Among the web design trends that we saw coming in the past couple of years is pageless design. It fully utilizes its digital platform and creates a unique and enjoyable user experience that is intuitive, appealing, and with lots of options.

If you're at the brink of deciding on whether to use pageless design for your website, here are several reasons to do so:

(1) Motivates customers through storytelling

It's been said that storytelling is the best form for delivering one's message. Stories can inspire and motivate people to take action. A pageless format allows you and your design team to control the order of information that's being presented to website visitors. Since pageless web design uses a 'linear format', it helps in crafting the story while also delivering experience that's impossible to achieve using multi-page website structure.

(2) Improves user experience

Intuitive and simple navigation of a pageless design are achieved through scrolling. This eliminates the confusion and distraction that may cause your visitors to overlook the most important sections of your website content.

If you look at today's computers and mobile devices, they all have the scrolling capability which can help many users adapt to the technology. The smarter interfaces and simple navigation encourages visitors to continue perusing these sites, and eventually take action.

(3) Increases conversion rates

Generating new leads, growing your online community, and increasing sales are every website's objectives. A pageless website can help you achieve these goals, thanks to its simple and uncomplicated design that's coupled with compelling story and instinctive interactions among site visitors.

(4) Creates device uniformity

Scrolling your website on a mobile device or desktop doesn't have to be different in terms of user experience. Visitors can easily navigate using any device without the unnecessary constraints of dropdown menus and numerous clicks on page links. Best of all, it's cost-effective since you'll only need one design for both mobile and desktop.

(5) Decreases bounce rate and promotes sharing

The lack of complexity and distractions are just two of the main reasons why website visitors stay for a longer period of time. With a pageless design, your visitors can enjoy and focus on your storytelling.

Sharing your website's story is better than just sharing a particular page. This helps drive your visitors into an effective sales funnel organically.

(6) Enables faster, easier, and more effective iteration

Dealing a single page based on visitors' feedback and analytics makes it easier, faster and effective. You'd only have to tweak specific interactions in order to improve and make them more satisfying to your visitors.

(7) You save time and money

As mentioned earlier, it's more cost-effective to have a pageless website especially if you're developing one that's compatible with all types of devices. Traditional websites take a lot of time and tens of thousands of dollars to develop. You'll not only get a visually appealing website, but also one that actually gives you the best results.

(8) Use of interactive elements

Parallax scrolling, animations, videos and sliders are ideal features that make pageless websites more visually appealing. These features also initiate user-generated interactivity throughout your website.

As a business owner, you'd want a website that goes along with the ever-changing development and design objective. It needs to fulfill the primary goal of providing great user experience in order for visitors stay within the sales funnel, while sharing your site and returning for more.

Need a pageless web design for your own business website? Fast Track can help your business achieve one of today's web design trends. The first step is to contact us today.

Launching a website for your business is a dream come true. After all the hard work, sweat, and tears that you've put into planning and executing your business, it's only a matter of time that a website is put in place.

With the help of a business website team, it is much easier now to achieve that dream of having a website to gain online presence and audience. Of course, it's more exciting to see the end product and show it to the world. But it's also essential to check the most important elements before letting your customers know. This is the most crucial part of having a website the first time - the inspection will help you see any flaws and have them fixed before making it live.

Here are some of the factors you need to look into prior to launching your business website:

(1) Website content

Depending on the business and audience you have, your content should be able to deliver the message clearly. However, each and every page of your website should be checked before the very first visitor lands on your site.

Ask your friend or colleague to do a second check and make sure it's thorough. While outsourced web development includes checking and corrections of content on your site, it's always best to do a second and third (and even a fourth) check to make sure it's 100% error-free and reader-friendly.

(2) Sitemap

The sitemap.xml file is found in the root directory. This allows search engines to find and properly categorize your website. Your small business website solution can help you find and submit your sitemap to all major search engines.

(3) Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions used to be among the relevant elements of SEO. Nevertheless, these are still very useful especially in providing short overviews of pages on a website. These are the wordings you see on the SERPs when you search for a specific topic and it's just below the bolded page title.

(4) Contact details

Your contact details should be the very first element to check on your website and you can add or update them moving forward. Include in your business' physical address, telephone number, email, Skype ID, and other possible contact info.

(5) Site speed

Online surfers are known to have very short attention spans. This is important to note because if you have a slow website, they will leave immediately.

Ensure that your website is up and loading fast. You can check your site's speed using tools such as Pingdom.

(6) Compatibility across various platforms

Check your website's compatibility across all possible platforms. You'll never know where your site visitors are coming from and what browsers or devices they're using. You can check your site's compatibility using Browsershot which automatically tests different platforms.

(7) Favicon

Favicon is one of the factors that some business owners forget. Remember that this is an element that makes your website memorable as it helps with branding. Tell your business website team to create a customized favicon for your site if you haven't already.

(8) Internal and external links

Check all of your links - both internal and external. It may take a while since this is done manually, but it's worth the effort if you do it now. You don't want those 'dummy' links that most web designers and/or developers forget to check after developing your site offline.

(9) 404 pages

404 pages are often overlooked, but they are quite important especially when a previously existing page becomes inaccessible in the future.

(10) Legal policies

Check the link/s to your legal policies such as terms of services and privacy. Make sure copyrights, company info, and use of cookies are included in the legal pages of your site.

(11) JavaScript independence

Check if your site still works when JavaScript is turned off. For security reasons, many website owners turn it off. However, if you use image sliders, they might not work if the JavaScript is turned off. Also, check for other features and elements on your site that might be directly affected by JavaScript.

(12) RSS feed

If you have a blog on your site, it's best to setup an RSS feed so your visitors can subscribe to your posts. You can place the RSS feed icon together with your social media icons.

(13) Social media sharing capability

Driving more traffic through social media is now the norm. So make sure you regularly have shareable content via social media. You can add Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and other social media buttons. Your small business website solution will be able to incorporate these into your website's HTML or CSS code.

(14) Website functionality

Test and check your website's features once it's transferred from development server and made live. Such settings may affect the file structure and possibly break your website's functionality. Test your site and see if it will break.

(15) Backup

Last but not least, make sure to have a backup of your website. You can save your data in cloud space or any other location just to ensure that you have backup data when your site crashes. You may use tools or plug-ins for automatic backup.

So, are you ready to launch your website? Have you found any errors along the way?

Checking these factors before the launch will help you improve and find out early if ever there's anything wrong with your website. The other key to your success is to have an outsourced web development team to ensure you'll have a fully operational and trouble-free website launch.

If you need to get in touch with a business website team, give us a call or send us an email.

Redirecting from non-www domains to www domains (such as 301 redirection – permanent) is very important for ranking on search engines such as Google and it's also important to make sure that you're getting traffic from old locations to new.

So what's a 301 redirect, you ask?   Say for example, you're moving your site from one domain to another.  You wouldn't want to lose all of the traffic on your current site.  Instead, you want to keep that traffic, plus get traffic from the new site.  That's where a 301 redirect comes in.  It's basically a simple way for the internet to tell site visitors "don't visit the page here, visit it here instead".  When the user types in the URL of the old site, it redirects the visitor to the new site.  

Search engines consider  http://domain.com to be a different from  http://www.domain.com. This is an important search consideration, so it's critical that your technical team creates the site direction  both with and without the www prefix.    

It's better to have every link used in exactly the same form as your domain. For this purpose, it is common to configure the redirect request from non-www side to www side.

It can be done in a number of ways but in this written tutorial, we will just focus on ASP.Net. Here are two simple solutions.

1. web.config : 

This is the most common practice because the IIS access is on the shared hosting environment.

Make sure you replace example.com with the name of your domain.

<configuration>

  <system.webServer>

    <rewrite>

      <rules>

        <rule name="Redirect to WWW" stopProcessing="true">

          <match url=".*" />

          <conditions>

            <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^example.com$" />

          </conditions>

          <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.example.com/{R:0}"

                  redirectType="Permanent" />

        </rule>

      </rules>

    </rewrite>

  </system.webServer> 

</configuration>

2. Global.asax.cs:

If you wish to redirect  within your application, use the Application_BeginRequest in Global.asax.cs to intercept the request and do a 301 (permanent) redirection on the URL. 

NOTE:you will need to set up the bindings of the site in IIS to accept both the www.domain.com and domain.com host names.

protected void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs ev)

{

   string FromHomeURL = "http://www.example.com";

   string ToHomeURL = "http://example.com";

   if(HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.ToString().ToLower().Contains(FromHomeURL))

   {

       HttpContext.Current.Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";

       HttpContext.Current.Response.AddHeader("Location",

       Request.Url.ToString().ToLower().Replace(FromHomeURL, ToHomeURL));

   }

}

Would you like your site more SEO friendly?  Fast Track is here to help. Contact us today and let's begin this journey.

The primary aim of every online business owner is to get on the first page of the search engine results. However, not every business owner can afford an SEO consultant, especially if the business is new.

For now, here are 15 do-it-yourself SEO tricks you can start with:

(1) Commit to a long-term strategy

First off, understand that it takes time (usually months) to double your traffic using search engine optimization since search engine algorithms continuously change. There is no magic trick or instant solution that can accommodate each and every website's SEO requirement. Search Engine Optimization takes time, commitment, and a long-term outlook.
 
(2) Learn SEO

There are numerous guides that will help you to learn SEO in-depth, and you can apply the simplest and easiest strategies to increase site traffic.  Many of these these guides can be found online for free from many SEO authority sites.

(3) Have a good domain name

Select a domain name which contains your main target keyword. Shorter domain names are ideal since they're easier to remember. And of course, use a .com for the extension since it is globally appropriate.

(4) Do keyword research

Research relevant keywords that your target market might be searching on the web. Choose both popular and competitive keywords to have a balanced list. Ideally, it should be a balance between low competition and high monthly search volume.

You can use free keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner as well as free versions of WordTracker or Keyword Discovery, especially if you're on a tight budget.  

(5) Build an awesome website

If your goal is to dominate a certain niche, ask yourself if your website is as good, if not better, than the top 10 websites in that niche.

The truth is that there will always be competition among websites and businesses. But it’s important to make sure that there is one differentiator that separates your product or service from the rest. So, make sure your site is better in at least one or two aspects to increase your chance to be at the front page of the search engine results pages.

(6) Have web analytics on-hand

It's critical to have web analytics software installed on your site right at the start. If you have a plan and defined goals for SEO, the web analytics package that you choose can help track and analyze the elements on your site that work, and which ones don't.

(7) Publish unique, relevant, and useful content

'Content is still king' especially if it's useful to the end user - your future customer. Make sure it's uniquely written and easy for your audience to digest. And don't forget that you're writing content for humans, not the search engines.

(8) Optimize page title and Meta description

One of the most important on-page SEO factors is the page title. Use primary keywords on the page title for ranking purposes, and on the Meta description. While the latter doesn't have an impact on SEO, it serves as a snippet for online searchers to get an insight of a specific page on your site.

(9) Include a page for site map

A site map assists search engine spiders in finding all the important pages on your website. It also helps the spiders understand website hierarchy especially for those with hard-to-crawl navigation menus.

(10) Use image ALT tags

ALT tags are short text descriptions for images you use on your website. Since search engines cannot read an image, an ALT tag tells the SEs what it is.

(11) Create internal links

Internal links are great for user navigation. Use targeted keywords as anchor text, as this helps search engine spiders to understand what the page is about.

(12) Build external links wisely

Find authority sites within your industry and ask their owners if you can provide an original post with a link to your site (guest blogging). You can also build links using social media to spread awareness among your followers.

(13) Diversify your site's traffic source

While Google search engine traffic is a given, it's best to have other sources of traffic such as social sites, local search, and subscriber emails. This protects from suddenly losing majority of your traffic if, for example, the next algorithm update hits your site hard.

(14) Use local search opportunities

Optimize your site to catch local traffic by using your location name. Prepare a detailed description for your business and submit your website URL to free local listings.

(15) Take advantage of search engine tools

Google Webmaster Central, Bing Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer can help you learn more about how these search engines see your website (e.g. how many inbound links they can detect).

There are still more ways to increase website traffic without spending a lot of money and by doing it on your own. It does take time to see the effects of SEO tactics and applying them at the onset is the best time to do so.

Do you have any more DIY SEO tip/s to add to this list? List them down on the comments section.

The proliferation of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, presents a need for mobile-friendly websites. This need became inevitable a few of years ago when many online businesses delve into mobile marketing strategies (i.e. SMS or text ads) in order to reach new audiences, while retaining the old ones via mobile channels.

For small business owners, it is never too late to develop online presence for both computer and mobile device users. The first step is to choose a small business website solution that can help you build a website with a responsive design. With a responsive design, your viewers can see a good layout of your website whenever they prefer to use a mobile device.

To better understand the current impact of mobile-friendly websites, consider these stats:

In 2011, Microsoft created and published an infographic that shows internet usage via mobile will overtake desktop by 2014.

And according to Google…

• 80% of online searchers leave their homes with their mobile device
• smartphones are used: 97% at home, 83% on the go, and 78% in shops
• 70% of mobile searchers are connected with a business
• 52% of them called the business/service
• 50% looked up on a map or got directions to that business
• 66% of mobile searchers visited the business and 48% visited the website
• 36% of mobile searchers made a purchase

There are many online reports and whitepapers showing stats similar to these. What they all convey is the opportunity to convert mobile searchers into customers. If you haven’t considered how visitors are interacting with your site through their mobile devices, you should.

If you're considering converting your site to be mobile responsive, consider these on four important things:

(1) Ensure you have a mobile-friendly website so your existing customers and prospects can shop your products and services on both desktop and mobile devices.

(2) Find ways to interact and engage with your potential customers, especially during promotional specials.  Keep your customers informed and engaged.

(3) Use mobile-specific tools/features to enhance the customer experience. Since this depends on the type of business and customers you have, think about the best way to get their attention without offending or bothering them.  Typically, companies offer informative articles, tips and other types of content that enhances the life of the consumer rather than selling to them.

(4) Mobile is not about technology. It is about your customers and prospects and how they use their mobile devices in finding and interacting with you. A successful mobile strategy entails getting more (new) customers while also selling more to existing clients.

Why go mobile?

• It’s easier to immerse customers into your brand if they get the full electronic experience of your company on all devices.  
• Having a responsive design is good for your site SEO.
• Quite simply, it gives you more opportunity to sell!

Updating your website to a mobile-friendly format is essential to gain more customers. Most importantly, you have another way to keep the existing customers up-to-date and engaged.

Should you need a website update to make it mobile-friendly, Fast Track is here to help. Contact us today and let's begin this journey.