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See how discouraging such a website can be? How about, when your viewers are convinced by your winning text that they want your products or services, there is a phone number to call at the bottom of the very page upon which they are gazing? Voilé! Sales conversion!
Easy Peasy
Creating a website yourslef can be easy and can save you money. Wordpress is the most common platform. It is overlaid with a Theme in which you create your website. There are hundreds of Wordpress Themes; many of them are plug and play. They have layouts already formed and all you do is enter text. I recommend subscribing to Elegant Themes. For $87 you get access to thousands of great Themes, including the Divi Theme, which I use. It is the most versatile Theme I have come across. They have plenty of preformatted Themes, too.
Your site host loads Wordpress and your chosen theme on their end, and gives you a username and password to log onto your Wordpress dashboard for your site, which contains your Theme and all the user friendly controls you need to create, change, and maintain your website, as well as see your changes instantly on your website. You don’t need to know code to use these Themes.
If you do not wish to create and run your own website, and you cannot afford to pay a professional to create one for you, manifest a friend or acquaintance who can set one up for you and show you how to make changes and updates. Once you have been shown how, it is amazingly easy to do, even if you are not the least bit tech savvy.
The most important thing to remember is to keep your site up- to-date. If it is obvious you have not changed anything on the site in two years, folks visiting your site will wonder if you have wandered off or if you are still in business, or if you care. If the last event you listed is in 2012, it will seem as though you are currently not doing anything or not in business.
My Eyes Are Bleeding!
It is my very considered, wise, and vigorously defended position that the default font for Wordpress websites, (the standard website format), is too small. Many website creators just use the default font size, and even the default font, which is usually serif, a more difficult font to read then a sans-serif font.
To add insult to eye injury, many websites place this tiny font on dark backgrounds, which makes the text doubly hard to read.
But many folks who make their own websites in Wordpress don’t use a Theme overlay that has a function for changing text size, either by page or throughout the entire site. I ran up against this problem when creating the websites for Waves of Change and for The Wave, even though I was using a very flexible Theme. So I did some research and found a piece of HTML that allows me to change the font size throughout the website:
p {font-size: 150%;}
(100% indicates the original font size, 150% is 50% larger then the
original font size. You can change that number to any percentage you please.)
Don’t panic or look away, those of you who do not understand HTML and don’t want to learn any code. I am on that ship with you! I don’t like to try to figure out code, either. But this little gem is really easy to use. Search through your theme dashboard until you find the CSS Style Sheet, and place it there. (Or give it to your web guru to place.) On my Theme, Divi, there is a box in the Theme Options panel labeled “Custom CSS”, which is the CSS Style Sheet.
Here are some other quick does and don’ts:
Do keep it simple. Leave the fancy schmancy websites for those who can afford to have a professional create the site. When you get fancy, and you don’t have experience creating fancy effects, so much can go wrong. Then sites lock up, pages don’t open, and you drive clients away.
Don’t use dark background colors. Even when you use white text, it makes text very hard to read. Don’t make your customers and clients work to read your text. They won’t. They’ll just move on.
Do keep your pages clean and neat. Crowding your site with lots of thingies and widgets and boxes full of text, harsh colors, and screaming headlines makes your site look cheap and hucksterish. It won’t attract the kind of attention your want and folks won’t read a site crammed with boxes of text. They won’t click on a bunch
of disorganized icons, either. They will be overwhelmed and confused and . . . you guessed it . . . move on.
Do make sure that everything you post is spell-checked and that your grammar and punctuation are correct. Many website programs automatically remove the double space between sentences when you cut and paste text. Be sure to go over the text to add back the double spaces. This is correct punctuation and it makes blocks of text much easier to read and comprehend when sentences are separated correctly with double spaces.
Correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation lends the impression of intelligence and care. Incorrect spelling, grammar and punctuation can caste an air of carelessness over your entire site, your services and products. Trust is essential to growing and maintaining the relationship between you and your clients and customers. A site that looks carelessly put together takes a serious bite out of that trust.
I hope you find these tips helpful. I invite you to email me at wehearyou@woctoheal.com if you have questions about website construction.
Next time: Search Engine Optimization. Now that you have created a beautiful, easy-to-read, easy-to-navigate website, make it easy to find.
July/August 2015
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