Milledgeville Cares is part of our campaign to provide free web design for Milledgeville non-profit organizations this year. As a fairly new organization, they wanted to get their name out there and the web is a great place to start! Milledgeville Cares is an initiative to help those in need in our community. They work closely with other organizations in Milledgeville like churches, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters to provide the best help for all of those who need it.

Check them out at www.milledgevillecares.com!

This post was inspired by a panel I was a part of earlier this year at Digital Bridges to evaluate the effectiveness of local business owners’ websites in Milledgeville, GA.

Here are some of the things we looked for that can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your own website:

• Usability
  Your site needs to be easy for your customers and potential customers to use. They should be able to find the information they are looking for quickly and navigate throughout your website will ease. Links need to be labeled well and generally, users shouldn’t have more than 2 clicks before reaching the content they need. Every page of your site needs to have a “Call to Action” so the user knows what to do next. Your site should also be cross-browser friendly and load quickly, which are things your web designer should ensure.
• Design
  As most of you know, your website should be aesthetically pleasing; you need a consistent color scheme that suits the “personality” of your business and the field you are in. For example, it wouldn’t be effective to have a black and gray color scheme for a daycare’s website. However, that same color scheme may work for a fashion website. Your font(s) need to be easily read and an appropriate size as well.
• Effective content
  Your website’s content should consist of concise but informative text. It should be broken up into small paragraphs and headings and subheadings should be used and clearly labeled. Most web users don’t want to come to your business’s website and read a lot of information. They want to get the information they are looking for quickly. Your content should also include keywords about your business and field to help search engines and users know what the site is about. Include relevant contextual links to help search engines and users understand how different pages relate to each other. Last but not least, make sure to regularly update the content on your site!
• Easily found
  As we always say– What good is your website if no one can find it? You could have a great looking site with excellent usability and good content, but it needs to be easily found by your target audience in search engines. Although some of the things I have mentioned thus far should help with this, here are some other tips. Make sure to make your title tags, description tags, and H1 tags relevant to search terms your target audience will use to find you. If this sounds like foreign language to you, this is something a web developer can help you with. Make sure to include a site map with links to all of your pages listed in a logical way. It is definitely important to make sure your website is indexing in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Visit these search engines and type in your URL to see what pages are and are not indexing on your site.

For a one-on-one consultation on your website’s effectiveness, contact us via our contact form or give me a call at 478-390-6770!

I was part of a panel at Digital Bridges Milledgeville called “Is your website working for you?” to evaluate the websites of various business owners in the community. Leia Eubanks was having trouble getting her website to index in search engines because she was using a free service to build it. We developed her website based on her previous design as a self-hosted WordPress blog to allow her to gain a better reach within search engines.

Leia Eubanks Consulting: Central Georgia’s Development & Event Consultant
Leia is a development consultant and assists nonprofits and public agencies with anything and everything fundraising related. From prospect research and grant writing to designing annual fundraising campaigns, membership drives, and events, she can help your organization achieve its fundraising goals. 

She is also an event consultant for weddings, grand openings, open houses, birthday and anniversary parties, and other events.

The new Christopher Macken Concepts website is officially launched! It now serves as a portal website for his other endeavours, including Christopher Macken Cosmetics and M Famous Couture Clothing Line. The development of the site included a restructuring of CMC’s web properties to put the cosmetic site its own domain, add a one-page site for M Famous, and included a new custom WordPress blog, which can be found at blog.christophermacken.com!