What a good website should look like? or Should i say Shouldn’t

Posted on 08 January 2019 by Ndungu

Here’s how many websites are developed. The decision-makers gather around the conference table and begin brainstorming. “Our website should include our mission statement so visitors know what guides us,” says one executive.

“It should look and sound professional, so let’s use stock photos and have Mary write the copy because she was an English major in college,” says another.

Someone from the sales department adds, “On the Contact Us page, let’s use a form with lots of questions that will help us make a sale. Have visitors tell us their budget and how soon they intend to make a purchase. And let’s be sure to get their full name, mailing address and phone number so we can have a salesperson pursue them.”

“We should have a page with all our products. But let’s not put too many details or prices because we want visitors to have to contact us,” says a third. Are you cringing as you read these website suggestions? If not, you should be. They’re off-base and sure to alienate visitors.

Customer-centric is everything

While all these ideas have merit for the company, they don’t make much sense for visitors. And that’s a big mistake. If you don’t put your visitors first, your website won’t be effective. Bottom line, it’s not about you!

The best websites are customer-centric. They’re designed to provide the information visitors seek and to present it in an interesting, organized fashion. They let the customer see the real you, which then builds trust.

Remove the Following From Your Website

Certain elements on your website are going to detract from the value and message you’re trying to convey. Complicated animations, content that’s too long, stocky website images are just a few factors on the list.

With an audience that only has an attention span of 8 seconds, you need to create a first impression that easily gets the main points across. This should be done with short, powerful sections of content and applicable photographs/icons that are sectioned off by clear and concise headers.

If you’ve got those right, then review it and make sure it doesn’t contain jargon or ambiguous terminology. It only serves to muddy your content and confuse your users.

Use the Right Images

Not every image is going to fit with the type of message you’re trying to show your audience.

Just because a stock website has the image, doesn’t mean it looks genuine and will evoke trust in your company. Ideally, you want to use photos that portray images of the real people that work at your company and the office itself.

Avoid industry jargon.

Don’t use words or phrases that your visitors may not recognize. Use familiar terminology.

Make your home page a to-the-point summary.

Since your home page is the most common entrance to your website, it should describe how customers will benefit from your content, products, or services. If visitors can’t quickly figure out what’s in it for them, they’ll click that back button. Poof, gone!

15 Tips to Create Killer Website Content

Let Your Visitors Scroll on Your Homepage

Above the fold is old. Don’t be wary of designing a slightly longer homepage. Including 3-5 sections that help direct new and recurring users to proper areas of your site can help create a seamless experience.

But what should these sections be?

This list could go on forever, but a quick hit-list of some of the more crucial elements includes:

  • Value proposition
  • Intro Video Overview of Services
  • Product Features
  • About Us
  • Testimonials
  • Case Studies/Success Stories
  • Resources

Don’t be Afraid of White Space

Whitespace is an essential design element that helps you break up the page and increase readability.

Also called ‘negative space’, white space refers to the areas around elements on a page that are empty and lacking content or visual items.

Mobile Optimization

Don’t forget about optimizing your site for mobile. If you don’t already know, 80% of internet users own a smartphone, and “Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead”.

I’d be a little concerned if I were you.

Update Your Content To Appeal to Your Persona

When you’re writing copy that you want to impress your website visitors with, many of us tend to fall into a dangerous trap.

The content is ‘we’ and ‘our’ focused.

‘We will increase revenue by..”, “Our benefits include…” are just examples of the headers that many uses throughout web pages. Although you may be showcasing the ways your business might help because of how great you and your products are, it’s not going to get the point across.

Strip out the “we’s” and “our’s” and replace them with “you’s” and “your’s”. Your potential customers want you to meet them eye-to-eye, understand the pain points they have, and directly explain how they could be solved.

So rather than a header like ‘Our Case Studies’, try something like ‘Your Potential Success Story’. Or rather than a careers page that focuses how great the company is, filter in some content that explains how applicants futures are important and their ability to define their future working at your business.

This grammatical switch may seem insignificant, but subconsciously it will affect the way customers see your business.

For web hosting and website design in Kenya, get in touch with Big Host Africa

read more here https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/tips-for-improving-your-web-design

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PHP 7? What does this mean for you as a developer?

Posted on 07 January 2019 by Ndungu

Introducing PHP 7 – a revolution in the way we deliver applications that power everything from websites and mobile to enterprises and the cloud. This is the most important change for PHP since the release of PHP 5 in 2004, bringing explosive performance improvements, drastically reduced memory consumption, and a host of brand-new language features to make your apps soar.

Designed and refactored for today’s workloads, PHP 7 is the ultimate choice for web developers today. We’ll take a look at the top  features here.

1. SPEED!

The developers worked very hard to refactor the PHP codebase in order to reduce memory consumption and increase performance. And they certainly succeeded.

Benchmarks for PHP 7 consistently show speeds twice as fast as PHP 5.6 and many times even faster!

2. Type Declarations

Type declarations simply means specifying which type of variable is being set instead of allowing PHP to set this automatically. PHP is considered to be a weak typed language. In essence, this means that PHP does not require you to declare data types.

3. New Operators

Spaceship Operator

PHP 7 also brings us some new operators. The first one we’re going to explore is the spaceship operator. With a name like that, who doesn’t want to use it? The spaceship operator, or Combined Comparison Operator, is a nice addition to the language, complementing the greater-than and less-than operators.

Spaceship Operator
< = >

 

 

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New WordPress Block Editor – WordPress “Gutenberg”

Posted on 07 January 2019 by Ndungu

The new block editor brings with it a completely different approach to content creation in the form of blocks (hence the name…). And in this post, you’re going to learn exactly how to use those blocks, and the new editor’s other features, to create content at your WordPress site.

What is Gutenberg?

As a customary catch-up for those who don’t know, Gutenberg is the new way to edit content in WordPress. It replaces the tired TinyMCE post content editor and can do a lot more too – think shortcodes, widgets, menus, and even custom fields. It is a client-side interface built with React that uses a block based system to build up content:

We Called it Gutenberg for a Reason

WordPress has always been about websites, but it’s not just about websites. It’s about freedom, about possibility, and about carving out your own livelihood, whether it’s by making a living through your site or by working in the WordPress ecosystem itself. We’re democratizing publishing — and democratizing work — for everyone, regardless of language, ability, or economic wherewithal.

When Johannes Gutenberg’s press came out, people mostly used it to print the same religious text monks had been copying. It wasn’t until ten or fifteen years later that people started innovating and trying their hands at new kinds of writing, and the wheels of change started to spin faster. Now it’s WordPress’ turn to do the same. Gutenberg meets our challenges and opportunities head on while simultaneously benefitting everyone who makes a living working in the WP ecosystem. It’s about a lot more than just blocks.

Developers and agencies will be able to create interactive templates that clients can easily update without breaking things or dealing with custom post types: Imagine a custom “employee” block that you can add to an About page that includes a picture, name, and bio. They’ll be able to replace most meta boxes, and they’ll get a chance to update old code or clients to work in this new paradigm.

If you need assistance with Gutenberg Big Host Africa is ready to advice or even resolve issue you may have. if you are unfamiliar with block editor or your site no longer displaying correctly, you can also install classic editor.

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Magento: For E-commerce Website Development

Posted on 07 January 2019 by Ndungu

One of the most important decisions when starting an ecommerce business is which content management system (CMS) you’ll use to manage products and transactions. There are many options available, and while that means that there are several great choices for business owners, it also means that selecting the right one is no easy task.

Setting up an e-commerce store is not that much easy if your foundation is not strong. In today’s scenario, the business owners are looking for best platforms for their e-commerce websites development, and magento is the best solution to fulfill all their needs. It is an open-source system built for ecommerce, and has two different editions—Community and Enterprise—to accommodate both small and large businesses.

Benefits of Magento for E-commerce Website Development

1) Free: Magento is an opensource platform and hence has a lot of features that are completely free.

2) Available in 3 Flavors: – Magento is available in 3 different flavors.
-Community Edition (open source)
-Enterprise edition
-Magento Go (hosted solution)

3) SEO Edge: – Magento has a unique feature i.e ‘Magento SEO’. Magento seo has solved multiple issues by facilitating this unique feature.

4) Developers Friendly: Magento developers finds it easy and friendly to add pages and update content to the website.

5) Multiple Store Management: With magento, running and managing online business 24-7 has become stress-free. Before magento, managing multiple stores from single administrative panel was inconvenient.

6) Secure: Magento is very secure, if your server running on a separate system, the information of your online store, products, records of customers, orders and transactions are completely private with no third party access.

7) Mobile Friendly: Last but not least, Magento is mobile friendly too. The mobile apps of magento allows store integration across multiple devices

8) It’s built for sales: Although most other CMS have ecommerce functionality as an add-on, Magento is unique in that it was built specifically with sales in mind. This means that in terms of driving conversions, it’s one of the best choices out there.

If you’d like some assistance with the launch of a Magento site, or to discuss your options for creating an ecommerce site, don’t hesitate to contact us!

 

 

 

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Secure /tmp and /dev/shm partition

Posted on 02 November 2010 by Ndungu

This is you secure your VPS partitions in ssh

Is it a Dedicated server OR a VPS? If it’s a Dedicated server, edit the /etc/fstab file

vi /etc/fstab

replace “defaults” in front of /tmp, /dev/shm to

nosuid,noexec,rw

Save the file and remount the partitions:

mount -o remount /tmp
mount -o remount /dev/shm

To secure /var/tmp, rename the existing /var/tmp and create a symlink

mv /var/tmp /var/tmp_bak
ln -s /tmp /var/tmp

Hope this helps

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Ten Steps to Survival by Innovation

Posted on 17 March 2010 by Ndungu

Big Host Africa - Ten Steps to Survival by Innovation bighostweb.comContinuous innovation is required to survive in business, beginning with your startup, and increasing in importance as your business matures. Technologists often insist that new things can’t be invented on a schedule, but successful companies seem to be able to do it.

Many people have tried to define a process for innovation, but most are too abstract for me. Finally I found a book, “Robert’s Rules of Innovation: A 10-Step Program for Corporate Survival,” by Robert F. Brands, which seems to be more concrete, and chronicles several decades of practical experience to solidify the ten steps: Continue Reading

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Benefits Of Ecommerce

Posted on 04 November 2009 by Ndungu

Benefits of e-commerce, Big Host Africa,VPS web hosting, domain registration and Content Management System (CMS) Design and implementationE Commerce is one of the most important facets of the Internet to have emerged in the recent times. Ecommerce or electronic commerce involves carrying out business over the Internet with the assistance of computers, which are linked to each other forming a network. To be specific ecommerce would be buying and selling of goods and services and transfer of funds through digital communications. Continue Reading

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The Lure of E-commerce

Posted on 04 November 2009 by Ndungu

Benefits of e-commerce, Big Host Africa,VPS web hosting, domain registration and Content Management System (CMS) Design and implementationThe following list summarizes what might be called the “lure of e-commerce”:

  • Lower transaction costs – if an e-commerce site is implemented well, the web can significantly lower both order-taking costs up front and customer service costs after the sale by automating processes. Continue Reading

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Capture the Market

Posted on 29 October 2009 by Ndungu

Capture the market, Big Host Africa,VPS web hosting, domain registration and Content Management System (CMS) Design and implementationBusinesses today are always on the look out for effective marketing strategies. Although modern means of mass communication are very promising channels to be used for marketing purposes, making use of promotional products still carries immense value.

Business entities have long taken advantage of this simple marketing tactic due to the effective result that it has the potential to deliver. Employing this tactic today is far more cost effective than it has ever been in the past. This is due to the easy availability of promotional products through the internet. Continue Reading

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Can IT Help Your Business?

Posted on 03 October 2009 by Ndungu

Can I.T Help Your business, Big Host Africa,VPS web hosting, domain registration and Content Management System (CMS) Design and implementationWith the advancements in information technology (IT), businesses are becoming increasingly dependent on the services it provides. Indeed, from instant communication and storing customer data on computer systems, to video conference calling and selling online, IT has become an integrated part of the business landscape.

And, if businesses want to compete in what is a cut-throat and fast paced world, it is essential they harness the power of such technology. Not only does it offer an effective method of conducting business, but if used intelligently, IT also allows companies to stay flexible and thus meet the changing demands of consumers more efficiently. Continue Reading

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