• Content – Is your content still relevant to your products or the services you are offering? Has anything about your business changed within the past year? Make sure that your content reflects what you want to say and the message you want to send to potential customers. Is it clear enough? Can visitors find the information they need? No one likes to hit a dead end, so it’s a good idea to go through the pages of your site and make sure that each one offers a link to more information, a call to action or a way to contact you.
• Images – Spring is a good time to take some new photos or splash out on a professional photographer. Good images can make all the difference in creating a website that stands out from the crowd. Check that your existing imagery is still relevant and update any images that look dated. If you’ve made any changes to your business in the past year, this should be reflected through new photos on the site. Think about whether your images are welcoming and invite people to buy your product or service. Spring is an ideal time to take photos, with clear blue skies, fresh foliage and all those gorgeous spring flowers and blossoms that can help sell your product. If outside shots are not suitable, check that you have adequate indoor lighting and that you’re not casting your own shadow in your photos.
• Videos – Videos can help sell your product or service online. It could be as simple as taking a small video from your digital camera and uploading to a free video hosting site like YouTube and then embedding it into your website. (If this sounds a little too technical, give us a call or drop us an email and we can help you out!) Visitors love to be able to see your products or services, especially if they are located elsewhere in the country (or world!).
• Blog – If you don’t have a blog, now is the time to get one! If you do have a blog, have you been making regular updates? You don’t have to be posting blogs every day. Updates could be once a week, once a fortnight or once a month. The important thing is to keep at it and keep it regular. It is disheartening to arrive on a nice website and realise their last update is a year old; it makes you feel as if the site is out of date, so why stick around? A blog helps you to communicate to your visitors, keep them up to date on the latest news and events, and encourage interaction. Not to mention those search engines really love that fresh content. Why not put a spring blog up on your site? There’s no shortage of things to chat about when we finally arrive after a long, cold winter to those stunning spring days, warmer temperatures, outdoor activities and the excitement of summer just around the corner! Your visitors and search engines will love you for it!
• Resources – Do you consider yourself an industry expert? Are you a knowledge base for your field of work? Why not utilise this information and share this on your website? This will not only offer further resources for your visitors, they will be more likely to return to your site again and again. You will be seen as a trusted source for information within your field and you will likely gain many more visitors who may be searching for such information through search engines and arrive on your site because of a particular article, etc. Resources could be as simple as including links to further information, or as extensive as writing dedicated information on your site or on your blog that helps to showcase you as an industry expert.
• Social media – If you don’t have any social media, you’re missing out! No doubt you’ve heard about Facebook and Twitter, and that’s just to name a couple. These are social media sites that are taking the world by storm and you need to be part of it! Make it easy for your visitors to share your information across social media platforms by creating a free Facebook and/or Twitter account. These can be linked with your website in a number of ways and can actually save you time by allowing your website to be the location for core updates which are automatically fed through to your social media pages. By including ‘like’, ‘follow’, ‘tweet’ and ‘connect’ options on your website, you are encouraging visitors to interact with you via your social media pages. If you are making updates to these sites and gaining fans or followers, you’re essentially exposing your business to millions of potential customers – if one fan likes your post, it will show on their page for all their friends to see, etc., etc. until you’re a viral marketing sensation! If you’re interested in the possibilities of social media, give us a call to discuss the many options and find out what might work for your business.
• Call-to-actions – Are you driving visitors to the right areas of your business? Make sure you have a clear idea of your website objectives and what you want people to do when they’re on your site. If you want to increase phone enquiries, do you have a call to action prominently displaying your phone number and a reason for people to get in touch? Do you want to build up your database to be able to send newsletter updates to your customers? If so, do you have a newsletter signup form easily accessible? Perhaps you could include a giveaway or incentive for visitors to subscribe. If you are clear on what you want to achieve through the site, check that your calls to action reflect this on your website.
• Design – Are your branding colours still the same? Do you still have the same logo? Certain designs and colours can start to date after a while. If that is the case for your website, small updates can sometimes make a huge difference. Neutral colours will stand the test of time, those shiny-looking buttons may not!
• Search engines – Let’s face it, you could have the best-looking website in the world, but if that site is not optimised to show within search engines then no one will find you. SEO is a broad term that covers a vast range of different elements that help search engines, like Google, to find you. It’s not a once-off job because the goal posts are always moving, so on-going SEO is recommended to keep benefitting your website and trying to climb the results ladder. Now is good time to analyse how your website is performing and look at ways of increasing this online performance, visitor numbers and sales. Here at TML Web Design, we have a range of SEO options, including on-going optimisation plans. Contact us to find out what we could do for you.
• Do a Google search – Have you Googled your business lately? Do you really know where your business is showing up online? You might be surprised to Google your business and find information about your business on some sites you didn’t even know about. It’s worthwhile doing this every so often to check that all information being published about your company is correct and up to date.

Finished? Ah, now doesn’t that feel great? And if you need a little help with your spring cleaning, give us a call and we’ll pull on our cleaning gloves and give you a hand.

One very important ranking factor is your tags. Both, your title tags and meta tags aren’t visible in the body copy of your website, but people will see this vital information when they are using search engines. On the results page, search engines display search results with a title followed by a two-line description – your title and meta tags. Therefore, the information in both title and meta tags are not only important for search engines, but will entice browsers to click through to your website.

A good title tag should be around 70 characters including spaces (as search engines won’t display more characters). Be sure to include your optimised keywords in your title tag. The same applies to meta tags. However, in meta tags you have a little more room – up to 160 characters including spaces. Make sure you craft a keyword-rich, enticing description of your page. Finally, title and meta tags should be customised for each page of your website.

Other important SEO factors to consider are navigation and links. The navigation of your website should be clear and easy to follow. This not only helps tremendously for user friendliness, but also helps search engines to index your website correctly. As a rule of thumb: if your human visitors get confused, so do search engines, which has, of course, negative effects on your ranking efforts.

With regards to links, lots of incoming links demonstrate your website’s popularity to search engines which is good for ranking. A good internal linking structure (links within your website) also helps with ranking.

Last but not least, the speed at which your website loads is an SEO factor. Factors affecting the loading speed are, for example, the file size of images on your site, your web hosting and the complexity of the code in which your website is written. At TML Web Design we use WordPress to build our websites which generates the fast-loading, simple code that search engines like, and we host your website with a renowned web hosting company. So get in touch and we can design your website or rebuild your existing one!

Firstly, read our post on Copy Writing for the Web. Equipped with this knowledge, there are some additional things to look out for when creating smart SEO body copy. While any keyword-rich web content will help in ranking, you should know how to use your keywords effectively. Firstly, think about keyword phrases rather than single keywords. That means, if you provide Wellington-based boutique B&B and apartment accommodation it isn’t effective to try and rank for the single keyword ‘accommodation’ as you would compete with accommodation providers world-wide. So working with keyword phrases such as ‘Boutique B&B Wellington’ and ‘Apartments Wellington’ makes more sense.

Secondly, you should choose a keyword phrase (or closely related group of keyword phrases) for each page of your website. If you are trying to cover all of your keywords in all of your pages, you’ll end up ranking for nothing. In the accommodation provider example you would, for example, optimise your keywords around B&B accommodation on a B&B page and focus on keywords around apartment accommodation on another page.

Furthermore, you should always include your keyword phrases in headers, and you might consider highlighting some important terms with boldface. (Don’t overdo the latter though!) Finally, search engines love fresh content (and lots of it). This is where regular blogging comes in. If you aren’t confident about writing blogs for your website, TML web design offers excellent blogging services and can help you out – contact us today!

Break it up!
The length of on-page web content should be a minimum of 250 words per page (excluding header and sidebars) because search engines like long text. However, a big block of web content isn’t user-friendly so you should break it up. The aim is to achieve scanable paragraphs of three to four lines as well as sectioned-off content under header tags so your readers can easily scan and consume your content.

Sneak in those keywords!
While you should aim for high keyword density, you don’t want your text to sound too robotic. A great way to fit in extra keywords is in optimised header tags. By using keywords in header tags you can easily up your keyword density by 1%.

Use bullet lists in the right way!
While bullet lists offer great scanability to your reader, search engines regard them as broken content which doesn’t count for as much as other page copy. A way around this is to use a keyword-rich bullet list at the top of the page to outline the page’s content. Do make sure, however, that you have about three lines preceding and following the bullet list, and that you still have a minimum of 250 words of unbroken content on the page. This ensures that search engines still properly index your page but you don’t have to compromise on scanability.

Do your homework!
As with everything in life, you have to do your homework before beginning your web copy writing. Think about your target audience and what they really need and want to know. Make sure your homepage has a very concise synopsis of what you offer. Then tie your copy into specific ‘call to action’ graphics such as joining your newsletter, completing a quote request or adding a product to a shopping cart to move the visitor to take the action you want.

As there is clearly a lot to consider when it comes to writing for the web, we understand if you would prefer to leave it in the hands of the experts and contact us to do your copy writing for you!

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve probably heard of Facebook. To say it’s had quite an impact on the web is something of an understatement; it has on occasion received more traffic than Google. For better or worse, anyone you have ever known (including great aunts, annoying ex-workmates and very old school friends) can find out you are on Facebook and ask to be your ‘friend’. Whether you accept or not is totally up to you, but it can be quite the social conundrum!

So what is Facebook exactly? Well, it is technically a social networking website where people can communicate with each other via private or public messages or ‘wall posts’. The communication can be quite passive – you post to your wall and all of your friends automatically get the post in their ‘news feed’ – or people can write directly onto their friends’ walls or send private messages to each other (like email). Facebook users can also upload photos (and restrict which friends can view them), join interest and hobby groups and become fans of pages. Pages can be about absolutely anything you could possibly think of, so if you hate Mondays you can join or start a group or a page and share with each other why Mondays suck so much!

Why go on Facebook?

When used as a personal communication tool, it’s a great way of keeping in touch with people, organising social and networking events, and staying up-to-date with your interests. As a business tool, Facebook is a very powerful way to utilise viral marketing to promote your business. As of July 2010, there were more than 500 million people on Facebook from around the world including 1.7 million New Zealanders – that’s quite an audience. To use it for business, we recommend you set up a Facebook page (follow the step by step instructions below). But before you can do that, you need to have an account on Facebook for your personal profile. You need the account to attach the Facebook page to, but it is up to you how much information you put online, and you can restrict who can see it via the privacy settings.

How to create a Facebook page

Here’s how you get started on Facebook

Create a Facebook account or login to your Facebook account if you have one. You can create an account from the Facebook homepage at www.facebook.com.

1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php.
2. Choose the ‘Official Page’ option, choose the Business option, and then choose the category your business fits into from the drop-down box.
3. Enter your Page Name into the Page Name box (e.g. Acme Hotel).
4. Tick the ‘I’m the official representative….” box (you might want to read the Facebook terms and conditions and the specific Page terms online at http://www.facebook.com/terms_pages.php.
5. Click the ‘Create Official Page’ button.
6. You will now be directed to your page.
7. Upload an image to your page. The image will be displayed in the image box at the top of the page and as a smaller image in your posts to the wall.
8. If you don’t want your page to be visible to everyone just yet, go to Edit Page, click Edit under Settings and change Published to Unpublished.
9. Wall settings – set up your permissions for your wall (who can write on it).
10. Mobile settings – you will be assigned a unique email address that you can send emails to. The emails will show up as wall posts on your page.  Note down the address if you want to update your page this way. You can also update your page via text messaging and will need to activate this by sending a text to the number shown during the Text Activation (Telecom and Vodafone are currently supported).
11. Work your way through the remaining settings. For example you may want to add the Review box so people can leave reviews about your business.
12. Write a short description about your business by clicking on the text box under the image.
13. Twitter option – if you are on Twitter www.twitter.com you can connect your Facebook page to Twitter so your updates are automatically published to your Twitter account.
14. Blog import – import your blog (if you have one). Your blog has an RSS feed (real simple syndication) which means it can be published on other websites like Facebook. From the Edit Page section, go to Notes and click Edit – go to the bottom of the page and look for ‘Edit Import Settings’. You can now import your blog (enter your website address into the box).
15. Now go to your Wall and write your first post. It could be as simple as “Welcome to our new Facebook page”.

Promoting your Facebook Page

1. Start by ‘Liking’ your own page as this will show up in your friends’ news feeds.
2. Send a message to your Facebook friends directly by clicking on the ‘Suggest to Friends’ link. Your friends will get an email from you suggesting that they like your page.  You’ll be surprised at how many friends of friends will also become fans.
3. Consider promoting your page with an advert (you can set a daily budget). At the time of writing there were 1.7 million New Zealanders over the age of 13 on Facebook.
4. Promote the page on your website with a ‘Like’ box. With a ‘Like’ box visitors to your website can ‘like’ your Facebook page with one click (so they become a fan). They can also see recent posts from the page and how many people like the page.
5. Add a ‘Like’ button to your website. The button differs from the ‘Like’ box as it’s just a button, and when a visitor to your site clicks on it, the link to your website will be added to their Facebook profile.

If you get stuck or need some guidance, the team at TML Web Design can set up your page for you, import your RSS feed, add your images and publish your page. Just give us a call on 03 366 3340 or email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz.

Measuring the success of your current website

Just how well your website is performing depends on how you measure its success. Here are a few ways you can measure the website’s success:

• The number of visitors the site receives each month
• The number of referrals the site receives from Google
• The number of website enquiries you receive
• The number of phone calls generated from your site
• The number of bookings or reservations generated from your site
• The number of direct sales from your website
• The number of downloads from your website

Working out your website conversion rates

A conversion rate is the percentage of people who take the desired action on your site (e.g. they complete an enquiry form or subscribe to a newsletter). A site can have a conversion rate for every ‘action’ on the site. If your website receives 1,000 visitors a month and 10 people complete your enquiry form each month, then your enquiry form conversion rate is 1%. To increase this to 20 enquiries a month you would need to double your visitor numbers or increase your conversion rate to 2%. A typical ‘lead generation’ website will have a conversion rate of 2-3%.

You can increase traffic or improve conversions to get the same result. It is probably a more efficient strategy to increase conversion rate, though getting more traffic to a website is always a desirable goal to work toward as well.

Attracting more visitors to your website (increasing traffic)

• Search engine optimisation – have your site ‘optimised’ so it ranks more highly in the search engines for your keyword phrases.
• Add more content – content attracts visitors to the site via search and links so add interesting and informative content to your site such as ‘how to’ guides, freebies, blog posts, articles and so forth.
• Get more links to your website on website directories and other sites.
• Advertise the website offline on signage, print adverts and stationery.
• Pay to show up in Google Adwords (pay per click).
• Participate in social media websites such as Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter.

Increasing your website’s conversion rates

There are many factors that can affect the performance of your website and how people interact with it. If your website is of a high design standard but is still under-performing, we would recommend making small incremental changes that can be measured independently, rather than making sweeping changes to the website.

Changes you can make to your website include:

• Increase the speed of your website by optimising images, or removing unnecessary banners or scripts from your site.
• Keep the clicks to a minimum – don’t hide important information too deeply in the site.
• Put the most important information at the top of the website – such as contact details and phone numbers.
• Repeat some of the most important information at the bottom of the website as research shows that many people are paying a lot of attention to website footers.
• Make your ‘calls to action’ obvious, unambiguous and compelling. A call to action is asking your visitors to do something – such as complete an enquiry form or join a mailing list. A small link at the bottom of your website to ‘join mailing list’ is not going to be as effective as a graphic at the top that includes an inducement to join the list (such as a discount voucher).
• Your website visitors will not fall into one homogenous group, so make your offer appeal to a broader range of customers by providing multiple options (three options has been found to be optimal).
• Establish your credibility and reputation with customer testimonials, case studies, accreditations, and awards.
• Review your website copy. Is it persuasive enough? Does it answer the questions people are asking themselves? Ask an independent person to read your website and provide you with feedback.
• Check the website’s usability. Just how easy is it to use? Have someone unfamiliar with your website complete a number of goals on the site (such as joining the newsletter, finding pricing and contact details). Watch them interact with the site and note where they get confused.

For more help and advice contact the team at TML Web Design. We can take a look at your current website and provide some suggestions on how to improve conversions and traffic. Give us a call on 03 366 3340 or email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz.



There’s little doubt in our minds about the biggest trend online this year; it has to be social media marketing and in particular Facebook. Social media has taken off for businesses in a big way and there are now web consultants specialising just in this area. If you are in two minds about social media due to a lack of knowledge about how it all works, just jump right in and give it a go.

Social media is one of those things that you won’t really ‘get’ until you actually start doing it. Once you do, you’ll quickly realise just how important it is going to become. There are now 1,132,600 New Zealanders on Facebook over the age of 18. You can reach these people in three ways: you can create a Facebook group, a Facebook page, or advertise. That’s a lot of potential! With advertising you can target specific ages, interests or relationship statuses. As an example, there are currently 40,000 New Zealanders on Facebook who have a relationship status ‘engaged’. That’s a ‘no-brainer’ marketing tactic if that’s your target audience.

So here’s how you get started with Facebook and import an RSS Feed from your blog

1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages
2. Click the ‘Create a Page’ button
3. Select your business category from the drop down box
4. Give your page a name
5. Tick ‘do not make this page visible’ (keep it private while you are building it)
6. Now login to your Facebook account, or create a Facebook account if you don’t have one
7. If you are on Twitter you can link your page to Twitter
8. Change the page picture (it could be your business logo)
9. Write a description about your page
10. Click on ‘Edit Page’ under your photo spot
11. Under ‘Notes’ click ‘edit’
12. On the right hand side look for ‘import a blog’
13. Paste your blog feed url into the url box – for example it will be http://www.yourwebsite.co.nz/feed/ (if you use WordPress)
14. Click ‘Start Importing’
15. Confirm the import by clicking on the ‘Confirm Import’ button
16. That’s it! Once you are ready for the page to go live go back to your settings and publish the page, then make sure you become a fan of your page (so your network will see this)
17. Next add a Facebook logo ‘badge’ and a link to your page on your website
18. Now all you need to do is keep adding new content to your blog (which will automatically update your Facebook page) and supplement this with direct comments to your Facebook page.
19. Then sit back and watch your network grow!

If you get stuck or need some guidance, the team at TML Web Design can set up your page for you, import your RSS feed, add your images and publish your page. Just give us a call on 03 366 3340 or email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz.

A proprietary system has been built from the ground up by the web development company that owns it. It is ‘proprietary’ as the firm has the intellectual property rights to the code that runs the system. If your site is built in a proprietary system, what you purchase is a license to use the system.

Most proprietary CMS systems are hosted on servers provided by the company that owns the CMS. Once you have bought into one of these systems, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to move your website and keep the content management system. Basically, to move the website to another firm requires a complete rebuild of the site, as the site must be built in the specific proprietary software with its own set of themes. If the CMS you are using is substantially upgraded or redeveloped by the company at a later date you may find yourself with an “old” website that has to migrate to the new upgraded system (often at a considerable redevelopment cost) to receive any new enhancements or features.

Open source content management systems like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are widely used by web developers. They have huge benefits for web clients as the site, once built, can be easily moved around between developers and hosts, so you are not locked into any one vendor. Web development costs can be kept to a reasonable level as there are no licensing fees for the system. Sure there is still a cost involved – you still have to pay for hosting, the time it takes to install the site, set it up, design a look and load all the content. But as the web firm does not have to cover the cost of developing the open source system in the first place, they can keep their costs down, and this saving is passed on to you.

Web firms with proprietary systems need to earn a return on their development investment. The firm will have put a considerable amount of time and money into developing their system, but even then they often can’t compete with the hundreds of core developers that will be working collaboratively on an open source system. In fact, there are companies that have developed a proprietary system then decided to make it open source and subsequently experienced exponential growth in their business.

With open source systems it’s a case of ‘many hands make light work’. At TML we are very much fans of open source, and in particular WordPress. So if you’re keen to have your site developed in a widely supported content management system, give us a call on 03 366 3340 or email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz.

Like any self-respecting cult, there is always a charismatic leader with a clear vision for the future. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is certainly charismatic, but he’s also a genuinely humble guy, who seems to be in awe of the whole WordPress phenomenon.

WordPress has not always been regarded as a ‘content management system’ as it has its roots well and truly in blogging. Just a few years ago you’d be hard pressed to find tutorials on how to use WordPress as a content management system. Things have certainly changed. In November 09, WordPress won a coveted Open Source CMS award which, according to Matt Mullenweg, “marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS”.

So its official – WordPress has grown up and become a fully fledged content management system, but it hasn’t lost any of it blogging ‘street cred’ either. It’s still a fantastic way to publish a blog and link up to social media websites for extra exposure online.

As web designers with business clients (who have a strong desire to update their own websites), we have some very specific requirements in a content management system, and WordPress delivers every time.

So here’s why we choose WordPress over other CMS systems:

• Our clients find WordPress very intuitive to use; they get excited about their websites – and we get a thrill every time we discover they’ve published a new blog or added an image gallery. It makes us look good!
• The search engines love WordPress so our clients get better rankings in Google, which is great for business.
• Installing WordPress to a web server is a breeze with WordPress’s famous ‘5 minute install’ – and the system is very widely supported by web hosting firms.
• It’s very well supported. If the answer to a WordPress coding question isn’t in the Codex there will be someone somewhere in the world who has published the solution online.
• There are thousands of WordPress themes to look at for inspiration.
• There are dozens of WordPress showcase websites where you can discover how others are using WordPress.
• There is an amazing community of WordPress users who are very generous with their time and information.
• There are thousands of WordPress plugins that greatly extend the functionality of a website. Some of our favourites include quote rotators; image galleries, sitemap generators, and search engine optimisation add-ons.
• WordPress provide one-click installs of themes and plugins direct from their website.
• It’s so efficient to set up that we can spend more time on designing the look and layout of a website, and less on technical issues.
• WordPress is constantly being improved with new features and enhancements.
• Using a ‘pick n mix’ approach to using plugins, custom fields and code snippets, we can pretty much bend WordPress to fit many different requirements – it will even do e-commerce.

So that’s it in a nutshell – why WordPress is our content management system of choice. Now, if you want to benefit from its ease of use, extendibility and ongoing development, give us a call on 03 366 3340 or email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz and let us know about your website needs.

PS, here are some of the WordPress things we can do for you:

• Install WordPress for you
• Install themes for you
• Host your WordPress website
• Create a new theme for you
• Build you a blog
• Build you an entire website with a blog

1. Your content must be relevant and appealing

There’s an old saying that ‘content is king’ online. It’s probably quite fair to say that an average-looking website with well-written content that resonates with its target audience will outperform a ‘bells and whistles’ website with poorly written ‘company-centric’ copy. The reason for this is quite simple: when someone is highly interested in a website’s subject matter (generally a specific solution to their problem) and the content is ticking all the boxes for them (“yes, this looks to be just the right solution to my problem”), they’re just not that influenced by the bells and whistles – in fact they may overlook quite a lot of your content.

When you prepare your text give a lot of thought to your target audience and what they really need to know.

You can even create fictional characters for your website (called personas) and write up scenarios on why they would visit your website and the sort of information they would need to make a decision. Anticipate the questions your visitors will have and answer them throughout your copy, or have a dedicated ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ page.

Tie your copy into specific ‘call to action’ graphics that move the visitor to take the action you want, whether it is to join your newsletter, complete a quote request or add a product to a shopping cart.

Make sure your homepage has a very concise synopsis of what you do and the benefits of your offer. Remember that the website is not for you, it’s for your visitors – and they want to know, specifically: “What’s in it for me?”

Remember to sprinkle your keywords throughout your copy so you stand a better a chance of ranking highly in the search engines.

2. Your imagery – paint the best picture possible

Really good photos create a very positive first impression. Average photos won’t create any impression at all. They won’t necessarily detract from the site – they’ll just be ignored. It’s like this: you wear black every day, and no one says anything. One day you turn up wearing red and suddenly you get five compliments on how great you look! Great-looking photos will have the same effect.

With the plethora of online image library banks there’s ample opportunity to get stunning free (or inexpensive) stock photos which will convey just the right feeling or emotion. Start by visiting www.sxc.hu and www.istock.com. If you need photos of your actual product then get in a professional or at least a talented amateur photographer.

3. The navigation must be clear and easy to use

Have a text-based navigation system that is easy to use (no images and no flash animation). The visitor should know which page they are on and where they can go to next, so have ‘on’ ‘hover’ and ‘off’ states for links. Drop-down and ‘fly out’ navigation systems can be problematic for some users so are best avoided. If you have multiple levels of navigation and need to show links to sub pages, it’s generally much more usable to do this with a vertical menu positioned at the top of a side column.

Link relevant phrases within the actual copy of the site to matching pages. This helps with navigation and search engine rankings, as people will often click on these text links rather than the main navigation as they are in context with the subject.

Add links to key pages in the footer. Large footers are becoming very common on websites as research has shown that many users look for navigation at the bottom of each page (even ignoring the main navigation system). Your footer can include links to your most important pages (the ones that have the most information about your offer), your latest news items or blog posts, and we highly recommend you show your contact details in the footer as well.

Want to know more?

Give us a call on 366 3340 or send an email to info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz.