The Website TLC Session - Episode 31

A lot of people will sign up for a hosting service who ostensibly take care of it all. But depending on the level of service, I mean, if you're paying like WP engine, for example, you might pay them thirty, forty quid a month and it's they're going to take care of the backups, they're going to take care of the software updates and all that kind of stuff. And that's fine. But if you've bought one of these packages off, like GoDaddy or somebody that's like twelve quid a year or something for your hosting, then probably not going to do anything for that. They won't be keeping the software up to date.

But I mean, that's that stuff is absolutely essential. You, you can't have a website with all that without all that stuff. So you need to make sure it's being done. Yeah.

Okay. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface.

Yay! We're getting there.

Okay. Um, there's been a short sort of hiatus in podcast production because of Storm Arwen, which came through and put power out. And still, nearly a week on, there are people without power. So it's been a strange old time here in northeast Scotland over the last week, hasn't it?

Everyone seems a bit disorientated.

And feel a bit.

Feels like we didn't have a weekend and then Monday didn't feel like a Monday and now it's. I don't even know what day it is. Is it Thursday?

There's nothing different about you not knowing what day it is. Let's face it.

I think it's Thursday, but it doesn't feel like a Thursday. And it's been a really strange week.

So it's um, it's us, the guys at Red evolution. I'm Dave and I'm with.

Julie.

And talking about people being disorientated and all over the place. What a segway.

Yes. Nicely done.

Um, we're going to talk today about websites and it's kind of like the website TLC session. And this all came about following a phone call that Julie took last week or the week before.

Yeah, there was somebody phoned up and they'd been given our phone number by someone else and they said they needed someone to look after their website. Now I immediately thought, you know, that could be one of a number of things and sort of tried to identify what exactly they meant. What's what they wanted us to look after. And it became fairly clear during a, quite a short conversation that they actually didn't really know what they needed us to look after. And I was asking, do you need hosting? No, no, no. Do you need, you know, security updates? No. Do you need, um, you know, content added? Well, maybe, but it depends. And, you know, they were really, really confused and I thought, well it's not that surprising because it is actually quite confusing.

It is confusing. And I would hasten to add that like when people come along and that's where they are, that's perfectly fine. That's exactly what we're used to dealing with. Why should they understand that stuff? It's what we do day in, day out. And it's not what they do day in, day out.

No, your website is there and you kind of know that you're supposed to be doing something to it, and you can't just let it sit there and do nothing, but you're not necessarily sure what what that thing is. And this person was exactly in that position and they just weren't very sure, you know, really what their priority should be or where they should be spending their budget.

That's right. So so based on that you thought would be it's a good subject for a podcast and I agree. And your idea, and we may stick to this was we may not this kind of three areas and that you thought were the areas that we could look at in order to provide a kind of website, TLC podcast.

Yeah, I think it breaks down into sort of three different types of looking after your website, if you like. I think, I think there's the, the sort of technical stuff you're hosting and the techie things, the things that I absolutely don't get involved in and you know better than me. And then there's the things you absolutely have to do, like housekeeping type things like making sure your prices are up to date. And we'll get into that in more detail. And then there's the, the other stuff, the stuff that we, we, we really like doing. And the, the biggest part of our work, which is making sure your, your website actually sort of contributes to your business and continues to bring in traffic and new customers. So I think those those would be the sort of three main areas and they're all very different.

Yeah. I mean, we're not going to dwell too much on the really geeky stuff. Please don't. Um, no I won't. Suffice to say that the, uh, tech, the tech stuff, uh, the software your website runs on, so your website might be running on WordPress or it might be running on Kraft. Any number of content management systems we've.

Spoken.

About before. Yeah. In fact, you know, make a good point where Hubspot's concerned. I mean, one of the, one of the great things about HubSpot, HubSpot is it's a software as a service. So you don't have to worry about hosting and everything. It's like they do it all. Same with, uh, for e-commerce, Shopify, squarespace is the same. So yeah, so if you, if you use one of those SaaS solutions, then you don't have to worry about the, the software, you don't have to worry about the hosting. It's all part of the monthly.

You pay a monthly fee. And then that covers everything so you don't have to think about it. So that's quite nice.

But if you're if you're going down the Self-hosting route, you've downloaded WordPress or your developers, your web guys built you a website in WordPress or Joomla or craft, then chances are you're going to need to host that website somewhere. I mean, it's just basically a computer that's connected to the internet. It's, you know, it.

Looks a little different.

It's where all the files sit. Exactly. And that needs to be looked after. Needs to be the software that runs that computer. That server needs to be updated. And again, if you have a hosting contract, sometimes that's included, although often it isn't. If you buy really cheap hosting, it's like whatever it was set at when you set it up, when you created it, that's what it's like five years later, potentially out of date, vulnerable, insecure, literally.

It's just sitting there and it's just a home for it and nobody touches it. The other thing people get confused about is the domain name hosting, which is completely different.

That's right.

Yeah. And that's, that's handled elsewhere. And that's just your, your, the name of your website, The dot com or the dot co dot UK or whatever it is. And that that's completely different. And that's.

It's a separate.

It's.

A separate registration body. It's a separate invoice. It's often a separate service. You know, sometimes you might register a domain with fast hosts or one, two, three reg and then host your website with them. Or GoDaddy is another common one and host your website with them as well. But, but quite often that's not the case.

Yeah, it's completely separate as a different login. It's a different person you pay.

The main advice with that one is to set it to auto renew, and then you can just basically forget about it. It's not expensive. It'll renew every year or every two years or however you've set the auto renewal and it gets paid, and then your website never goes offline because your domain hosting your domain registration fee isn't paid.

It's also a good idea to do it yourself. Actually own the domain name yourself. Don't get your agency to do it if you can possibly help it, because if you change agencies, it can get really messy. If your agency, you have a freelancer and they go out of business or something, and then they get all the reminders that your domain name needs renewing.

And they do nothing about that.

Yeah. And then then suddenly your website goes down because your domain name isn't registered.

We've certainly rescued a few people in that situation before. And then there's, as we said, the software that your websites running on WordPress, craft, Joomla, whatever it is, it needs updating again, usually fairly simple process, but if it isn't done, the website can become vulnerable.

So yeah.

The server, the software, the domain name, all that kind of geeky techie stuff, you could broadly call it a bit kind of like sysops system operations, maybe it sounds a bit geeky. A lot of people will sign up for a hosting service who ostensibly take care of it all, but depending on the level of service, I mean, if you're paying like WP engine, for example, you might pay them thirty, forty quid a month and it's they're going to take care of the backups, they're going to take care of the software updates and all that kind of stuff. And that's fine. But if you've bought one of these packages off, like GoDaddy or somebody that's like twelve quid a year or something for your hosting, then don't.

Expect them to do.

Anything for that. They won't be keeping the software up to date.

But I mean, that's that stuff is absolutely essential. You you can't have a website with all that without all that stuff. So you need to make sure it's being done. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. And leaving that to one side, we then have the, what you called essential content.

Yeah.

Yeah. Go on then. Talk about.

That. Um, things like, well your are your products correct or your product details.

Correct or services or services.

You know what you, what you actually provide is the information on your website up to date and correct. Are your prices up to date? Is your people page up to date? Is your address right? Is your phone number right? Are the emails right? Do your forms work? Just the stuff that is absolute basics. You know that you aren't actually telling people things that aren't true.

Yeah. Your about us page, for example, all that stuff. It's the content that isn't the, you know, the bits of the website, the content that isn't necessarily going to help you generate business, but it's the sort of content that people will need once they're considering getting in touch with you.

Yeah, and it has to be accurate. It has to be up to date. Otherwise, it's like having a, you know, your price is wrong in your shop or having a shop window with things you don't actually sell.

Yeah. I mean, the obvious one that we see from time to time is when people decide they're going to create a blog, but they then abandon it. And so the blog was last updated four years ago, and news is another common one. And all of these things can sort of indicate to anybody coming along that your business is not a going concern, because it looks like the website wasn't updated since. Since forever.

Yeah. It looks like you're, you're either not in business anymore or that you're, you've kind of lost interest in it. So you're not giving the right impression to the outside world. So yeah, that's the sort of thing that you can probably do yourself if you've got, you know, how to log into your website, you just need to like change your prices or update your products or, you know, take, take off people who have left the company or adding new people and things like that. Most, you know, a lot of businesses, they, you know, they've got somebody who can go in and just make those sort of minor updates. Um, or they've got an agency who can just, you know, do, do bits and bobs like that for them. And that's, you know, just bare essentials to, to make sure that everything is actually accurate.

Yeah. And it's not unusual for those things that we've talked about, the tech stuff and the essential content side of things to be looked after by an agency who maybe just provide a very basic website management package. I mean, certainly we do that for.

A.

Few customers where we don't do very much other than keep the website spinning and make little minor changes. We don't have many customers we do that for. It's not really a gig that we that we go after particularly.

It's not the fun stuff. Not really, but it's fine. We, you know, we can easily do it. And you know, people, it's nice that people can rely on us and we can just make sure that that nothing goes wrong. And it all, all ticks along nicely. But it's not it's not growing the business, but it's just keeping it stable.

Yeah. One thing I would strongly recommend, if you're a smaller business or even a, you know, a larger business who doesn't want to make any sort of investment in this side of things in the web? Then then definitely go for one of the services we mentioned earlier, such as squarespace, Shopify, HubSpot, even. I think Wix is a half decent offering now as well. These tools that let you build a website and. But they take care of all of the, the tech and the geek, the geeky stuff.

It makes it easy and they're quite easy to update and you don't have to worry about that. So I took a drink of water and now I'm dying.

I think you've ruined it. I think we need to start again.

We're not starting again. I'm never going to say all that again.

Okay. So if you if you're, you know, if your website, if you think it's a key part of your business or it actually is a key part of your business in terms of, um, lead gen business generation, then the things we've mentioned up to now are essential, but not, you know, they have to be in place, but neither of those things is what's going to actually help your website bring in customers.

No, they're just going to make sure that your website doesn't not bring in customers.

Okay, I think I understood what you mean. So, okay, the third thing that's part of a website, TLC package or website TLC service would be what? Julie.

It would be constantly adding to it, enhancing it, adding things to it that are going to actually attract new visitors to your website. And those visitors might actually turn into customers. So yeah, business growth. I don't know how to explain it. Content.

Clearly you don't know how to explain it.

That's what I do every day, but I can't actually describe it. So I'm thinking my mom still doesn't know what I do either.

Well, okay. He he is. He is where? Here's my take on it that I think I think agencies are guilty of saying to people that, oh, you need to keep adding content to your website. Yeah. And it's a, it's kind of, you know, lots of people say it. And I, I understand why business owners get confused about that. What do you mean? Is it because Google, you know, Lord, Google has to see things constantly changing and being added to the website. Otherwise it it doesn't look on as favorably or. And it's none of that really. I mean, Google plays a key role in this, obviously, but what we're talking about is matching up the searches that people do in Google when they're trying to solve a problem with content on your website. I think that's right. And the reason I'm pausing a bit here is we had a bit of a minor glitch, and I've had to go back and start recording again. So hopefully that'll be a seamless sense. And nobody'll even realise that happened because I never said anything, did I?

No, no, it's not obvious at all. Okay, so the thing is that Google is Google's purpose is to give people the best possible answer to the question that they just typed in. So it's always looking and checking what the best possible answer is. So you want to be providing that best answer to the question. And to do that you need to know what the questions are.

You do. Yeah. So when we talk about content, when we talk about website content, the third part of this website, TLC, in order to get your website to bring in business, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about the content that people are actually looking for. And we've covered this a lot in previous podcasts. But you know, until that thing stopped recording a second ago, we were talking about how people are still really confused about that. So some of the things you need to think about around that is do you is to either work with an agency who can help you or if you're doing it yourself, it's about understanding the kind of content, for example, that Google is currently serving up when people search for certain things. Yeah. And making sure that your content is not just as good as that, but we're better.

Better, more relevant, and more.

Useful. Yeah.

And that the pages that that content's on are really easy to navigate that, you know, they're, they're easy to find, find your way around. That's the same as navigate. But and you know, when someone lands on it, they, they can find what they're looking for and they can use the page. Well, it looks good. So they're not just sort of going on to it and going, oh, I don't like the look of this and bouncing straight off because Google will will think, well, it's not a good page even if the words on it are right. If it looks really horrible, then and you bounce straight back off it, then Google kind of realises that it's probably not giving you the best sort of experience overall. So a bit of prettifying as well is nice.

Yeah, to make the content more engaging, I guess. Um, so I think we, I think we've kind of covered what we wanted to cover on this, you know, how to look after your website or, you know, website, basic website, TLC, the, the content piece that we've just spoken about, uh, last is something that we've spoken about in a lot of other podcasts, and we're not going to go into great detail. No, it's just.

That it's different. It's different from the other types of of updates. There's essential updates. And then there's the, the business growth updates, which are your content and also just, you know, keeping the website fresh and, and making sure that it's easy to get around. So checking how people use it and making sure that they can, can use it. Well, all those things come into the, the, the non-essential, but for non-essential for keeping it running, but absolutely essential for growing your business type updates.

Yep. Okay. Agreed. I, I kind of got a bit thrown by, by the tech letting us down, so I really can't think of anything I want to add to this one. It was, it was always going to be a sort of short and.

Sweet, a clarification of when somebody says, you need somebody to look after your website, the sort of options that you have and you know, the way to clarify, you know, what you're looking for when you speak to somebody.

Yeah. And just finally to reiterate, if you, if you are on a tight budget, definitely look at some of the hosted solutions that we've mentioned. Um, if you're doing it yourself, don't neglect the software updates that we've spoken about because you can get into all sorts of trouble if your software's not updated, people will hack your website. Um, again, yeah.

The fix.

Lots of sites that have been down that avenue.

They know different.

Compromise.

To look for and they know where the holes are to get in. So yeah, definitely.

Okay. Um, so this is Digital Marketing From The Coalface, the podcast delivered by people doing digital marketing day in, day out, and not just people who want to teach you how to do digital marketing. Um, if you've got any questions or if you want to come on the show, go to the contacts tab and get in touch. Meantime, you're going off for a week's holiday, aren't you?

I am going off for a week's holiday and I'm very much looking forward to it.

Yeah, I'm actually looking forward to you going on a week's holiday as well. Thanks.

That's nice to feel wanted.

Okay, bye for now.