 Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the next session of Recover and Rise. I hope everybody has got settled in the room and everybody's overfamed with the remote platform. I will ask Bradley in a minute just to jump on and give us a quick run through. Obviously, Recover and Rise is delivered and brought to us by West Sussex County Council in conjunction with several partners and we'll talk a little bit more about that later. And we've got the fantastic Mike Humphrey's talking to us today about website development. But without further ado, let me introduce Bradley who can just chat us through Remo and make sure everybody's comfortable and happy. Bradley, you there? Yep, there you are. Hello. Hi, thanks. Cheryl, welcome everybody. It's a pleasure to team up with Freedomworks to deliver this series of the Getting Online Digital Accelerator series. So we are here powering the event on the Brilliant Remo platform and for those that haven't used it before, it can look a little, well, quite somewhat different to Zoom and Teams and what a lot of people have become accustomed to. So whilst we're in this presentation mode, just to highlight a couple of areas, particularly for when Mike is speaking, you will see the chat box on the right hand side. So we encourage people to contribute to the discussion there. You can also see in the tabs above the chat box, there is a Q&A area which I highly recommend. If you have any questions for Mike during his presentation to put them in there, it just saves that if there is discussion in the chat box, your question getting lost. Any question will find its way into the Q&A area. What I think will be sensible for me to talk about the Remo platform in terms of the networking is I will do that just before we come back into the room and I will share my screen and just show you what you will go back into seeing. So Cheryl, I think for now that's probably the best thing for everyone just to kind of understand the presentation mode and just before we go back into the networking and the discussion session after Mike's talk back into the room. I'll talk a little bit more about how that works I think before people forget it. Brilliant, thank you Bradley, that's appreciated. So as Bradley just said, we're going to have a session from Mike Humphrey from DigiBubble on website development. We're also going to meet some of our digital champions and we're going to have a network session at the end that I hope you'll all stay for. I've got a couple of slides just to share with you very quickly if I may, just about the series and just about what's coming up. So here we are, recover and rise, activating your online. So the whole series really is about how we can get the most in digital technology. We're up here at series one getting online. We've got series two, series three systems and productivity and then series four after Christmas growth and expansion brought to you from different partners Creative Bloom and Always Possible but all on the same principle of getting you online and making sure that you can make the very very best of digital technology. They're all at lunch times and you can book on to everything in advance. Here we are today on website development just in case you haven't looked further than today. Here's the next four or five webinars that are coming up. So this Thursday stay with us again with Mike from DigiBubble to improve your website. Then next week we're talking web security and e-commerce. Then we're talking about visitor economy businesses and number seven is our mega networking session where you can really access the experts and get to know everybody a little bit better. So as I say Mike Humphreys today from DigiBubble is going to be running our session and Mike's, I've actually already had a sneak preview absolutely brilliant all about what a good website can do for you and what will work best but also about costs and costs and pitfalls which is really good. I think everybody needs to know what's it going to cost me and what do I need to watch out for. So before we go to Mike I just want to introduce a few people if I may just very quickly and I'll clear my screen. We've got our digital champions. If you bear with me I'll come back on to here. We've got our digital champions who are coming to you through Coaster Capital. You can get free support from these digital champions so if there's something particularly along the way that you think oh actually I could really do with some help about that you can access free support through our digital champions. A few of them are going to be online every time we have one of these webinar series and then they'll all be accessible at series seven with our networking. So if I may just before we start with Mike could I just ask Lisa and Malcolm and Rob and Susan just to pop on the screen quickly for 30 seconds if I do one at a time um just introduce yourself so everybody knows who you are and Malcolm can I start with you? Are you there? Malcolm Duffett is this hopefully yes he's here he's telling me he's here if you pop your camera on in your mic on there we go. Hi there. Hi Cheryl how are you doing? Hello everybody. If you just want to just take a quick 30 seconds just to introduce yourself that'd be lovely. Thank you. Thanks Cheryl. Yeah so as Cheryl mentioned I'm one of the digital champions working with Coaster Capital. My background is 20 odd years now in e-commerce and digital from website design and e-commerce store building to performance marketing customer acquisition email marketing. I've held roles agency side in terms of web and marketing agencies and I've also held head of e-commerce roles for food and drink and luxury products brands. I now work as a freelance consultant and I help businesses who sell products to consumers to do that better and sell more. Brilliant thank you Malcolm and you're actually running one of our webinars in next week. Yes I'll do the e-commerce one next Thursday. Yeah absolutely so we'll hear a lot more from Malcolm then thank you ever so much lovely to have you with us thank you. I think I've got Susan on screen as well now Susan if you just want to pop your camera on for me. Yep just bear with me for a second. Yeah lovely Susan Winchester. So sorry I'm just trying to put my camera on hold on a sec. Sorry it did come up that I sorry. It's alright. In terms of well hello everybody anyway it's Susan Winchester I'm working with Coaster Capital I've been working as a digital and growth champion with them for the last 18 months or so prior to that I worked started my career business marketing business strategy in the financial services industry then I worked for a Department for International Trade promoting British businesses for the financial services sector and encouraging inward investment to the UK. Since then I've been working as a freelancer on mainly in digital transformation kind of capacity helping businesses grow and improve their presence prove their presence to sell more in the marketplace so that's kind of me in nutshell. Brilliant thank you Susan and thank you for joining us today and we'll have a look at that camera business with you after if you want to. Yeah I don't know where it's gone but anyway sorry about that. No no worries thank you ever so much and Lisa Lisa are you there Lisa Kerr? I know you are because I've been chatting with you already. If you just pop your camera and your mic on brilliant there you are. Hi everyone nice to see you nice to see you again those who came to the last workshop I'm Lisa Kerr from consulting with Kerr and my business focuses on productivity for profitability so I look at all areas of systems and processes but particularly using digital systems digital tools to make your business more efficient so I will be particularly interested in the series three of these workshops which is all about productivity and really happy to help with anything else along the way Brilliant no absolutely brilliant somebody understands the back end of it all so that's absolutely fantastic thank you thank you for joining us again because I know you were with us last week so thanks again with that and last Rob Rob are you there with us today I think you are Rob where are you you can pop your camera on your mic on hello there you are here I am yes so yes I'm another of the digital champions I'm a consultant leadership coach and an author I wrote this book if you're interested it's upside down and what I do really is I work with business leaders and do three things to understand where they are relative to their competitors from a digital capability perspective to identify the opportunities and threats in their market and then help them develop a strategy to develop those digital capabilities and really I'm looking at the whole spectrum from people processes and and technology a little bit about my background I've started up and run digital agencies in London I was e-commerce director for 2e travel in Crawley for seven years and I was driving digital transformation across a hundred odd SMEs in the UK and globally so that's a little bit about me and really looking forward to working with you all brilliant thank you ever so much world thank you brilliant okay and so that's our digital champions that here with us today and as I say after Mike's session on web development there will be chance to have a chat with them in the room but let's move swiftly on to Mike Mike Hartford who's his company DigiBubble are proficient in every aspect of web I could go on and on couldn't I Mike but as I say I've had a sneak preview this is a brilliant presentation so I hope you enjoy it over to you Mike thanks Cheryl and good afternoon everyone thank you for thank you for listening and coming along so yeah as has been highlighted I am going to be talking with you today about website development and just going through some of the fundamentals that we need to lay as a clear foundation so to kick off we just have a quick look at what's what's coming up first of all introduce me who's this guy and then we'll go into some of the website foundations looking at the different types of websites domains website hosting emails and also importantly what is a CMS a content management system which is the foundations of your site and how to make a good choice around what's best for your business and then we're going to have a look at a bit more of the processes around actually building and evolving your sites and considering your navigation your planning and content and also some key design considerations and then aside of that we're also going to have a quick look at media how we do mobile and multi-device testing and then finally looking at analytics and tracking so with that I'll move on to our first slide which with a bit of an introduction about me and my business so DigiBubble we are a full-service digital agency that started in 2006 we are a partnership and my business partner Keith is on the call somewhere we were built on a technical and a digital advertising background so Keith and I both recognize that we have a broad range of skills that are in demand in the market we both had experience of project managing and delivering large digital digital projects and what we did is identified that there was a consistent issue between digital support companies and what companies required and actually the supporter they received so a bit from 2006 to 2015 both Keith and I worked as a bit of a side hustle and involved a number of businesses websites during that time and in November 2015 we both took the plunge quit full-time employment and and built DigiBubble and what that's come to look like now is a central controlling point for businesses digital touch points so we build functional websites that are secure and compliant we build and run digital advertising across a number of mediums and we work with enhanced functionality and tools like e-commerce and booking systems and we write and build content and news blogs and present our clients as thought leaders within their sector and we report and we provide insight and strategy consultation and for us the most important thing for us is looking at what our performance indicators for our clients requirements online and what is their ROI so what is the return that they're looking for and so that's us so moving on into the foundations of what you can expect to see online is first of all what's a website so a website is a number of ink to ink to linked web pages that share it a common domain name so a place think of it as a digital leaflet for your business or a set of tools that businesses can can provide online and the different types of websites are brochures so these are what like the entry level almost just a leaflet online give you some bit of company information a bit of a breakdown of what your company does and some some basic contacts details and automated forms then we go into magazines news and blog posts a little bit more involved a little bit more content heavy a few a few larger sites required tools are required e-commerce so actually starting to manage payments through the system communicate with third party third partners like sage and world pay and payment gateways paypal and then there's marketing so smaller less information but more lead generation and business generation from from your online and then advanced functions so we sort of including calendar updates and more sorts of the the world's your oyster when it comes to what you want your website to do the tools are available and so looking at your domain which is a very important element so this is the actual url the address that you would be um you would you people would find your website when they type it into the address bar um there's a number of examples there so dot gov is looking at government websites dot edu is education nonprofits go under org commercial websites have come in dot calm and dot uk a dot co dot uk um there's a broad range of additional ones dot shop dot mobile there's all sorts out there um i've listed a few down the bottom a few partners where you can obtain domains so google one two three go daddy three four sp a common so at least top 10 providers of domains and in terms of pricing you can be looking at anywhere from two two or three pounds up to thousands of pounds per year for your domain depending on on how active the keyword or the term that people are searching for so there's a very broad brushstroke in um um pattern of thought around your domain and we start looking at hosting so actually you need to really think about where your website is going to be stored online so a web host is a service that makes your your site accessible to people searching so these are companies that own physical servers that your website is stored on and then when your domain is searched or your domain is typed into your address bar it gets pointed to those those hosting servers it's important to choose a good partner with this a bad website host will result in in poor performance in terms of speed seo um the tools and the functions that you need to do so if you do have payment gateways and you need a lot of quick back and forth you need to make sure that your website hosting is there um again the prices around this really really vary you can you can start as a web host from five pounds six pounds a month um going up to thousands depending on how big your website is going to be and what the sort of tools and the speed in which you need to communicate to these servers are as a company we we generally stick with amazon web services which is a cloud-based and it's scalable so it it grows and shrinks according to your demand and at the moment they're market leaders um next element is we're looking at email hosting now i put this in it's not necessarily web development but they fall into the a similar bucket a lot of time clients will come to us and say i i thought that my website hosted and my email hosting are the same and they're fundamentally not um what you need to think about is that your website is probably the lighter load there's probably less for a host to think about with your website than there is for your email your email's got hundreds of attachments contacts pdfs held in in storage for a long long time so if you're if you've got a lot of emails back and forth looking at a good robust well-rounded suite of tools for your email is important um g-suite and office 365 are two email hosting email providers that we we regularly recommend to our clients prices for these start from five pounds up to 30 40 50 pounds depending on the range of tools that that you require um so moving into the real guts of your website so now we've picked our domain we've picked our host we've got our emails and we've got it all synced up and ready to go start thinking about what is the going to be the very foundation of your website um so a content management system is a software application that enables you to control and edit your website and your digital content so wordpress is very very common um jumlah is sort of a good intermediate little bit trickier than wordpress and then drupal is where you really start building into some bespoke um systems again price points vary wordpress have got free options but the tools that you get behind the free options are very very limited um what your content management system is going to allow you to do is to create and edit your content um control workflow organize yourself um assign users to your account so you can have editor levels you can have administrators that look after the whole site customer levels so you can manage your your users and you can do that securely um also given that we are now very much international and there's going to be more than likely opportunities for you to work across um different languages and different capabilities internationally making sure that your cms is geared up for that um making sure that your your content management system allows you to scale your business so actually you're not just narrowing your your field of view into one or two sets of tools that you need now allow you to look at what you are going to do to grow and evolve and make sure that your cms system is ready to grow and evolve with you um they would all in this in this example they would all allow personalization analytics commerce management systems tools all sorts of stuff go on in there um i thought also take a moment just to recognize that there's a few diy options for you so if budget is limited and you are looking at raising just a little bit of a presence online with the hope to evolve companies WordPress as i say offer a price range from free up the world's your oyster wix again have got free options and square space have got free options they're limited and as you start to grow and evolve and want more tools like e-commerce within wix can actually be quite an expensive hobby um square space is very limited with the gateway partners that it uses so make sure that you really have a fundamental understanding of what your tools are um and what your requirements are and do you have the right tools for that and my my personal recommendation is look at the future what are you going to be trying to achieve with your with your digital presence in a year's time and what would those costs be so it may be better to to work with developers work with designers earlier in the process because trying to evolve your wix website into a full spec e-commerce platform that's fully bespoke is going to be potentially a lot of work in the future um so that's fundamentally the the the fundamentals um so what i'm going to start looking at now is looking at the process involved with with actually starting to build and think about your your website content in particular so start with the navigation um start planning your navigation to understand what is it your audience that they're for and how are you going to direct them through the it's a journey on your website if you throw everything out on the home page they're probably going to be a bit bombarded and they're going to be probably start trying to distance themselves from the website allow them control the journey and allow your users to flow through the website and that comes primarily from your navigation um use user-friendly language we don't have to be formal and um you don't already have to really sort of think about the language is is a bit like set in its ways you can be friendly you can be open you can have the language on your website represent you and your brand um stick to web conventions the user now online gets the idea that there's a navigation bar somewhere at the top either with the little the the burger menu you know we know things like the logo is going to link to the the home page and they're going to be able to scroll down and that's where they're going to see at the bottom a fat footer with address details company number um if you've got affiliate relationships that you're trying to negotiate you can have all of this in the footer um pick your primary navigation so what are your top five five or six points and signposts that you want to send people to your website and always consider what is your responsive journey looking like so actually how is this navigation going to translate into mobile and into tablet and varying screen sizes um so that's a quick look at the the navigation there so moving into planning and content is if you've got current copy have a look at it keep evaluate it what are you happy with tone of voice um does it really match what your audience has come to come to expect from you so determine your target audience and do a bit of research and to find out what your target audience thought process is like online um use site maps really so we we tend to have a good session on a whiteboard we've got post-it notes and really having a look at what the site map is going to look like where can we streamline content where can we really start collaborating with others to to to building a well linking the content with the navigation and make sure that it's a good smooth journey um tell a story don't don't sell a story but tell the story if it's about why you've come to market what problems you're you're searching for you know make it personal do right for humans as well as search engines it can be quite daunting to think right i'm gonna write content specifically so google can start picking up my content and then it becomes a bit sort of detached from your target audience so really think the two the two in tandem um make your copy action orientated to actually tell people while they're there what is it you want them to do complete this audio audit by this pair of sunglasses you know complete a digital health check whatever it happens to be let people know why they're there and what you want them to do and give your copy some visual appeal you know that's that's that's create space and use white space to really build a graphic and a visual journey that matches you your business and your brand so moving on into your design consideration so like i said previously what are your goals you identify and you can write down what your goals are so what you want people to do identify that target audience and then define your unique selling proposition so why is your audience going to pick you above another competitor out there and get that domain name secure it very early in the process because you don't want to go two months into developing the website and then realize that your domain name is taken and you have to rebrand everything um you've chosen your technical foundations with your cms and your domain and your hosting and then start collecting those design elements as well as written copy what animations are you going to have what photos videos and blogs are you going to be using and then start to build content for the core pages so don't think necessarily the home page because the home page is is just a synopsis it's just an over it's a broad brush stroke of what they can find under the covers um if you start writing from those tier two pages so write your about us write your history section write down what your services do write down your unique selling proposition and then once you've got all of that is very easy to streamline that and build that into the home page um so that's our design and um the design element so looking at our key considerations what we need to think about um if you're looking at media photos and videos um what we could do is my recommendation is to make it authentic and genuine and stock images are great there's shutter stock there's all sorts of services that would work really well um but they're very common now and people can see through sort of the the lack of authenticity so commit to a photographer come into your business take photos of you and your team really make it a personalized story and that authenticity will really make a difference um stick to your brand stick to that style and consistency and make sure the quality is there so if you've got if the raw media you're working with is the highest possible quality you can afford then a good graphic designer a good web developer um will be able to scale that down maintain the quality but still making sure that the the the file size and type is is is appropriate so really monitor that that quality um make sure that they're relevant so you know the your your pictures and your media are telling the story and they've got a purpose behind what they're doing um consider your seo so the the you can optimize the back of your photos to really consider what the keywords you're trying to target what's the what are the search engines going to be looking at the meta tags behind and the attributes behind your images what are they going to be looking at and then like i said consider that type the the media type and the file size that's very important if you're going to have really heavy videos you need to start looking at some third party tools to really streamline your videos onto the site so your hosting needs to be spot on or you need to work with something like a youtube or a vimeo to stream those videos um the media as well photo scale those down ready for web because you don't want to have large data large large file sizes having to be loaded when people first land on your website it's going to slow the website down and ultimately lead to a drop-off in audiences because they won't they won't hang around and so multi device it's sort of common now i read an article that there's now over 800 separate devices just in the uk for people to view a website from and they include kindles ipads of varying sizes all of the android phones so the the key to to having a mobile experience is to really plan it and really think from the ground up what component parts on the website am i going to be utilizing to make the mobile journey worthwhile and prioritize the user experience so it's quite good to get sucked into some design element flip boxes that work really really well on desktop but they don't translate into a mobile experience very well so prioritize the user experience and make sure that you get that dynamic sorted first before you then start adding in layers of complexity and also don't assume that your mobile visitors are in transit they're not always on the bus they're not always walking the dog sometimes they're just sitting there watching bake-off and a scanning through something that they're trying to buy so they're multi-screening so so consider that when you're building a a digital project as mobile friendly um make your content easy to read so that's the volume of it on mobile people have got less attention span when it comes to word count so try and keep it snappy try and keep the headlines very directional looking back at our content plan is make sure you tell people quickly about what you want them to do and what what is the process you're looking there and also your content management your cms system is key to whether or not your system's going to work across multi-device so really consider this early and then start matching your tools to to apply to that um so analytics and tracking this is this is whereby this is my favorite bit of any website so if it's live and it's running it's not going to work unless you really understand what your audience are doing and you can start to evolve and build out your project and shape the future developments because you understand your consumer's behavior so google analytics and market leader but there are other systems adobe has got some very advanced tools hot jar is a good example if you're trying to see heat maps on website so what are the hot spots on your website and where should you be putting more calls to action and where should you be evolving your content so without analytics is going to be really hard to get a real good steer on how you can evolve and build your digital project and you need your analytics to influence your marketing message because for all of the will in the world and all of the years experience your your digital support partner might have without the analytics then they're going to be able to prove themselves right or wrong and that's what you need to do and you need to really understand that analytics understand the user journey and track and monitor those six your successes so put in conversion tracking you start understanding how many people do i need to send to my website to get a closed piece of business and what is that piece of business worth but i go into a little bit more detail on thursday's session for improving your website but at the very foundations of building your site you need to get some google analytics or a similar platform into your website so you can really start building out a better understanding of what your audience is up to so here are some top tips as we sort of approach the end of the presentation here so research your audience audience is key build your digital project for them and know your enemy so go out find out who in your space is is working who do you aspire to be and what are they doing that's winning um use headings so don't just load in a number of text-based uh sections across your site use headings because these gets picked up easier by search engines start giving you a better seo responses and you'll start sort of getting that organic traffic climbing quite organically um hook your reader so give them give them something from your home page really start giving them little snippets and little insights to what they can experience when they start to delve a little deeper into your site and don't overcoat over complicate things and what i call front load your information if if you're selling sunglasses online you don't need to be coy about it let's put it right there in the top top header and tell people yeah click here to buy sunglasses now if you've got the information at the top you've streamed on that journey into into the deeper element of your website so that also leans on be direct um a conversational tone is key and what you want to do is be active don't sit back and and hope that people are going to be coming on to your website and working it be active go and find your audience research get their feedback really start to build out and evolve your content strategies to really match with with search trends online um be generous you know people with your visuals people are on their mobile phones people are on their laptops and they don't just want to read a whole page of content let's be generous assign post people with nice visual graphics let's use the white space um intelligent on the space you've got it you might as well use it and leave out the jargon especially within our within our industry there's tons of jargon and there's no doubt the same for every every industry out there so just simplify it keep it conversational be direct and research is is the main tips we've got out of that and and that's the end of um my presentation so thank you everyone and i'm happy to go through any questions if there's um any thanks mike absolutely brilliant there are some questions actually um and that's why i popped onto the screen because i was going to try and interrupt you and then thought better of it so sorry thank you Cheryl sorry about that um a couple of questions actually so um Lisa asks if you've already got a website that's hosted by one provider how easy is it to swap to somebody else uh there's a lot of moving parts such size of the website the sort of tools that you've got on what needs to be transferred fundamentally it can be um an easy process so Keith on the call would look after that within within our business so there is a technical element that needs to be taken care of i wouldn't like to take it on um but we we can transfer websites from one provider to another within within hours a couple of hours so prices vary there's a lot of moving parts but it's not it's not a difficult job that you should shy away from okay and also much on the same sort of lines if you're if you've got a website that uses Wix as the content management system how easy is it to move to a different content management system say i mean Lisa suggests Joomla so i'm guessing this is from a startup website that maybe somebody has built onto something a little bit more progressive yeah so i think there's a lot of dynamics where Wix and Squarespace moving into WordPress is that they've both got tools built into the platform where you can export the website and it allows you to move it into WordPress so those mechanisms are in place again you'll need some technical help to do it where you start going into Dupler and Drupal is that these are bespoke like you need to be a coder to really understand and build out these platforms in any real meaningful way so yeah i'd say you'd need some professional help but if you pick the right profession or the right professional if you pick a keyf then it's going to be easy doing it yourself i'd say it's it's going to be more tricky but the information's out there but it's also like you say if it's part of an evolutionary process then i'd say that would be a good time to sort of open up a consultation with a company like DigiBubble and say right this is what my ambitions are these are the tools that i'm hoping to unlock and is a full scale bespoke hard coded website right for you it might not be so there could be a number of options so i'd say get a conversation going with with a partner you can trust and just sort of thrash out the plan yeah so really have a good plan in place before you actually do anything to sort of make sure that you're getting the right tools if you like for the job in hand yeah um got quite a few questions popping up actually might so please don't go anywhere um in terms of finding your new website and i think this is something you're going to cover more on thursday but how realistic is it to get onto page one of google um using seo and are google ads a good option yeah well so for something like DigiBubble if someone searches my company online i've we've gone to great lengths to make sure that we dominate that keyword so what is your branded search now you should be making headway on from the second your websites live on on getting your branded term found very easily see i'd i'd say you give it three months before the search engines really settle in and you've got yourself a consistent top page for your brand um for other keywords if it's something like personal loan they're going to be a really aggressive um tough market to hit so what we tend to do is focus on niche keywords we look at search trends we do keyword researching to what are the common terms that people are searching and when and you start building your content strategy around that if you set that pattern in from the foundation of your website build then over time you're going to become a really strong seo um sort of partner because you are ultimately asking google for you their customers to come to you so you want to give google all of the information they want so it it it can be very difficult if you're in a competitive market um but for something like your branded term you should be able to get yourself page one relatively quickly okay i've got a few more here actually um any thoughts on the oh this is a very tricky one actually any thoughts on the average number of pages a good website should have um and what are the must-haves in terms of pages i think anything we we generally say around 2000 words if it's a brochure website so this is a a a website that's just broadcasting who you are what you do and what you want your customers to do so think something like a decking company um antique dealers um anything that's just just giving information without having an e-commerce element or having any of these advanced tools then no more than 2000 words is enough to sort of get your content righter to start working with and um yeah and page count the world's moved past page count a little bit more if you've got something like word press you can duplicate all of your pages and build out content um quite easily so it's not really a load for your designer to think about is more of a consideration for your hosting it's actually the bigger your website the more hosting requirements you need and the slower that website's going to go so i would say that there there isn't really an average but the fundamentals that you want your pages i always think of the old who what why where when how you know the answer those questions people people if you're a plumber in book and readjust you're going to need people a little hello i'm a plumber a little bit about you and your dog and then the services you offer the areas you cover why you're better than the market and and a way of people getting in touch and having a contact form that's not a huge amount to to put together if you know your business and you know it well you can get that knocked out pretty quick um and regarding seo search engine optimization are we or are you of the opinion that pictures are is picture optimization better or page text and headings uh i would say page text and headings because fundamentally when you search it's all about the keywords and even within search engines the search engines are looking for hard text written behind the image in alterna attributes they're called so you put them in a behind the behind the image so images are important because there is more common that people are looking at the visuals they're looking at image search but majority of the traffic that comes from seo is text based so i would focus on your headings and your content and then the the supporting images that you're putting within that are are supporting that so it works as a holistic solution for the page really and sorry i've got more um how important is it to update your website regularly it's vital every month if and if you're not you've just got to this but if you're considering seo if you're considering even seo's starts impacting how google ads ranks you so even can impact your paid advertising um if you're not updating your information if the connections you've got with third parties like google my business is out of date if you're if the bottom of your website says 2017 then from a visual perspective so excluding search engines and seo um your customers are not going to be thinking great about you and we haven't updated your website not even the number at the bottom that tells me is 2017 do you work there did not work it it creates an element of unknown um from a seo perspective the search engines are going to be looking as one of the major scores is when was the website last updated because google doesn't want to send their customers to a website that's five years out of date so yeah i'd say get content something regularly that you can update to show that you're active if it's a blog post if it's a case study even if it's a social media feed and you're active on your social media something on your website that tells google and your customers that you are in business and you are still going that's brilliant thank you um and actually a little point about videos and mp4s and vicky's asked can you add mp4s easily if they're not from youtube i know there's a huge surge isn't there in in video production moving videos online um vicky found one site came up with errors and they couldn't do it so how easy is it to to sort of plug in things to your website plug in videos mp4s whatever yeah there's tools out there for you to do it well um mp4s and like the the raw files are quite heavy so actually if you can start looking at a partner that's like a vimeo like a youtube pay the extra to have a professional grade account on that because then they're doing the hosting they're doing the heavy lifting and they're just streaming it through to your website so your website doesn't have that that that file size behind it so it can really impact your page speed it can really impact the load times of your website if you've got these big heavy files on there so it is possible if you're having troubles with mp4 you give that qr a scan and that will get 10 minutes with with us and we can talk you through have a look at the back of the site and work it out so it can be quite drawed out videos could be quite problematic and heavy media can be quite problematic okay so just picking up on that mic that little qr code there that we're all looking at that can be scanned can it if somebody yeah let's see if you've got your mobile i did test it was working and i've done it again it's working so that'll take you through to the digiprubble website we've got a good collection of tools so on thursday's section i'm talking through a few tools that we've got on the site so we've got a website health checker so it grades your website and gives you a score about your performance um an ROI calculator so you can actually calculate what you should and shouldn't be bid in what is a comfortable bid range for you um says lots of tools we've got on the site we've firmly in the belief that if we share our knowledge with you it allows us to do our job better yeah no that's absolutely brilliant these questions are just going on and on and on so i mean obviously it's a really really interesting subject i think probably for the best to give you a break as well as anything else mike um you're hanging around for our networking yeah i'm about and i you don't have to shut it down for me i can talk about this for days i could you tell me what to shut up is the old one oh kindred spirit um so what i was going to suggest is um that we actually move on just the last little bit of our presentation and then we go into networking and mike if you're happy the questions that aren't answered maybe those people can can sort of talk with you at the networking session yeah i'll i'll be about yeah and the details are there i love a chat so just jump jump on the phone give us a call we're always happy to share a bit of advice brilliant absolutely brilliant and obviously mike is going to be not only is going to be with us for the next half an hour but he's also going to be with us again on thursday talking about how to improve your website and some little hints and tips and tricks and some case studies of where did you bubble of actually work with some local clients to really make make some magic happen i think so yeah lovely thank you ever so much everyone thanks ever so much mike and we'll chat with you in a minute thank you um so just as i say um following on from that we are going to hang around we have got a little networking session for half an hour but before we go into that i just wanted to share some funding and some grant opportunities with you um if i may just sorry bear with me a minute just to make sure that everybody is aware of these um because not only are we able to signpost you to support from our digital champions we've also got some grant funding that we're aware of so i just wanted to raise these we will share all of these slides so please don't feel that you have to sort of start scribbling down like mad and we'll also share mike's slides so first and foremost the business hot house in chichester have actually got some grant funding available at the moment um so if you are looking to build a new website you might want to have a chat with the business hot house first because they've actually got some money to to give away um some match funded money so i do have a chat with them we've also got low case low carbon across the southeast who again have funding um for businesses that want to adapt to climate change and then there's rise um which is a knowledge exchange through the university of brighton sussex so there are so many support and streams at the moment and grant funding to really help you um excuse me to really absolutely help you get your business moving and to do what you need to do um i'm going to quickly hand you over to bradley again who's just going to whiz through um how we're going to network on reemo and i know lots of people have got lots of questions um about um continuing on from mike's presentation so bradley if you can just explain to us what we can and can't do that would be absolutely fair thank you i will do and i'm just going to very quickly share my screen so uh just to show you what you're going to be going back into and this is the reemo room uh some of you will be familiar with this because you came in just before the presentation uh but some have joined during the presentation so this is what we are going to go back into uh when sharyl closes down the presentation mode you would just need to turn your camera and microphone on uh you'll just see uh that it looks like a real room and that is the beauty of the reemo platform and what you have the ability to do is move from table to table so if you see a table with an empty seat all you need to do is double click on that table and you will move there straight away your camera and microphone when it's turned on will appear at the top of the screen my advice is when you are on a table if you see in the control bar at the bottom of your screen there's an option to use tile view this makes everyone on your table appear much bigger and in a much more user-friendly way um if you want to find anyone in particular you'll see that these little circles some some are colored circles some have people's faces on these are people in the room so you can actually find people in the room you can click on their icons a virtual business card will appear if you click on their icons and if you want to join someone on a specific table let's say Mike for example um if you want to go and find Mike and ask him lots of those questions that were unanswered all you need to do is just scan your mouse around the room find Mike and double click on his table but given that there were so many questions i'm not sure there'll be an empty seat on his table um immediately if you need any help you'll see on the left hand side there are some help desks so please just come over and see myself or my colleague Nikita here's where we can give you some help on the remote platform but we'll let you get back into it really and and and make the most of the platform it's a it's a really interactive platform the idea is that it it makes the networking experience a lot more authentic and humanized so yeah that's it from me but if anyone has any questions just use the chat box or come and find us on the left hand side in the help desks brilliant thank you so much Bradley so all remains to do then really is to say thank you ever so much for attending today as I say just to you and confirm we will send slides out to anybody who would like those slides and from Mike's presentation and our slides as well so you've got those grant and funding opportunities don't forget the digital champions are also in the room so um if you're thinking Sydney is thinking oh actually I could really do with some help for strategy for my website or for I don't know Google ads or whatever it might be um go and chat with a a digital champion as well because you can sign up for some free support um so please do stay with us and please do book for Thursday session and come along and hear from Mike again about how we can improve our websites and what we can do to power up our businesses even more so thank you all very much and I shall see you in the networking shortly