The easy website builder: Adding Social Media widgets to your site
When I’m a fan of a website, whether it’s an online clothing shop, a travel agency or a restaurant, I usually become a fan on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. I think that’s what we all do so we can engage with them and to ensure we don’t miss any of their offers. Everything is moving toward social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and many others so it’s only normal to add them to your site to let your visitors and customers know where they can find you online. When you’re building your site, whether it’s a personal site, an e-shop or a presentation site, integrating widgets into your site is very important. Let’s look at a few reasons why you need to add 3rd party widgets to your site and how easy you can do that. Help your customers find you Whether you’re a lawyer or you own a shop or run a coffee shop, people need to know where they can find you. Adding a Google Maps widget on your site is the easiest way to give them directions, rather than writing your address in plain text. People are looking for directions from a specific location and with Google Maps they can see exactly what route to take to get to you. For instance, last week I was looking up directions to a hotel in Berlin that I booked for this month. As I’ve never been to Berlin before, I was having trouble finding their address based on the limited directions offered on their site. No step-by-step instructions from the airport, just an address. When you add a Google widget on your site, it makes it easier for your customers to find you as they can see exactly how they can get to your location. When you’re building your site with the easy website builder from 123-reg, you simply need to drag’n’drop the Google Maps widget on to your template and add a line of code from Google Maps to show you location. Engage openly and ask for feedback Most every company in the world is using Facebook, Twitter and many more social networks to interact with their customers and to also attract new customers. You can also use these networks to ask for feedback from your customers and encourage them to share their opinions on the products or services that you’re selling. It’s the easiest way to communicate with your clients and find out first-hand what they think about your products and what you can do to improve them. Your customers’ testimonials are seen as recommendations and that’s why so many companies or brands have included social networks into their marketing strategies. With our easy website builder, you can add these widgets to your site by simply draggin’n’dropping them from the Social tab on the left menu onto your template. Find out where your customers are spending their time online and add widgets for those social networks on your site so they know where to find you online. Show how your product works YouTube is such an amazing tool to grow your business. There are so many things you can do with it to connect with customers, promote your products, share your knowledge and show off your expertise. You can upload videos, testimonials from your customers to add to your credibility, promote events, share a tour of your office and many more. So, why not also add a YouTube widget on your site? If you’re a fan of Flickr, you can also add a Flickr widget to your site so your visitors can see your photos directly on your site, without having to visit your Flickr account. Add pictures of your office, your team or show how your product works. You can do all this and more with our easy website maker. Not only can you build a new website from scratch with little to no programming skills, but you can also create a more engaging experience for your visitors. We’re offering a 14-days free trials so you can see for yourself how easy it is to build a great website that you visitors will come to love. What other widgets are you using on your site?
6 Top Tips to make even the simplest of websites dynamic
Keeping your website dynamic, keeps them coming back for more. It’s not rocket science, but in a time-pressured environment with limited resources, investing in keeping your website dynamic may not be your number one priority. It needn’t prove that painful however. Here’s six ways that you can improve your website dynamics with the minimum of fuss, time and investment: 1 Use social media widgets This is the simplest and easiest way of making your website ‘update’ on a regular basis. Widgets for Facebook, Twitter, et al are free and easy to embed in your HTML. If you can’t afford the time to create dynamic content directly for your site, then dual-using the content you are putting out on social media is the fastest and most efficient way of creating a dynamic website. 2 Take advantage of RSS feeds RSS actually stands for Rich Site Summary (also known as Really Simple Syndication) and was designed to pull summaries of dynamic content from elsewhere into other sites. If you already have a blog for your site, then you can link that RSS feed. Similarly if you have a YouTube or iTunes feed, using the RSS feed is a great way to cross-promote these. If you don’t have your own content on an RSS feed don’t worry. There are plenty of news sites and the like who offers embedding of their RSS feed, or RSS widget onto your site. Many sites use this to provide up-to-date news headlines to their own visitors and it can work as a way of keeping visitors on your site. 3 Add some Video Sticky content is important. The kind of stuff that keeps people on your site and keeps them coming back. Video is becoming ever more important on the internet and is a great way to keep visitors updated and entertained. Whether that is product promotional videos, interviews with key people or footage of recent events you have attended, all will have an ‘interest’ value for key parts of your audience. As mentioned above, if you host your videos on YouTube, you can get a dual-use of those videos by embedding them on your main site or using the RSS feed for your YouTube channel. 4 Use Images As the song goes, “a picture paints a thousand words” particularly online, when people rarely have the time or inclination to read pages of text. An interesting image, perhaps taking from an unusual angle, can become a big talking point for your brand 5 Polls and contests Interaction and engagement grabs attention. It’s why social media works so well. By running a poll “What is your favourite product…” you are inviting visitors the chance to play a part in your page. If they grasp the nettle and take part there is a good chance they will make a mental note to come back and see what the final vote result was too. Offer a contest (maybe giving away a free product) does the same. Both create new, changing content to your site. Depending on your site and business you may want to update these every month or every week. 6 Use related links The most successful of e-commerce operations have built on that success in recent years by recommending other products customers have added to their shopping basket when making similar selections. This is dynamic web systems at their user-experience best. Most e-commerce software offers this functionality so make sure you have it switched on if you have an online shop. If your site is built using WordPress, Joomla, etc there are many widgets that offer a similar function, recommending other articles that may be of interest to your visitors. Don’t overdo it though. Dynamic sites are not as search engine friendly as a static site, especially if the dynamism is based on pulling content from elsewhere. In addition, too many scripts and widgets increase page load which also has a negative SEO impact, so be aware. The importance is to make your site dynamic enough to make visitors want to keep coming back. Remember overdoing the bells and whistles will also detract from your design and of number one importance is your user’s experience.