Does your business need an official website or does your brand’s social media presence seem like it’s enough? Now, that’s actually a great question that people ask us more often than you’d imagine – “official website vs social media profile“, what does your business really need?

For businesses, social media has made it easy to communicate their brand’s message to the right people at the right time. With an effective strategy, they could even get their brand to stick out to their audience well enough for them to be interested. There are many other benefits to be had from using social media – if done the right way.

Creating a branded page on social media is quick and easy. The best part of it is that it’s all for free. All you need after setting up your page is an effective strategy to get noticed by the people and get them to interact with you online. Now, why would you want to build a website that will require you to spend money on a domain name, hosting, web designers fees, SEO, updates and maintenance, when you could just set-up a social media profile for your business?

The Benefits of Social Media for Small Businesses

Faster and Easier Communication

Something businesses have strived to achieve for a long time – real-time interaction. Customers can contact a customer service representative faster and easier. Businesses can also receive reviews, respond to product or service enquiries, and attend to customers’ grievances in real-time. Depending on the industry and the issue, challenges may still arise, but the line of communication that once was challenging to establish is no longer nearly as difficult to do so.

Branding

The impression a brand gives off and the reputation it may have established can be greatly enhanced and showcased through your branded page and the posts you make. Social media allows businesses to publish content that matters to their target audience. This helps a lot in training their customers to keep their brand at the top of their mind whenever those important buying decisions need to happen.

As a social media marketer, I create content that aims to show off a brand culture and brand personality in order to stand out among the rest for the traits that make our brand different. I use it to tell our brand’s story and let others understand what we do. I use it to personify our brand and socialise with our audience not just as a branded page but as a real human being. That is the real power of social media, and I think it’s the biggest impact social media has on most brands.

Networking, Partnerships and Community Growth

Establishing quality relationships is now a lot easier with the streamlined communication we get from social media, and building relationships with key influencers ears a lot of value for your brand.

User-Generated Content

User-generated content is the best form of free advertising you could use on your prefered social platforms. The larger the audience, the more potential the content has to really impact a brand and its messaging.

Most brands will have people post their content with specific hashtags. So, the brand isn’t just receiving the content; the content is actually being posted throughout social networks.

Reach Potential Customers

Maintaining a brand’s respected reputation comes with an opportunity to impress potential customers through your content and more importantly, through how you handle even the most unrelated customer interactions.

People often turn to social media and online review sites to get a good idea of what they can expect from you. Just like marketers, consumers are using social media as a tool to help them make better purchases and decisions in general.

On average, people take into account 10 reviews of a local business before making a purchasing decision. This gives potential customers the chance to see that businesses truly care about their customers even after they’ve made the sale.

Competitor Monitoring

Social media channels allow us to keep our finger on the pulse of not just other marketing tactics and practices, but also with the tactics used by direct competitors. The truth is we can learn a lot from our competition.

Your competitors aim to do the same things as you – establish and protect their own brand’s reputation and ultimately sell their products and services. Monitoring the competitors’ activities and creating ways for your business to do better while keeping the audience entertained and informed play a major role in reaching your business goals.

Things You Need To Know Before Building Your Official Website

Owning an official website built for your business is very different from the points made above, especially when it comes to cost. When done professionally, a website is going to cost more than setting up free social media pages, but the differences don’t end there. Here are some things you’ll need to do and understand before building a website for your business:

Purchase Your Domain and Website Hosting Service

In a nutshell, your domain is your “address”, while your website hosting service provides the server space or the “land” where your website will live.

To get your website started, you have to purchase your domain name and pay for website hosting. Both of these have recurring costs that could vary depending on the duration that you select for your registration contract. The average cost for a domain will typically be anywhere from AU$ 14.00 to 17.00 if you’re going for a brand-new domain.

Some extensions like .biz, .xyz, or .info, along with hundreds of others will end up being incredibly cheap because internet users aren’t quite used to those extensions and they don’t pack the same kind of punch. Some extensions will lead to even higher registration fees, like .co, .ai, .io and others.

Website Builder, Development and Technical Experts

In reality, most small business owners cannot double as web designers. If you have the budget, you will most likely end up hiring a web designer to design, build, and occasionally update your website for you. But for the younger and smaller businesses, the costs are just too high to shoulder. The good news is that there is now a more cost-effective option to get your website up and running while still maintaining that much needed professional appeal.

Stacked Site is said to be the hybrid of a web builder and WordPress. It provides the ease of a builder and the flexibility and scalability of a WordPress site. Subscriptions are offered on monthly and yearly plans at AU$29 and AU$290 respectively – which is good for those who are on a tight budget.

You can expect that you’ll be provided with various online resources backed by streamlined support to ensure that you will be able to use their platform accordingly. The platform has an online community where Stacked Site Experts and Mentors can be contacted for support.

A collection of video tutorial to help new users to get started is available on their YouTube channel.

The team has also created a dedicated online course and an updated Knowledge Base to help you learn all the available features and functions of their web builder.

With all the available premium plugins and features and your new skills as a newbie website designer, you’ll never have to worry about hiring an expert for your website’s future updates.

Why Your Business Needs a Website

Gain Full Control of Your Online Presence

As a business owner, it’s important to get full control of your online presence, and the only way to do that is by setting up your shop in your very own space.

If you set up your business solely on one or more social platforms, your growth is ultimately at the mercy of those platforms. They can make changes any time and all that you can do is go with the new flow, even if it impacts your business. If that platform gets acquired and changed or shut down, you may no longer be able to reach your customers and you may even lose money in the process.

Some might say “Facebook will never shut down”, or “Instagram will always be around“. Who knows, right? Remember what happened to the social networking giants Friendster and Multiply? Both companies suspended their services due to the evolving landscape in the challenging industry and lack of engagement by the online community.

Just a little while ago when many branded pages were recently hurt due to an update that Facebook implemented that flipped its newsfeed algorithm, decreasing the organic reach of branded pages.

The same thing could happen on another social platform at any time. YouTube could start charging us to store videos on their servers. Twitter could decide to become a premium platform where businesses have to pay for every tweet. In either of these circumstances, if you don’t pay then you no longer get to reach your customers.

Your Website is the Hub of Your Online Presence – Your Social Media Page is a Marketing Tool

If you have your own website, it serves as the most accessible hub for your business. In this case, you have full control of your situation.

This is how you should treat social media – as a marketing platform to drive traffic back to your website. Use that traffic to grow your email and customer lists so you can communicate with them any time on your own terms.

At the end of the day, it’s much smarter to invest in something you own than to build on land that doesn’t belong to you. Some day the rules are going to change and it could have a major impact on your business if you aren’t in control. This is why we highly recommend that you invest in a website now and then use social media to drive traffic to your website and grow your business online the right way.

The post Website vs Social Media: What Does Your Business Need? appeared first on Stacked Site.

The research found that users will leave if the content layout is unattractive, if images take too long to load and if websites are not appropriately customized for mobiles. All of these statistics are related to web design. So it is clear that, users value design before they look into the site further. Here are 5 web design practices that are a must for any good website:

• Call-To-Action – Make sure your website has a clear call to action on the home page of your website. This could include signing up, subscribe buttons, demos and other actions that a user should ideally take. The CTA acts as your final communication with the customer and it has to compel them to take action. Make sure the CTA button is provocative, easy to read and understand. Use powerful words in your CTA and don’t hold back on the emotional aspect either.

• Balance it Out – A good website is one that strikes a balance between looks and functionality. Make your website look eye-catching in terms of font colors, fonts, images and white space. All of this aesthetic tuning will help first time visitors navigate your website with ease. Don’t forget that your website needs to look just as beautiful on mobile, otherwise visitors will turn away.

• White Space – Web pages aren’t newspapers – you don’t have to stuff every corner with images and content. Good designers know that a certain amount of white space is required in every design to balance out the spacing. The white space makes it pleasant for the readers to view and examine each element without getting distracted.

• Speed – No one likes slow websites. If your competitors website is even 2 seconds faster than yours, then users will likely move to their site. The current milieu calls for instant gratification and you cannot let your competitor have the upper hand.

• More pages, more leads – Users are bound to get suspicious if there are only 3-4 pages filled with products. Studies have shown that conversion rates are better for websites that have more pages. This allows to get as much information as they need and you can spread out content more freely. The general pages are as follows; Home, Products, Pricing, Blog, About Us and Contact. All of these can have sub-pages under them for different purposes.

Bad web design hinders the opportunities both you and the customers get. This will consequently affect your leads and sales so it is important to focus on it. If you’re unsure how to go about it, consult your local graphic designers in Brisbane.

The post Five Web Design Best Practices to Boost Growth and Conversions appeared first on Stacked Site.

Animation is not entirely new. Adobe flash revolutionized animation and the use of vector graphics in web design. Moving animators and gif files were used previously to add a fun element to the design and break the monotone of the presentation. It made the engagement livelier. It was much later that graphics designers started to understand the potential of animation to improve user experience and also drive sales by increasing conversion. Using CSS and Javascript codes have also made the pages less heavy and improved the loading speeds beyond belief.

Why is animation so important in UI?

 Right amount of animation can engage the audience and also guide them to the CTAs where they can convert. For example, when you are filling the password field of an account that you have on a website and mistakenly you key in a wrong password, immediately the field shakes to tell you that you are wrong. This design imitates the “head nodding from side to side” gesture that you often make when you know you have made a mistake.

What do you think about a prompt that slides down slowly or a pop-up that appears almost from the thin air to draw your attention to a call to action? All these effects have improved interactivity of your website. Sometimes, the icons become bigger in size as you hover your mouse over it and encourage you to make the click. A new form of animation is to use a colored circle like a halo around an icon and as you point your mouse arrow towards it, the circle starts to spin. Isn’t it cool?

Don’t overuse animation

 Although animation is great, there is a limit. Overusing it could make the page really slow. In the age of smart phones, when making a website is an imperative, you have to make your website responsive and quick. So, apply minimal effects. The most important question that you need to reflect on is that have you managed to improve user experience by using it? Is it making them happy or proving to be a useless distraction?

If you can get answers to these questions correctly and you are satisfied with the design, more often than not, the visitors would also find it attractive. After all, you are also a user. You know what makes you happy or annoyed when you visit a website, right?

The post The Importance of Animation in Web Design appeared first on Stacked Site.

Website usability has become a hot topic today thanks to the proliferation of companies dependent on the internet for sales. The constantly changing social landscape requires informed and innovative marketing efforts. Your website must be the bedrock of such efforts. This is where website UX comes in.

Now that we’ve agreed that improving your website’s UX can improve your conversion rates, it is time to improve it. Here are four tips for the same.

Is your website responsive? Designing different websites for different devices could be difficult. Instead if you can build a single website which is responsive, it would automatically adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions.

Google has announced its plan to penalize websites for lack of responsiveness by assigning lower ranking scores. (Source: mobilemarketingengine). Other search engines may soon follow suit. This will push your website down the SERP and affect your website traffic.

Is the loading time too high? A website which is too slow to load can invalidate all your other efforts. The bounce rate can be very high. At the same time, if you don’t optimize the loading speed of your website, there is a fair chance that lead generation and conversion rates might decline.

Are you using images, color and white space strategically? Images are important for a website because it helps to break the monotony. Studies have shown that visitors connect with an image much quicker than they can interpret a copy. But are the images consistent with the copy?

Is it too gaudy? Does it feel superfluous? You will have to use images which tell a story and establish a link with the visitors. Put them at the right focal points. Using the right color combination for contrast is important and can help in lead generation. White space plays a similar role and helps to get rid of clutter. It helps the visitor to focus on the all important CTA(s).

Is your website easily navigable? It is the need of the hour to use intuitive navigation to improve user experience. Use the company logo on the top of each page and link it to the home page. Use primary navigation options at the top and follow it up with secondary navigation options below it or along the side margins. Embed a well designed site map at the top or bottom of the page and link the page to your blog(s) and other landing pages. Have an option for social sharing.

It is dangerous to neglect the UX issues of your website. It will take the sheen of your marketing efforts and have a devastating impact on your business. Apply these tips to enjoy the benefits immediately.

The post 4 Tips to Improve User Experience on Your Website appeared first on Stacked Site.