Inspirational and Empowering Child Care Business Owners To Build Successful Child Care Businesses

Posts tagged ‘website design’

5 Steps to a Great Website!

 Your Website Just Can’t be Good It has to be Great!!~ Shama Kabani

 

I created my first website for my childcare business in 1999. The website provided basic information about my program including: the location, hours, rates and photos of my program. In fact, the website was free, but I didn’t get much business from the site. There were many reasons why this site did not work for me, however, I prefer to tell you about the site that did work for me.

In 2003, I registered the domain name www.learningdays.com  for $19.00. It was a great investment for my business and is still paying off. I also signed up for web hosting with www.samsclub.com for only $5.00 a month.

After setting up my site, I was clueless about how to create a site that would attract visitors. Over time, I learned how to add content, how to structure the site, make it a very informative site and most of all attract more families to enroll their children in my program.

For online marketing or website building tips, be sure to check our my a e-book titled, ” An Online Marketing Plan.” One of the resources that I quoted in the book includes a book written by Shama Kabani, titled: “The Zen of Social Marketing.”

The ebook is loaded with great social media marketing tips that will drive traffic to your business. In the second chapter of the  book Kabani wrote: ” Why Your Website Can’t Just Be Good- it has to be Great!” She also includes the five elements of a Great website and they are as follows:

1.Design-When a website looks great, it sends the impression that the company or product is great. Keep in mind that your website may be your first chance to make an impression upon your site visitors, so make it a great one!

2.Structure– Have you ever been to a website and didn’t know where to start or how to check out? While structuring or restructuring your website, be sure that your visitors can easily  navigate through your website.  A confused consumer may easily say no to your service or product.

3.Content-According to Shama Kabani, Content is King!  More over, it is the heart of your website. The first purpose of a blog or website is to educate and build expertise. A really great site offers content in the following forms: written articles, audio and video. This is a great way to meet the learning preferences of your site visitors.

4.Optimization-  is a marketing tool that allows any online user to get more clicks in their web copy writing efforts for their website by improving the search engine results in the Web. Moreover, make sure that search engines can read your website. This is a great way to attract website visitors from major search engines such as Google.

5.Maintenance Your website needs to be maintained the same way that we maintain our physical building. Content needs to be changed, design needs to be updated and items may need to be moved around. I suggest that a website be reviewed 2-3 times a week to track visitors with a scheduled monthly maintenance plan that includes:  website visitors feedback.

I hope that you have been inspired to create a great website that will attract visitor, turn them into consumers and eventually transform them into customers. I wish you much success with your website!

For more marketing tips, check out my Marketing 101 toolkit!

Source:

2010. Kabani, Shama. The Zen of Social Media Marketing. Pages, 21-22

Category:

Administration, Marketing, social media, Website

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Is Your Website SEO Friendly?

According to Christian Arno, “There is a saying, “build it and they will come,” but this definitely doesn’t always apply to websites. The best way to get people to your website is to make sure it’s search engine optimized.”

I Discovered That My Child care Business Website Was Not SEO Friendly

Every Wednesday  I plan to add new content to my childcare center website, update the calendar of events and upload new photos. After reviewing my website, I was compelled to look into upgrading my website, So I called my web hosting company.

I was not happy with the news that I received about my website. In fact, my web hosting representative told me that my website was not SEO Friendly and that’s why I was not seeing the traffic that I desired. JUST WHAT I NEEDED TO HEAR!!

Moreover, the representative told me that my website template was phased out and he was surprised that I was still using that plan. Well, I know why….It’s because I was only paying $5 a month for web hosting.  In other words, I was being cheap and trying to save my business money!

However, after our conversation, I realized that creating a SEO Friendly website was more important than saving money on webs hosting. In fact, I asked the representative for the best package available, so that I can upgrade my website with 7-days, create an SEO Friendly website and begin to attract more parents to my site!

I love adding content to my websites and sharing business tips via blogging, however, I will be the first to admit that I did not know what SEO meant. So I did a little research and I want to share what I discovered with you. (Just in case you didn’t know)

Wikipedia defines SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as: “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Now that you have the facts about SEO, I hope that you have been compelled to find out if your website is SEO friendly, because your enrollment and online visibility depends on it!

If you feel that it is time to upgrade your website, I found a great web hosting package with 1 & 1 Web hosting for only $29.95! The first month is Free and the plan is loaded!

I can hardly believe that I waited this long to upgrade my website! Better hosting doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg! Check out—-> 1&1 Web Hosting Plans ON OFFER!

Shiketa

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Quality Care

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