With the competing demands on your time as a business owner, we know it can be difficult to keep up with all the changes going on in digital. We caught up with director of Green Gecko Digital, Marco Sarussi, to find out what top three developments in website design and management he thinks you need to know about.
WordPress roll out Gutenberg editor
WordPress is the world’s most popular website content management system (CMS), powering an impressive 33% of all websites, according to W3Techs.
At the beginning of the year, WordPress introduced Gutenberg. A development that is designed to improve the editing experience, Marco says that it has been met with caution by website designers and managers.
“As with many software changes, developers have been a little cautious to implement the new ways of working. It isn’t mandatory yet, but change is inevitable”, Marco explains.
WordPress is currently giving users the option to revert to the original WordPress. “As it’s so new, not many people are using it, and we are not yet using it for our clients’ sites”, Marco says. “We all know that with new software there can be problems and bugs to iron out so we’re being proactive to ensure that our clients get the best return on investment and only move over when we’re confident it’s right to do so.”
The rise of conversion rate optimisation (CRO)
Marco tells us that CRO has been gaining in awareness and influence, becoming increasingly popular in the last 12 months. “People are redesigning their websites for conversion optimisation to drive particular actions, like purchases or sales leads”, Marco explains. “Clients are starting to understand its importance and the data that drives it.”
Using data from Google Analytics or other analytics tools and website optimisation tools like Crazy Egg or Hotjar can help you understand what users are doing on your website. It will highlight which areas of pages are popular, problems they might have, and you can even ask users for feedback.
“This is a welcome development because clients can be spending lots of money on pay-per-click advertising like Google Ads, but if the traffic that is being delivered doesn’t convert to sales on the website then it is money down the drain”, Marco says.
Shopify and Mailchimp fall out
Website managers who used Shopify with Mailchimp to send customers targeted emails are facing disruption, Marco says, as the two software giants are no longer working together.
“You may have noticed other companies are trying to cash in by advertising on Facebook to replace the solution before the integration stops working on 12 May 2019”, Marco says.
Mailchimp has made its own recommendations for workarounds, which include installing a third-party integration such as ShopSync, Zapier and Automate.io.
“This has been quite a shock announcement and businesses will need to act as soon as possible to avoid losing data that you have spent a lot of money and effort to gather.”
Marco Sarussi is director of Green Gecko Digital in Yorkshire, the one-stop digital company that specialises in web design, pay per click and social media management.
If you liked this post, please share with your friends and followers. If you are also doing some amazing things with digital technology, why not enter yourself for the Digital Enterprise Top 100 initiative. Entries close on 3 May 2019. www.de100.co.uk