livebooks blog

The liveBooks team would like to wish you a Happy New Years. We know that with the beginning of a fresh new year, many people get wrapped up in new projects and goals. Why not make one of them cleaning up your website? Here are a few tips that will help get your website ready for a new year with a fresh start!

1. Update your image gallery

Sometimes you get caught up with work, whether it’s at photoshoots, editing images, creating editorials, and forget to update your website with the new images you’ve created. Updating your images is an important part of showcasing your work. This is especially important for your homepage. Now is a great time to look at your recent jobs and see which images would be best to showcase.

2. Check your links

It’s important to check your external and internal links continuously throughout the year. Links that don’t lead your audience anywhere create a poor user experience. They are less likely to go back to your website once this happens. It is especially important to check external links as other websites may change page names, website URLs, etc. Internal links are equally as important but are under your control. Check these every time you change a page name within your website.

3. Optimize your SEO 

SEO is one of the most important aspects of your website! The liveBooks8 platform allows you to control SEO on a page/photo level as well as as on a site-wide level. It’s important that all of your SEO tags, descriptions and titles be up-to-date. Now is a great moment to look over these parts of your website. Still need some help understanding what SEO is and how you can optimize it on your website? Read our SEO Everything™ article!

4. Remove any outdated information from your pages

As a new year begins, it brings the opportunity to showcase new works and events that you would like your clients to see and attend. Potential clients interested in attending your events and conferences could be lost if they see that you have not updated information for the 2017 year.

5. Update your website’s copyright footer

Your website’s copyright year will not automatically update. Make sure that if you have a copyright on your website, to change the year from 2016 to 2017! This is especially important in the footer – the place where most people forget to look through.

These simple tips will make your website look both cleaner and more professional. As the new year begins, make sure to set aside some time to complete these tasks. They will make your website look both more professional and will help attract the right clients in 2017.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be one of the most important features that your website can have. This feature encompassed the technical requirements needed to improve your website’s rankings, drive organic traffic, and increase awareness in search engines. liveBooks is proud to boast that our built-in SEO tool offers our clients the ability to customize their SEO settings on a photo, page, and site-wide level.  Additionally, all liveBooks8 sites automatically include micro date that search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process to provide a richer browsing experience for users.

Learn how to start utilizing our SEO Everything™ tools with our quick tutorial below.

Have you been paying attention to how your website’s search engine mobile performance results have been doing? If you haven’t, it’s time to start now! Google has now announce that it will create a mobile index separate from its existing search engine. Due to the fact that over half of Google searches are now being made through mobile devices, it was only a matter of time before Google took actions to improve its users’ experience.

Google plans to create two separate web indexes – one dedicated to mobile pages and another to desktop pages. Mobile versions of the pages will be prioritized on its search results page. A desktop version will be displayed if the website has no mobile pages available.

What Does This Mean to Your Website?

Google will now place value on mobile pages when indexing a site and determining its position on search results. Once Google sets the change in motion, websites that do not have mobile-friendly designs will likely see significantly reduced search engine traffic.

If you host your mobile content on a separate subdomain, this could cause some problems for your search engine results. This is to say that if, for example, a mobile user attempted to access “yourcompany.com” on a mobile phone, they might see the URL displayed as “mobile.yourcompany.com”. If this is the case for your website, it may be time to revise the content you display on the mobile website. Google will be prioritizing the content on that subdomain rather than your desktop version.

Testing Your Website

You can now test how your mobile website is seen by Google’s web crawlers! Visit Google’s test for mobile friendliness to find out how your website performs. You will enter your website’s URL and click the “Analyze” button. If you’re website is seen as mobile-friendly, a green message will display letting you know.

liveBooks is Ready for Google’s Mobile Index. Are you?

liveBooks is ready for this change in search engine indexing! We are proud to say that all liveBooks websites are fully-responsive. Regardless of screen size, your website will adjust its width and features such as text and images to optimize its mobile visibility.

If you haven’t started using liveBooks yet, start your free trial and begin creating your beautiful, fully-responsive website today!

liveBooks offers many options for you to customize your site’s mobile navigation. With its standard settings, your site will come with mobile navigation style that matches your chosen theme. You will be able to customize options for navigation within the Design tool:

1. Select Design from the Dashboard navigation bar.
2. If not already selected, select the Sitewide tab on the righthand sidebar.
3. Select Navigation

4. Select the Mobile tab to view your mobile navigation design settings.

5. Dropdown your icon options under the Layout dropdown menu. We give you 45 icons with over 130 icon style and shape variations to choose from, providing unique customization for you and your business’ brand. Select from the icons you see here.

6. Take a look below Layout and you will find all of your icon settings. Change how the icon looks and animates here:

(A) Icon – choose your icon color via presets or leave it without one.

(B) Shape – add a shape beneath your icon or leave it without one.

(C) Symbol Size – adjust how large or small you want your icon to appear.

(D) Icon Position – have your icon appear on the left or right side of your site.

(E) Style – have your navigation appear from above or slide in from the side of the screen.

(F) Reveal – select how the navigation reveals the menu items:

• Fullscreen – fill the entire screen with your navigation menu, on the click action.
• Push Content – choose this option to have your navigation menu push your content over, on the click action.
• Overlay Content – choose this option to have your navigation overlay on top of all your content, on the click action.

(G) Animation – 5 different animation effects

(H) Trigger – choose how your navigation menu is made visible:

• Label & icon – include the first navigation item’s title with your icon on the side, the styled expandable menu displays beneath.
• Icon only – show only the icon.

(I) Use mobile navigation on all devices – enable to display the mobile navigation in all viewports/devices. Currently available on two layout types: Top Navigation (Logo Above) and Top Navigation (Logo Below).

7. The Text panel adjusts default styling and font choices for all views of your navigation menu.

(J) Select your desired font and stylings for your navigation menu.

8. Within the Expandable Menus panel, design how the navigation menu appears on reveal.

(K) The design settings made here are for your navigation menu if you enable a navigation menu that appears on a click action.

(L) Sub-Navigation – choose “Always expand” to make all sub-navigation pages visible in the expanded menu. “Expand on click” makes an arrow appear and will require the customer to click the parent navigation item to view the child pages.

9. Select Save and Publish to make all of your navigation changes live now.