₦airaland Forum

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Nowadays, it takes more than just having a business website to keep your website relevant and attract the necessary traffic volume to scale your business. There are some practices you will need to make and it starts from the beginning of your website. Below I have listed a few of these practices and I invite you to read and practice them in order to keep your website relevant in today’s ever competitive digital world.

Purchase secure, scalable website hosting with good tech support

A website host (or sometimes referred to as a website hosting provider) is a company that offers the technology and services necessary for a website to be viewed on the internet. You connect your domain name to your hosting provider so that when users visit your website address, they are shown your website that you store on your hosting account.

Here are some guidelines for choosing a good website hosting plan:

Although you can get a “shared server” hosting plan for as little as $2 per month, I would typically advise against this. Shared hosting means you are sharing a server and its resources with other customers, which can make the performance of your site suffer. Also, if one of the other websites on your shared server is hacked, it is possible for your website to also be infected.

A “dedicated server” hosting plan is the most expensive option—cost can range from around $100 to $2,000 per month—but it would make your website perform the most optimally. Having a dedicated server plan means that the physical server machine is entirely dedicated to your site; therefore, all the resources are yours and it is more secure than a shared hosting plan, as long as the technology is optimal. However, it is much more expensive than what most small businesses usually are willing to pay. Once you have a very high-performing site, this may be what you need, but it is overkill for most early stage and small businesses.

The compromise I typically recommend is a “virtual private server” (VPS) hosting plan which offers the best of both worlds. The cost ranges from around $20 to $50 per month, which is affordable for the hosting services you will receive. A VPS is one machine that is partitioned to act as multiple machines, which gives it a similar affordability to shared hosting, with similar security and performance potential as a dedicated server hosting plan.

Make sure your hosting company has phone and/or chat support so you can be helped quickly if you have a problem. Email support can often take too long and become frustrating when a problem needs to be resolved immediately. Phone support is best, but chatting works as well, too.

Check to see what kind of server security is in place on the server you are considering. You will want to be able to access your server via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). There should be daily backups being made of your server contents. There should also be an easy, one or two-click method to install Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. Make sure the hosting company performs regular security maintenance. Ideally your hosting company has a published security protocol you can review so you know how they keep their servers safe.

Some popular website hosting companies include: GoDaddy, DreamHost, Bluehost, InMotion, SiteGround.


Choose a good e-commerce platform

If you sell a product, it’s important that you have an e-commerce website. Today, a tremendous amount of shopping is done online. Not having an ecommerce website is shutting out almost half of your potential customers and seriously hurting your business due to the increase of online shopping options that are being made available to your customers by your competitors. If you decide to allow users to financially transact with you online, you will need to choose the right platform for your business model.

Here are some popular small business e-commerce platforms:

WooCommerce: WooCommerce is one of the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms—it can turn your WordPress website into an online store. Like WordPress, there are many plugins available, and it attaches to WordPress, which makes it extremely flexible. There are many free and premium themes pre-built for WooCommerce. (As a rule, it is better to use a premium theme from a reputable developer because it will offer better security and support.) If you are not tech-savvy, you will most likely need a WordPress developer to help you set it up and use it. WooCommerce also offers a very high amount of capabilities and scalability that your small business might need.

Shopify: Shopify is a cloud based e-commerce platform that allows you to create and customize an online store, and to manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping. It is not a WordPress extension like WooCommerce—it is a standalone platform that is hosted on the Shopify server—so if you have a main website, your e-commerce site would technically be separate from that. You can link to your Shopify account from your regular website built with WordPress, Drupal, Wix, etc., unless your main website has a Shopify integration plugin. Features include unlimited products, unlimited bandwidth, fraud analysis, discount codes, reports, and much more. The key benefits of Shopify are that you do not need a developer to set up a store, and everything on the backend is already set up for you when you subscribe. The downside is you do not have as much control or flexibility over your store as you would with WooCommerce.

Shopify Plus: Shopify Plus is Shopify, but with a higher level of customization, more staff accounts, and international e-commerce options. It also has a higher level of support. However, all of this obviously comes with a higher subscription cost, and it still does not have all the flexibility and customization abilities as WooCommerce.

Business Squarespace: Squarespace has an e-commerce subscription option, so if you chose Squarespace to build your site and have very simple e-commerce needs, you can choose this route. Business Squarespace charges a transaction fee, but this can be bypassed by upgrading your subscription to a basic online store. It includes a free domain, SSL security, SEO, abandoned cart recovery, discounts, real-time carrier shipping, and more. However, it has been noted it is not as user-friendly as Shopify. And like Shopify, it is simply not as flexible as WooCommerce.

Wix: Wix actually has a Shopify extension which is very user friendly. You will have to upgrade your Wix account and subscribe to Shopify in order to use it.

GoDaddy Online Store: GoDaddy has a relatively new e-commerce standalone subscription platform that is relatively easy to set up and use. Very little technical knowledge is required to launch your shop with GoDaddy Online Store. The templates are simple and clean, and somewhat customizable. Features include marketing and SEO tools, social media integration, appointment booking, SSL security, rapid page loading, and more.

 
Create an interesting, memorable, and engaging website user interface
Make sure your small business website interface leaves a positive impression that drives results. You can do so by implementing the following suggestions:
1. Use beautiful graphics and easy-to-read fonts.
2. Make sure your graphics are compressed and optimized for fast loading. If your website is slow, search engines like Google will penalize your ranking.
3. Research the competition to see how they have designed and optimized their websites; implement similar components that will work for your small business website.
4. Research your target audience to see what they want from your site and make it easy for them to accomplish it.
5. Stay consistently on brand throughout your website design.
6. Design an intuitive navigation system which allows users to get to the pages they need quickly.
7. Publish easily accessible contact information.
8. Incorporate obvious call-to-actions (especially “buy now” buttons).
9. Create pages that are standard for small business websites, such as:
Home
About us
Products/Services (with descriptions and visually appealing images)
Sitemap (for SEO purposes)
Management team
Contact us
Terms of use (the online contract governing how users can use your site)
Privacy policy
Additional pages relevant to your specific small business


Prominently display a clear description of your business
It is important to let people know who you are and what you do right away so they don’t feel confused when they visit your small business website. Make sure your main homepage banner (also known as a “hero image”) and subsequent banners are visual representations of your services, and also that you have an introductory text blurb near the top of the page that describes who you are and what you do.

Additionally, make sure both your main and footer navigation menus have "About Us" page links easily accessible so people can click them and read more about your business in depth.


Optimize your small business website for search engines
SEO is a set of practices you apply to your website to ensure search engines index and rank your website appropriately and then show it to search engine users. Once your website is “crawled” by search engines, it competes with websites that have similar content. The better your website design and content is, the higher your site will show up on search engine result pages.


SEO mainly includes the following practices:
Keyword research and implementation
Optimal website code
Fast loading speed
Being secure and having an SSL certificate installed; SSL is the standard security technology that ensures data passed between web servers and browsers remains private
Having a mobile-friendly site
Existence of high-quality backlinks (links on external websites with related content) that lead to your site
Having lots of positive reviews online (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.)
Using internal links throughout your site to keep people clicking and reading
Using social media to link to your site (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.)

SEO is an extremely important ongoing process that can mean the difference between showing up on the first page of search engine results pages (resulting in large amounts of free traffic to your website) or page 300 (resulting in no traffic).


Regularly create and publish quality content
Both content quantity and freshness are important to search engines, so it’s important that you create a plan to publish quality articles and/or blog posts on your site and on external sites that link to your site. If you want to rank highly in search engine results and encourage people to return to your site again and again, you will have to update your website with new and relevant content as frequently as possible.

In addition to static page content and articles, a great form of content to post on your website is testimonials. Asking for testimonials from your customers and then publishing them on your website is a great way to post fresh, high-quality content on your site that makes your small business more attractive.

Make sure your content uses an appropriate, on-brand tone that people will enjoy reading.


Install webmaster tools
Make use of vital data to help you analyze traffic and site performance by installing Google Analytics and Google Search Console (both preferably via Google Tag Manager), and Bing Webmaster Tools. These tools can be used to track the following types of information:
Daily, weekly, and monthly visitors to your site
Number of views on each page of your site
“Bounce rate”—the percentage of users who come to your site and leave after having only viewed one page (Google algorithms give higher rankings to websites that have a low bounce rate, on the theory that visitors are spending more time on the site and find it valuable.)
Average time spent on site by visitors
Crawl errors on your site (errors that the search engines found on your site in crawling its content)
Broken links on the site
Keywords that lead users to your site
Backlinks to your site
Web page download time
Other information that can help you enhance your SEO


Implement a website maintenance plan
A website shouldn’t be created and then allowed to grow stale. In order to have a successful website that ranks well in search engines and doesn't get hacked, you need to make sure it is properly maintained.

Here are some tips to create a small business website maintenance plan:
Check Webmaster Tools data at least once a month and have any vital errors emailed to you in real time.
Use traffic data to learn more about your audience so you can better cater to them.
Use performance data to optimize and fix warnings and errors.
Make sure all software is always up to date.
Run security scans so you know your website is clean of malware and hasn’t been hacked.
Use “split testing” to see if certain variations of your website help performance; for example, if you are selling a product, you might have two versions of a particular landing page with different images and wording—the split testing allows you to see which version has a higher conversion rate.
Follow my advice about SEO (see point #7), and continually publish quality content (see point #.
Find on-trend and effective ways to market your business online.
Allow website users to provide you with feedback about your site.
Continue to check out your competition from time to time to see what they are doing with their online presence and see if what they’ve done can work for you as well.
Make sure your website is backed up in multiple ways at least once a day and at least 10 days back.


Have an Effective Overall Digital Marketing Strategy
Focusing time and effort on an effective digital marketing strategy is one of the main keys to digital success. Rather than throwing ideas at a wall and seeing if any of them stick, it’s crucial that you develop a strategy that is designed to help you meet your specific business goals. You need to have a plan for how you will get your content, your brand and your message out to the world. And you need to be able to adapt this plan to changes in the marketplace.

Making changes to your website and your digital strategy can have a huge impact on your success. For example, in 2012, Coca-Cola launched “Coca-Cola Unbottled,” a company blog. The website underwent several changes in design, content and focus over the next several months. After making changes and looking at the data, Coke used this data to determine what other changes are necessary to the design of the site. These changes resulted in a 106% increase in page views and a 1,247% increase in “Unbottled” home page visits. This shows how having a sound digital strategy and regularly monitoring how this strategy is performing can positively impact your business.

It’s also crucial that your website is designed in a way that helps funnel your users towards a purchasing decision. By directing visitors to a purchasing decision, you make it easier for them to buy from you. Not only does this increase sales, it also improves a user’s experience with your website and therefor will increase the likelihood of them shopping with you again and referring their friends and family to your site and product. The less hoops that someone has to go through to buy from you will directly translate into more revenue for your business.


Conclusion: An effective digital strategy and website strategy is necessary to stay relevant in todays ever evolving digital era. You can read similar articles on growing your business online via https://drag.com.ng/blog-2/

Any season

charlsecy:
Do they work during dry season?

I started smoking weed at 16yrs too(2009). I was in 100Lvl. I've quit now but it took 10 years to beat the addiction, I didn't even consider it as an addiction until it got tiring for me to continue smoking weed(physically & mentally). My mum cried n was upset when she discovered. Your brothers case is not so different. He will probably continue smoking week for another 10+years too, studies show that people who start smoking in their teens find it hardest to stop. Hopefully your brother is brilliant, then he shouldn't have a problem living a normal life. Weed did not affect my studies, growth or personal life.
Do you know that Marijuana is safer than alcohol? You should be more worried if he's drinking heavily.
As time goes by all of una cry and worry will fade away. When he realizes the need to stop, he'll stop but the conviction has to come from within his heart. I hope this is helpful?

Guest2008:
How Can I Help My Brother Out Of This Mess

Good afternoon nairalanders. As I'm typing this, my mum is not herself and she's been crying since morning because she caught my younger one smoking in his room..

He locked himself in the room for a very long time and my mum decided to go check on him. After a while, he sprayed his room and opened the door.

The room was filled with this hard drug smell, she called me and we decided to check the room even though he denied ever smoking.. We saw a light brown paper that he probably tears from, a nylon containing something like sand and a lighter behind the toilet seat. Despite all this, he still denied it claiming the smell is probably from the next compound.
My brother just clocked 16 and he's in SS2..

How can I advise and help him stop because I believe he was actually smoking even though he denied it?

Yes, but it's nothing spiritual. It's physics. The most widely used weather-modification technique is probably cloud seeding, which involves priming clouds with particles of silver iodide. There are several techniques to make it rain. I mean several.

Gretcodez:
do you believe in Rainmakers ?

Better keep quiet & delete your account

djflexcy:
I hate when foolish people mention me, you just displayed your stupidity, were you among those arrested? Did I mention your name. In whatever you do get sense bro says the good book.
Shalom

Mumu! How does crystal meth fit this story? You just want to talk.

djflexcy:
When meth comes into play, you feel so fly then leave your family and friends heartbroken from the CRASH caused by recklessness

N22 million wey dey don spend finish, na Christmas season we dey o.

Ronald is the only the person that will take family photo wearing only boxers, all him family go wear cloth. Last last 7 million people will still like the picture, me included.

I've been suspecting Mexican are migrating here and running their underground drug cartels here. I'm too sure now.

What's the name of the school?

Because it is

Daddyvibez:
Why does this sound funny and crazyy at the same time

An FBI go solve this case las las

Bro you can go ahead with uni & still be learning blockchain together, you have lots of time. Don't be a blockhead

It's easy to close your eyes to the truth & say it doesn't exist. But this is real & know that evil thrives when good men choose to do nothing. Stay woke

JavaScript90:
lol. the name alone is funny. how can water have seed?
OK I have read the article and it is not coming from any reputable source or expert, this report can be best described as trash or propaganda because addiction to this drug is not an 'Igbo' thing but rather a general menace of drug abuse among Nigerian youths

It's everywhere in Nigeria, I've been to the north, I'm from the east, & I live in the south. I've come across it everywhere. Very easy to access

Moneyboyz:
I thought this drug is mostly available in the USA, I don't use drugs but I know guys here take weed and shit all the time but I've never seen anyone talk about meth, never heard of it here in the south.

Meth is cheap and easy to get addicted to. Many homeless people in USA are addicted to this Shit cause it's cheap and everywhere. They would rather live homeless and take some meth to feel high than Have a roof over their heads.

Its not easy bro, I retired gfrom mtn in dec 2016, I was 22yrs then, but I've always been entrepreneurial. It wasn't easy cuz I had a drug addiction problem when I resigned. But now I'm off that & confident. Now I own a web design & creative agency, on the side I trade forex and invest in bitcoin. So I think I've found my way & I'm earning pretty well despite the increasing price of things. This isn't denial, because i acknowledge prices of things are increasing at a scary rate but u think I'll be alright.

Denvacandy:
Was just randomly thinking how people that are jobless are surviving in this country with the increase in price of things.

I earn roughly 100-130k monthly and i can say its not being easy, spending money on food, data and unkeep.


So i really need to know how people who are jobless are coping in this country, people that have no source of income.

They debiting your card, so cancel your existing cards then get 2 new cards, 1 for ATM/POS, the 2nd is for online payment. And be careful

Opexzy:
I will keep this as short as possible.

Three days ago I got a debit alert of 2700 naira from no where on my access bank account. I quickly moved the rest of my money into the other access bank account. I looked at the transaction description but I couldn't make any sense of it, so I let it slide... Since the card will expire this month.

Fast forward to today. I wanted to withdraw some cash, I have so many bank accounts but only this account has an atm card, so i would always move the amount I want to spend to this account. To my greatest surprise, I found out that this account has been thrown into negative with a deficit of over 3500 naira... How is this even possible... I checked my transaction history and I realised that I have like three different debit transactions today alone, I didn't even get an alert. Is Access Bank whining me or what? I don't even know where this debit transactions are coming from.

Bellow are the screenshots from my Access more mobile app. Please can anyone explain what's going on here.

The first image was the first debit alert I received.
The second one is my negative balance and the debit transaction from unknown sources.

Authority1o1:
Okay...


You've been warned. So the next time you want to buy frozen chicken, ask your supplier if it was smuggled. If he answers in the affirmative, relay what NAFDAC has advised to your supplier. Then leave his shop. Very wise NAFDAC.

Also, since Formalin is hazardous to us, before buying we should be sure to turn those frozen chicken over to see a tag that says 'Smuggled. Please do not consume. Contains Formalin'. Once you spot this tag, be responsible enough to walk out of that supplier's shop. Your health is priceless.

It's just like my bank telling me to inspect the cash they've given to me, because people have been depositing counterfeit money to them.

CR7 na GOAT too, the no.7 na just stew on top the asun

Afokesco:
Wearing a particular Number doesn't make you a good footballer ..you can wear any number....who don Sabi don sabi...Messi no dey reason number....Messi na humble player

Yeah right. Go listen to CLB

Bitchiamjay:
Kanye West ft Playboi Carti | Junya.

The beat on this one hits different. Drake must be wishing he made this song. Ye is Goated.

Drake - CLB

You be cruise, na 3rd class n dropouts get farming solely

Kriss216:
There's nothing wrong being a farmer. Farming is not solely for 3rd class or drop outs.



Congratulations to him, though. More grace.

Everything is wrong when you own a 1st class degree in Mathematics

Kriss216:
There's nothing wrong being a farmer. Farming is not solely for 3rd class or drop outs.



Congratulations to him, though. More grace.

I remember going to cyber cafes as a young boy to browse the internet and I’ll spend long hours there; really because my Aunty owned the place. The experience I had each time I was in the café was thrilling and exciting, although many of the websites took time to load and the videos always buffered because the internet speed wasn’t 3G or 4G. This was around year 2000.

A lot has changed between then and now. Websites are now responsive and accessible with smartphones. Network service providers are providing 4G services and experimenting with 5G. Creating a website nowadays is much less complicated than it was a decade ago; platforms like Wix and WordPress make it easy for people to create beautiful and functional websites for their business within a short period of time.

To help you figure out the website optimization game, take the time to learn some of these mind-blowing facts about your website speed. Each provides insight into subtle changes that you could make to improve your website.

1. The average attention span has decreased from 12 to 8 seconds
A goldfish, at 9 seconds, has a longer attention span than the average internet user. You must deliver the content to the audience in the shortest amount of time possible. Otherwise, you risk having a high bounce rate and the potential customer leaving to get what they need elsewhere.

2. Only 0.5 seconds is required to form an opinion
Once the website has loaded, the average user will take half a second to make up their mind on certain aspects of the website. Therefore, you must make a good first impression. The use of images, background theme, and content layout must be in line with the expectations of your average user.

3. 47% of users expect websites to load within 2 seconds
Pay attention to website loading speeds – they must be under 2 seconds. Otherwise you run the risk of frustrating some of your website visitors. Most people would rather use your competitor than stick around for slow loading speeds.

4. There has been a 14% increase in the average connection speed
This means you can get away with webpages that use up more bandwidth without decreasing in the loading speed. It somewhat frees up your creativity, as fewer restrictions are imposed on how many elements you can have per page.

To conclude, you want your website to be as fast as possible. How fast the content on your website loads will have an impact on your rankings and user interactions with your site. This is why you need to ensure that your website is moving as quickly as possible, at all times for optimal search results and user experience. Do you have any website optimization facts that’s mind blowing? then share in the comment.

Read full article here https://drag.com.ng/4-mind-blowing-facts-about-the-speed-of-your-website/

Hiss

redcliff:
the will power to succeed embedded in the DNA of his tribe got him the merit to get there.

They intended to sell a seat on the shuttle for $50m until they gave it to the old lady n teenager for free. Remove Obi cubana & Otedola from your list, only Dangote can comfortably afford to take a trip to space right now. There are levels to this.

castrokins:
When Are Obi Cubana, Dangote And Ote$ Going?

They intended to sell a seat on the shuttle for $50m until they gave it to the old lady n teenager for free. Remove Obi cubana & Otedola from your list, only Dangote can comfortably afford to take a trip to space right now

Princeton92:
Impressively good... What's next?

many are called but few are chosen.

rittanie:
I thought been a pastor is a calling..imagine them sack your calling.

Rollace Hotels, I don't know why they calling it Rolex

pinkgoodies:
He doesn't own Rolex Hotel. The hotel is owned by Emeka Otigba.

She belongs to the streets

Why person go do ritual? Smh

SaintAY:
why people no go do ritual, smh