Articles

In today’s fast-paced digital world, having a well-maintained website is crucial for business success. However, managing website updates, security patches and technical support in-house can be time-consuming and complex. That’s where outsourcing website maintenance comes in. In this article, we explore the key benefits of outsourcing your website maintenance to professionals.

Your website’s performance is a critical factor in user experience, search engine rankings and ultimately, your business success. A slow or poorly designed website can drive visitors away, negatively impact your SEO and reduce conversion rates.

The good news? You don’t need a full website overhaul to see improvements. With a few strategic web design tweaks, you can enhance your site's speed, usability and efficiency. Here are five quick and effective changes you can implement today.

In the digital era, a website is often the first touchpoint for people looking to learn more about a non-profit organisation. A well-designed website can boost credibility, foster trust and inspire action – whether it’s donations, volunteering or advocacy.

Here are our top ten tips to ensure your non-profit’s website stands out and serves its purpose effectively.

For many businesses, their website is their primary marketing tool for generating enquiries for their business. Whilst some companies are great at updating and maintaining their website, keeping it current with new content and images and upgrading their software, for many businesses, a website can be a set-and-forget affair.

This is fine; however, when work gets in the way, it can be months or even years before you turn around and think to yourself, ‘Our website’s looking a little dated. It might be time for an upgrade!’.

Developing a website for your business is a great way to reach potential customers looking for your products or services. But just having a website often isn't enough. To attract visitors and convert them into customers, your site needs to be both well-designed and optimised for search engines. This is where web design and SEO (search engine optimisation) come together. A beautifully designed website without proper SEO might look great, but what's the point if no one can find it?

Anyone with a website will know that having a well-designed website is essential for business, no matter what you sell or how big your company is. Whether you’re a local business or a global brand, your website is a crucial touchpoint for customers.

If you’ve ever visited a website and noticed a little padlock icon in the address bar you’ve encountered an SSL certificate. This icon signifies that the connection between your browser and the website is secure, protecting any data you exchange. An SSL certificate is essential for building trust with your visitors and generating better rankings on Google. In this blog post, we’ll explain what SSL certificates are, why they matter and how you can get one for your website.

A website audit is essential for keeping your site healthy, improving user experience and boosting search engine rankings. Whether you're a business owner or a web developer, regularly conducting a website audit helps you identify and fix issues that could harm your site’s performance and impact the user experience of your potential customers. In this guide, we’ll explore some key focus areas to ensure a thorough website audit.

If you’ve spent time online shopping, looking at website analytics or simply watching young people on their phones, you will know that attention spans are shrinking, and user expectations are higher than ever. One of the most critical factors for a successful website is its loading speed.

If you’ve been using Joomla 3 for your website, you may have heard that it’s reaching its official End of Life (EOL). This is a significant milestone for anyone using the platform, and it's essential to understand what it means and how you can prepare to ensure a smooth transition.

Find out how to backup your Joomla website using Akeeba Backup. Ensure no website data is lost by taking regular backups of your site.

In the world of digital marketing, well-written copy for your web pages is vital for a business to optimise its chance for customer acquisition. But what exactly is effective copywriting for a website, and how do we go about getting it right?

Your website acts as a digital storefront for your business and is quite often the first point of contact between your business and potential customers. Just like a physical shop would get a fresh coat of paint or modifications to make it more appealing, your website design also needs updating, but when should you look at refreshing your website design?

Having a strong online presence has become non-negotiable in the ever-evolving landscape of the modern business world. For small businesses in particular, a well-designed and functional website can be a game-changer as your website is often the first interaction potential customers have with your brand. But just how important is a website for a small business? Let's delve into the reasons why it's not merely important but crucial.

One often-underestimated element of a website design that wields incredible power in shaping visual identity and readability is typography. The choice of fonts, their arrangement and how text is laid out alongside other design elements can significantly influence how potential visitors perceive your website. In this blog post, we delve into the crucial role of typography in web design and explore how it impacts both the aesthetics and readability of your website.

In today’s digital world, your website is quite often the first point of contact between your business and potential customers, so when your site goes down, it can lead to a moment of panic for the website owner and cause customers to move on to your competitors. Find out what to do when your website is down to minimise disruption to your online presence.

In the world of website design, first impressions matter for your customers. Your website design – particularly the colour scheme, plays a significant role in shaping initial impressions from potential customers.

Domain names serve as digital addresses, guiding users to their desired online destinations (ie. a website), but what happens when a domain's lease on its name expires? To demystify this process, let's embark on a journey through the life cycle of a domain.

In a digital world where content is constantly being updated and changed, a static website can quickly become irrelevant in the eyes of a search engine. Keeping your website’s content fresh and up-to-date is essential for maintaining its effectiveness. But just how often should you update your website content?

When it comes to websites and holding people’s attention, every second counts. A powerful call to action can make the difference between a fleeting visitor and a loyal customer. In this article, we'll explore the art of creating effective CTAs that will engage users and boost your conversions.

One of the crucial elements when building a website is your hosting – a place where your website files and images are stored. It’s an essential component of any online presence, so it’s important to choose a hosting plan that suits your needs and budget.

When talking about websites with clients – in particular content management systems, many people have heard of WordPress and have even used it but haven’t necessarily heard of Joomla or edited a website with this CMS before.

Joomla is an excellent tool for building websites, and once your website is up and running, sometimes it’s easy to forget that you need to maintain your software. Without maintaining your CMS, your site may be slowed down by unnecessary files, out-of-date modules and clutter in your database.

So what happens after you’ve had success with your SEO campaign? Can you save money by stopping your SEO? Many business owners think that SEO is a one-off expense and they’ll maintain their rankings long term. Stopping your SEO is not a good idea as it can drastically affect your revenue.

Planning your website design will help save you time and money and ensure you get the website you want for your business. This article outlines several key areas to focus on when planning your website.

We’ve been getting a lot of clients asking us lately if they should purchase the .au equivalent of their .com.au domain names. Is it worth the money? Does it add any benefit to the business? Does it protect my brand? We answer all this and more below.

If you’re looking to improve your website’s rankings, then backlinks should be an essential component of your SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy.

Google Business Profile is a free tool that gives business owners an opportunity to showcase general information to their potential customers. This feature of Google makes it super easy for potential customers to find out details about your company in a single search query.

Your website can look amazing, work beautifully and be completely on brand, but if it’s failing to attract and convert customers then something’s missing and it’s not doing the job it’s designed to do. Here are some ways to help your website become more profitable and help get customers through the door.

We often get asked here in the Marketeam office... what’s the benefit of updating your website on a regular basis? There are many reasons why it’s a good idea to update your website frequently but before we jump into these reasons, we need to outline what ‘updating your website’ actually means. 

If your website design is outdated it could be damaging your business. If Google doesn’t look at your site favourably when it comes to mobile responsiveness, page speed and other factors this could mean a drop in rankings, which leads to a drop in traffic.

In the world of websites, it’s imperative to stay ahead of your competitors. The best way to do this is to ensure your website always looks fresh and is updated with new content regularly. In this article, you will find out how to identify if your website may be out of date and what you can do about it.

Since our dog Ellie came into our lives 12 months ago, she’s been a regular fixture here at the Marketeam office. While she still hasn’t quite got the hang of how to design a website or how to write good SEO copy, she’s still in training. She’s great at letting us know when our clients have arrived for a meeting and will sometimes bark when we’re on the phone, which is why she’s earned the title “Head of Security”.

There are so many elements that make up a good website – clear navigation, great content, awesome design just to name a few. Here’s our take on the top 10 things to include in your website build in order for it to be an effective business tool.

So you’ve logged into Joomla to manage your website and you want to edit an article but there’s a lock next to it and you can’t get in… what do you do?

There’s nothing worse than having a customer call you and tell you they’re trying to put an order through your website and it’s either not working properly or is entirely down.  The first thing that comes to many people’s minds is ‘how many other customers have I lost?’ quickly followed by ‘how long has my website been down?’.  Before you panic and call your web developer, hosting company or the person in the know about your website, it’s worth doing a few checks to find out a few things. 

Is your Joomla website running slow? There are a variety of reasons why your Joomla website is slow to load and we go through a range of different areas to check to ensure your site's speed doesn’t become an issue for your users or Google.

So you have a Joomla website and you want to give someone access to the back-end so they can go in and make edits and updates… how do you do that? It’s a very simple process – all you need to do is set them up as a user.

If you have a Joomla website and want to know the best way to optimise your titles, descriptions and URLs, this ultimate guide runs you through everything you need to know.

Almost every website needs some type of contact form to help customers contact you and get in touch about your products or services. If you’re using Joomla there are a whole bunch (43 in fact) of form components you can choose from the Joomla Extensions Directory, but which is the best one?

When it comes to running a business, many of us are experts at knowing the products or services that we sell intimately. We know them inside out because we work with them every day. Talking to customers about what we do and landing the next big project by outlining all the benefits of our services or products is a great feeling, but what if we could do it better? What if there was a way to take customers on a journey – your journey, and let them feel something about your business, not just find out information?

If you’ve been researching local web design companies for your business website, there’s a good chance you’ve come across a wide range of different approaches to how a web agency approaches, designs and builds their websites. Just like most business, there’s never one way to put something together or build a particular thing and websites are no different. Most people when they think about their website, they tend to think about the design of their site. This is no doubt an important aspect of the overall experience their website brings to their potential customers, but there are many different ways of putting together a design and some of them have more limitations and implications than others.

Having designed and re-designed hundreds and hundreds of websites over the past decade, we get asked all the time ‘Why should I update the design of my website?’. There are several benefits to giving your website a refresh, least of which it gives you an opportunity to update your software and modules to ensure your website is as secure as possible, and also provides the chance to look at the marketing messages and images you use throughout the site (particularly on your homepage).

What many small business owners don’t realise until it’s too late is that if you don’t have control over your domain, you can’t effectively manage your email or website properly. You’re essentially handing over control and in some cases ownership of your website and email to a third party.

Mistakes are an inevitable part of doing business and it’s easy to make a mistake if you’re not aware you’re doing anything wrong – particularly online. Many businesses build a website with good intentions but fall into these common traps outlined below. If you find you suffer from some of these common website mistakes, don’t worry – we outline how you can fix them, or if you need some assistance, feel free to contact Marketeam and we’d be happy to assist where we can.

When it comes to investing in a website there are lots of different moving parts to the project that you want to make sure come together to create a smooth and easy experience with your web design company. We’ve heard some real horror stories from potential clients about rogue web developers who fall off the face of the earth, projects that grind to a halt or web design agencies that promise the world and deliver a snowglobe.

When you’re working on your Joomla website and you’ve come across an issue or you need to find out the answer to something specific, sometimes you need to find out the Joomla version you’re using to search for answers.

Using structured data on your website is a great way to let Google know all about the different elements of your business and help to display these in search results. By adding structured data to your website you’re letting Google know more about the type of website you have, your address and phone number details and review information.

Every day more and more Australians access their favourite websites and social sites using mobile devices. More google searches are now completed on mobile phones than on desktop computer so it makes sense more and more Australians are getting their information on their smartphones.

If you’re using the latest version of Joomla (version 3.8+) you might have noticed that some of the URLs on your website may have numbers in them.

Lots of our clients have been asking about what the mobile-first indexing that Google has been rolling out means for their website and their ranking in Google. You may have noticed in the past couple of weeks that your rankings may have been moving up and down as Google rolls out this indexing method that also affects their ranking algorithm and in turn, your rankings in Google.

As a web designer I spend a lot of time online. A LOT of time! Over the years I’ve found loads of different, interesting and useful tools and websites that help me to complete tasks that would otherwise be burdensome, time-consuming or just plain annoying. Hopefully by sharing some of these tools, I can help other business owners, web designers or just people interested in performing tasks more effectively to lighten the load a little throughout their day. So without further delay, here’s my list of six favourite online tools.

You’ve got your coffee and you’re ready to work. You open your computer and try to open your email but there’s no new messages. “That’s strange?” you say to yourself. “I usually always have at least a few new emails every morning!” So you fire up your web browser to see if your internet connection is working. You navigate to your business website and see a ‘404 site not found’ message. This is usually when we see clients start to panic and think “My website’s down and my email isn’t working”. 90% of the time when this occurs it’s because your domain name has lapsed and it’s expired, but fear not – there are things you can do to ensure this doesn’t happen.

When it comes to web design there are so many different ways to get online these days – anyone not familiar with the industry can get overwhelmed with the various options, services and systems available, with a huge variance of pricing. So what’s the best option to go with? Is a cheap web design worth the money? Aren’t all websites the same? All these questions and more will be answered in this article.

In today’s world we float between devices pretty seamlessly. Laptops, desktops, tablets and mobile devices are in most homes in Australia, and when a customer is looking at your website and wants to move from one device to another, or looks at your site on their computer at work then may check it out again on their tablet or mobile at home, they should have a seamless experience and the web design should allow for a smooth transition between devices. 

In the world of business it’s easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest fads for marketing and generating business. There’s a plethora of schemes, frameworks and blueprints that all seem to promise business success and riches, but usually tend to overcharge and under deliver. Here at Marketeam we’ve always believed in the saying “success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” and building successful websites is no different. To make a website successful takes a lot of hard work and dedication, even more if you don’t know what you’re doing. With that in mind we’ve decided to put together this guide of important things about websites for small businesses.

As part of the web design process for every client, Marketeam comes up with a complete custom design that matches client’s branding and colour palettes. But how do we actually come up with unique designs every time? Well, the answer to that question is we use templates as a framework for all of our websites and then incorporate additional design elements to make them unique.

We feel designing and developing websites this way gives us the freedom and flexibility to create amazing looking websites – every time, whilst cutting down on development and design costs for our customers. So here’s why we use templates to build our websites.

When it comes to SEO or search engine optimisation, there seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding what it actually is and what companies should be doing when they charge a fee to do SEO work on your website. We’ve all had those emails or phone calls from overseas call centres promising you “page one results on Google!” for a small fee, but what does it all mean, and when someone tells you they can make your website ‘SEO friendly’, is that the same as SEO optimised? Before we launch into the differences between search engine friendly and search engine optimised let's take a quick look at what SEO or search engine optimisation actually is.

As website designers we spend our life in front of the computer screen. We are constantly building websites for customers – launching, testing and setting live our creations on the internet. If there’s one question we get asked more than any other, it’s “why does my website look slightly different on different computers or browsers?” Now we wish there was an easy answer to this question but it’s a little complicated so we’re going to try and break it down and explain it in the best way we can.

We’ve been working with Joomla for around 10 years now and in that time we’ve learnt the system pretty much inside out. We’ve used all versions of Joomla from 1.0 upwards and sometimes we’re so used to doing things in this system we forget that what might be simple or trivial for us, could be a revelation for a customer. One of these simple tricks recently came to our attention so we thought it would be wise to share it in our blog. This simple trick can let you see any published page on your Joomla website without knowing what the URL is.

When it comes to great website design, there’s a few elements that will always span across the different design trends we see, year in year out in our industry. At the time of writing (September 2017) the website design trend we’re seeing – and have seen all throughout the year – is large, full page slideshows with a funky background image or video and marketing message or a call to action button.

If you’re thinking about getting a website built you’re probably in the process of looking for a Brisbane based web design company – or perhaps you’ve spoken to a few people and they’ve talked to you about their website developer or ‘my website designer did this for me’’ etc and you may be asking yourself, what’s the difference between a website developer and a designer?

When you're developing a new website, adding content to an existing website or employing a copywriter to build up the content on your website, one of the questions that will inevitably pop up is "how much content is ideal for SEO?" This is one of those questions that tends to get a lot of personal opinion injected into the argument. I think the main point to remember about writing content is to always have the user in mind. If you ramble and go on and on with your content, the only reason being to get additional keywords in your copy or to try and have loads of different keyword variations, then you're going to lose your readers.

We all know that keywords are a really important factor of your search engine optimisation strategy. Choosing the right keywords and keyword phrases for use on your website is the key to driving the right type of traffic. At the end of the day most people want visitors to their website to perform some type of action - sign up to a newsletter, make a purchase, etc. One of the most important factors in doing this is to drive the right type of traffic to your website. Without the right type of visitors, your website will get loads of traffic (which looks great in an analytics report) but you won’t be converting any customers (which looks bad on the balance sheet).

When it comes to adding images to your website it seems like a fairly straightforward process, right? Take a photo or grab an image somewhere online and upload it to your site and you’re done! Whilst this is the general gist of using images on your website, when you start scratching the surface you will begin to realise there’s a lot more to using images on your website than ‘upload, insert and publish’. Before we get into how to find, edit and optimise images for the web, let’s get a basic understanding of images, the different types you can get and some basic attributes of them. 

Often, when I’m talking at a workshop or conference I tell people that search engines love new, unique and relevant content. This inevitably leads to me telling them that they should be updating their websites on a regular basis to ensure that search engines frequently come back to your website to get new content, and to give your visitors new and interesting info each time they go to your website. Then I will always get asked the question “how often should we update our website?”

Some of you may have heard of the term ‘alt tag’ when researching SEO. You may have even heard of its importance in terms of SEO, but are wondering ‘what is an alt tag and why is it important?’

To be a valuable search engine you need to have a fresh index with lots of new information in it – all the time. To get this information a search engine needs to crawl the web and then filter this information into usable chunks of data that relate to search queries. One of the things search engines do to ensure quality search results is to remove duplicate content from their index. Duplicate content fills up search engines with superfluous content and creates a bad user experience for searchers.  

You may have heard the term long tail keywords when it comes to SEO, but perhaps you’re not really sure what they are, how they work or why people are targeting them. In this article we will attempt to shed some light on long tail keywords, why smart 
SEOs are targeting them and how you can use them in your SEO strategies. If used correctly, they can help to bring more targeted visitors to your site, resulting in higher conversion rates and more customers.

Have you ever set up a blog category in your Joomla install only to have the blog page layout look a little, well... wonky? The blog layout is a great way to display multiple articles on the one page as blogs can be a really effective SEO tool for your website, but if the layout isn’t up to scratch, people are likely to not read through your content and click to a competitors website.

If you’ve used Joomla for any length of time you have no doubt stumbled across the anomaly of when setting up a page, your homepage modules show up on the page – even though you haven’t allocated a homepage template to the page (if you’re using a system like Gantry) or allocated homepage modules to that page. What gives and why is this happening?

So you’ve decided on using Joomla for your next website design project and you’re in the process of looking for web design companies to quote on your site. There’s so many options, questions and ways of building websites these days it’s hard to know what questions to ask, right? There are many questions you can ask a potential web design company or contract web developer, and these will be dependant on the requirements of your project. Before you even start looking at companies to build a website for you... you will need to have a clear understanding of what you want your website to do and the functionality requirements of your new website. That being the case, there are several areas you will need to cover before getting to the stage where you’re asking a Joomla website development company for a quote. 

Many clients have asked why there’s a /cms or /main on the end of our website URLs. There’s a very simple answer to this question – to help fend off potentially devastating hacking attempts on your website.

If you're using JCE Editor and you're finding that it's stripping out some of your website elements like YouTube videos, online forms, particular bits of html code or iframes, there's a way to set JCE Editor so it recognises these elements and doesn't strip them out. 

One of the most important aspects of your SEO strategy is choosing the right keywords. If you're not targeting the right keywords you're not going to convert any customers.

You may have heard a lot of talk on the internet about responsive design and how that relates to websites. In this article we take a look at what exactly is responsive design and how it’s the next level of technology for website developers and web designers.

There is a pair of crested pigeons nesting in a date palm in my front garden. Over the past two months I’ve been watching this pair of pigeons make their nest, lay their eggs and sit on their precious white, marble-sized cargo waiting for their offspring to break out of the confines of their egg. My daughters and I often check the eggs to see how they are coming along in the hatching process (so far no baby pigeons). Whilst I’ve been watching this whole process I’ve learnt that there’s some very important business lessons to learn from this pigeon pair, and as always – the best lessons are often the simplest or the ones derived from nature. So here are my “5 business lessons I learnt from a pigeon”.

Sometimes, as business owners, we get wrapped up in the world of commerce. Marketing our products and services to potential customers can take up a large proportion of our time. We sometimes forget people are just that – people. Marketing to the masses and shouting your message to the crowd quickly gets lost in the sea of noise that is the Internet.

Canned responses has to be one of my favourite features of Gmail, and it’s by far the feature I use most often (besides the awesome search function). Using canned responses can help improve customer service whilst making your business processes more efficient.

I came across this great article this morning and it got me thinking that often, when writing content or copy for websites, brochures and other marketing material, business owners don’t inspire action.

Having unique and relevant title and description tags is one of the easist and most effective ways to assist your SEO efforts and drive targeted traffic to your website.

Here’s something interesting I came across today. Two days ago I uploaded a video called Custom CSS for Joomla module in Chrome and when I was testing to ensure it was coming up in Google I noticed that there was a little “New” icon next to the video. Take a look at the image below. 

So you’ve got your Joomla website looking great. The design is done and you’ve spent loads of time getting the content and images just right but when you open your site in Chrome or Safari, some of the modules look not quite right or out of alignment. You can change the .css file but that also changes how it displays in IE and Firefox. So you ask yourself - How can I change the css for a module in Joomla so it only changes in Chrome or Safari?

When you think about it... it’s actually a little scary to think how many websites and services are out there, but how few people know how they run or the code behind these systems. Every one of us have no doubt used Facebook, Google Maps, web-based email and other online platforms... and my guess is you haven’t even thought about what goes into building a service like this?

Running a small business is hard. Typically, most small businesses have limited staff, limited time and a limited budget for sales and marketing efforts. This being the case sometimes it's easy to fall into the trap of just 'running' your business and letting the 'promotion' of your business slide.

Content is King. You may have heard many experts, gurus and specialists sprout this time and again across many different websites, newsletters, forums or seminars / conferences. There's a reason for this.

When searching for a product or service that they want to visit or call, most people search using local terms. If you're in a business that services a local area (mechanics, hairdressers, and other service-based businesses) then it makes sense to localise your website to attract customers from your local area, right?

On a search engine’s results page (SERP) what does the different coloured text represent? It's well worth getting to know what a search engine's results page represents and the information that gets displayed within them.

These days things happen fast. The internet has bought about a mentality of instant access, instant information and instant gratification. It's so easy to go to another website or do another search for a product, service or information, so with this in mind we need to make our websites usable and easy to manage, navigate and fulfill whatever action your potential customer wants to fill when they get to your website.

When writing copy for your website there are some very important rules to consider. The difference between good copy and bad copy can really make an impact on the amount of traffic you drive to your website and how you convert those customers.

Saving on business expenses is something we all like to do. Today we’re going to show you how you can save money and increase office productivity using free and low cost online tools and services.