More Than One Website?Many business owners and website builders don’t just have the one website for their online company these days, but quite often there are several websites associated with one company. Different websites specialising in certain areas of a multi-faceted business can offer many benefits to customers, internet users and business owners alike.
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Lots of Reason8 website builders have been asking about adding a blog / forum facility to their websites. If you run an online business, which would benefit from having an open communication channel / forum, message board or Blog page then fear not. It’s not as difficult as you think to add one. Reason8 websites are built with compatibility in mind and work really well with external systems to provide a multi facility site.
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When you build a website for your business, it won’t just be viewed on a desktop or laptop computer. These days, it will more frequently and more likely to be viewed on a mobile phone. The IPhone, no longer a unique mobile office, has quickly been joined by a huge choice of smart phones nearly all of which offer internet access and good quality website viewing ability.
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Add more Gates and Footpaths Building a website for your business starts with your home page where you include enticing information, inviting images and a clear idea of what the rest of your site offers. Once you have done this you could merely rely on the normal navigation bar buttons to allow visitors to click through to other pages but a little more persuasion is always a good idea. Creating links through to specific pages with inviting statements or invitations will encourage more people to go further into your site, which is exactly what you want to achieve.
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Once you’ve built a website for your business, the main objective of your website is to generate response from internet users and visitors. Your Reason8 website makes sure that your contact page is your main priority as you will enter your contact details in step one of your control panel. There are however a number of alternative ways to encourage your website visitors to make contact with you.
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The NEW Template Designer offers all the flexibility and tools required to design your own professional website header and background. Your website header is a great place to include links to your primary website pages, login page and contact pages. This tutorial shows you how to include such links and will help you to make sure you include the important ones when you build a website.
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Some Reason8 website builders have recently asked about how to create 2 different kinds of links on their websites: External links from the Navigation Menu buttons and also creating a Login button from their website headers. Creating straight forward links using the Reason8 page editor and template builder is very simple. Creating an external link from a menu button is a little more technical so we’ll look at both of these issues now.
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Many online businesses, whether e-commerce or not, will have connections to associations, organisations, colleges, suppliers, affiliates, qualification providers etc. While you build a website, it can add authority and strength to your message to feature logos of all these connections. You can create links from logo images to the websites of these connections, which is a great way to obtain incoming links to your website from these connections. Reciprocal links can benefit all parties and are well worth a little time.
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OK, so you’ve built a website for your business. You’ve got all the information, images, keywords, products, services, unique selling points, special offers etc., etc, on your pages to both attract customers and to encourage them to get in touch or even better make a purchase from you there and then. Well done, pat yourself on the back and sit back and enjoy the benefits of your work. But is that really it? Is your work all done? Well that depends on how much response you want from customers, whether they’re new customers or clients who have already bought something from you.
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If your website offers lots of information, one of your main priorities as the website builder, will be to arrange this information into easy to read sections so that your website visitors can find what they need quickly and easily. One of the best ways to guide your visitors to the various sections of content is by creating indexes or menu pages. These are clickable menu’s using either images or text to transport visitors to the information they need with a simple click.
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Several Reason8 Website Builders have asked about adding audio and video to their websites. Your Reason8 website control panel allows you to add both very easily and we’ll look at both now. We’ve previously looked at adding Video to your website pages using YouTube, which also includes an automatic player to give your customers full control over the video. Click here to view that Tutorial.
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The Navigation of your website is what determines how easily your visitors can find their way around and ultimately find what they are looking for. When you build a website, which has pages with lots of text information, it’s best to create a mini index menu of the information at the top of these pages with links to the respective pieces of information. This will help your visitors find what they need without having to scroll through the whole lot. This is done using links and anchors (Click to view tutorial). But what if you need to link to a specific section of a page from a different page on your website?
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Website Navigation QuizThe Reason8 Tutorial Blog pages contain around 100 guides on how to get the best from your website. This series of quizzes have been created to provide a fun way for website builders to learn about the vast, amazing and flexible functions of your website editor. If you get stuck with anything while you build your website, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll find the help you need here. If you don’t, then leave a comment at the bottom and tell us what you need help with.
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Word of mouth is probably one the most trusted and effective methods of advertising. If you consider the way you’d react to a tv, radio or press advertisement claiming how great something is and then compare that to your response to someone you know and trust telling you about a really good product, service or company that they’ve found and recommend. You’d be far more likely to go with what your friend says wouldn’t you? So when you build a website, how can you help to generate more word of mouth about your company, products or services?
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Images are an integral part of any website, especially an ecommerce site, which will be using images to sell the products and / or services. Presenting your images in the best light is vital to help customers make that all important decision – to buy! If a customer wants a closer look at a product image, wouldn’t it be great if they could simply click on it and a larger version popped up in its own window? Well, brace yourself because your image presentation is about to get really exciting!! Reason8 have made life very easy for website builders with a feature called the Lightbox and you’re not going to believe how simple it is to incorporate this feature into your website.
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In our last tutorial, we looked at how as a website builder, you can make sure visitors don’t get lost in your site by including a link to your home page at the bottom of all your pages. Now let’s look at secondary navigation, which includes links to your contact page, about us, terms and conditions, delivery and copyright information etc. and the importance of maintaining a familiar structure to your Navigation.
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When browsers surf the internet looking for information, they want to find it quickly and easily. The first few seconds after clicking onto a site should at least give them an idea of what the site offers and whether they are likely to find what they are looking for. They’re hoping to find the best product or service that they need at that time and of course the best price. As the website builder for your business, if your site shows no real indication of what’s on offer and / or gives visitors no idea of where to go next or how to get to the primary information pages, then the chances are they’ll click away to the next site pretty much immediately. If this is the case then YOU need to make some changes immediately.
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It’s a well know fact that building natural links to your website is a sure fire way of improving your search engine
position. Our blog Search Engine Optimisation – Inbound Links, explains the importance of building links and how to go about getting them. At Reason8 we supply you with a few level of links to get you started. We also recommend that you actively source more links from relevant websites.
Briefly, links are like votes to your website. The more votes you have, the more authoritive (important) your site is seen to the search engines. For these ‘votes’ to carry any real weight they need pass some benefit from the source site, to the linked site. However, this is not always the case.
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E-commerce is a continually growing shopping medium, which continues to out-perform high street shopping as shoppers look for both bargains and convenience. As a website builder, your E-commerce website needs to offer as much choice as possible to compete with the visible options and choice offered when customers actually go into a shop to browse. Your Reason8 Shopping Basket Wizard makes it very simple to offer such choices and options.
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As a website builder, one of your main achievements will be successfully generating response from your customers and visitors both new and existing. The easiest way to ensure maximum response from customers is to make it very, very simple for them to get in touch. There are several ways you can provide simple ways for your customers to get in touch and they are all easy to add to your website, using your Content Editor.
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“Remember that writing for the screen is not the same as writing for paper. Website builders need to keep their content punchy, simple and to the point.”
Grabbing and holding the attention of visitors and browsers flying through the net can be achieved in many ways, but one of the main ones is with your text content. Filling your pages with endless scrolls of text will lose their interest in seconds, they probably won’t get past the second line before giving up and moving to a website with more images and less text. People read for pleasure but not when they’re looking for something. Sourcing specific information needs to be a simple and speedy task.
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The top priority for most business owners is a website, which will bring in more customers! The best way that you can achieve this is to get the best possible position on the search engines. There are hundreds of suggestions and tricks floating around on how to cheat the search engine system but such cheats should be given a wide berth. Search engines don’t like being cheated and will actually mark down website builders who attempt this. You need to play fair and rather than trying to trick the search engines, you should be thinking about how you could help them in making your website pages as visible as possible.
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Following on from our last Blog about on page Navigation, Let’s look at another form of navigation, which will ensure your viewers enjoy a simple and pleasant experience when viewing your pages. Your Reason8 Website Builder makes it very simple to ensure that your whole site can be easily navigated by customers both old and new. The navigation we’ll look at today is Page Jumps. Page Jump Links are vital on web pages, which feature a lot of text information, to avoid viewers having to scroll endlessly to view and find all the necessary information.
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As a website builder, one of your first tasks is to make sure that your website presents an inviting, inspiring and easy to use environment for your visitors. Your next task is to grab their attention. A new Flash animated website header is a great way to do this. Go to Step 2 in your control panel to explore this option. Holding on to their attention requires an inviting homepage with good quality images and plenty of keyword rich, descriptive information. Internet users often want the quickest, easiest route to what they are looking for. The whole point of the internet is speed and convenience, so make sure your website offers both.
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When you first consider getting a website for your business, one of the main criteria you should look for is Effective Search Engine Optimisation. There are plenty of Website Hosting Companies offering free websites, with website builders, which must seem very tempting, even cost effective but are they????? The simple answer is NO. Most hide lots of extra costs for services and functions which really need to be included with your website as standard, especially if it’s a business website which needs to attract new customers and be accessible by existing customers online. Search Engine Optimisation is one of the services and is pretty much the most important as without it, your website is invisible to searches. It’s a bit like buying a car and then having to pay extra for the wheels??!
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Getting a great position on search engine results lists is one of the main aims of all website builders. We’ve covered Search Engine optimisation quite a bit in these tutorial blogs because SEO is such a hot topic. Click here for a menu of the tutorials available. You can learn how to make sure your content includes lots of your relevant keywords. Make your pages look great with good quality relevant images and an effective layout. Ensure your information is clear and enticing and that the navigation for your site is simple and offers lots of ways in which visitors can work their way through your pages etc., etc., etc.
If you’ve already done all this, there is other thing you can do, which could really help to boost your position and traffic, especially if you’re in a highly competitive market….
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You’ve built a website full to bursting with all the information and incentives your customers need. You have hopefully been lucky enough to secure a great domain name for your business. It’ll be punchy, memorable, and will perfectly describe what your online business is offering and how it operates. But that enough? Why not have two or more domain names pointed at your fabulous new website. Give browsers more chance to find you and become customers.
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I hope you’ve all enjoyed and been helped by these Tutorial Blogs. The Blogs offer constant access to step-by-step guides on how to make the very most of your Reason8 Website. If you get stuck when you build a website with Reason8 you can look for tutorials covering the following subjects:
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Social network sites or SNSs have attracted millions of users and have offered a flexible communication portal for friends and strangers alike to get connected and stay connected. Since they appeared on our computer screens, social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, have now become a daily activity for millions of their users. There are in fact hundreds of social networks, supporting a huge range of interests and topics. Social networks allow strangers to connect with each other to discuss, share and view information on shared interests, political views, or activities. Social Network Sites are also a fantastic marketing tool for website builders, offering a potentially enormous audience!
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When you build a website, its vitally important to keep your web pages fresh and new. Search Engines are programmed to notice new information and changes to web pages, so it doesn’t only work to keep your customers interested, it keeps the search engines on their toes too!! Of course as a Reason8 Website Builder, you have the simplest of tools to be able to do this. Your page editor makes it extremely easy to add new images and text as and when you launch new products or introduce new services for your customers.
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When your website needs to provide pages with lots and lots of text information on a number of different subjects it’s important to avoid creating excessively long text heavy pages. Viewers faced with lengthy pages of text will frequently click away as they rarely have the time to trawl through all the information to find what they are looking for. There is a way in which you can avoid long scrolling pages when you build a website and its done using links and anchors.
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Following the recent series of tutorials on Changing your Buttons, here are a few Button Style ideas to show you how the different setting options can work with each other…
It will really make a difference to the final look of your site if the colours you use for your buttons work well with your existing website design. Using a chosen colour scheme to create continuity throughout a design is a style used by many website builders. The easiest way is to pick out some colours from the ones on your site. They don’t have to be the most prominent colours, they could be colours used in small, subtle parts of the design or they could be a slightly different shade of a prominent colour. However you choose your button colour scheme, try to avoid colours, which will clash and so could dominate the pages too strongly. You want your buttons to stand out but you don’t want them to be hijacking your visitors attention away from your page content!
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This is Part 3 of the tutorial looking at the new upgraded editing system for the buttons on your navigation bar. The Button Wizard has recently been updated to offer a host of new and exciting features and options. These options will allow you to design new, fun, animated, colour co-ordinated, dynamic buttons to grab visitors attentions and help guide them through the pages of your website. If you've taken the time to build your website and have got the pages looking great, then it seems only right to make the doors to those pages look inviting too!
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Fun and effective clickability should be one of your main priorities when you build a website as it’s the key to successful navigation. Make sure your visitors have a choice of clickable buttons and links not just in your main menu bar but on your pages too. It not only gives visitors more control but provides endless roads and doors, which will take them further into your website. The editing system for the buttons on your navigation bar has recently been updated and now offers a host of new and exciting features and options. Our first Blog looks at the first step in Upgrading your Web Page Buttons.
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Got the wrong type of buttons? People love clicking buttons and links on a website. It’s fun, interactive and creates an instant live reaction, which gives visitors a feeling of control. Fun and effective clickability should be one of your main priorities when you build a website as it’s the key to successful navigation. Make sure your visitors have a choice of clickable buttons and links not just in your main menu bar but on your pages too. It not only gives visitors more control but provides endless roads and doors, which will take them further into your website. The editing system for the buttons on your navigation bar has recently been updated and now offers a host of new and exciting features and options.
Come and see how easy it is to upgrade them and see how much difference it makes to your website!
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If you’ve ever been to a website and not known where to begin or how to find the information you need, you’ll know how frustrating and time consuming it can be. Websites can provide a vast amount of information but quite often visitors have a specific need and haven’t got time to scroll through pages and pages of text to find the answers they’re looking for. The structure of your website navigation, when you build a website is therefore vitally important to ensure that visitors can find what they need quickly and easily.
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Following on from yesterdays Blog, where we looked at using the speed and flexibility of your website editor to make the most of any special offers, seasonal products, short term discounts, events, open days, new products, special services etc., etc. If you've taken the time to build a website, why not make sure it can help you to take advantage of every possible marketing opportunity. Apart from capitalizing on the extra income these offers and events can generate, it can also help your position on the search engines. Search Engines love to see new information and regular changes to the content on your web pages so by including this ever changing information on your website, it’ll keep the search engines interested as well as your customers.
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We've already mentioned that Search Engines love to see new information and regular changes to the content on your web pages. Many business owners have websites, where, to have even the smallest amendment made, they need to contact their Website Design Company, explain what changes they need and then wait until their request can be fit into the busy schedules of the company’s web designers. Quite often by the time the change has been made, its too late. If however, you build a website with Reason8, you’ll have no such problem! Simply log in, make your changes and Click Save. WYSIWYG!
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You may be surprised to know that Search engines don’t actually find websites. They find Web Pages. They look at each page on your website as individual documents. They know that all your pages are part of the same website and are all related and linked but the content on each of your pages is individually reviewed. The complex process managing the visibility and optimisation of each of your individual pages is based on this knowledge, which is why each page has a Title, Description and a list of keywords. You can view these by clicking the Google Icon next to each page in Step 3.
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When a website has lots of different information about lots of different things, it's important to lay it all out in sections so that visitors can cast their eyes over different areas and fully take in the separate pieces of information. In addition to the information about your products and services, you may wish to tell visitors about regular special offers or provide general news. You may want to invite them to join a forum or blog, highlight different aspects of your business, emphasize the customer service you offer or advise about the delivery and postage options…
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There are many situations where websites offer visitors and customers the facility to download documents such as word documents, excel sheets or PDF’s (Printable Document Format). As a website builder, you may need to provide enormous amounts of information, which customers or visitors may need to refer to again and again. Placing this much text onto your WebPages will result in visitors scrolling endlessly, which can be very frustrating. Allowing them to download the info in one document, means they can save it to their computer for future reference as and when required. It also helps you to keep the design of your pages clean and punchy.
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If you’ve successfully followed the 4 steps of building your website, give yourself a huge pat on the back for a job very well done. You’ve created your main website pages and added lots of information and images. The design looks good. Your pages are inviting. If you have an Ecommerce website, you will have created your online shop, added all your products, pictures, options, postage costs etc. Your visitors and potential customers have a great choice of products and services to choose from and plenty of ways in which to get in touch with you………….
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Once you’ve caught a visitors attention and gained their interest, the next step is to encourage them to come further into your website to have a closer look. Effective Website Navigation is the key to bringing visitors inside. The most obvious navigation is of course the menu bar, which contains the buttons for all your web pages. However, there are several more enticing methods of navigation, one of the simplest being internal links.
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We’ve looked at several of the flexibilities and functions of your Reason8 website editor. The system has been designed to make the process of building a website as easy and as fun as possible. Catering for the masses – it’s simple to use for beginners, with helpful wizards and guides to show you what to do, while being flexible enough for the more technically minded to produce a website which can be pretty spectacular!
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When you first start thinking about building a website for your business, one of the main criteria you should really look for is Effective Search Engine Optimisation. There are plenty of companies out there offering websites, which you can build yourself but many of them hide lots of extra costs for services and functions which really should be included as standard. Search Engine Optimisation being one of them. It's very much like buying a car and then finding out you need to pay extra for the steering wheel??!
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This Blog is Part 2 of a series looking at different ways to display your products and services. There are various ways, but we recommend going for the clear, easy to browse options, which will encourage visitors not only to click further into your site for more information but could also encourage maximum response and purchasing. Here, we're looking at using Visual Index or Menu Pages. Index or Menu Pages are a great way for website builders to display a breakdown of the products you have available and the various categories and groups of products you specialise in. Click to see Part 1.
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Index pages or Visual Menu Pages are a great way for website builders to display a breakdown of the products or services they have available. Ideal for websites with or without a shopping basket, it can help visitors to find what they're looking for quickly and easily by clearly showing the various categories and groups of products you specialise in.
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Your web pages work so very hard for you and can do so much to make sure your website is performing at its best. All you have to do is feed them and give them a little inspiration and guidance every now and again. Their extensive list of skills includes: invitation, salutation, inspiration, instruction, education, direction, interaction, entertainment, demonstration, advertising, marketing, sales, optimisation, administration, security, customer service, accountancy etc., etc., etc.…….. They could be one of the cheapest and most industrious one-stop workforces ever known to man, so they've got to be worth a bit of TLC every now and again don’t you think!
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When you build a website for your business, you’ll want to let as many people as possible know about it. Word of mouth may well be one of the very first forms of advertising and yes it probably does date back to medieval times if not earlier, long before the word technology even existed but it’s still one of the best forms of marketing around. When someone you know and trust tells you about something great, you are far more likely to try it out than if a complete stranger had pointed it out to you! If someone has found your site or has become a customer and likes what they see, then make it easy for them to tell their friends about you.
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You’ll know if your website is working as hard and effectively as it can for you, when the calls, enquiries and orders start coming in. When you build a website, response from visitors is the ultimate goal, but can you do more to encourage potential customers to get in touch with you if they need to?
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