On today’s episode, we are going to talk about the things that should be on your homepage in 2017. Right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast episode number 320. Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we are going to be talking about those things that should be on our homepages of our WordPress websites here in 2017. But before we get into that I do have some announcements that I want to share with you. In the middle of last week or so we got WordPress security and maintenance release version 4.7.1.

It is a security release and most likely your WordPress site has already automatically updated to this, if you have that feature turned on. Or sometimes hosting companies will automatically turn that on and automatically update your software. It basically fixes 62 different bugs that were found in 4.7 and it really fixed some about eight different security issues. I’m not going to read through all of those. If you want to find out more information you can head over to wordpress.org/news and you can find that information right there. And so, that is the first piece of information. If your site has not automatically updated go ahead and do that update to 4.7.1.

Another thing that came out of the WordPress space or from automatic this week was a new wordpress.com for Lightroom makes publishing your photos easy. And so, this is basically a Lightroom to wordpress.com plugin. And you can set this up within Lightroom on your computer and then it links to your wordpress.com account and it can automatically publish pictures on your behalf right there to your wordpress.com site. So, if that’s something interesting to you, there is a link in the show notes for that as well. And then lastly, this is kind of cool, there is a thing called yearinwp.com.

And basically, what you do is you go and enter your WordPress username, so I’m going to type Dustin Hartzler as I’m talking here, and we’re going to go ahead and look at all the information that comes up on this page. It’s kind of a neat – it basically goes into your wordpress.org profile and looks at all the information. And so, it pulls in – it says I’m from Dayton, Ohio and it says in 2016 I spoke at two word camps. It looks like there was a couple word camps that didn’t actually make it into my WordPress profile. And my plugin that I have that’s called As Heard On was downloaded 418 times which is really kind of neat the stats to see that.

And it shows if you have multiple podcasts or plugins it’ll show you the breakdown of all the different podcasts that you have. And it shows an average, it shows that it was an average 12 per week and that’s it. And then you can easily share that with your audience with social sharing buttons on there. So, that was kind of cool if you want to get more information or if you want to see how you contributed or what you community involvement was in the WordPress space. You can head over to yearinwp.com and then you can put in your username and you can find that. So, those are the announcements for this week.

With more than 48,000 plugins in the WordPress repository it’s hard to find the right ones so each week I just try to highlight a neat, interesting plugin that may or may not work for you. And this one is just a really interesting plugin and I think it came up kind of because it’s the beginning of the year but this is called Weight Loss Tracker. And it allows registered users of your website to track their weight and relevant body measurements and then a history can be displayed in both a table and chart. And so, I thought this was kind of a neat idea. This isn’t something you normally would think of and 98 percent of websites out there will never use anything like this.

But I thought what about if you’re a fitness blogger or you’re a personal trainer and you wanted to get information about your clients or people that are in your community. You can give them an account and then they can go in and add either their differences in their body weight from the first time or last time or they can add their – I guess that’s what it calculates. You can put in your weight and then it calculates how much you’ve lost and you can put in measurements from different areas and what not. And so, it’s just really interesting to see, this is something that somebody created and it has some really unique uses.

And it just makes WordPress so awesome in the fact that there is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of websites and a small percentage use this but this one has more than 400 active installs and people using it. So, it serves some sort of niche out there that somebody that needed this type of information on the WordPress site and they built a plugin for it. So, I think that’s really cool and it just kind of shows you the unlimited possibilities of plugin creation that’s out there. So, if you need a weight loss tracker plugin you can find that by searching Weight Loss Tracker in the WordPress repository whereas always there’s a link in the show notes for episode number 320.

Before we get to the main segment of the show I want to throw in a new, little section in here. And I just want to spend a little time each week keeping you updated on what I’ve been doing programming wise or with my website. I know that in the past three, four, five years I’ve been giving advice every single week, “This is what we should do, this is what we should do.” And a lot of times it’s like, “Oh, I need to do this” or “I need to update my about page” and all these things.” And I’ve never actually done a lot of the things that I’ve instructed on this podcast.

So, I wanted to spend just a little bit of time each week telling you what I’ve done in the past week to kind of move my website or my plugin or whatever I’m working on or trying to learn or develop how to get that a little bit better. So, I’m gonna try to take my own advice and then report back this week. So, last week we talked about all of the things to remove from your website and so some of the things that are still outstanding on my list that I didn’t get to is I still have social media icons in the header. They match the rest of my theme so they’re not like the blue Facebook or the blue Twitter icons or what not. They kind of vanish into the header if you will. So, I haven’t done that and then most of my submit buttons need to have a little bit better of a call to action so I need to work on that.

And I need to set up Crazyegg and see where people are clicking and working around my website. I’ve done a lot of the other things. I’ve made sure I don’t have any stock photo places. I broke up some of those long paragraphs I have in different places. I’ve simplified some of the contact forms. I’m working on right now redoing the footer of my website to just kind of add an extra place for people to sign up for an email newsletter list. So, I’m working on that. I haven’t pushed any of that code live quite yet. And another thing that I did and this has been a long time coming, it’s been on my to do list for a long time and I’m like, “I’m finally going to accomplish this and conquer this.”

But I basically got rid of the Yoast SEO plugin and I moved to the WP SEO plugin. And the WP SEO plugin is actually the same plugin that’s used on WordPress VIP sites and so there’s not a lot of bells and whistles and it’s very clean and streamlined. And you have to install it from the GitHub repository and there’s a link in the show notes for that. But basically, what I did is I went ahead and did this because No. 1 I get tired Yoast updating every third day. It seems like there’s always an update for the Yoast plugin. And then the other reason is there was always little ones and notifications in places within the Yoast settings that just drove me crazy.

So finally, I went ahead and I did this and what I ended up doing was once I got all this setup and moved over, then I’m like, “Well, is there an easy way to go and convert any of the settings that I’ve done inside of Yoast –” Normally when I post a podcast episode I customize the title and I customize the meta description. Those are the two things that I really care about. That’s the only thing that I really care about, honestly. And so, there’s a little bit of code in the show notes, but I basically went into the database and ran these SQL queries, if you will. And it basically went in there and replaced the meta key from Yoast and then turned it into WP SEO if that makes any sense whatsoever.

So basically, I went into the database and instead of manually doing this or manually copying and pasting this for all 319 posts that I have on my website, I just went in and I said, “Hey, in the database, anywhere that you see the meta key Yoast_WPSEO_title let’s change that to _meta_title.” And then I did the same for the meta description and meta description. Like I said, there’s some code in the show notes where you can see this. But basically, I ran those and I hit enter and then it automatically updated all of my posts. And then I was very comfortable that now I didn’t have any more data saved inside of Yoast and then I was able to completely remove that plugin. So, I feel that’s a real great step in the right way to kind of eliminating and just making my website feel a lot more clean and allowing me not to have to update the plugin every single week.

So, that’s kind of an overarching update of what I’ve been doing at yourwebsiteengineer.com and I promise these won’t always be this long, but I just kind of wanted to set that up today. So, let’s talk about some items to be on your homepage in the year 2017 and last week we talked about things to take out of your website to not have whatsoever, but here are some things that we want to make sure we have on our website. And there’s a list of 11 and I don’t think you need to be doing all 11 because that would be one gigantic homepage and it probably would be very unclear for the direction that people need to go once they’re on your webpage. But let’s talk about some of the things that should be on your website.

You want to have some sort of value proposition. You want to tell your visitors exactly what you do with clear, easy to find value propositions. It may seem like a no brainer but you see a lot of people like, “Best in the industry” or “First class service” and things like that and you have no idea what they actually do for their website. So, that’s the first thing. We want to make sure we have a value proposition, what you do for them, and how easy and simple can it be. I think what I’m gonna change mine to, and this is on the to do list for the week, is I want to make the value proposition of “Helping you create an easy – or helping you create a perfect website.” Something along those lines. “Perfect website” or “Perfect WordPress site” or whatever that looks like. That’s my value proposition.

That my goal with this whole podcast is just try to help you create your perfect website and make it simple, fun, and easy, I guess. And the second thing we want to talk about is we want to make sure that our navigation is intuitive. We want to make sure that we don’t have a bajillion dropdown menus and just makes it really hard to navigate. And a lot of people aren’t gonna try to navigate through two, three, four sections of dropdowns. So, we want to make sure we’ve got it simple, easy, and try to find what people are using. I think going back to last week’s episode when we talked about Crazyegg, that’s a service or a little script that you can run on your website that you can see where people are actually clicking on things on your website which is really good.

So, if you see that menu item that’s never been clicked, let’s just go ahead and remove it and get rid of it and put something that has more value right there in that premium space right there at the top of your website. You want to have contact information? Usually this is found in the footer, but you can put it wherever you feel appropriate. Most people like to scroll down to the footer section and this is a brick and mortar address if you are operating a store or some sort of business. You want to have a phone number if that makes any sense on your website. You want to put social icons in that area too where people can reach out and contact you on those social chat channels as well. You might also want to include blog highlights if you have a blog on your website.

And you might want to highlight the recent posts or maybe the most important post that you’ve had or you can set it up so that you can flag a post or you can make sticky and maybe that sticky post is the one that’s on the homepage. It’s there for a month or two or whatever. You can do some really great marketing for your own business or your own company if you put those blog posts right on your homepage. Your blog content shows your expertise and helpfulness and just relaying that information, giving it away for free, and it just offers people a low barrier to enter – a low risk option to converting and starting a relationship with your brand. So, that’s a great way to start.

Another thing that is an option for your homepage is client testimonials. And I know that last week we said take the testimonial page off, but we want to kind of sprinkle some of these testimonials into different areas of our website. And so, it says that “Research shows that 79 percent of consumers trust online reviews and testimonials as personal recommendations from their friends or peers.” And so, you want to make sure that people are feeling comfortable and that they have some sort of visuals on your website that talk about testimonials. Now again, if you’re not selling anything or it all depends on the value of your website and what kind of website that you’re building. So, that’s another thing to think about.

Another thing on your homepage is you want to offer – or you want to put high quality and original images. So, stock images, like we talked about last week, are convenient, they’re easy to put a stock image on a website, but we want to do something that you will build credibility to people that are looking at your website. We want to make sure that they are either of your building or your product or – I’m thinking of a bathroom renovation company. Like they turned yellow bathtubs into green bathtubs or white bathtubs or whatever, show those pictures on the homepage with high quality images to show befores and afters. Using real photos of your team, of your office on your homepage just paints a realistic portrait of what people can expect from working with you.

I know that – you’re looking for a general contractor or somebody, it’s great to see their picture on the website and kind of see – it’s all about the perception that your persona gives being online. So, that’s another thing to think about. Make sure that there are at least some images of some kind on your homepage. Another thing that’s probably a great thing that every website should have on their homepage is an overview of services and features. So, this may be a video that gives customers a brief overview of what your company does or it could be a kind of a – I’m trying to think of the best way to describe it. Like little icons that show you work in SEO and you build websites and you do design or whatever that looks like. Just some sort of visual indication that these are the services and products that you offer as your company.

You can also link those to more in depth pages so they can find more about those services. But having just brief little snippets to make sure people are in the right spot, that’s a great thing for your homepage. Another thing that I love seeing on homepages are awards or certifications or associations or maybe you’ve been featured on The Huffington Post or you’ve been on the news or whatever. Or you have some sort of diamond award for your platinum hotel or whatever that case is. If you have those, just don’t hang them up in the office. If you have a business, brick and mortar place, put those on your website and showcase those. I like to put on my website the places that I’ve spoken, the places where I’ve instructed in a live setting. And so, that’s something that you want to put on your website as well.

You want to have a clear call to action. So, you want to make sure that there’s something that they can do when they land on your website whether that’s signing up for a newsletter or contact you right now to get a quote or whatever that looks like. You want to just make sure that that is something that is in the forefront of their minds when a visitor comes to your website. Let’s see, what else? A couple more here. Google Analytics is one that just really doesn’t make a lot of sense to be on your homepage. It’s kind of a backend thing that you want to be able track everything that’s going on on your website and you need to have Google Analytics code running on your homepage. So, you can see how many people are coming to your homepage versus your contact page versus your about page versus landing on some random page in the middle of your website because they came to you from Google Search.

So, that’s something to think about as well. Make sure that we’re running Google Analytics and we’ve got that running on all of our pages. A phone number is applicable as well, or if it is applicable, we want to have that. We can have that in the contact section. I also like to see phone numbers toward the top of websites especially if it’s a restaurant or someplace where people might have to call or inquire about something. Make that phone number easy to find whether that be just on – like I said, in the header of your menu or in the footer or on the contact page, you got to make sure that it’s on the homepage somewhere. But you want to have it in multiple places as well to make sure that people can easily find you and find where you can be located or if you’re open for business or whatever that looks like.

And then the last one I have on my list is resources. So, most times people will come to your website for the first time but they’re not ready to buy right away. You want to make sure that you link to a resource center or this could just be links to the blog area or how to videos or whatever the case may be. And this will help you establish your credibility through leaders in your industry. So, that’s another thing to think about. So, like I said, there’s 11 ideas that I kind of came up with for things to be on your homepage, but we don’t necessarily have to put on all 11 on them. Just make sure that you’re using the one’s that make sense.

I would say there’s a handful of them that are necessary always, like the intuitive navigation that’s simple, we want to do that. We want to have our contact information. We want to use high quality images. We want to at least showcase what we do, our features, our overviews things like that. And some sort of call to action. And then always you want to have Google Analytics running on your website to make sure that you’re understanding how many people come to your website. That is a no brainer for sure. So, those are the 11 things and there’s definitely a few things I need to be working on on my homepage.

I’ll be reporting to you next week with some of the things I fixed or changed or modified or tweaked. And then we’ll continue to just kind of dive in – I’ve been planning on just spending a few weeks here in January just talking about how we can kind of set our website up for success for the rest of the year. Kind of like get some of these things out of the way, things to get rid of, things to add, and then we’ll start diving back into actual this is how we do it with WordPress. So, that’s kind of where we are focusing this month and then next month we’ll talk more about some WordPress-y things that we can do to improve our websites. Getting them running faster, get us using WordPress more efficiently and quicker and all of those good things as well.

So, that’s what I wanted to share with you this week. I also just wanted to say thank you to those using resources on my resource page. Just going and using those links do give me a small commission and it’s very appreciative and helps the website run and helps me pay for all the hosting costs and everything for the website and the podcast hosting and all that good stuff. So, thank you so much for tuning in. If you ever have a recommendation, those are where my recommendations are just head over to yourengineerwebsite.com/resources and all of those things that are there are places that I highly recommend or services that I use on a daily basis.

That’s all I’ve got to share with you this week. I’ll be here next week and we’ll be talking about more things we can do to set our websites up for success in 2017. Till again take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-Bye.