How to Design Website Landing Page in WordPress and Why

by John Tarr | Mar 31, 2019 | Landing Pages, Tutorials | 0 comments

How to Design Website Landing Pages in WordPress and Why

When it comes to “landing pages” people either do not know what that means or have some vague understanding of what that term landing page means when it comes to websites.

Most people think that by just having a website itself is all that is needed to reach the world with their store front and communicate what they do or offer to the world.

Yes, a website is essential to show off and communicate what you have to offer but you can do so much more with this tool called a website. This landing page tool is basically built in to the website you already have.

If your website has been designed on a WordPress platform it is very easy to make one or a whole series of landing pages to help your business grow in ways only you can think of. The use for landing pages is almost endless but I will give you a few reasons to spark your imagination to get your creative juices rolling.

What is a website landing page?

This page is designed off your website to be a stand-alone website page independent of the parent website itself. It is not a page that will be connected to the menu in the main parent website itself. It will have all the same characteristics of the main website when it comes to color, fonts and image usage so you will want to make it consistent to the parent website, so you do not confuse potential clients or people.

What are landing pages used for? More Internet Reach of course!

It’s a way for taking your website places it could not go to before. When you put a focus key phrase on a particular website page your internet reach for your website becomes very narrow. Landing pages opens up the internet for more creative use by you and your website.

Landing pages are basically a CTA (Call To Action). Just like you may have inside your website with a CTA button taking someone to a specific location a landing page does the same thing only in a larger sense.

Here are Just A Few Landing Page Uses

Focus CTA for advertising on other advertising platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even Yelp. This CTA will help focus what you are promoting.
Selling individual products or product lines. Again, this a CTA but for a narrower range.

Special offer. Something that you are promoting that has a start and end date.
Email address collection.
Reaching more locations such as states and cities.
Types of products that are offered.

Once you get the idea or concept of landing pages the whole world will open up on how to promote yourself or business.

One Word Of Caution

Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo do not like duplicate content on website pages unless that page points back to a parent page.

You do this in one of two ways.

The first way is by using a Website Canonical (referring to) from a landing page to the parent page. When it comes to WordPress, I use a plugin called Yoast to do this. Yoast is one of the best WordPress plugins that you can use, and its SEO usage is the only one I have come to rely on all my websites I designs.

The FREE version of this plugin is all I use on many of my websites but I sometime purchase the more advanced version for $89 a year when I have websites that need more of a SEO punch. That version lets me set up 5 Focus Key Phrases instead of just one.

** Remember you can only use one focus key phrase on a website and that phrase should also show up in the URL for that page. Yoast will let you know if you have used that focus key phrase in another location on the whole website. The reason you should only use a focus key phrase on a website is because it confuses search engines and they do not know where to point so they end up not ranking that page at all. We want to make life easy for search engines.

Not only is Yoast an amazing tool when setting up SEO for a particular page but it has many other features that are very useful. One is the placement of a canonical for a landing page that will point back to the parent page and all its content.

Below are two photographs on how that is done inside of the Yoast plugin.

How to Design Website Landing Pages in WordPress and Why

The second way of having a page point back to the parent page is by…

…design a Landing Page that feeds off the Parent Page.

WordPress makes this easy to do.

You do this by setting up a main parent page first and then make landing pages that point to that particular parent page.

Once your parent page has been published with all its content and SEO, it will then show up in the Page Attributes on the far right of the tool bar. If these landing pages are being made to show up on search engines for different states or cities, then you want to make your Focus Key Phrase more basic like I did here for this wedding photographer.

The parent page SEO was just Wedding Photography. It will show up in the URL as /wedding-photography/

The Page attribute is (no parent). That is because it is the parent page.

I then went and made a page to be used as a landing page for the city of Phoenix. I use a theme that lets me save whole pages as a template, so I take the parent page I designed and load it up on this landing page. The focus key phrase would then be Phoenix Wedding Photographer.

** Do not publish this page…

…until you have the following steps done or your URL will be wrong.

Put Phoenix Wedding Photographer in the SEO title, meta description and focus key phrase but in the SLUG you will just put the word phoenix in lower case letters. Go over to the right-hand side where the Page Attributes are located and click the down arrow to Wedding Photographer.

Photo of designing SEO with the Yeast tool

This is how the landing page will know what it will connect to. I then go into the content of the page and where ever you originally had just wedding photography you want it to say Phoenix Wedding Photography including the title. Your title should be the H1 tag.

Remember a page can only have one H1 tag but you can have many H2, H3, H4 or H5 tags as you want to break up the text as in sub-titles. More than one H1 tag also confuses the search engines.

When all that is done you can then publish your landing page.

It will show up in the URL as: /wedding-photography/phoenix/

I will then take this landing page technique and change the city over and over until I have as many cities that I want his website to show up on Google and Bing searches. You can also use it to promote different products or promotions.

Do not forget to send a sitemap to Google Console and Bing Webmaster Tools so those two search engines will index and crawl your website with the new changes right away instead of when they get around to which in many cases takes weeks.

The website that I used for this demonstration was for a photographer by the name of Jason Tarr of Beyond The Shutter Photography. You can see his whole landing page link right here and look at the landing page itself.

https://bts.photography/wedding-photographer/phoenix/

Go here if you would like Best Website Solutions to Design Website Landing Pages for you.

Go here if you would like to watch a how-to YouTube video on How to Design Website Landing Pages in WordPress and Why directly below.

How to Design Website Landing Pages in WordPress and Why

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Websites That Looks Good On Cell Phones

by John Tarr | Jul 9, 2018 | Website Design | 0 comments

Websites That Looks Good On Cell Phones

Mobile Responsive Website

What does mobile responsive really mean?

Mobile responsive means your website is mobile friendly. How does the website or blog look on mobile devices such as cell phones?

Over 60% of all online browsing is currently being done on these small devices and the percentage will only get larger with more people using them in the coming years. You want your website to look good small. You want to make sure that your website adjusts itself to cell phones.

Websites are usually designed on a desk or laptop. This means that the website will be designed to in a horizontal (left to right) or landscape view. You can rotate your cell phone to view a website horizontally, but this is not what most people naturally do. They almost always view their cell phone vertically (up and down).

Website + Mobile Responsive = Looking Good

Making a website to be viewed correctly is almost like fitting a square peg into a round hole when you think about it. Most photographers understand this quandary. A horizontal image tells a much different story than a vertical one does.

Another BIG reason to make sure your website or bog mobile responsive is Google. Google will rank you much higher if your website is responsive than those websites that are not. It will waste all that hard work on SEO (search engine optimization when you are trying to have your website to rank higher.

Another BIG reason to make sure your website or bog mobile responsive is Google.

Google will rank you much higher if your website is responsive than those websites that are not.

You will waste all that hard work on SEO (search engine optimization) when you are trying to have your website to rank higher and gain more traffic.

Websites That Looks Good On Cell Phones

Google accounts for over 5.7 billion searches every day. How will you and your website stay ahead of the competition?

44% of Fortune 500 companies are not mobile ready.

Google has been publishing details about how changes to its search algorithm will favor mobile friendly sites over non-mobile friendly ones.

Google even offers a mobile responsive test, so you can see how a visitor can use your page on a mobile device. You enter a page URL and receive a score.

We design all our WordPress websites with a premium theme installed to make our website mobile responsive. This is the only theme we use to design websites with because it is constantly being upgraded to keep up with the changing times of websites and internet use.

Website That Looks Good On Cell Phone

This theme has an amazing page builder that allows us to view and change all three devices they will view it on. Desktop, iPad and cell phone.

The theme that we use does a great job adjusting most of the time but not always so it gives us this option of making changes no matter what is being viewed.

This tool is powerful and something that was not offered until recently. It has been worth every penny that we paid, and our customers reap the benefits.

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Websites That Looks Good On Cell Phones

Arizona Responsive Website Design.

Cell Phone Website Design. Phoenix Responsive Website Design

Phoenix Cell Phone Website Design

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7 Reasons Not Letting Your Website Designer Keep You Hostage

by John Tarr | Jul 2, 2018 | Website Design, Web Design | 0 comments

7 Reasons Not Letting Your Website Designer

Keep You Hostage

Being held hostage is a good term for what happens to many people when they have had their website designed by many web developers to various degrees. This is a control issue that does not need to happen especially in this day and age. Websites have come a long way when you relied on a website designer to make even simple changes. Most modern websites do not need all that much code anymore, but use a platform that is far simpler to use.

When we design website, we like to be able to turn the site over to the business owner so they can make simple changes themselves. We teach them how to navigate their website from the backend. They can, of course, have us make additions, extra pages, up date SEO and deal with the website maintenance.

7 Reasons Not Letting Your Website Designer Keep You Hostage

They Will Not Give You Login and Password Info

1.) Many website designers will not even give the login and passwords to the owner of the website, so you could not get in the backend if you wanted to or not. This website belongs to the owner of the website, not the developer so there is no reason to withhold that critical information.

They may say something like “I am afraid you will break something” or “only a web developer should go in the back end because only he/she knows what is going on”. That may have been true in the “old” days of website design, but not today. We have come a long way baby. It’s time for you to look for a new website developer if he says like that or something similar.

Website Control

Do Not Buy Your Domain and Hosting from Your Developer

2.) Do not buy your domain name and hosting platform through your website developer. That gives them to much control and makes it very hard to switch developers if not impossible. It also keeps you from changing hosting companies if you wish to do so.

Buy your domain name and host it yourself, using your own name and passwords, then give them that information. Best Website Solutions will help people and businesses to navigate this confusing part by signing them up with their own account with their own name and, passwords through a hosting company. We then put the tools we will need to build the website into this shopping cart and they then pay for what is in the shopping cart, independent of us. We never see credit card information. This is the only way to make sure your website and domain name stays under your control and ownership at all times.

Website Platforms Are Very Important

3.) Make sure your website has NOT been designed in a platform that only takes code to build. We only design website in WordPress. 30% of all websites are now designed in the world on this system. It is user friendly on so many levels.

Domain Control

Making Changes Yourself

4.) Can you make simple changes yourself? WordPress is the first thing that simplifies the process, but you also need a great theme that has an “easy to use” page builder. We use only one theme on ALL the WordPress websites we build, because it is easy to customize and has an amazing page builder built in.

We Turn The Website Over to You

5.) When we are done building your website, we add good SEO to it, so it can be found on the internet, we turn it over to you, the owner of the website. We teach you how to use various aspects of the website directly. Also, we give you video’s that we have made and uploaded to YouTube so that you can refer to at any time you need help. Of course, we will always be there for more complex changes and website maintenance if you wish for us to do that. We want to make it easy for you to make changes yourself.

What if Something Happens

6.) What if your website developer dies, goes out of business or many other things that happens in the normal course of life. What if cannot track them down? What then? How do you get control of your website? You want to have this control issue all worked out from the very start if possible or resolve this now before a crisis arises.

Website Owner

Not just About Money

7.) To us it’s not all about money and control. We like to think we build a relationship with individuals or companies when it comes to their website. It’s like a collaboration to help our customers put their best foot forward. We love to help them grow their business and become successful.

In Conclusion

I know this blog article will resonate with many website owners. If this is happening to you, I can help you get this control back. We can talk one on one, so I can have a better idea of what you are facing, or you can email me with any questions you might have.

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7 Reasons Not Letting Your Website Designer Keep You Hostage

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Domain Control. Website Owner

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9 Signs it’s Time for a New Website

by John Tarr | Jun 16, 2018 | Website Design, Website Redesign | 0 comments

9 Signs it’s Time for a New Website

Your website is more than likely the first place of contact that prospective clients will have with you. It’s your store front. What kind of impression are you giving when they land there for the first time? What kind of message are you trying to convey?

At one time, it was a big deal just having a website but, those days are long gone. Does your website look out of date, with old features that were designed years ago? If you had a real business store front wouldn’t you redesign it and decorate it in a newer more current motif from time to time to attract new customers?

Yes, you have made smaller updates to the content and have even added new photo’s, but how do you know it’s not time for a complete overhaul to your website?

9 Signs it’s Time for a New Website

1.) Your Website Looks Outdated

If your website is 5 years old or more it’s probably showing its age. People notice. Fonts, backgrounds, images and content layout will tell people how old your website is. Modern technology is constantly changing and so are website layouts and designs. Take a look at what your competitors are doing. Take some time and see what new innovations they might be using to be relevant and modern looking.

2.) It’s Hard to Edit and Update Your Website

If you are calling your website developer to make small changes on your website, then it is definitely time for a website redesign. New content management systems such as WordPress have changed a lot in the last couple of years. You want to be able to make some changes on your own and not have to use code or a website developer. That is all possible now if you have the right platform and theme installed on the website.

3.) Is Your Website Hard to Navigate?

Your website should be easily navigable for your customers. They should be able to quickly and easily find what they came to your website for. Is your website having high a bounce rate? If it is, then it could be because your customers are having a hard time navigating the site.

4.) Is Your Website Mobile Responsive?

Mobile responsive means your website is mobile friendly. How does the website look on mobile devices such as cell phones and iPads? Over 50% of all online browsing is currently being done on these small devices and the percentage is only going to get larger with more people using them in the coming years. You want your website to look good small.

Time for a New Website?

5.) SSL Certificate is Essential

This has become a big deal with Google now. If your website only shows http// then you do not have an SSL certificate. If it does, it will have a “S” at the end after the “P” as in https//. The “S” stands for security and it means your website is secure.

No SSL certificate and Google will now give a warning for people not to enter your website or tell them that they enter at their own risk. You will also see a green lock and the word “Secure” at the front of the browser address just before the https//. You defiantly want to go green. To learn more about why SSL certificates are essential.

Website Redesign

6.) Your Embarrassed to Give Out Your Website Address

This is a big sign you need a new website. That may seem funny at first but, it is really not. You want to be proud of who are and what you do, so what better way than to have a great looking and functional website to show this.

7.) Your Website Is Not Delivering

Is your website delivering leads and traffic like it used to? A new website will definitely get you back in the game. How do you know for sure it’s not delivering? The only way to know for sure is to have some kind of tracking device. We recommend Google Analytics to give you hard data on what is really going on with your website. This will give you some idea on what needs to be changed and where your ongoing upgrades need to be made.

8.) My Website Loads Slow

One sure way that will turn away potential customers is to have a slow loading website. People have no patience anymore and will not hang around for a website to load slowly. A slow loading website gives out the signal that you are no longer relevant and there is something wrong with your business. Optimize everything on your website especially the photographs.

Why I Need a New Website

9.) Search Engine Rankings

Are your search engine rankings low? Search engine algorithms have changed a lot over the last few years. Search engine optimization (SEO) and focus keywords are still BIG but high-quality content has caught up as far as Google is concerned. This is also why having a blog on your website is so essential. It brings in fresh new quality content to your website on a regular basis. We use a SEO plugin called Yoast on all our wordpress websites that we design. They have a lot great information about SEO and how it helps to drive traffic to your website.

In Conclusion

Give your website a long hard look and run by some of the questions I have brought up and see if you need to make some changes to your digital store front. You are good at what you do so show it by putting your best visual foot forward. You will be glad you did.

If you would like to know more about our Website Design or Graphic Arts business, please give us a call our email us.

We would love to help grow your business through digital and print media.

We have written other articles…

…that you might be interested in when it comes to promoting your business in the digital age. Here are three: 1.) 5 Reasons Why Email Lists Are Important 2.) How to Optimize Images for Faster Website Speed 3.) 8 Benefits of Blogging From Your Business Website. We have written many more so check out our blog archive.

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9 Signs it’s Time for a New Website

Time for a New Website?

Why I Need a New Website

Website Redesign WordPress. My Old Website Needs Help

Website Designed by Best Website Solutions

Reinventing Myself Through Graphic Design

by John Tarr | Jun 12, 2018 | Graphic Design | 0 comments

Reinventing Myself Through Graphic Design

I was a professional photographer for 40+ years when I became disabled with a hip replacement that went south. I no longer had the mobility I once had so going back to school for graphic design was the next logical choice.

The same layout and placement of elements is very similar in many ways. Now, I design behind a big computer screen instead of a small digital computer called a camera.

I also have found the graphic art principles also apply to designing websites.

I always admired the people in the graphic arts field because I saw the result of what they did swirling all around me in the world.

From labels on boxes to ads on TV, printed flyers to movie credits.

The ordinary street and store front signs and deep into the internet world of websites, social media, graphic design is all around us.

Learning new software was the biggest obstacle when I first started graphic art school. It was a struggle at first because computers were not my strong point. I was very old school in many ways.

I had learned photography back in 1969 in high school using a 35mm camera and developing B&W film, and printing images in a darkroom the old-fashioned way. I was very hands on in a manual sort of way, like many people from my generation that started before computers came on the scene.

I think back on those computer and software struggles and it’s hard for me think of me having a hard time with them because I live and breathe with them now.

Finding Myself Through Graphic Design

Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign

They are the three big engines that drive graphic design and are all made by Adobe. All very different from each other but, also very similar in many ways.

A.) Photoshop, to work on images and photographs to make them the best that they can be through cropping and image manipulation.

B.) Illustrator, to design individual pieces as in logo’s, individual flyers, ad’s or even adding text to images as a visual graphic for social media.

C.) InDesign, the software that designs multi-page newsletters, magazines or PDF’s for print and digital distribution. I will, many times make a main template for an organization that will be used for future designs with this program. InDesign is the hardest to learn because it can do so many different things on many different levels all at once so my schooling in this program was well worth it.

After I started school I realized website design would become part of this mix. My graphic art skills would be used to make websites look great in addition to functioning as they should.

The Software Design Process

I use Photoshop and Illustrator to design specific pieces, then bring them all together in to InDesign for a multi-page book or newsletter layout.

All the programs by Adobe play together extremely well and let me cross platform to each other easily and efficiently.

Drop and drag is the name of that game when work with them all at the same time.

That is the benefit of having three software programs that are made by the same company.

Learning Graphic Design

Many times, I will have all three open at the same time on three different computer monitors so I can be as efficient as possible. When working on a website I will have both Photoshop and Illustrator open with InDesign being the odd man out because WordPress is taking the place of InDesign as digital layout software.

I enjoy and love what I do now because it’s like using different elements of the same puzzle when I am in the designing mode. Graphic art and website design is a combination that allows me to branch out creatively in a couple different directions when the need arises.

I also like the fact that I help people, companies, churches, nonprofits and different organizations grow and become more successful at what they do with my creative skills.

This really is my idea of having fun.

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