Tag: SEO

Google recently announced that "Core Web Vitals" will be incorporated as a Google ranking signal. This set of specific factors will change the way the user’s experience affects your ranking. Although the update will be launched in 2021, these metrics are already being used to measure the quality of a webpage and user’s experience. Core Web Vitals are focused on page loading, interactivity, and visual stability. This upcoming change to search rankings will evaluate the overall user experience provided by a page. Once the update takes place, pages that fail to provide a good user experience will rank lower in the search results. However, if you know how to update your site for Core Web Vitals, you can use this to your advantage. For website owners and managers, this update means that you can boost your SEO by working with the right web designer.

An Overview Of Core Web Vitals

There are 3 specific measurements that make up the Core Web Vitals.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - Page Loading

Defined as the time interval between the start of a page-load to when the largest image or text block in a user’s viewport is fully rendered, this important user experience factor is what makes a webpage be perceived as slow or fast by the users. LCP is the measurement of how long it takes for the main content to be ready. If you have ever experienced a delay in an image or a text loading, you know how frustrating this can be.

First Input Delay (FID) - Interactivity

This measures the time of the user's interactivity and how long the page is ready to respond to clicks, scrolls, or other actions. This is an important factor that can greatly affect the way a user perceives your website. When you click on a link or a button, you expect it to work right away, otherwise, it will seem broken. In many cases, long loading times can lead people to leave your website.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - Visual Stability

This refers to the unexpected shifting of page elements when the page is still loading. It is probably the most annoying and common problem that you will ever find in a website. Whenever a website is still loading you will see how some elements like buttons or text boxes move around the screen and sometimes disappear. This is especially inconvenient when the webpage takes a long time to load completely. Sometimes it might seem like the page is ready to interact and when you’re about to click on something, it moves.

How A Web Designer Can Help You Boost Your SEO?

If you oversimplify the new ranking factors, you just need to make elements load faster. However, for LCP, FID and CLS to be correctly addressed and optimized you need a lot of technical knowledge–it’s not as simple as resizing images and editing a few lines of code.  For this reason alone is that a web designer can now be one of your biggest allies when it comes to optimizing your webpage for SEO.  When building a new website or redesigning an existing one, working with a web designer that is able to update the site for Core Web Vitals is important. Of course, these are not the only ranking factors and SEO takes more than just that, but if you want to take full advantage of this upcoming update and get an edge over your competitors, this is the right time. ---- S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses and non-profit businesses.  We specialize in implementing low cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs. Discover how to elevate your business getting the right tools and services!

As a  local business owner, one of your biggest interests should be targeting your local audience and making sure you are found, that approach is known as Local SEO. Place your business right where people are looking for it or the services related to it is key to succeed and be profitable. Luckily, there is a platform that was created to help businesses, especially local ones, to boost their local presence and make sure people find them online: Google My Business. Google My Business is a free platform developed by Google that allows businesses how their business information shows up across Google Search and Google Maps. If you’re wondering why Google My Business is so important, the answer is simple. The most popular search engine that people use to seek any information regarding a company or service is Google, and being on the business listing that Google provides to users is essential to let people know your business exits. Setting up a Google My Business profile is a vital part of local SEO.

How To Set Up Google My Business: A Step-By-Step Guide

Boost your local presence by creating a Google My Business Profile for your business. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to set up a profile. Go to google.com/business/ and click the button “Manage now” Write your business name: In this second part, you have two options: First, enter your business name on the section that says “type your business name” to confirm if your business listing already exists in order to avoid duplication or to add a new Google My Business Profile to an existing business in case you just opened a new location for that business. If your business hasn't been listed on Google My Business then click on “Add your business to Google” and type the name of your business. Then click next. Choose your business category: Google My Business allows you to have several categories but during the set up you have to choose the main category that fits your business best. Decide if your business will have a visible location or not: If your choice is Yes, fill the black spaces with your country, street address, city, state and zip code. Note: Right after adding your business address, you need to define if your services are provided outside your location as well. If yes, you will need to add the service areas.  Set your specific location on the map: If your choice is No, you won’t have to add an address and instead you will see the following image to define your service areas. Add your contact detail: Include your phone number and select the choice that applies to your business when it comes to a website. If you don’t have a website, Google My Business can create a google website with a simple layout and all the information you have provided. Complete the verification process: After clicking on Finish, you will have to prove Google that your business really exists and that is where you say it is. There are two main verification methods, Postcards verification and Phone verification. The postcard verification used to arrive 5 days, but due to COVID-19 it might take longer. While the phone verification is a quicker method to get an automated message with a verification code. Whether you select postcard verification or phone verification, you will need to go to your profile, look for the section that says “Pending verification” and click on “Enter verification code” to add your code. That’s it!

The Right Ally To Boost Your Local Presence

S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses and non-profit businesses.  We specialize in implementing low cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs. Discover how to elevate your business getting the right tools and services!

Data has so much power, especially in business, because it helps with decision-making. The secret to success with a website is the same: understanding what happens on it. There are several effective tools that can help companies and marketers to find all the information they need in a single place, but the best-known tool is Google Analytics. Analytics’ primary goal is helping businesses understand their sites and keep track of their performance based on the content, products and more. It’s also a functional tool because it works with Google’s advertising and publisher products, so you can use your insights to deliver quality results.

Why Google Analytics?  

All digital marketers, SEO specialists, webmasters, and even non-experts that manage a website think Analytics is essential and love having it within their toolbox, because it allows them to discover massive amounts of data about a website’s performance and users’ behavior.  There are several benefits of using Google Analytics, including: Free: The most fantastic feature about Analytics is that it is completely free. For such a powerful tool, it is hard to believe that Google has given us Analytics for free to get insights about our websites. Know your Audience: Analytics is not only a user-friendly platform, but it has a wealth of data to discover everything about your audience or traffic. It allows digital marketers to see where traffic is coming from, like the country, or the source (social media, organic or paid), what they are interested in, or how they behave. Tracking Conversions: Analytics allows to track conversions for any type of website. Whether it is an ecommerce site or a traditional website, it can track phone calls, email clicks, form submissions, newsletter subscriptions.  Reporting: This easy-to-use platform also has the ability to create complete reports that cover all these aspects, like audience details and website conversions, to name a few. 

Important Metrics 

When it comes to metrics, Analytics has many; however, it is vital to choose to focus on the ones that are relevant to your business and that are aligned to your goals. Here are some of the metrics you can measure:

• Users (visits)
• New users (New visits)
• Sessions
• Pageviews
• Bounce rate
• Average session duration

Defining which metrics are important to you and which ones to include within your report really depends on the goals and plans of your business. For example, if you’re trying to increase the traffic of your website then you would want to focus on users and new users.  On the other hand, if you’re interested in figuring out if people are engaging enough with your site, then bounce rate and average session duration are the right metrics to look at. An important fact about metrics is that not all businesses are the same. What works for one, may not apply to another. For example, time on site (average session duration), is extremely valuable for some businesses: if visitors stay longer on their landing pages, they’re more likely to take an action and buy. Nevertheless, time on site is a metric that depends entirely on the type of business, industry and even the way that the website is structured. For some companies, there is not much they can offer to their visitors and because of the nature of the industry users are used to calling or filling a form faster than others.  There are so many things to learn about Google Analytics; fortunately Google offers a Free Pro Course to learn how to use Analytics and how to understand  a report.

Getting Smart with: SFX Small Business Solutions

S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses and non-profit businesses.  We specialize in implementing low cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs. Our team of experts is ready to support you and teach you how to become an expert using the right tools.

Nowadays, the digital marketing world has multiple practices that help businesses achieve specific goals and be more profitable over time. There are inorganic marketing practices that are paid like pay-per-click (Google Ads, Bing Ads), email marketing, Facebook Ads, and more. There are others, like SEO, that are organic.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and according to Moz, it is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Although SEO is a very long process, it has huge benefits over time. With SEO you can build business reputation, boost credibility, increase visibility and online presence, drive organic visits to your website and get quality leads. Good SEO means you won’t ever have to pay for ads.

How To Do SEO The Right Way

There are a variety of SEO strategies, but some, called black hat SEO, are seen as wrong. They don’t abide by search engine guidelines, but instead use tricks to gain rankings (and not very well). White hat SEO are practices that search engines do approve of. When thinking of the right path of SEO, there is only one: the white one. Doing SEO includes two methods: on-site SEO (also known as on-page SEO) and off-page SEO. On-page SEO involves elements like creating content, or optimizing the HTML source code of a site or specific page. On the other hand, off-page SEO is associated with links and other external signals.

On-Page SEO

One of the basic things that on-page SEO includes is clean code. Clean code matters because clean code enhances the ranking performance of a website on search engines. Code is the language search engines use to understand the content, the purpose of a website, and the way it looks. Like any other language, it needs to be “well-spoken” and well-written in order to be understandable. Alt text (or alt tag) and title tags are elements of on-page SEO as well. However ,both are a part of clean code. Alt text for example, is an image tag within the code that explains to Google bots or Bing bots what the image is or shows. Title tags are html elements that indicate the title of a webpage and are displayed as a snippet result on search engine result pages (SERPs). Another major element of on-page SEO is content. Having properly written copy means your website’s content answers users’ queries and helps them find the information and solution they are looking for. Think about what your target audience needs and write valuable content to answer their questions. The content is very important: search engines like Google have confirmed that relevant content is the number one signal that they consider ranking some sites higher on search engine result pages (SERPs).   On-page SEO also includes keyword density. Keyword density is basically the percentage of times a keyword or search terms is on a page, to determine whether this page is relevant or not to the specific keyword. The key with this method is to add a keyword whenever it makes sense, to make sure your content is natural to the average user.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is related to link building, which is the process of getting hyperlinks from other sites to your own in order to build that reputation you need to rank better on search engine result pages. It’s pretty simple: when Google isees many sites linking to a website, it understands that that website is a source of information for others, which makes it relevant enough to rank better. An example of link building is guest blogs. Some websites offer to write content for other pages in order to be linked back to by relevant and highly reputable blogs.However, not all the websites are linked to valuable sites or pages. Making sure you disavow bad links will save your website from being penalized. How can you disavow bad links? Using a fantastic tool developed by Google called Search Console. Another method within off page SEO that can be performed on Search Console is submitting new content to make it start appearing on search engine result pages. Citations are also part of the off-page SEO work that should be done for a website. According to Moz, “A local citation is any online mention of the name, address, and phone number for a local business. Citations can occur on local business directories, on websites and apps, and on social platforms.” Citations are crucial in SEO because they ensure data accuracy and prove a local business does exist. This will help a website improve in ranking as well.

Want To Improve Your Website’s SEO?

S-FX.com Small Business Solutions can help you create a strategy that builds longer-lasting results and that generates high ROI long-term, just by doing SEO. S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses and non-profit businesses. We specialize in implementing low cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs.

According to a recent Web Technology Survey, over 35% of the websites around the world are powered by WordPress, the most popular open-source platform to create websites with just a few clicks, without knowing anything about code. Wordpress was built on PHP and mySQL, which are structured query languages. It was developed by Mat Mullenweg and Mike Little, as a successor of b2/cafelog, a tool blog that was well-known in 2002.

Why Wordpress?

Of all the CMS platforms, WordPress is the most versatile content management system because it allows you to create a variety of websites, such as:

• Blogs: Ideal to share and publish thoughts, images, tutorials, advice, tips, recipes, etc.  
• Business websites: The most usual way to build websites to take traditional businesses to the new era. 
• Ecommerce websites: It's so adaptable that allows transforming a common website into an online store. It actually has its own plugin for e-commerce to make the job easier. 
• Portfolio websites: The favorite of designers and artists. 
• Forums: Many websites include forums to answer their readers or client’s questions. Wordpress allows users to add a forum by just installing a plugin. 

Wordpress is highly scalable, meaning anyone from a small business owner to a huge company can use it for their business’ website. With the right support and resources, it can have a high processing power, quick loading times, and easy upgrades. It will grow with your business as it gains more and more visitors. It’s also open source and free to use.

Top Features 

WordPress’s popularity comes mainly from their easy-to-use interface that facilitates non-experts and beginners to create custom websites with creative and original themes. Here are some features that make WordPress the favorite website building platform: 

• Flexibility: As we mentioned above, WordPress enables the creation of many types of websites.
• Beginner-Friendly: It’s a super friendly platform, especially for beginners. Its interface is simple and clear. 
• Highly Secure: WordPress updates ensure it’s a website platform secure against hackers.
• SEO-Friendly: All WordPress’ websites are mobile-friendly, meaning it allows for responsive design. Also, all themes are written in great code so bots (like Google bots or Bing bots) can understand easily what the business is about. These features are excellent for your SEO.
• Free Plugins: Wordpress offers many plugins, from plugins to manage online stores and create forums to plugins that optimize images and solve other technical issues. They are users’ favorite feature because there are plugins that can be installed in order to insert code for technical purposes.
• Highly customizable: Its many themes have unique designs and layouts to display content the best way possible. All layouts were designed to provide the best experience for users, which helps your SEO.
• Built-in Blog: Since it's is the biggest blog creation platform, it allows business websites to add a blog section, which can add to your content marketing.
• Not Tied to a Developer: WordPress allows you to switch to another developer, following syntax. This means that even if one developer designed or is designing your site, you can easily switch to another one if necessary.

As you see WordPress has every reason to be the favorite for business owners, beginners, web developers, bloggers and ecommerce professionals alike.

Grow Your Business with WordPress

S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses and non-profit businesses.  We specialize in implementing low cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs. If you want to build a website that stands out from the rest, let us guide you. No matter the type of website you need or the style you are already thinking of, the S-FX Small Business Solutions’ team can help you make it true! CONTACT US TO GET STARTED

A few years ago, companies struggled to create a website for themselves. But gone are the days when only professional programmers could create a modern website; nowadays, CMS platforms make the job much easier and more user-friendly for those with no experience in programming or HTML.  CMS stands for Content Management System, a platform that helps non-designers and non-programmers build a website easily and faster. Learning how to use CMS platforms is a valuable use of your time as a business owner.  There are several well-known CMS Platforms for web design. Let’s dive into our top 4.

WordPress

Previously known as a blogging platform, WordPress is probably the most popular CMS platform in the world. This user-friendly interface allows non-experts to customize and create modern websites using themes and plugins.  WordPress’s success came thanks to its simple and easy-to-use interface that enables users to publish pages and posts and edit themes and shift the format of the content. It also provides regular updates that ensure the website is secure against hackers.  Some of WordPress’ best features are the following:

• Beginner-friendly
• Supports user registration
• SEO-friendly
• Mobile user-friendly
• Free plugins
• Intuitive content management options
• Highly customizable 

Non-designers love working with WordPress because of the many page builders' plugins that create and customize website layouts. Some of users’ favorite page builders plugins are:

• Divi 
• Beaver Builder
• Elementor
• Avada
• WP Bakery

Joomla

Joomla is a CMS Platform; although not as popular or beginner-friendly as others, it has many exciting features that make it the perfect choice for those who need to manage custom post types.  This flexible platform is primarily known for its multilingual support, meaning it does not require plugins to add more languages to your website, as other CMS platforms do. Also, its software is strongly code-based, which benefits websites in terms of page speed, and it enables using multiple themes at once.  Some key features of Joomla are:

• CMS of easy installation
• Great support for custom post types
• Unique templates
• Advanced user management options
• Free Plugins
• URL Creation for good SEO Results
• High-quality support for users

Shopify

Shopify is the leading CMS software for e-commerce sites. It hosts and manages the software for its users, which is very useful for non-programmers. This easy-to-use CMS platform is ideal for businesses with online stores that want to manage and sell their products online. It has its own payment gateway, but it also supports other payment gateways like Paypal and Authorized.net. Shopify is a versatile website-building platform that allows business owners to sell their products through an engaging website. Its interface operates perfectly for all kind of products such as:

• Physical products (jewelry and clothes)
• Digital products (e-courses, e-books, and audios)
• Memberships
• Consultations
• Classes and lessons

Shopify’s best features include:

• Great customer support
• SEO-friendly
• Maintenance and security support
• Mobile responsiveness
• Fast loading speed

Squarespace 

Squarespace is a CMS platform ideal for creative professionals that want to create modern websites without having to write HTML. This highly intuitive website builder is well-known for its all-in-one system where you can find support with everything: domain, hosting, galleries, analytics, etc. A few useful features that you can find on Squarespace are:

• Drag-and-drop management
• Easy navigation
• Great editing tools
• Built-in templates
• Built-in SEO tools
• Responsive image loader
• 24/7 support

Build Your Site With The Experts 

If you need help getting started, you can also work with an experienced web designer to build a beautiful and functional site. Contact S-FX today to learn more about CMS platforms and how they can help you offer a rich online experience to your customers.   -------- S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses, and non-profit businesses. We specialize in implementing low-cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs.

Web designers do more than decide how your website will look like. Their job involves many artistic and technical concepts, as well as knowledge of the internet and search engines. Most importantly, their work can significantly affect your business’ success online.

What is Web Design?

Web design is not the same as web development. Web developers build sites from scratch by coding, but a designer determines how the site will look when it’s fully realized, and determines the aesthetics and layout of the site. They also perform many other tasks on the site to make it’s doing everything for your business that it can -- that’s why it’s not so simple to become a web designer. Even if you decide not to build your site from scratch, you should hire a web designer to handle the actual design and launch of your site, as well as maintenance.

What Do Web Designers Do?

We design.

Web designers are versed in everything involved in the theory of design, and specifically designing for the internet and the different devices your site will appear on. They know how colors can affect a customer’s experience on your site. They understand the importance of fonts and can use them effectively, from how many fonts they use to what size they are. Design on a site goes beyond the aesthetics, and also involves how a visitor navigates your site through scrolling, menus, content, and buttons. They also make sure your website has responsive design, meaning it appears correctly whether someone visits your site on a phone, a tablet, or a desktop computer. This is very important, since more and more people are doing their searching -- and shopping -- on smartphones and tablets nowadays.

We make sure your site is functional.

Beyond simply designing the look of your website, web designers make sure that your website works well and is ready for search engines. What does this mean? The entire purpose of your site is for customers to find you through Google or another search engine. This is a topic we could explore at length, but basically web designers make sure your site is ready for Google to find and suggest to internet users. Web designers optimize your site so that each page loads quickly, which has a huge effect on how long visitors stay on the site -- and decide to buy. They also perform other technical tasks that improve your site’s SEO (search engine optimization) so Google can lead internet users to your site. They also make sure to perform server maintenance so that your page is always working and functional. These technical aspects are part of why web designers are crucial to your business and its site. Even if you can hop on a free website creation site and make a site with a template, there are technical aspects you won’t necessarily understand, and they will make or break your site’s success.

We customize and maintain your site.

Once your site is done, a web designer’s work isn’t over. Your business may need other features and customizations on the site, which the designer can implement correctly. They can also make simple improvements on the site’s code so that it functions better. Additionally, web designers do constant maintenance to your site, because it will need it. They can fix bugs and security hacks that happen occasionally, as well as make sure to backup your site regularly so you’re always secured. And if you ever want to update or migrate your site, they can handle that as well.  

Web Designers: Essential To Your Business’ Success

Though it may not always be obvious, web designers are essential to the success of your site -- and therefore, to the success of your business. With so much online traffic and so many customers and sales happening through websites, your business needs not just a website, but a beautiful, functional, and updated website to compete and thrive.   ----- S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses and non-profit businesses.  We specialize in implementing low cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs.

What’s Responsive web Design?

Responsive web design is a website design principle that ensures a website is “mobile-friendly.” This means that if someone opens your site on their smartphone, it will look cohesive and attractive. It will be clear to navigate, text will be a readable size, and images won’t be out of place. Responsive websites are true to their namesake in that they respond to their environment, which in this case is the screen they’re displayed on, be that a desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Responsive web design provides a fluid layout that automatically and seamlessly adjusts to the size of the screen it’s displayed upon. Meanwhile, an adaptive (fixed) design can only accommodate device sizes it’s been preprogrammed to play nice with. A responsive design ensures that your small business’s website will look nice on any device, but it goes far beyond that.

Web Design Made Easy

In the past, companies would develop a separate desktop and mobile site. This resulted in twice as much effort, as both the desktop site and mobile site required different content and SEO (search engine optimization) resources. Now, responsive web design means you can create one site and then easily set it to adjust for different devices and browsers, checking to make sure it’s all good to go. Responsive design lets you consolidate your efforts and more effectively manage your online presence. It also saves you money because you don’t have to create two sites.

Why Do I Need A Responsive Site?

Everyone is on their smartphone. We know this isn't a surprise to you, but it’s true, and this means everyone is searching and buying on their phones, too. Almost 60% of all online searches happen on phones, and half of all traffic online is mobile. What does this mean for your site? You need to get seen. Which leads to ranking and visibility. It improves your rankings. In 2015, Google announced that responsiveness would matter when ranking sites on its search engine. This means that if your site is not responsive, people who are searching for your business may not find you, and never end up clicking on your site at all. If they do find you, they need to be able to navigate your site correctly. It provides a better user experience. Responsive sites adapt to the user’s device, making it easy to navigate no matter where they are. If a site is not responsive, some of your content will either not reach the user or will reach them in such a difficult-to-read fashion that it’ll leave the user frustrated. This also ties into ranking, because Google ranks sites based on user experience as well. And if your user isn’t having a good experience, they won’t buy. It increases conversion rates. According to Google’s Think Insights on Mobile, a frustrated mobile user has a 61% chance of leaving your site for another. However, a user enjoying a positive experience is 67% more likely to buy a product or service. That’s big-time! More and more shopping is happening on mobile, so responsive web design can make or break a sale for you. ---------- S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses and non-profit businesses.  We specialize in implementing low cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs.

Want to become a web designer but not sure where to start? There’s more to it than you might think, but we have broken it all down for you. Here are the six steps you should take to become a web designer.

Learn the basics of HTML & CSS

There’s a difference between a web designer and a web developer. Designers develop the look and design of a website, while developers build a site and create a structure. You can imagine “developers as construction workers, and web designers as architects.” Currently, many CMS platforms and code editors help do the heavy lifting for you when it comes to building a website. However, while a web designer’s job doesn’t require an in-depth knowledge of coding, it’s still vital to understand the fundamentals of coding, the language, and how it all works. Not only will it help you do your job as a designer, but your clients will also feel they’re in safer hands. Take a basic course on HTML and CSS to give yourself a solid base before you become a web designer.

Understand basic SEO principles

The fundamental purpose of a website is to rank in search engines and get found by potential customers, then turn those website visits into customers. Therefore, as a designer, it’s key not only to understand how to convert a lead on the site with an engaging layout, images, and copy, but to optimize the site for these search engines. Search engine optimization requires an understanding of both the front and back end. Everything from meta data, loading times, tags, and more go into being successful on a search engine. Alongside these, effective copywriting and valuable content are indispensable pieces of the puzzle. If your website isn’t optimized for SEO, it won’t be a successful product, so take the time to understand basic SEO principles so you can apply them.

The difference between UX & UI

These terms are often used interchangeably, but it’s important to know the difference and apply them. UX is user experience, or how a user feels as they navigate your site. UI refers to user interface, which is all about the visuals and the actual elements they interact with. They work together to create an effective product. When you become a web designer, your design will have a huge effect on a user’s feelings and actions. You must understand the psychology of color, text, layout, and more to take full advantage of them and create a more effective site.

Build a web design software toolset

To become a web designer, you have to learn various tools and develop your skills in all of them. Each of these will allow you to develop visuals and graphics for the site, build a design to present to your client, and then help bring it to life with the developer. Here are examples of the software you should learn.   Graphic Editors:

• Photoshop
• Canva
• Paint.net

Prototyping Tools:

• Dreamweaver
• Invisionapp
• Mockplus

CMS Framework:

• Wordpress
• Joomla

Join developer communities

No designer is an island. Connecting with other designers and developers will increase your knowledge in an applied setting. You can join Facebook groups, forums, and more for free to connect with like-minded individuals, get feedback from others in your field, and even troubleshoot a problem you can’t solve.

Experiment!

Once you’ve done all the learning, it’s time to do. Start designing websites to discover where your skills and knowledge are lacking and to get more comfortable with everything you’ve learned. Applying your skills is the only way to truly become a web designer. Our CEO says, “The best way to learn how to code is to actually code. I taught myself HTML by viewing the source of other websites and then tweaking the code to change the look of the website. While coding is more sophisticated these days, the concept remains the same - trial and error can take you a long way.”   ----- S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses and non-profit businesses.  We specialize in implementing low cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs.