The Weebly website development and management system is much more powerful than most Kiwi users appreciate. While Weebly is one of the simplest website builders to use, many business and other users often give up without realising they are sitting on a goldmine. With a little perseverence and advice your Weebly website can be a very effective marketing and selling tool for you and your business.

Terry Alve from Value Websites has been using and profiting from Weebly Websites for over 10 years. During that time, he notes, Weebly have developed their website platform in leaps and bounds. Despite that they have maintained core values of simplicity, ease of use, along with clear and concise help systems. The end result is a wonderfully functional and effective, user-friendly website builder.

So, why do some struggle with their Weebly? 

A core issue, Terry notes, is that many small business Weebly owners and users are quite time poor. When they run into a website development issue they often give up when the solution is relatively simple. Issues we have been able to assist with include (with relevant links): getting header graphics sorted, tweaking the new and powerful Weebly eCommerce system, improving links to a payment processor and creatively adding documentation like product lists.

We can help troubleshoot and develop your Weebly website. Whether its advice, detailed instruction or asking us to do some hands on work; Value Websites are available to assist you. In working with us you will work with a Company that has designed and developed 50+ Weebly websites. We consider ourselves amongst the most experienced and knowledgeable Weebly developers in New Zealand.

Finally, a piece of valuable free advice.

One of the most under-rated components of a Weebly website is their Blog component. This very user-friendly facility is a great Weebly website back door to good search engine rankings. While we rank well in Google search engine first pages for a number of search terms (especially for Weebly related terms), a good news blog post - like this - will quickly rank on Google and other SEs. This will provide your website with a valuable entry point from which searchers will visit, explore and respond to some of your web pages. One of the reasons why we regularly write VW News posts.

And it costs you nothing (but a little time) to discuss your Weebly website issue with Terry. 

Want to talk ...?

Value Websites works with several small to medium sized businesses. In fact we are one ourselves. We offer you some of our learnings and obersvations in this article.

Do you know that there are various mistakes you can make as your business develops that can slowly kill it over time if you are not alert and watching out for them?

These mistakes are not just reserved for new companies and their operators.  Even seemingly “successful” businesses that have been around for several years can still be making these mistakes as they lose money and valuable time along the way.

Although some of these common mistakes are more prevalent in service type companies, they can exist in almost any business endeavour.  Perhaps you will notice a few challenges for your business as you consider these 8 BIG small business mistakes.

1. Underestimating Project/Service Time
This mistake is a big one and it applies to companies that sell a service as well as to those that sell a product. Time is often a company’s bread and butter. Estimating time to perform each and every service in your repertoire realistically is vital.  The best way to estimate time is to do it once yourself or watch your best employee do the task and allow for extra time to cover the unexpected on top of it.  For businesses selling products, logistics time needs to be determined accurately and carefully.


2. Not Knowing YOUR Company Numbers and/or Incorrectly Setting Prices
Note the emphasis on the word “YOUR”. Don’t use a competitor’s pricing as your benchmark without actually knowing why they use the numbers they do.  What if the competitor has a bad pricing structure and is barely making money or even losing money?!  It’s not good enough to know a competitor’s price, cut it by 10%, and then start selling without robust research. Your costs may be more than theirs!  You can use a competitor’s pricing as a starting point but you can’t base your whole strategy on it.

Different industries have their own variables as far as costs go and you need to be aware of them for your service or product pricing.  Cost price is not the only cost to have in your head when you are pricing products.  How much your labour and materials cost for a service is only a piece of an hourly rate.  Employees cost more than just salary and not every employee is part of your labour cost. There are plenty of overhead expenses that need to be built into your price like insurance, office expenses, rates, insurance, telco fees, etc. And don’t forget to factor in a value for the quality factor. Especially if a selling or service point in your business is your above-average product or service quality. For instance, if service and/or quality is part of your unique service proposition and/or unique selling point (USP) then expect people will be happy to pay for it, so charge for it.

Our June promotion is about adding value to your website or website assets like email list, email newsletter, copywriting, form assets, SEO, Adwords, imagery, audio visual resources, etc.

When we talk about adding value, we are essentially on about increasing: 

1. Traffic and hits to your website or web property; 
2. Usability - improving user experience so users stay longer and explore deeper into your web and abandon making a desired response less often ; 
   
3. SEO effectiveness so that you have page one ranking in search engines for more key terms;
4. Adwords campaign responses through choosing effective key terms and testing them to achieve better performance;
5. Business and website profitability.

In short, ensuring your website assets increase in value.

Recently we have been thinking a lot about website valuations and the factors that contribute to an increasingly valuable website asset. As the web matures and as web owners consider selling their website/s and businesses with a website, our focus is moving more to ensuring that we work with web owners to establish and achieve both short and longer term goals. It is not just about getting a website up and running and optimised for immediate traffic, service delivery and sales. It is also about building in sustainability through testing, tweaking, editing, rewriting, improving SEO and generally taking a broad approach to improving the web/site asset value.

Two resources we offer clients are: