As part of our recent website upgrade, Value Websites has a new logo - see above. It is described on our About page in these words,

These changes consolidate our decision to major on building and editing Weebly websites. With provision of their eCommerce and membership business plan, Weebly has produced a website development platform that meets most requirements of small and medium businesses. While we may choose to occasionally develop using other platforms, we are familiar with a few, we major on Weebly because they are the most user-friendly of the CMS platforms  currently available. We regularly find that our clients are able substantially to edit their sites with us (or Weebly Help Desk) guiding in the background. Naturally this offers significant savings for clients. 

Our other major web business commitment is to online form development. Weebly's form functionality is sufficient for many uses. If more is more is required, we offer Formstack which will meet most online form requirements. We continue to do forms work with SP Conference Management who organise 5-6 major conferences annually.

Increasingly we receive calls from around New Zealand about Weebly website issues. While we have no formal ties with Weebly, other than as users of their products, we are being recognised as leading NZ Weebly experts. I guess after building 50+ Weebly sites and contributing to parts of others, we know what makes Weebly sites tick!

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 ...?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of a website takes focused time and some skill but you do not have to be a professional to get the basics right.

In our experience, and we have made the mistake too, we can be temped to take a deep breath when we have finished putting the words and images together to create our website, without paying needful attention to SEO. 

Many of us are using content management systems to develop and edit our websites. Thankfully most of these do assist us greatly to get SEO started at least. However, we still need to complete the detailed work:

• checking that the key terms in the text and tags of each web page are consistent with the page's title and description tags;
• in other words, the meta title, description and keyword tags need to accurately reflect the page content;
• having unique meta tags for each page - often I find that a set of universal meta tags are applied to all pages which is better than nothing, but not enough;
• ensuring that every  image has an alt tag not only to advise those who have turned images off or who are blind, but also to added relevant content to the web page - assuming the image has something to do with the page subject;
• making sure that Head tags are there containing main key terms for the web page - another way of telling the search engines what we think are the key terms for this page;
• linking your website to Google Analytics and Webmaser Tools to ensure that you can check down the track periodically that your website is performing as you wish;
• working to ensure that clients and others interested link to your website from theirs, especially if their content is in any way relevant to yours, offering to reciprocate by placing a link to their site on yours - this is called back linking;
• if possible, trying to get back links from Google Page Rank (PR) 4+ websites to your web site which will contribute to your page rank growing and you getting more page one listings for your key terms.

If you pay attention to getting these SEO factors done well, you be well on the way to making your website work for you as the marketing and promotional tool it should be.

By the way, why don't we swap links on our websites. Value Websites has PR4 with Google, so it may well be worth your while. Place the code below on your website and let us know. We will respond by linking back to you. Happy to do this as a freebie - win: win for both of us!

THE HTML CODE

<p><strong><a target="_blank" href="http://www.valuewebsites.co.nz/">Value Websites</a></strong>design, develop and edit professional websites.</p>

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: