Tips & Tricks

Earlier this month I spoke at a conference here in Buffalo, NY focused on helping new and budding small business owners develop their company.

I had a few main goals:

• Teach about Domain Names (and to own them themselves)
• Teach about the ways to produce a Website
• Teach about finding a Professional
• Teach about what to do after a Website is launched (SEO, PPC, Email, Social)

It’s hard to hold a workshop on creating a website. This talk was meant more to be an outline to set business owners free with knowledge of how to start and tackle that website project with confidence.

The video is about an hour long. Thanks to Neil at Nickel City Graphics for taping me so I could share this.

Here’s the slides: http://slid.es/timbouchard/winning-website

“Mobile ready websites increase sales”

It’s a bold statement, but one that can be said with more confidence as each day passes in this new smartphone encouraged “instant access” world we live in.

THE MOBILE MARKET TAKES OVER

As of May 2013, 56% of the mobile market is using a Smartphone (iPhone, Droid, etc.) to browse the web on the go. Not far behind, is the new boom in the tablet market, now overtaking the desktop world.

It’s a new reality that as high as 25% of your web traffic is being viewed on a non-desktop device.

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The world of website standards is constantly changing. With the introduction of new devices literally every year, the browsers that accompany them, and the varying screen sizes, you can never really know how someone will try and access your site.

We’ve mentioned before (as the web world has been noting for the better part of 2 years) that responsive design has taken a front seat in the web production process. Along with that, search engines have been fine tuning their methods for discovering the best relevant pages for search results.

Both of these new standards have made one thing and one thing only the most important part of your website:

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OK, so you have a brand new website made by a super cool company called Luminus Media. What now? Well, if you are hosting with this super cool company, it’s now time to point to domain to our servers. There’s two ways this happens:

1. Change Name Servers: This is like hiring a new general manager. It moves ALL domain control to the new server.
2. Change A Record IP: This is like hiring a new department manager. It only points the part of the domain that you specify. Mainly used for pointing the domain to one location for the website and another for a large email hosting service.

Well we know the gameplan now, so what’s next. Either your domain manager or web company (with login access to your account) will execute one of the above tasks to point your domain to the website hosting server. They will tell you immediately that it has been done.

Here is the fun part that web providers as well as website owners hate, but it needs to be clarified (excuse the following capslock)….

****** DOMAIN NAME CHANGES MAY TAKE 5 MINUTES TO 48 HOURS ******

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