Essentee Blog

It's that time of year. The time when predictions are made and last year's are picked over to see if they came true and if not, the justifications made for why not.

So you've spent months and probably more money than you would have liked to, bringing your new website to life.

How important is it, really, to have a some specific goals for your website?

Why not just get on with it and just aim for "lots of" something - like paying customers?

Traffic is the lifeblood of a website. But you need something to encourage visitors.

Web users have very short attention spans – and your visitors will have come to your website for a reason.

There are a lot of useful free tools out there - here is a selection of them.

• Keyword generator - free keyword suggestion tool from Wordtracker.
• W3C CSS validator - run your site through this checker to see if there are any CSS errors on your site, or run it through the HTML validator to check the markup validity.
• W3C also have a link checker to make sure there are no broken links on your site.
• Website optimizer - will check the speed of your site (a bit outdated, but fun non the less)
• Google ad planner - for certain sites, you can see what their traffic is (even if you're not planning ads!)
• Google analytics - official site from where you can follow the blog and get help with Google analytics.
• Lorem Ipsum - This lets you create psudo latin dummy text to use as a placeholder alternative to 'insert text here'.

Why do I need web hosting?

Website hosting is, simply put, a place to store your website and all its contents where the general public can find it. It is the destination that your domain name leads people to.

This post gives you a bunch of ideas on how to get those all important visitors to your site, using offline and online tactics...

This is a post in a series about common mistakes small business make on the web. You can read the previous ones: Small business SEO mistakes and 5 website mistakes made by small business.

Following from a previous article "Five website mistakes", we continue with more common problems with websites. These are on-page mistakes. Other issues that relate to off-page activities are in Website mistakes by small business - off site mistakes