Website development and design have been widely affected by the growing changes in technology. In the last decade, web hosting has also seen a shift from the traditional form of hosting to cloud based hosting. The technologies are bringing more reliability, speed and cost effectiveness in the business of web development and maintenance. Virtually every medium-sized business and big companies have websites. This has created a huge demand for website programming and designing. It has also created many ways of increasing the speed at which these websites are built. This has mainly been attributed to the categories that have been given to websites such as blog websites, e-commerce websites and even payment processing websites. The most commonly used open-source methods of developing and designing websites include the following.

CMS

CMSs have changed the traditional way of building websites from scratch. Basically, a CMS is a content management system that allows and ensures ease of data handling within the site. A CMS is software mostly open-source software that has already been developed to run various forms of web applications. Website programming knowledge is not necessary with CMS as one can easily build his or her own website within a couple of hours by just using drag and drop options. WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are the commonly used blogging CMS platforms today.  Read More →

If you have recently had a website created that has gone live or have a new product or service that you wish to promote, you may become frustrated that the search engines have not re-crawled your list and indexed the information, meaning that no one will find you on the search engine result pages. This could lose you valuable sales and if you have a special offer that is only on for a limited time could potentially mean that the offer has expired before it has even been picked up by the likes of Google, Bing or Yahoo.

You could go down the route of setting up Pay per Click adverts which are normally pretty instant but can be costly but you should also ensure that you take advantage of the social media websites, most of which are free. Social media is growing fast in popularity and you can easily reach thousands of people within a few seconds. You need to build up a group of followers and find places that you can post your links in order to reach the most people. But if done correctly it can get instant traffic to your website.

When people think of social media marketing, they normally think or either pay per click types of advertising within the social media websites, or simply of creating a business page and promoting it to gain likes / followers and build up a community etc. These are both great forms of social media marketing but there is often one very important aspect that people forget to consider.
Social media is a place for consumers to discuss a product  / service or company with friends and family. Often this information can also be seen by people that follow the company and may not know the writer of the comment. It is very important to read comments made about your business and proactively respond to positive and also negative comments. A negative comment can have more than 5 times the impact a positive one can and therefore it makes sense to act on these. It may be that the person has made a mistake in which case you need to confirm this in a public response (always making sure you are friendly and professional) but if the person has a valid point then do not be afraid to admit that you are disappointed in the service they have received and will ensure that the situation is rectified. People can be very forgiving and will often not be put off by a company who admits that they had a problem but that it has been resolved and that is very proactive in sorting out any issues that arise.