website maintenance.
I have worked on several different web building platforms for a variety of different projects.
These platforms include:
Wordpress
Shopify
Hubspot
Wix
Airo
Squarespace
Hostinger
These seven builders are used, at total, in nearly 90% of websites today.
Each of the builders have their ups and downs, and it's all a matter of choosing the one that will meet your needs.
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Web Building
I built this website using Wix. I chose Wix over other builders because I didn't need the bells and whistles that comes with builders like Wordpress of Hubspot. I also didn't want to lean heavily into AI, which is a major function found in Airo and Hostinger.
Quality and consistent web maintenance will keep your website running strong and smoothly without lag. When used correctly, the tools available for building your website can keep the weight of you code light, improving user experience - and increasing your web traffic.
When combined with effective search engine optimization (SEO), Google will be able to serve up your webpages to users, making you more visible, and your brand stronger and more recognizable.
With the use of templates, you can save yourself a lot of time and aggravation trying to perfectly replicate page elements, such as custom headers and footers, hero image spaces, paragraph styles, and color scheme.
Wordpress
Wordpress is my favorite web building tool. If you are willing to go beyond their paywalls, sky's the limit in terms of capabilities. There are countless beautiful themes to choose from that can be tailored to fit your industry and business needs, as well as templates if you don't want to start your pages from scratch.
I have built many web pages using Wordpress, including blogs, custom headers/footers, promotions, landing pages, and product descriptions. Below is an example of a custom header I built on Wordpress. Each "View Bio" button links over to a section of the sales reps' bio page. Click to enlarge.
Wordpress gives you the ability to build your website any way you want it by allowing you to incorporate images, video, contact forms, blogs, lotties, and ecommerce. Since this tool is so widely used, there are thousands of plug-ins available to download that further customize you website and improve your user experience (UX).
Hubspot
Hubspot is more than a web builder. It is a full service content management system (CMS). It can house all of your business content and needs, including your website and blogs, digital assets , social media planning, customer relationship management (CRM) needs, track your sales pipeline, and full scale marketing automation with with amazing workflow tools.
I am experienced in building and maintaining CRMs, digital assets, building and customizing webpages, setting up workflows, chatflows, and managing multichannel social media campaigns on Hubspot.
Themes
No matter which web builder you choose, you will have access to thousands of themes to help build the bones of your website. Though not required to start your build, themes can be a great spring board, and sometimes come with a suite of tools that you wouldn't otherwise have.
Selecting the right theme for you website is a matter of finding what will visually represent your business the best.
Web builders have themes ready to go in their themes library, but there are so many more available by third parties. One that I have used is Jupiter X. This theme is really a game changer. It comes with a package of enhanced tools that bring your output to the next level while cutting down on hours spent building.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is an important component to being found on search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. There are several factors to having great SEO for your website.
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Keywords - High ranking keywords throughout your website and articles are going to help search engines identify your content as the solution to search queries, helping your webpages rank higher in searches. This does not cost anything except for the time spent.
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Image descriptions - Proper image descriptions are not just for keeping your image library organized, they can help elevate the searchability of your content by showing search engines more data about your content as a whole. Image descriptions also improve usability of websites for the visually impaired.
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Tags- Great tagging makes your images more searchable too, which leads to more visitors looking to learn more.
Luckily, there are SEO tools that can help. Web builders have SEO plug-ins that can give you SEO scores and make suggestions for how to improve it. Some are available for free, and are paid. I have found that free versions come with a lot of limitations and paywalls. This doesn't mean they aren't helpful, but they leave a lot of holes.
Here are some great SEO tools you can incorporate into you web building:
Rank Math
All-in-One SEO
Yoast
Surfer SERO
SEOPress
These all come with some learning curves, but there is a lot of informative training material available that can make you a pro in no time.
Responsive Web Design
Having responsive web design is a very important feature in web builders, and is something that designers need to keep a close eye on. Most web builders allow you to edit for desktop and mobile, and some will also include editing for tablet too. Optimizing for as many screen types as possible is key to maintaining a quality user experience (UX).
When considering UX on smaller screens, it is important for your content and images to remain accessible. This can be done by making sure that you set your images to be clickable. Some builders call this a lightbox, while other may just refer to the function as a pop up. If a user has a bad experience on your website, this will effect their opinion of doing business with your company. So be mindful and double (or triple) check that your hyperlinks are properly connected, your images can be enlarged easily, and your anchors are placed correctly.