve done everything you can to please search engines but totally forgot about your readers, you’ve got the wrong mindset. Your visitors don’t care for huge chunks of white-on-white text, or sentences that look like endless strings of keywords. They just want to find the information they’re looking for. Use SEO wisely

Number Five Low-Quality Content: There is no bigger asset for a website than original, useful, and engaging content. You’ve heard it a million times before, so you’d better believe it. Low-quality content can not only ruin your search engine rankings, but also drive your readers away for good. Create content that your visitors will love to read –and share.

Number Six Too Cluttered: If it takes your visitors more than a few seconds to find what they’re looking for, your website is probably on the wrong track. Search bars, drop-down menus and other organizational tools can be extremely useful, but you really need to get rid of the junk first. A site that consists of heaps and heaps of unnecessary information, ads, links, and other irrelevant content can be a huge turn-off for your visitors. Keep it neat and user-friendly.

Number Seven Too Much Marketing Hype: Refrain from making unrealistic claims on your site, and avoid using hype words like “unique”, “awesome”, or “the best”. Unless you have tangible proof that your product or service actually is the best on the market, don’t toot your own horn. Instead, let the customers be your judge.

Number Eight Too much advertising: There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make some money out of your website. However, flooding your website with pop-ups, pop-unders, in-text links, banners, apps, and all kinds of advertising material can be seizure-inducing to your visitors. Don’t get greedy; keep the amount of ads you display per page reasonable, and make sure they don’t interfere with your content.

Number Nine: No clear call to action: If you want your readers to sign up for your newsletter, make a donation, or buy your products, you’ll have to be clear about it. Don’t expect them to guess, or figure things out on their own. Your call to action is the direction you give to your visitors as to what they should do next –and it works like a charm!

Number Ten: Mandatory Registration: Few things are more annoying in the online world than a website that asks you to give up your personal information before you can even take a peek at its content. The moment you ask a visitor to enter his email address, he knows that he will be bombarded with promotional material. Instead, let him see what your site is about, and kindly invite him to sign up

If you find that your website suffers from more than a couple of these mistakes, you’re probably in dire need of a revamp. Make your site as functional and user-friendly as possible, and the traffic will follow.