Things You Can Do With A Website With Tips

What this episode covers

Is your small business website effectively pulling in visitors, keeping them around and converting them to customers? If your website is a little more than an online placeholder, it's time to start putting it to work so you can grow your business and take advantage of the huge potential consumer base for the online market. Today's consumers are accessing your website from their desktops and laptops, and also from their smartphones and tablets. Even if you're using a WordPress.com, investing the few dollars a month in a web host and domain name tells visitors you're serious about your company-and makes you more trustworthy. Make sure visitors can get in touch with you quickly and conveniently. Through images, succinct descriptions or both, visitors to your site should be able to figure out right away what your company does. Highlight Your USP. Your unique selling point lets visitors know why they should stick around and do business with you, instead of clicking back to the search results. You can learn more about what's working and what isn't on your website and get more testimonials-by having a feedback form for visitors. Your website content should focus on how you can benefit your customers, instead of how awesome you are. Keeping your site updated makes both visitors and search engines happy. Natural SEO strategies are essential in getting new visitors to your website. You don't have to share your favorite colors or foods, but including the names and bios of business owners and staff on your website gives things a personal touch. The more steps customers have to go through to buy something from your website, the more often they'll abandon their carts. Place social sharing buttons prominently on your website for increased reach. These things are unnecessary, annoying to most visitors and slow down your loading time. Break things up naturally and use smart navigation to help visitors find what they need. Things You Didn't Know You Can Do With A Website When you're talking about designing a website for your business, it always pays to pay attention to what the Web can do these days - and there's a surprising amount of options out there that people just haven't heard about. Communicate Events Quickly withWebSocketsHTML was built to create static webpages; most "Dynamic" websites are just constantly pinging their servers and refreshing the screen. WebSockets create a full, two-way communication channel over TCP/IP, which allows your browser to communicate with massively reduced latency - so quickly that you can easily play RTS games that hold the same data server-side, for example, without needing to abuse Flash to do it. Drag and Drop Files Into the Browser Window toUploadThere's no need to get all caught up in those infernal file choosers when uploading anymore - with modern web standards, you can choose areas of your site to function as "Drag-n-drop boxes." Just be certain that you clearly label them and tell the user why they might want to upload and what you're going to do with the file. Render 3D In-browser with the advent of WebGL, the stepchild of OpenGL, many modern browsers -notably FireFox and Chrome - can allow webpages to render 3D graphics without needing a special plugin to do so. Run Web Apps Even When There are No web browsers nowadays are trained to cache just about everything - including, among other things, web apps in their entirety. You can have a website that, even if the computer isn't online, can be pulled out of the cache so completely that, for example, Gmail or the Kindle Cloud Reader can be used for everything that doesn't involve sending or retrieving new information. Video Conferencing Yes, your webpage can be set up to access a user's webcam - with their permission, naturally - and with the new WebRTCAPI, can host a video conference between different web browsers without any plug-ins necessary. Assign Web Apps as Default Applications Your end-user has to choose to do this, y

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