Ladysmith is located on the eastern shores of beautiful Vancouver Island in British Columbia. With a population of over 8,000, it has a thriving downtown business community centered around historic First Avenue.
The LDBA actively works to cultivate an environment of economic and cultural vibrancy in the Ladysmith downtown core. The meeting schedule is:
We think WordPress is an awesome website updating tool but is so much better with some key plugins (additional pieces of software, which can be easily added to your WordPress system). Here are our essentials and some of our favourites.
Essential
Developed by Yoast, this is an essential one for hooking your WP site into Analytics.
I thought that the All in One SEO Pack plugin was the best SEO plugin until I tried Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. It actually previews your title and meta description tags and lets you know if you’ve missed an element in your post based on your targeted keyword phrase. It also adds sitemap.xml and Google, Yahoo! and Bing site verification functionality! Joost “Yoast” de Valk is one of the best.
Why not read the rest of this article?
Posted by LDBA Admin under: Articles.
It’s good to be back on 1st Avenue!
To celebrate this milestone, Paul Mycroft Design hosted an Open House in June, to which there was a great turnout. Thank you to all of you who came: TAKE 5, Chris Burness (Skellig), Brian (Canadian Royal Legion) and Carol van Acker (BMO), Art Lindala, John Surtees, Connie and Bill Manning among many others.
Why not read the rest of this article?
Posted by LDBA Admin under: News.
Submitted by: Paul Mycroft Design
Source: Paul Mycroft Blog
Either as a web designer or a business owner, there are not enough hours in the day to work on your client’s or business website. As budgets get stretched and time becomes more valuable, larger projects can get put on hold. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t some affordable, high impact ways to boost your website and its search engine ranking.
Here are some quick tips to get you going.
Switch Domain Name Host
Are you paying $35/year to host your domain name? If you own 5 domain names, that can cost you $350 to renew them all for just 2 years! Why not switch to someone like Go Daddy, where domain names cost just $10/year? To renew those 5 domain names has just gone down to $100 for 2 years, saving you $250. And with the transfer fee of $8, you get one year free!
Switch Web Host
Again, are you paying too much money to host your website? A company like 1and1 charges upwards of $4/month to host 20 external domains so you can have all your smaller websites on one package. We’ve been happy with their service to-date and they have an excellent Control Panel and customer service.
Start an Email Newsletter
With the cost of print and mail going up, it can be costly to run a campaign to your customer list. Let’s say you have 1,000 customers. To design, print and mail a postcard would cost $420 just to mail! Thrown in $1 per print at FedEx Kinko’s and you are looking at $1,500!
With an professional email newsletter, once the initial design and build fee is paid (which can be about $500), the cost of delivery has gone down to just $35 ($5/delivery plus 3¢/email address) and you get to see who opens it, when they open it, which links they click on and much more. Also, your list can grow on its own, which can be a powerful and affordable way to tweak your marketing strategy.
WordPress Templates
Sometimes, the cost of designing and building a website can run into 4 figures. Why not purchase a pre-designed WordPress template, adjust it to suit your brand then launch and start updating your own site? And Google LOVES WordPress!
Install Google Analytics
Start learning what your visitors are doing on your website. Now.
This is so crucial, we can’t stress this factor enough. Why have a website if you don’t know what it is doing? Is it harming your online reputation? Do you get very little traffic from Google? Are people typing in some keywords that you haven’t thought about? Are you getting traffic from one particular site? Or one particular region or country?
Google Analytics if free. We used to be skeptical but have grown to love this tool and what it can do to help your business.
LinkedIn Profile
Get yourself a free LinkedIn profile or update the one you have. Add some Applications; if you have a blog, add it in; if you have an Amazon reading list, add it in; if you have a slideshow of your products, add it in.
Google AdWords
Are you paying too much for your pay-per-click advertising on Google AdWords? Can you tweak some ads or remove some dead keywords? Maybe geo-target your ads so they only appear in specific regions or cities (you can get this from Google Analytics)?
Home and Key Landing Pages
Does your Home page speak to your visitor? Can you change it up so it sends people down the right funnel in your website? Does it have enough keyword-rich copy? Do you have a new line of products, which need promoting?
What about the main landing pages on your site? If someone landed on them directly from a search engine, are they good enough? Do they “say the right thing” then send people to your target pages?
A few tweaks here and there can have a dramatic boost in your rankings and traffic.
Review Title and Meta Tags
This one is often overlooked and underestimated. Are your too long? Do they say the right thing?
The Title tag is what appears as the 1st LINE link in a search engine results snippet. It isn’t actually visible on your web page; it is visible at the VERY TOP of your web browser. We recommend no more than 60 characters (otherwise the search engines cut it off with a …) and position your main keyword phrase at the beginning.
e.g. POOR: Paul Mycroft Design provides professional web design and email newsletter marketing (83 characters)
BETTER: Professional Web Design | Email Newsletter Design | SEO (55 characters)
This is what it looks like in Google:
Secondly, adjust your Meta description tag, again not visible but still important as it can be displayed under the first line in the above snippet. Try to use 12-15 words and keep it short and sweet. Mention your company name too and keep it relevant to what is on the page.
Lastly, use the Meta Keywords tag to list 6 keyword phrases visible on the page.
Add More Pages
Take this opportunity to add more keyword-rich pages. Learn which are your strongest phrases from Google Analytics then write pages around them and link to them internally. Give your visitors what they want!
Use your Blog
Do you have a blog but don’t use it? Did you pay all that money to have a web designer install it on your website and you don’t have the time to write? Well, you need to find thetime, my friend. This particualar article took us 1.5 hours to write but we know that many of our customers will find it useful.
Home Page Now, Site Later
Is your web designer willing to build you a Home page only then add pages later? This can be a great way to affordably establish yourself on the Internet and service your customers at the same time.
We did this for The Royal Dar, a local Vancouver Island Indian restaurant, and they are enjoying some traffic. A group of 10 women recently used their Home page to book dinner using their Facebook pages! Nice!
Payment Plan?
Is your web designer willing to put you on a payment plan if the budget is too high? Have you asked? If he or she is willing, this can be a great way to get your website up now then pay for it later. And everyone wins.
. . . .
Please let us know if we can help you with any of these tips to boost your website.
Posted by LDBA Admin under: Articles.
Company name: Paul Mycroft Design Ltd
Website: www.paulmycroft.com | www.market2all.com
Contact: Paul Mycroft
Year formed: 2002
Address: 622 1st Avenue, #202, Ladysmith, BC, V9G 1A1
Phone: (250) 245-8777
Fax: (250) 245-8790
Our Design Services
Paul Mycroft Design is a professional web design firm who has been in business for over 15 years, specializing in professional WordPress web design, email newsletter marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media marketing and online branding.
We have built up a great list of clients from around the world including Canada, the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, so working remotely is not an issue. Unless we are asleep or having breakfast.
We pride ourselves on giving you the personal attention and awesome customer service that you won’t get from a large agency.
Our design services come in many forms.
Every website we deliver can be updated by you, the client. By utilizing WordPress, the easiest Content Management System on the market today, it offers a feature set on par or better than any other software of its kind. From updating and creating pages to writing a blog post, adding a portfolio slideshow to a cool photo gallery, WordPress takes advantage of literally thousands of plugins, which can add so many additional features and functions to an already amazing system. Also, upgrades are free!
To compliment your website, we offer Market 2 All, a gold standard email marketing newsletter tool, which allows you to send fully-branded campaigns at any time of the day to subscribers for pennies! It also shows you awesome reports and handles subscriptions.
Take a look at our portfolio links to see the work we’ve done and what can be possible for you or your business. Then get in touch.
Call us today on (250) 245-8777 to get started.
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Posted by LDBA Admin under: Members; Web Design.
