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Your website content plays one of the most important roles in creating your online presence. It can tell the story of your unique brand, illustrate your service, and drive potential customers to purchase. Once you’ve chosen the perfect website template, the next step is to figure out what types of content your website needs most. From blog posts to logos, there are many kinds of content you’ll need to consider if you want your website to accurately communicate your product, services, and brand. Whether you’re redesigning your website or starting a new website from scratch, gathering and creating your website’s content can quickly become overwhelming. Save valuable time by reading these tips before you start building your website.

How Many Pages Do You Really Need?

Before you start typing, take a step back and think about what pages your website truly needs. Drilling down your sitemap should be the first step of the content creation process. Think about your current website, look at your competitor’s website, and brainstorm what the main goal of your website will be. Is it to sell your product, describe your services, or highlight what makes you special? Once you have the main points you want to get across to your potential customers, creating your website pages will be easier. Don’t waste your time creating content that you’ll never share with your audience.

Can You Utilize Freelance Writers?

More company-specific content such as your mission statement, service descriptions, and company overview should be written in-house. However, think about what content could potentially be outsourced. Maybe you’re writing a blog, or need more general pages on your website. If there’s an opportunity to outsource, identify it and take advantage of freelance writers. Ask your colleagues and friends if they have any suggestions of writers they’ve used in the past, or check out some of the many online tools available for content writing services.

What Kind of Images Should You Use?

Images can make or break your online presence, and are the backbone of nearly every website design. Having high-quality images is key to making your website look professional, trustworthy, and can help demonstrate your services effectively to your website visitors. On the other hand, low-quality, or poorly-sized images can negatively impact how visitors view your company, and can considerably lower your conversion rates by causing longer page loading times. Make sure you have enough high-quality images for your website by hiring a professional photographer, or by using stock images. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words!

Website Content Best Practices:

To make your website as user-friendly as possible, there are certain website content best practices to keep in mind. These tips will not only help your website load faster through optimal image sizing, but will also help you layout your content in the most appealing way for website visitors. To make your website as efficient as possible, make sure your content follows these guidelines.

Logo and Graphic, and Icons

Your logo represents your brand and is one of the first impressions you leave with your customers, while icons play a large role in how easily customers navigate your website and understand your services. Follow these guidelines to make sure your logo and icons look crisp and clean on your site, no matter what type of device users are viewing your website on.

• File Type: A PNG file is best for these types of images. It allows you to have your logo set on a transparent background and provides you with a high quality, professional looking graphic.

• Size: Size your logo and icons 3 times larger than what you’d like them to be on the site. This will ensure that they look crisp and clean on retina screens. For example, if your logo is going to be around 250 pixels in width on your site, you’d want to make the logo 750 pixels wide.

Images

As mentioned before, purposeful images can enhance a customer’s experience and help incorporate your branding throughout your site. Follow these best practices to make sure your images look great and don’t slow down your page load times.

• File Type: Always use JPG files for images. PNG files can be very large and don’t necessarily make your image look better. It’s always best to only use PNG files for graphics like logos, icons, or type.

• Size: A good rule of thumb is to keep your image file size under 300KB. For large, full screen images like headers stick between 1600px and 2000px in width. Smaller images like thumbnails don’t need to be any larger than 900px in width.

Content

Always write your website content for actual users, rather than for search engines. While you may be tempted to “keyword stuff” your website in hopes of improving your ranking in search engines, having low-quality content on your website will only hurt your web presence in the long run. As a best practice, make sure the content you’re writing for your website visitors is useful. As a starting point, think of common questions you get about your business and develop articles that answer those questions.

We’ve changed our online habits these past years. The internet is right in our pocket, so we expect our mobiles to give us the information we ask for ASAP. Yet we have reached the point where we abandon our half-filled carts, read only the news titles and go through only half of those 25 pictures of cats doing crazy acrobatics. The culprit in most cases is the slow loading time for pages we’re visiting.

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While growing your portfolio may be a daily task, updating your website tends to get postponed. Because this is a common occurrence among many of our clients, we’ve added a number of features to ensure that your online presence mirrors your offline hard work. You won’t have to be a trained magician for this one – you will be able to make your pages invisible with one easy tap of your finger.

So far we’ve covered the tools that allow you to add contributors to manage your content, the ability to duplicate pages or blocks as well as your Save Design tool, just to name a few. In this week’s article we will focus on your Work in Progress pages and the feature that makes them truly awesome: keeping them invisible from your website until they’re ready to be published.

Any new page that you add to your website can be set as invisible. All you need to do is:

1. Go to your Content editor and click the gear icon attributed to the page you want to set as invisible.
2. When prompted with the page settings pop-up, disable Page Visibility.
3. The page set as invisible will now be displayed as orange and it will have the Invisible attribute above its title.

Now you can work on that page while still making changes to the rest of the site and publishing. While the page is set as invisible it will not appear on your website. When your page has the content you want, simply toggle back its visibility and hit Publish! Now your website will have a new page with awesome content that you can share on all your social media platforms.

Pro tip: When you toggle visibility for a page that has an Legacy URL, the redirect will be deleted automatically. Before making a page invisible make sure you’ve copied the redirect link so you can add it again once the page visibility is turned on. This will ensure that all legacy links will properly send your visitors to your new pages.

In our previous article we’ve covered the context in which we began migrating our websites from Flash to HTML5. But the website migration process doesn’t have to start from a Flash website. In fact, website migration is a common practice among businesses and individuals who feel that the current status of their website is drawing close to its inevitable end. There’s only so much “spring cleaning” a website can take before it’s time to switch to a better, improved and easy to manage version of it.

For the past two years liveBooks has migrated thousands of websites to our new HTML5 platform. Our dedicated migration team goes above and beyond when it comes to delivering a migrated website. From transferring your content, to revising the final result and following up on the delivery by the support staff, we’re making sure that every migration request is answered with the best results for you and your business.

Preparing for the big step

Moving to a new website platform is similar to changing your place of business, but with the help of a professional moving team that does all the hard work. What we ask from you is your vision and an update on your content.
Before starting the migration process check out our website templates and choose the one that best suits your business’ needs. We have dozens of layouts available for you to pick from. Each one is developed with distinct characteristics in functionality and design.
Once you find the new home for your content, it’s time to go through all the old one and decide what goes and what stays. Clean it up!
Choose which images are way too old to go on the new platform and make sure that the ones you want transferred are properly set up.
Go through your written content and update any texts that need editing.
Check all the links. Some of them might not be working anymore.
Delete empty pages.
We’ll take it from here.

The migration process

As soon as you give us the OK, the migration process begins:

1. We download your content and move it to the template you’ve chosen.
2. We add all existing SEO from your old website. This is a very important step that will ensure your website to be found on any search engine. (Note! If your old site had no SEO, please take a moment write down descriptions and keywords that will help your business grow. Here are some useful tips for you to consider.)
3. We add self canonical URLs for your pages. This step helps search engines index your pages as individual ones, removing any duplicates that might be otherwise wrongly identified and penalized.
4. We create redirects from all of your old links. This means that your visitors that bookmarked your pages or are accessing them from their browsing history will now get redirected to your new and improved website.
5. We make all the design changes you want, if you want them. This is where we put the finishing touches on your new site. It’s where we change colors, fonts or gallery layouts if that’s your vision. All action taken on this step is to assure the delivery of the online extension of your brand as you’ve established it on the market.
6. We revise your website before delivery. This means checking the website works and looks great on all devices: desktop, tablet and mobile. We check all the links and make sure they all work.
7. We deliver your website. Our support team will deliver your website and give you access to your account. This is the perfect time for you to browse through your new content and design editor. Our knowledge base is full of articles to answer any questions you might have.

The perks of liveBooks migration

• More time for you and your business and fewer headaches with your website maintenance
• Your work will be showcased on our modern and elegant liveBooks platform.
• You will have two dozen templates to choose from and the possibility to upgrade to a custom package which allows the integration of custom code to any of your pages.
• Your liveBooks site will be built based on your existing one, with improvements in design, functionality and SEO.
• The liveBooks Image Gallery will contain all your images, properly tagged and organized. This tool is great for all users with a large number of photographs and galleries.
• Get found with the SEO Everything™ feature that makes our existing clients Google superstars.
• Your new site will be optimized for all mobile devices.
• Our award-winning support specialists are ready to take all your questions and requests.
• All liveBooks websites are easy to update.
• The liveBooks migration process is free of charge.

We’ve seen many websites wither away and drag business along with them. The culprits are always the same: either the clients have a hard time accessing their content or they don’t have access at all to their content and updating the website is a difficult chore, or the platform they’ve used is no longer a reliable online standard. For us here at liveBooks, this is unacceptable.

Our theory is this: your business deserves a great website! You should always be able to access your website and update your content easily. You should have a team of support specialists to help you if things get tangled. You should never have to worry about your website.

If you want to migrate your website with our help, please get in touch with us by phone, email or chat with us from our website! We’re happy to help you build a better website for your business.

We’ll leave you with a quick before & after visual tour of one of our many migrated websites.

Before migration:

After migration: