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5 Shocking reasons why every business needs a website

In this 21st century, it is unrealistic to run a business effectively without a website. With the advent of the internet, not being ‘Tech savvy’ or ‘Lack of funds’ or even ‘I don’t have enough time’ is no longer an excuse for not getting a professional website for your business. Not having a website is actually costing you a fortune financially including your time and energy.

This is a bit of statistics that might give an insight to how important a website is to you, 81% of people research a business or service on the internet prior to making a purchase decision. That’s 25.92 million people searching for businesses online. Yet a huge percentage of business owners listed on business directories like vconnect don’t see the need for a website. We’re not statisticians, but we can see that there’s a glaring disconnect here.

Still unsure if your business needs a website? Keep reading

A Website attracts new customers which in turn generates more income for your Business

An insight to the statistics of 81% of prospects researching your business before making a purchase online is that people check your website an average of 5 times before buying from you. If you don’t have a website, you are losing money on the table.

Your website can be available 24/7/365 even when you’re not. A website acts as your “always-on” business advocate during and outside of office hours.

A Website builds instant trust for your business and service

First impressions count, and websites allow you to make a very strong impression with a well-designed introduction for your business.

A website can help showcase your expertise and better position your business to the customers you want. A website can be your number one tool for standing out in a crowd.

A Website is not as expensive as you think

The initial fear of starting your website development process is totally unnecessary. Most web hosting companies like ducehost also offer web design as an added service for clients. This makes your signup process quick and painless.

A Website offers a better return on investment than any other form of advertising. If you’re planning to market your business, a website should be your first priority.

Over time the relatively low investment of getting a business website will payoff for your company by driving you new customers and building your brand.

A Website keeps you in control of your Brand

Do you know that you can be reviewed as a business with your website? Sometimes unknowingly and/or negatively. How does this affect you? 79% of users who read online reviews believe them and this in turn influences the brand.

A website shapes the perception of your business in a way that social media channels cannot provide. Having a website helps you position yourself in the market to get the exact type of customers you’re looking for

A Website will save you time

Whether you’re trading emails, taking calls, or sending out proposals – communicating with potential customers takes time. Your website can save you that time by providing answers to common customer questions and inquiries. What does this mean for you? You can spend your time doing more valuable things.

There’s a very small and inexpensive barrier to entry, and there is a massive opportunity to help grow your business.

If you’re going to do one thing today to help your business be more successful, it’s to make getting a website your top priority.

It’s easy to be a better business. Get a website.

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5 things we must know before building your website

Your website is the foundation of your internet existence. It is the bridge that connects your great products and services to the online community that is your market and audience. In today’s world, it is almost impossible for a business to succeed without a firm web presence.

Even if you already have a website, reviewing these points may shine a light on that one thing you overlooked. Use this guide as your resource to make the process of creating your own website a whole lot easier.

Establish the aim of your website

It’s always important to ask crucial questions about why you’re building the website. Is the aim of your site to inform people that your business exists and encourage them to get in touch? Is it to sell your products online? Or how about to showcase your creative work? Having a clear focus will help you as well as your visitors.

 Know your target market

Make sure you clarify this early on as it will affect your theme, design, content, usability, networking efforts and search engine optimization. In short, everything revolves around your target market.

Choose your domain name wisely

Pick something that’s short, easy to remember, and reflects the nature of your site. It’s not easy to change it at a later date, so now’s the time to get it right. Of course, if your site is for your business, then it only follows that your domain name to it.

Be informed about SEO

Search Engine Optimization is going to play a big part in attracting people to your website. As well as incorporating keywords or search terms that your audience is likely to be typing into Google, you need to provide the search engines with a succinct explanation of what those visitors will find when they get there. In the meantime, Google Adwords is a great tool for researching keywords in your subject area.

Set yourself a deadline

Web design can take more time if you don’t manage your time properly. Set yourself daily or weekly targets of having certain areas of your site done – this way you won’t get tired and frustrated doing too much at once. It is important you build a process that is efficient enough to bring results. If you can answer the first question of establishing the aim of your website, it will provide you with knowledge on what functions you want for the website.

Planning out your content on your website gives you an edge of optimizing the features of your website for your prospective clients. Important questions to ask are how do you want your customers to feel when they come to your website (i.e. User Experience). Another important question to ask is, how easy will it be for users to navigate your website (i.e. User Interface)

Designing a website is more than having a lot of functions, you always want your customers to come back and engage with your website. Planning how your site looks, along with the features will make you reach your target audience at a faster rate and in turn improve on your Sales or leads or any other form of Data you will want.

You still have a chance of getting your website up and running with our team at ducehost. We offer planning strategies that make your website a sales machine for your business. This includes us knowing who your ideal customers, what they like, who they are etc. Which all become data in building your website.

You’re also more than welcome to contact the design experts at Ducehost on Instagram to get a free, completely customized quote about making your site with high performance and Responsive!Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram at Ducehost.

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How does responsive design help your website?

You may have heard the phrase ‘responsive web design’ thrown around a lot over the last few years. If you are unsure whether or not your business should be implementing a responsive design to your site, learning a bit more about it might help you with your answer!

Responsive design can help you solve a lot of problems for your website. It will make your site mobile-friendly, improve the way it looks on devices with both large and small screens, and increase the amount of time that visitors spend on your site. It can also help you improve your rankings in search engines.

The ultimate goal of responsive design is to avoid the unnecessary resizing, scrolling, zooming, or panning that occurs with sites that have not been optimized for different devices. It is often very difficult to navigate these sites, and it may even cost you potential customers who become frustrated with trying to figure out how to do something.

Responsive website stats suggest that it’s wise to appeal to both desktop and mobile viewers. The number of mobile viewers now outnumbers desktop, and this number will only continue to rise as global smartphone accessibility increases.

Here are some of the major benefits you get when your website is responsive

  • Cost effectiveness
  • Flexibility
  • Improved user experience
  • Search engine optimization gains

Cost Effectiveness

If you had the idea of creating a website for your desktop audience without your mobile audience in mind, please drop it. Majority of users would view your site on their mobile especially if you offer ecommerce services. Your can reach your sales goals when your site appeals to all your users on all devices.

Flexibility

When you have a website with responsive design, you can make changes quickly and easily. You do not need to worry about making changes on two websites. This flexibility is a huge advantage when you just want to make a quick design tweak or fix a typo on your site—you only have to do it once.

Improved user experience

User experience is crucial to website owners. You want people to enjoy using your site, and you want it to be easy to use which in turn makes it easy for you to convince them to come back. If someone visits your website on a mobile device, and it takes forever to load or your pictures do not have the proper resolution, it can make your company appear very unprofessional.

Being unprofessional with your site design will in turn affect how your customers perceive your brand. Having a responsive site will make it easy for visitors to trust your brand and engage with your content online.

Search engine optimization gains

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a strategy used by many companies to help boost themselves in Google’s search page rankings. The closer you are to the top, the better the chance potential customers will find you.

Responsive design can help with SEO because Google gives preference to websites that are mobile-friendly. In combination with other SEO factors, responsiveness can help give you a big boost in search engine results.

If responsive website success stories don’t convince you to make the change to this way of designing, then let the cost and time savings convince you. Responsive design is an important part of any modern web strategy—and it should be part of yours, too.

If you’re ready to invest in a responsive website, check out our responsive design page and our web domain and hosting platform to learn more about how much a new design will cost, as well as some other additional benefits we didn’t cover in this article. You’re also more than welcome to contact the design experts at Ducehost on Instagram to get a free, completely customized quote about making your site with high performance and Responsive!

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WHY ISN’T ANYONE VISITING YOUR WEBSITE?

When you open up your website’s analytics and see that no one is even visiting your website, how does it make you feel, pretty disheartening, right? It’s a moment when you may feel you’ve wasted your time. All the time, energy, and money you’ve invested into your website has had no impact.

The fact is, there are a lot of people online who want to connect with you and want to visit your website. They are online, researching solutions, and yes they want your services. The issue is not with a lack of people but the lack of a direction to you

Here are 5 Reasons why Businesses aren’t visiting your website

You’re missing on Social Media

Most businesses focus on building a website to make money and return on investment. They fail to build a corresponding online presence on social media. Your online community is the force you need to drive traffic to your website. If you can be found on social media, you can be found on your website

You’re not exploring Backlinks

Backlinks are simply links that link back to your website. They are good for both search engines and humans too. A great strategy to getting quality backlinks is guest posting, writing a column, getting featured in the media, or having such awesome and compelling content that everyone links to it.

Your site loads slowly

Statistics shows people will wait 7 seconds for sites to load before they hit the back button. Not only that, various studies show that website visitors are more likely to return to websites that load fast. That been said, it is very important to say that as a website or business owner, you are constantly optimizing your page speed and looking for ways to improve your page speed. The faster it loads, the more prospects you’re likely to retain.

Your website isn’t mobile friendly

Responsive website design is vital. One of the great features of a responsive website is that it can be optimized for speed. 

With the rise of mobile use, your website needs to support them. Google ranks mobile sites higher in mobile search results. This means you could really be missing out.

Search engines aren’t indexing your site

You don’t need to invest buckets of money into Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but you do need to have a website that is, at the very least, technically visible to search engines. On top of that, if you can do further on page, off page, and local search engine optimization, it can certainly help you get found based on searcher’s queries.

Making more awareness of your business online and what you do will take time. There’s no shortcut to building online relationships and getting known but once you’ve really reached out and connected, you’ll have solid and diverse traffic sources for your website.

And some of it is strategy and technical too. Getting backlinks, SEO, proper design, and having a website that is mobile friendly will all play a part in increasing traffic too.

What do you think of this list? Can you see where your website might be improved? As always, We’d love to know your thoughts. You can learn more about us or follow us on instagram. Would love to hear from you.