Where do spam emails come from?

When you register a new website, your details go into the Whois database. Your details are then vulnerable to spammers who use software to scan this database for new sites.

Spammers will either guess standard email addresses, things like ‘admin@company.com.au’, or they’ll use software which scans your site for email addresses. There are also sites like hunter.io/search where people can attempt to get your email address format.

Sometimes it will just be people googling companies in certain industries in the hope that they’ll get some work. Other times it will be general, untargeted spam and phishing attempts.

Either way, this quickly adds up to an inbox stuffed with unwanted junk. So, what can you do about it?

Some common mistakes to avoid when attempting to reduce spam emails

Disguise your email address

Sometimes referred to as ‘address munging’, the theory is that by putting xxx[at]company[dot]com[dot]au rather than xxx@company.com.au, you’ll trick the spammer’s email-finding software into not recognising your email address.

This may have been true at one point but, logically, if someone can program software to sift through text for an email address, they can almost certainly teach it to look for the same thing but with [at] instead of an @ symbol. Aside from not being foolproof, this method can also be jarring for people reading your website.

Put your email address as an image

Like address munging, putting your email address on your website as an image is designed to trick software into not recognising it. While this method is probably more effective than using [at] instead of @, it’s also even more irritating for people using your site. People can’t copy and paste an image so will end up having to re-type the whole address, which can lead to typos and missed opportunities.

This technique is also bad for visually impaired users, as the text-to-speech software they use may not be able to recognise that the image contains an email address.

Using Javascript to hide your email address

Hiding your email address from spambots using Javascript can be highly effective. However, this technique is generally frowned upon as people viewing your site with Javascript disabled won’t be able to see your email address at all.

More effective spam reduction options

Don’t make your email address a link

Remove the hyperlink from your email address on your site, and instead keep it as plain text for someone to copy – this can be slightly annoying for people using your site, but if used in conjunction with a contact form it can give people different options.

Contact forms

Contact forms can cut down on spambots as some are unable to recognise contact form fields. You can also include a ‘honeypot’ in your contact form – this is a hidden input which isn’t visible to a real, human, user, but which will automatically be filled by a spambot. If the honeypot field is filled it prevents the form from being submitted. However, this method does not prevent individual people from spamming you.

Captcha

As its name suggests, a captcha or ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’, is a test used to tell spambots from people. By including a captcha on your contact form, you can minimise the amount of robot-generated spam arriving in your inbox. These come in multiple forms from simple tick boxes to typing in codes/words or identifying images.

Only use social media

Of course, the simplest way to avoid spam emails is to receive no emails at all. Depending on the nature of your business it may be preferable to provide social media sites as your only points of contact.

Spam emails may be a reality of modern communication, but by taking a few steps to protect yourself and keeping up-to-date with spam reduction techniques, you can reduce the number that reaches your inbox.

There really are no secrets. You only have to look at the world’s most successful websites and the sites you use every day to see examples of great design right in front of you.

Finding out what these sites have in common, and why they’re doing what they’re doing, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to design a website that reflects well on your brand and makes it easy for your site visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for.

We’re not saying every website should look exactly the same. But if you’re looking for ways to express your uniqueness, don’t do so at a cost to the user experience.

Whether you’re designing your site from the ground up or using a template, make sure your website is:

Visually appealing

What do people want to see? That should be your priority when designing the look of your website, rather than, how can I show off my artistic skills? Artistic design has its place when it’s used appropriately, but most of the time, your website users are going to be happy with a page that’s easy to read and doesn’t overload their senses.

You can give your website any colour scheme you want, but think about those sites you use every day: what do they have in common? The vast majority of them (if not all) feature black sans serif text on a plain white background.

Research has confirmed time and again that this is the combination people find most comfortable to read, and you should make sure all elements of your typography are easy on the eyes: font sizes, spacing between lines and the number of characters per line.

Think about how sites like Facebook and Amazon have created iconic looks with their simple colour schemes and user-friendly layouts. Most of the time, these sites still follow the black text, white background rule.

Easy to use

After visual appeal, navigation is the second biggest influence on what people think about your website (and consequently your brand).

Make it as easy as possible for your site visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for with menus that are clearly signposted, products and services organised into sub-categories, a search function and SEO-friendly URLs.

Every page on your website needs to have a clear goal and a clear Call to Action (CTA). For a multi-purpose page like your homepage, you should have a clear first action to help out new visitors, but you can also include other targeted CTAs that users are likely to be looking for.

The best way to check the usability of your site is to spend a little time searching and clicking through. If you were a customer, is it easy to find what you’re looking for, or frustrating?

Free from clutter

Image: The World’s Worst Website Ever

This goes hand-in-hand with visually appealing, but it’s worth stressing: your web pages should only include what they really need, with absolutely no filler.

Images are essential, and video can be great if it’s used sparingly. But when you clog a page with excessive pictures and videos, this will distract from the text, make it harder for users to complete actions, and cause longer loading times for users with slower connections – one of the biggest sins of web design.

Use your social links sparingly too. You should let people know if you have social media profiles, and you might want to include recent updates from your Twitter feed, but these logos shouldn’t be the most prominent features on your website. Otherwise, you’re just giving people more opportunities to leave you. (The exception to this is social sharing buttons on your blog posts and other marketing content, as you’ll want these to be shared as much as possible).

As for giving your website background music and spinning logos, these were annoying even in 1998.

Up-to-date

Even the best websites get stale if they aren’t updated frequently. User demands and preferences move quickly, and if your site is more than a few years old, certain aspects of its design will already be lagging behind.

There are other occasions when you should consider giving your website an overhaul. Maybe your business priorities have changed, your audience has changed or your brand’s profile has changed. A clean slate always delivers better results than bolting new features onto an outdated platform, and you won’t have to lose your old content.

Mobile-friendly

If you’re using a template to design your website, make sure it’s responsive. This means your pages will load in a special mobile-friendly layout when they’re accessed on phones and smaller tablets, or in their original size when viewed on a larger screen.

You can’t afford to ignore mobile users. Today, more searches are performed on mobile devices than desktops, and 35% of e-commerce transactions in Australia are made using smartphones (and rising). You can check whether your site is responsive using this tool from Google.

What’s the easiest way to make a great website?

You don’t need any training or experience in web design to put together a user-friendly, professional-looking website. You can either:

1. Pay someone to build your custom website, or

2. Use a template.

Template websites are the more affordable option. This involves buying a readymade theme that you can tweak to your preference to suit your branding. We recommend WordPress for its simplicity and flexibility, but you can try any of the popular CMS options.

Let us help

At Civic Web Media, we’ll help you create a modern and professional website that suits your business, whatever your budget. We’ll help you get started with website software and we can help you register your domain name and arrange hosting for your site.

That depends on what type of website you have, and how much sensitive information you expect your users to provide.

Switching your website from HTTP to more secure HTTPS is essential if you have an ecommerce site or if you handle other sensitive information. There can be benefits for other websites too, but it isn’t always necessary.

What is HTTPS?

Compared to the standard HTTP network protocol, HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) adds an extra layer of encryption between web servers and browsers. This was traditionally via Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption, although Transport Layer Security (TLS) is now more common.

When you visit a HTTPS website in your browser, the protocol authenticates the site and its server to protect you against malicious attacks and keep any data you enter secure. HTTPS works in both desktop and mobile browsers.

Your web hosting company should offer HTTPS as an option when you first create your website, and they might also help you to upgrade later.

How secure is HTTPS?

There’s no denying that HTTPS is more secure than HTTP, although the precise level of security depends on the type of certificate you have.

With HTTPS, all data submitted to your website is encrypted, keeping credit card details, passwords and other information secure. This protects your site and its users against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks and malicious content injections, so no third party will be able to gain control of your website and steal your customers’ data for themselves.

As many websites now use HTTPS, and people are familiar with it, your customers may also feel safer when they see the lock symbol on their browsers.

Does it improve SEO?

While security is the primary reason to consider switching to HTTPS, it can also help your website to rank on search engines – slightly.

Google announced that it was introducing HTTPS as a ranking factor in 2014, giving a small boost to sites that use this protocol in the interest of raising online security. However, it’s such a minor signal (originally accounting for less than 1% of global searches) that switching to HTTPS just to improve your search ranking isn’t very practical.

The number of HTTPS websites on the front page of Google search results is on the increase, but according to Pete Meyers of Moz, this likely reflects the trend of websites favouring HTTPS rather than a direct result of Google’s algorithm. Unless you have a large site and you’re dealing in large figures, you won’t see a noticeable difference – unless Google starts pushing it more strongly.

Find out what other factors affect SEO.

Do I need HTTPS?

If users are required to enter their personal details or credit card information into your website, upgrading to HTTPS can be considered mandatory for the security of your customers and your business.

On the other hand, if your website or business blog doesn’t ask your customers to provide anything more substantial than their email address when signing up to your mailing list, you probably won’t benefit much from making the switch.

The exception is if you expect your site to receive a lot of traffic. If even 1% of search volume adds up to thousands of hits per year, you could enjoy the SEO boost that HTTPS provides, and it’s likely to become a more important factor in the future.

How to convert from HTTP to HTTPS

If you decide to make the switch with your site, your first stop should be your hosting company. They’ll usually be able to sell you an SSL/TLS certificate, install it for you and help you redirect your pages. If not, you might need to seek professional assistance when going through the following five steps:

1. Buy an SSL certificate

These days, when people talk about SSL certificates, they usually mean TLS. Old habits.

You need to purchase a certificate for your site to activate HTTPS. These come in three levels, depending on how much security you need and how much you want to pay:

• Domain validation – encryption only.
• Organisation validation – encryption and authentication, required if users are submitting personal information.
• Extended validation – the highest level of security, usually reserved for larger e-commerce sites.

2. Install the certificate

If your hosting provider won’t install your certificate for you, you’ll have to do it yourself. You need to have a dedicated IP for this.

The installation process varies depending on the host, but you should be able to find the information you need through a Google search.

3. Redirect your URLs

Now you have an SSL certificate installed, every page on your site will benefit. They’ll also have new URLs, meaning every one of your old HTTP pages needs to be redirected to the shiny new HTTPS equivalent.

If you built your site in WordPress, you can use 301 redirects to make this easier. If you were planning on changing your domain name or making changes to your website structure, now is the perfect time.

4. Update your links

After you redirect your pages, your existing links should also redirect users to your new HTTPS pages. But it’s still a good idea to go through your pages and change the links so they point directly where you want them to go.

You might not have power over external links to your site, but be sure to update any that you do, like your social media profiles.

5. Update other page elements

It’s not just your URLs and links that get messed up by migrating. You’ll also need to update links to resources such as images and scripts in the page source.

You can do this manually by viewing the source of each page and fixing all the links to point to HTTPS resources, or you can use a site crawling tool to make things easier.

6. Submit your site to Google

If your old HTTP site was listed with Google Search Console, your new HTTPS site won’t be. You should add your site and submit your new sitemap as soon as possible, so Google can start crawling it and there won’t be an interruption in traffic.

If your website isn’t optimised for mobiles, customers arriving on your pages on their phones aren’t going to stick around. With Google, Bing and other search engines now giving priority to mobile-friendly results, smartphone users aren’t likely to come across your pages at all.

Making your website fit on a mobile screen – with text, images and links clearly visible without the need to pinch or scroll – is a good start. But there’s more to consider when designing a website tailor-made for your mobile users that improves convenience and conversions.

Why is being mobile-friendly essential?

Whether you have a blog, a promotional website or an e-commerce site, you can’t afford to ignore your mobile users. Today in Australia:

• 77% of people own a smartphone (Pew Research Center)
• More web searches are performed on mobiles than desktops
• 35% of e-commerce is carried out on mobile devices, and rising (Criteo)

Is your website mobile-friendly?

If you used a content management system like WordPress to build your website, the template you chose may already be adaptive to mobiles. If you built your website from the ground up, you’ll probably have to do the same again with a separate mobile site.

The easiest way to check how your site looks and feels on mobiles is to open it on your own phone. For a more detailed breakdown, Google can test your site and report back on what works and what doesn’t.

Google’s Principles of Mobile Site Design whitepaper offers more detailed insights.

How can you improve the mobile experience?

Navigation

• Only include the most relevant categories in top-level menus.
• Make your logo link back to your homepage.
• Place the search field near the top of the page.

Calls to action

• Make your CTA buttons big, obvious and easy to tap.
• CTA buttons shouldn’t interfere with other elements on the page.
• Include a click-to-call button on order forms.

Find out how to write the perfect call to action.

Promotions

• Avoid large promotional banners at the top of your pages.
• Make sure ads are distinct from your site’s navigation and calls to action.
• On apps, use dismissable banners rather than interstitial ads.

Mobile website or app?

Criteo’s State of Mobile Commerce report found that customers prefer to complete transactions in e-commerce apps rather than in mobile browsers. They’re also more likely to browse more items, add more to their baskets and spend more at the checkout when using apps.

• Introduce an e-commerce app to improve conversions by 120%.
• Allow guests to complete checkout, with benefits for registering.
• Make it easy to complete transactions on another device.

Find out more important reasons why your website needs to be mobile-friendly.

Whether you’re ready to design your new website or you’re worried that your existing site isn’t up to scratch, read on to find out why good web design is important and what bad web design will cost you.

Why does your website matter?

If you mostly interact with your customers through your Facebook page, make most of your sales through Amazon and use other platforms, it’s easy to overlook your own website.

But as your reputation grows and your content gets shared, more people are going to start checking out your official site – and if it looks less professional than the sites you’re linking from, you’ll be judged accordingly.

First impressions always count

Studies have shown that it takes just 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) for someone to form an opinion of your website – literally the blink of an eye (Taylor & Francis Online).

When someone’s making such a quick-fire unconscious judgement about you, they’re not going to take into account that you probably don’t have access to Facebook’s design budget. If they don’t like what they see, they’re more likely to close the tab and look elsewhere.

Your website represents your brand

If your site looks like it was quickly thrown together without putting any thought into the user experience, what does that say about you?

Following are two examples of web design: one done well, the other not so well. For each, notice what impression the site makes on you and how this makes you feel about its owners.

Good website design: Telligence

Modesty prevents us from extolling the virtues of our own website, but take a look at what our friends at Telligence have come up with for their homepage. When you first arrive at their site, you see:

• a drop-down navigation menu, making it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for
• a search button, if you’re looking for something even more specific
• an image banner introducing some of their services with links to find out more.

Have they got your attention? Scrolling down the page, you’ll find out more about:

• how Telligence can help you with different problems (list of services)
• what customers think about Telligence (testimonial video)
• some of the big names they’ve worked with
• directions to their office and how to get in touch.

This home page packs in a lot of information, but it’s organised in a logical sequence and presented in easily digested chunks. The reader doesn’t feel overwhelmed and they can scroll down until they find what they’re looking for (or use the navigation menu).

Most important of all, it looks polished and professional.

Bad website design: Norfolk Island International Airport

If you were planning a trip to or from Norfolk Island, and you looked up the website for Norfolk Island International Airport, what would you expect to see?

Based on your experience of other official airport websites, you might reasonably expect to see details of departures and arrivals (periodically updated), airlines, airport facilities, a terminal map, ground transportation and other useful visitor information.

Although this is the airport’s official website (and carrying an authoritative ‘.gov’ address), the information available to users is shockingly limited. Perhaps even worse is its amateur design, complete with mistakes and pages that are promised to be “under construction” (until when?)

What impression did the Norfolk Island Airport make on you? Does this influence your opinion about the airport itself?

Next time, we’ll break down how to design a modern, professional-looking website and tell you the easiest and most affordable way to do it using a content management system (CMS).

According to comScore and other industry research, this prediction was right on the money. Since that time, mobile has continued to gain ground as the preferred option for web browsing, search and e-commerce transactions in Australia and worldwide.

Why you can’t afford to ignore mobile users

As of May 2016, 77% of Australians owned a smartphone. This is the second highest penetration in the world, behind South Korea at 89%. (Pew Research Center)

Most people who visit your website and use your online services will be doing so on their phones so it’s essential that your content is tailored for their devices.

Think about your own experiences visiting web pages on your phone that aren’t optimised for mobile. Did you mind scrolling left and right on a page designed for a 1280×1024 desktop screen, zooming in on tiny text and fiddly buttons? Or did you abandon it in frustration?

Would you want most people who visit your site to have the same experience, or to offer them something better?

Mobile commerce

Mobile transactions are growing 300 times faster than other e-commerce transactions. Between 2013 and 2016, the number of transactions made on mobile devices was expected to increase by 42 per cent, compared to 13 per cent growth for e-commerce as a whole. (Coupofy)

In Australia, 35% of e-commerce transactions were completed using mobile devices by the end of 2015, as customers embrace the freedom offered by their phones to make purchases wherever they are.

Criteo’s State of Mobile Commerce report also found that the majority of transactions were made using dedicated e-commerce apps (54%) compared to in mobile browsers (46%). Conversion rates are also 120% higher for apps, which remove barriers and make it easier for customers to complete their purchases. App users spend more, browse four times as many products, and are twice as likely to add items to their baskets as customers shopping in their mobile web browser.

Mobile search

Image: Google

Google reported that mobile searches overtook desktop searches in 2015, and the search engine responded by launching a new ranking algorithm that prioritised mobile-friendly pages in app and browser searches. So did Bing.

It’s not enough to design your website for good SEO any more – you also need to make sure your pages are optimised for mobile, otherwise they will be penalised compared to your mobile-friendly competitors.

How to make your websites mobile-friendly

If you’ve never tested your website on a mobile device, use this handy tool from Google to check whether you’re already good to go.

If you’re not already optimised, there are two options for making your websites mobile-friendly: the easy way or the hard way.

1. Use responsive web design (RWD)

When you’re setting up your website or business blog, make sure that the platform you’re using is set up to scale images, text and other page elements automatically, whether they’re loaded on a mobile, desktop or tablet.

If you’re using WordPress or another content management system (CMS) to design your website, you can choose from a range of responsive themes or install plugins that will take care of it.

If you’re setting up your website manually, make sure that Googlebots are allowed to crawl the pages and their assets (including images) to change how the page is rendered.

2. Build a separate mobile site

The more labour-intensive option is to design your mobile site from scratch and manage it alongside your desktop site.

Image: Google

At the basic level, this involves rearranging the content of every page into a mobile-friendly layout. But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Because these are separate pages, they will require a unique set of URLs – often mobile.example.com or m.example.com. You can set up automatic redirects to make sure mobile users only see mobile pages (and vice versa), but you need to double-check those links to avoid embarrassment.

If you have an older site, some page elements may not be compatible with mobile browsers. This goes for sites built with Flash, outdated e-commerce platforms and videos or other elements restricted by device.

What about tablets?

According to Criteo, tablets accounted for 34% of mobile transactions in 2015 compared to 66% for phones, so this audience shouldn’t be ignored. Unfortunately, Google’s statistics do.

Depending on the size and type of tablet in question, visitors may be directed to either your mobile or your desktop site. In some cases, forcing a redirect to your desktop site can improve the user experience and conversion rates for tablets, especially those with larger screens.

Optimising your websites for mobile users isn’t just recommended – it’s mandatory if you hope to succeed in the mobile age. Find out about more ways you could be harming your success with content marketing mistakes to avoid.

WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites share a lot of similarities, but there are also a few key differences to consider when setting up your site (or trying to fix a problem). Knowing those differences can prevent a lot of frustration further down the line.

Price

Both versions of WordPress are free to use for your website, but things such as your domain name, hosting and add ons may cost extra. On WordPress.com, free sites come with ads (with revenue going to WordPress, not the site owner).

While the basic, and most common, form of WordPress.com is free, you can also pay for Premium ($129/year) or Business ($399/year) plans too. These allow you to have extra functions on to your site, but nothing that you can’t get for free with .org.

Domains

With .com sites, you have two options for your domain. You can choose to pay for a domain of your choosing, or you can sign up for a free account that follows this basic structure: civicwebmedia.wordpress.com.

For .org, there’s only one choice and that is that you need to pay for your own URL.

Hosting

WordPress.com includes free hosting when you sign up, as well as automatic data backup. For WordPress.org, you need to arrange your own hosting which can cost anywhere from a few bucks a month to hundreds a year, and you need to create backups to your site yourself.

Themes

Both versions of WordPress work with themes, where you install a ready-made site and then customise it to fit your needs.

WordPress.com themes are more limited in a few ways. Firstly, by number. Currently there are 375 themes to choose from (194 are free, 181 are premium – or paid – themes). While this gives a bit of choice, it pales into comparison with what’s available for .org sites – ThemeForest, a popular marketplace for templates, has more than 21,000 premium themes available.

WordPress.com themes are also a lot more restrictive. While you can still add your logo and change the colour scheme, with .org themes you can do a lot more. For more experienced users, you’re able to edit the theme coding directly – meaning you can make small tweaks or huge changes to the way your site looks. You can also install plugins, which can dramatically alter your site’s appearance and performance.

Plugins

Plugins are only available for .org sites, and they give users a lot of power. There are currently more than 40,000 plugins available, and most of them are free or have a free option.

Plugins can be used to make your site do almost anything. Whether that’s improving your SEO, cutting down spam comments, creating an online store or adding in a reservation system. Almost anything you can think of for your site has already been created, and most plugins can be installed and set up in just a few clicks.

WordPress.com does offer some of these options, but only if you pay the recurring annual fee.

Conclusion

Overall, WordPress.org is the better option for businesses. While you do have a small fee to pay upfront for hosting, after that you have a lot more control over your site and a lot more flexibility in what you can do.

WordPress.com offers a great service for people setting up personal blogs or photography portfolios, and because updates and security are handled for you, it makes things simple. However, because of its limitations (and its high price to upgrade) it might not have quite the same power to create exactly the type of site you want.

What a 301 redirect does

A 301 redirect tells browsers that a page has moved permanently, pointing them to a new target that you’ve specified. Visitors will automatically be taken to the new URL and search engines will see that you’ve moved your content and will pass on any ranking benefits accordingly.

For example, if you owned oldwebsite.com.au and then bought newwebsite.com.au, a 301 would take all visitors who typed in oldwebsite.com.au (or followed a link, clicked on a bookmark etc) straight to newwebsite.com.au.

Without a 301, one of two things is likely to happen. A visitor is going to come across either a 404 error page (or a blank page) which might cause them to leave your site and find an alternative, or you’re going to have to find another way to get them where you want them. A simple message saying you’ve moved with a link to your new site is a common workaround, but it’s akin to using duct tape instead of going for the long term fix. You won’t pass on any SEO value you’ve earned on the old site and you’re not delivering the best user experience.

Times you would use a redirect

301 redirects are useful in a number of cases, specifically when you get rid of a page or website.

• If you move domains, a 301 redirect will automatically take people going to the old site to your new one

• If you register both the .com.au and .com version of your URL, you can set it up so people who go to the .com site by mistake are taken straight to the Australian version

• If you post stats on a regular schedule, you might want to redirect people from an old version to the latest figures

• If you remove content (such as discontinued stock) for any reason, you can redirect visitors to a relevant page

• If you change your URL structure, you would redirect the old URLs to the new ones

• If there are several ways to reach your homepage (say http://www.civicwebmedia.com.au/, http://home.civicwebmedia.com.au/ and http://civicwebmedia.com.au/ ) then you should use both a canonical tag and two 301 redirects for best effects

When you’re redirecting a URL – say you’ve bought another company or you’ve purchased a better URL – it can be tempting, and it’s certainly easier, just to have the whole site redirect to your new homepage. The best practise in these cases, however, is to set up individual 301 redirects for each page – or at least each subfolder/category – to the equivalent area on your new website.

How to set up a 301 redirect

While there are some WordPress plugins that claim to create 301 redirects for you easily, in our experience these do not work consistently well. This means that you need to get into your hosting files, through either FTP or cPanel, and make the changes yourself.

As with any work of this nature, it can be easy to make a mistake. Always back up your website before attempting to change files on your server.

To create a new 301 rule through cPanel, go to the File Manager and select ‘Web Root’ and make sure you tick ‘Show Hidden Files’.

When your files load you should see one called .htaccess. This is the file you want to edit, but it’s a good idea to always download a copy of it before you make any changes should anything go wrong.

To redirect a single page you need to have the following in your .htaccess file.

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.website.com.au/newpage.html

Redirect 301 Tells web browsers that a page has moved.

/oldpage.html Shows which page has moved. You don’t need to have the full URL here.

http://www.website.com.au/newpage.html Shows where the new page is.

If you’re moving more than one page, simply put the same code on the next line (starting again with ‘Redirect 301’) and put in the relevant URLs.

To redirect a whole website

Redirect 301 / http://www.newwebsite.com.au/

To redirect a whole site from/to a sub folder

Redirect 301 / http://www.newwebsite.com.au/subfolder/

Redirect 301 /subfolder http://www.newwebsite.com.au/

For more advanced redirects (such as changing all .php addresses to .html) it’s possible to create a rewrite rule, which is well explained here.

Planning ahead and creating a 301 redirect every time you change a URL or delete a page is all round the most practical way to do things, but every now and then a link slips through the cracks. To double check, log into Google Webmaster Tools and in the Crawl menu on the left, under Crawl Errors, you can see all the pages it’s expecting to find but can’t.

Image: “Detour” by Morgan Dobbins is licensed under CC BY 2.0

WordPress is by far the most popular content management system today. According to W3Techs, almost a quarter of all websites and 59% of websites with a CMS use WordPress.

The greatest benefit of using WordPress is the flexibility it offers. It can be used to create simple blogs, content-rich websites, e-commerce stores, forums and more. Because it’s open source, people can add their own tweaks to improve sites and there is a wide range of templates and plugins to help customise and improve your site.

WordPress is fairly easy to pick up. Pages and articles can be added, edited and formatted easily and with more than 31,000 free plugins to choose from it’s simple to add functionality to a site. Because it’s so widely used there are plenty of resources online to help if you get stuck, including the official help files and sites like WPBeginner.

Used by: Civic Web Media, TechCrunch, Time, Wired.

Behind WordPress in usage is Joomla, with around 7% of all CMS sites and 3% of the total web. Joomla isn’t as intuitive as WordPress but for those who are tech savvy the system can be learned quite easily, with many tutorials online to help overcome small problems. Once you know how to use Joomla you can make sites that are a bit more powerful than those on WordPress but still aren’t too hard to manage. If you’re creating a social media site or e-commerce store there are lots of benefits to using Joomla and plenty of community help available for each.

Of the three most popular sites, Joomla has the fewest number of free themes and plugins, meaning you may have to do a lot of the work yourself.

Used by: Guggenheim, Harvard University, Linux, UNRIC.

The third most popular CMS at the moment is Drupal, with 2% of the web and 5% of CMS-enabled sites. It is the hardest of the three to learn, often requiring a lot of web experience and knowledge, but it’s capable of creating more complex sites than either Joomla or WordPress. It’s not usually recommended for small businesses setting up their own sites, but for bigger organisations that want a more advanced website and are happy to pay someone else to make and look after the site, it can have huge benefits.

While WordPress and Joomla come with standard admin systems, to make edits easily to a Drupal site a system needs to be created or installed. As there’s no official choice, ease of use will vary from program to program.

Used by: Australian Government, Bruno Mars, Oxfam, The Prince of Wales.

Rounding off the top four is Magento, a CMS that powers more than 1% of the entire internet and around 3% of sites with a content management system. Like WordPress and Drupal, Magento has been increasing in popularity recently.

Magento is purely for e-commerce sites as it lets you set up an online store and cart system. The community version of Magento is free but the enterprise edition, which has more features and functionality, has a fee to use.

Many people talk about a steep learning curve when beginning to use Magento but once you get over the initial hurdles it can be straight forward to use and update. For businesses expecting to make sales in multiple countries, Magento is a great choice as it offers multiple languages and currencies.

As a guideline, some say that unless you’re expecting to make at least $1m a year in sales then Magento is not the right choice for you. Unless you’re tech savvy it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to set things up yourself and the company only gives support to those with the paid option – which costs more than US$14,000/year. Because of the size of the software you’ll also need a dedicated server to handle things smoothly.

Used by: Bing Lee, Liverpool FC, Nike, Olympus.

While each CMS has its benefits, for small businesses that don’t have a dedicated IT specialist or a huge budget for web development, WordPress seems to be the best choice.

Stick with your name

Unless the domain you want has already been registered it’s always a good idea to use your business name for your website. This not only makes it simple for people to find, but also easy to remember.

For businesses that haven’t been formally set up yet, it’s worthwhile checking a few different available website names before making a commitment. Sites like knowem.com can also let you check a huge number of social media sites.

Australian business names also have to be registered with ASIC so be sure to check availability there, too.

Make it memorable

If you can’t get the exact domain you want you may have to change your thinking completely or add an extra word to your address. You can start adding words like ‘Newcastle’, ‘NSW’ or something related to your business or industry to the end to find something that’s available.  

Another thing to remember is that your domain should be easy to type. If you have any unusual spellings or substitutions in your URL (such as ‘u’ instead of ‘you’), a number (is that ‘5’ or ‘five’?) or a hyphen in your address then people may end up on the wrong site and you’ll lose a potential customer.  

Keeping your domain short is beneficial and, while the maximum length allowed is 63 characters, some e-mail programs and web browsers won’t work with anything that has more than 26 characters.

Your domain’s ending

Known as the top level domain (TLD), the last section of your web address can have a big impact on your site. For sites based in Australia it’s nearly always best to choose .com.au: it’s easier for people to remember, a lot of people will assume that’s what you’ve registered and it also shows search engines where you’re based.

If you have a presence in multiple countries, or you’re planning to expand, it’s worthwhile also registering the .com domain as well as country-specific endings like .co.nz.  

The next steps

Once you have your domain registered the next thing you need to do is arrange web hosting. Often you can get this through the same site where you registered your domain but, although this can make it easier to set up, you should always check to see if you can get a better deal elsewhere. After this has been completed you can begin to set up your website and start making the most of the online world.

Image: “Website address / URL bar” by Descrier is licensed under CC BY 2.0