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SEO is one subject that we often come back to with EverWeb. For some SEO may not be important, whilst for others it can be the key to a successful online presence, typically for business ventures. EverWeb makes adding SEO to your site easy. When you complete fields in the Page Settings tab of a page in your site, you are already adding information that will be used for SEO purposes when you publish your site..

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is used to improve your website’s visibility to search engines such as Google, Bing and Alexa. In turn this will drive more traffic organically to your site. Adding the right key words to the pages of your site optimizes them to help search engines better your ranking in search results.

The Benefits of Adding SEO To Your Site

1. Adding SEO To Your Site Increases Organic Traffic: Using SEO effectively should help your website rank higher in search engine results. This will make it easier for potential customers to find your site without the need to use paid for advertisements.
2. Gives Your Visitors a Better User Experience: When SEO is properly added to you site it should help improve your site’s speed, its mobile-friendliness, and navigation, all of which will enhance your visitors’ experience.
3. Better Perceived Credibility & Trust: Websites that rank on the first page of search engine results pages are perceived to be more reliable and authoritative which in turn increases trust among visitors.
4. Cost-Effective Marketing: Using SEO can help lead to more consistent traffic coming to your site over time without the ongoing costs that marketing may entail.
5. Build a Competitive Advantage: If you are not using SEO but your competitors are, they could be attracting more traffic, leads, and sales than you.
6. Targeted Audience & Higher Conversion Rate: SEO helps attract users who are actively searching for what you offer, increasing the chances of conversions (sales, sign-ups, etc.).
7. Localized SEO for Local Businesses: If your business operates in one country only, localizing SEO may help attract more local customers as your SEO is relevant to where you are based.
8. Long-Term Results: Unlike paid for advertising, where traffic will stop if you stop paying, SEO builds a foundation for long-term online success.

SEO and Your EverWeb Site…

As we mentioned at the start of this post, EverWeb has SEO baked in to it automatically. As you add information to the fields in the Page Settings tab of the inspector Window, EverWeb will use this for SEO purposes when your site is published. If SEO is important to your business there are three things that are important to bear in mind when starting to add SEO to your site’s pages :

1. Filling in the right fields for SEO
2. Adding quality information in SEO relevant fields
3. Using the right key words and/or phrases in SEO related fields

Effective SEO For Your EverWeb Site…

The best way to make sure that you are filling in the right fields with the best SEO keywords or phrases is to either follow the SEO for EverWeb Video Course, or check out chapter 12 – EverWeb & SEO – of the EverWeb User Manual which can be accessed either from the Projects Window or via the Help Menu. These tools will help you gain an understanding of SEO in clear, concise steps. There are lots of great tips as well that will help to boost your site’s search engine results page ranking.

Additional SEO Tools To Give You The Edge Over Your Competition

EverWeb gives you the basic tools that you need to set up SEO effectively for your site. This is usually sufficient for most users but if SEO is business critical, you can tailor your SEO more specifically through the use of the EverWeb SEO Power Up addon, which includes the very useful Check Page feature, making implementing SEO even easier!

Keeping Your Site’s SEO Up To Date

Once you have added the SEO that you want to the pages in your site that require it, remember to review these pages on a regular basis. There are two reasons why this is important to remember: firstly, your pages may change their content over time e.g. the home page or products page of your site. If this is the case then do you need to update the page’s SEO to reflect these changes? The second reason to check your SEO every so often is that search engines such as Google, may change their algorithms from time to time. These changes to the search engine algorithms may have a positive or negative effect on your search engine result page rankings. So you may need to realign your SEO to account for these changes.

Adding SEO to your site is a good way to boost page rankings in search engine results pages. It is also a no, or low, cost option to promote your site that usually only requires reviewing, or updating, on a regular basis.

The post Easily Add SEO To Your EverWeb Site! first appeared on Website Building for Mac OS X | EverWeb Website Builder.

The recent release of EverWeb 4.3 has some great new feature adds such as the all new PayPal Modern widget. As well the headline features, there are many other worthy, but less prominent, new and improved, EverWeb features to enjoy! Here is a round up of them…

Justified Text For TextBoxes

Justifying text within TextBoxes is one of the feature our customers have often asked for. Now, with EverWeb 4.3, a justified text button joins the left, centered and right margin aligned buttons in the Text Inspector, which itself got a major redesign in EverWeb version 4.0. The new feature means that you can now justify text anywhere in EverWeb as text justification was already available in the Styled Text Editor (which is used in some of EverWeb’s widgets) and in the Blog Post Editor.

TextBox justification can be applied to one or more paragraphs within a TextBox, and you can also mix and match text alignment styles within the TextBox if you want. Note that when you edit Text in a TextBox you will see the text displayed as left aligned, until you have finished editing the text. When you click away from the TextBox so that it is no longer selected, you will see the text displayed as justified.

Object Layout Buttons

We introduced layout buttons to objects in EverWeb 4.2 so you can directly access Widget Settings and other settings without moving away from the Editor Window. The number of Layout Buttons that you see depends on the type of object that you are working with and the page layout type you are using.

In EverWeb 4.3, you can now toggle the size of the Layout Buttons to be either normal size or small. To change this setting, go to the EverWeb-> Settings-> General menu on a Mac, or the Edit-> Options-> General menu in Windows. Check or uncheck the ‘Use small layout buttons’ to suit your personal preference.

Expanded Stock Photos Drag & Drop

Drag and dropping is, of course, one of the most common things we do when working in Windows or on macOS. Over the course of EverWeb’s development, we have enhanced this feature so that it is available in more places, especially in asset lists. In EverWeb 4.3 this capability has been expanded so that you can now drag and drop images from EverWeb’s Stock Photos window directly on to the Fill Slideshow Asset List in the Shape Options tab. This is a great way to save time and effort when creating slideshows!

Automatic AI Bot Defence

The advent of AI is bringing new and exciting tools for all of us to use. Unfortunately it can also bring new problems and issues. EverWeb 4.3 automatically blocks AI Bots from your site. For advanced users you can also edit the robots.txt file and the .htaccess file. When editing these files, remember to make sure to text your changes thoroughly. If you make a mistake you may find that your site comes up with ‘500 Internal Error’ type messages when published.

Use the File-> Edit Publishing Settings menu option to access this new feature. The Advanced Option section has the toggle to ‘Block AI Bots’ as well as the robots.txt and .htaccess file fields.

New Features For EverWeb Mac Users

For our macOS users, EverWeb 4.3 now officially supports macOS Sequioa, and for the eagle eyed, you may have noticed that you get live font previews in the Text Inspector Fonts menu dropdown list.

More EverWeb To Follow…

Our latest release has brought new features to EverWeb including the new PayPal Modern Widget, as well as adding user requested features such as justified text in TextBoxes. But there is more to come with lots of big updates coming soon that will make EverWeb even easier to use whilst delivering new features at the same time, so stay up to date with our blog posts to get all of the latest news!

The post Justified Text and Other New EverWeb 4.3 Feature Highlights! first appeared on Website Building for Mac OS X | EverWeb Website Builder.

Keeping in contact with your customers is a vital part of maintaining and growing your business. The classic approach is to use e-mailable newsletters to engage with new and existing customers. Signing up to such a newsletter can be facilitated in a number of different ways such as through your EverWeb made website. E-mailable newsletters are a great way to introduce existing, new, and potential customers, to your products and services. An E-mail newsletter will probably be just one of a number of methods you will use to maintain contact with your customers. Usually we recommend using a couple of contact methods such as such as blogs, vlogs, social media and so forth. Choose the methods that will give you the most coverage but take the least amount of your own effort.

In this blog, we are going to focus on creating an email newsletter sign up form in EverWeb. This is easy to do using EverWeb’s Contact Form Advanced widget. This widget is the most flexible way to create a contact form that blends in perfectly with the rest of your site, whilst giving you all the tools you need to create the form you want. You may also be aware of EverWeb’s Contact Form widget. This is a legacy widget that, whilst simple to use, does not have the features, or the security, that the Contact Form Advanced widget provides. As such, we recommend using the Contact Form Advanced widget in all instances.

Newsletter Sign Up Form Objectives

The main objective of a newsletter sign up form is to acquire the email address of your visitor so that you can market to them in the future. 

For your visitor, a newsletter sign up form should be quick, easy, and as simple as possible to complete. Contact forms that take too much time to complete, are too complex to fill in, ask for too much visitor information, and/or raise privacy concerns will probably scare your visitors away.

When creating your own newsletter sign up form, we recommend using the latest version of EverWeb if possible.

Adding a Newsletter Sign Up Form To Your Page

To create your own newsletter sign up form in EverWeb, start by creating the page on which you want to place the newsletter sign up form, if you have not done so already, or use an existing page. For example, you may want your sign up form to be highly visible, such as front and center on your Home page!

Wherever you decide to place your newsletter sign up form, the next step is to go to the Widgets tab, and drag and drop the Contact Form Advanced widget, on to your chosen page.

Contact Form Advanced Widget Settings

After you have added the Contact Form Advanced widget on to your page, you will now need to complete the following fields in the Widget Settings…

Start with the ‘Email Address to Send Form To’ which, as its name implies, is the email address your visitors will send their newsletter sign up forms to.

The next field should be completed if you have purchased EverWeb’s Contact Forms Enhanced Add-on. Click on the dropdown and select the add on so that your form can use the add-on’s features.

The next step is to give your form a name, using the ‘Contact Form Name’ field. If you are only using one form in your site, this may not be important to do. If, however, you are using the Contact Forms Enhanced add-on it will become more important to specifically name your form. In this way you can more easily manage the data and email addresses that you collect from the different forms that you may create in your site.

The next field in the Widget Settings is the ‘Mail Sending’ field. This field tells EverWeb how you want to send emails, either using SMTP Details, PHP Mail, or via EverWeb, Typically the ‘SMTP Defails’ option is the preferred method unless you are using EverWeb’s Contact Forms Enhanced add-on, in which case you should use the ‘EverWeb’ option.

Setting SMTP Settings

Once you have completed the first section of the Widget Settings, the next to complete is the SMTP Settings section. Depending on your selection in the ‘Mail Sending’ field, you have different options available.

If Mail Sending is set to ‘SMTP Details’ you will need to complete all of the fields in the SMTP Settings section. If you need help filling out these fields, click on the ‘More Help’ button. If you have selected ‘PHP Mail’ you will not need to complete the STMP Settings and fields in this section will be greyed out. If you selected ‘EverWeb, again the SMTP Settings will be greyed out, but you will need to select a Contact Forms Enhanced add-on in the Contact Form Enhanced Add-On field.

Designing The Newsletter Sign Up Contact Form

After completing the contact form’s basic settings, you can now turn your attention to the design of the form. To do this, you will use the Form Submission Settings section. The first field in this section is ‘Email Subject’. As this is a newsletter sign up form, you will probably want to title it as such e.g. ‘Newsletter Sign Up Request’.  The next field to complete, ‘Email Sent Success Message’, can be left as is, or customized as you want.

The following field in the Widget Settings is the ‘Forward to Page’ field. This field is used to redirect the visitor to another page within your website, once they have signed up to your email newsletter. For example, you may want create a ‘Thank you for signing up’ page in your site. On this page, you can then direct the visitor as to where to go next in your site, for example, your home page, or sales page.

The next field, Form Style, lets you to choose the overall style of your form using one of its three different options: Classic, Modern, or Transparent. When you choose a style, the widget in the Editor Window will automatically update, so you can try each style before choosing the one that suits your needs best.

Using Form Controls

The next section of the Widget Settings is probably the most important one from a form design perspective. The Form Controls section is where you define the fields and field labels that you want to include in your contact form. As simplicity is our goal for this form, delete the ‘Name’ and ‘Message’ fields. To do this just click on the field in the list you want to remove, then hit the delete or backspace key.

The remaining field in the Form Controls list is ‘Email’, which we are going to rename so that its field label is easier to understand by anyone completing the form. Double click on the ‘Email’ Form Control and edit the label to be, for example, ‘Enter Your Email Address’. 

The next step is to place some help text in the field. This is optional, but adding ‘Placeholder Text’ will improve the chances of your visitors completing the field correctly. In this example, the help text will be ‘Fill in your email address here’.. We are not going to add any Control Instructions as the Placeholder Text help is sufficient for our purposes.. 

Moving on to the Control Section Options section, set the maximum content width of the field so that it display properly on any device. In this example, we are am going to set the width to 250 pixels. This is narrow enough for the field to fit on one line, even on a small mobile phone. Optionally, finish by setting ‘Alignment’ to center.

Setting Up Fonts and Styles

In the next section of the Widget Settings we can set up our form’s fonts and styles. Use the Control Label Style and Form Fields Fonts button to set the font style of the form as you want.

Configuring the Submit Button

After setting up our form’s appearance and the Email Form Control, the last step is to customize the , ‘Submit’ button in the Submit Button section. Instead of using the word ‘Submit’, we will change the text to ‘Send’ in the Submit Caption field. Additionally, the text within the button will be center aligned, using the Alignment field.

To complete the look of the button, check the Use Styled Button checkbox and set the font and color of the button as you want.

The Newsletter Sign Up Form is now complete. If you want, you can additionally set up a confirmation email. Note that if you do this, you will need to enable Spam protection as well.

Once you have finished your page design, publish your site, then test your form.

The post Easily Create a Newsletter Sign Up Forms in EverWeb first appeared on Website Building for Mac OS X | EverWeb Website Builder.

Testing your EverWeb made website before you publish it to the Internet is one of the most important tasks you may have to do in your website building journey! The main reason for testing your site before publishing it is so that it is polished, reliable and user friendly. The best way to get all of those three aims checked off is through good design and thorough testing.

In EverWeb you have its Preview feature in the Toolbar which allows you to preview your site to popular web browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. This is all fine if you are working on your site on a desktop. As most people access web browsers from their phones, this is now probably the most important device type that you will want to preview your site on.

EverWeb 4.3 for macOS and Windows, now gives you an easy way to test your site on a mobile device with its new Preview QR Code feature. Although this is ideal for testing on a phone, it is also just as useful on a tablet device as well. And as you would expect, it is EverWeb easy to use!

Using Preview QR Code

All you need to get started with using Preview QR Code is EverWeb 4.3, or higher, for macOS or Microsoft Windows, an app that can scan QR Codes and of course, browser software on your phone or tablet. On your phone or tablet, Preview QR Code will support your default browser.

Now all you need to do in EverWeb is to go to the page in your website’s project that you want to preview and click on the Preview button in the Toolbar. From the dropdown list of browsers, choose the Preview QR Code option. EverWeb will generate a QR code on screen for you. With your phone or tablet, scan the code with your QR Code Reader.

You will now see a preview of the page as to how it will look on a mobile device.

Testing Your Site Using Preview QR Code

When testing your website on a mobile phone before publishing, you should ensure it provides a seamless and functional experience for mobile users. Here’s what to look out for:

1. Mobile Responsiveness

Confirm that your site adjusts correctly to different screen sizes and orientations (portrait and landscape). If you are site uses a Centered Layout, make sure that you have both desktop and mobile page counterparts set up and linked together before previewing.

If you are using a Responsive page, you may find that the page is too wide for the phone. If this is the case, check out our video on ‘Horizontal Page Drift‘.

In addition, check that elements like images, buttons, and text scale properly without overlapping or cutting off and also make sure that you have left enough left and right margins. If you need to add these in to your page, change the left and right margin values in the Metrics Inspector.

2. Navigation Usability

Test menus and drop down menus to ensure they are intuitive and easy to use on smaller screens. Also do not forget to verify that touch targets such as buttons and links are large enough to tap comfortably without accidental clicks, and that the links work correctly.

3. Page Load Speed

Ensure pages load quickly on mobile devices, even with slower internet connections. If you have a problem with page loading speed, optimize your images, and use Lazy Loading on them in the Metrics Inspector.

4. Text and Font Readability

Check that the font sizes, colors, and spacing you have used allow the text to be easily readable without the need for the visitor to have to zoom in. As such avoid small fonts and remember that the text should contrast well with the page background background.

5. Media and Content Behavior

All of your images, videos, and other media should display correctly and do not overflow or appear distorted. As you are testing on a mobile device, remember to test interactive elements such as sliders, and carousels to make sure they work properly on touch devices.

6. Form and Input Fields

Test your forms, such as those you can create with EverWeb’s Contact Form Advanced widget for usability, ensuring that any input field is easy to access and fill out. Also check that any validation that you built in to your fields works as you expect.

7. Compatibility Across Devices and Browsers

Although it may seem tedious it is important to remember to test your site on different mobile operating systems (iOS, Android) and on a variety of browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.). You should find that all core features of your site are consistent across all platforms.

8. Touch Gestures and Interactivity

Test swipe, scroll, pinch-to-zoom, and other touch gestures for proper functionality. Check whether interactive elements like accordions, tabs, and modals work well with touch input.

Using EverWeb’s new Preview QR Code feature together with a proper testing plan will guarantee you a polished, user friendly site that loads quickly!

The post Testing Web Pages on Mobile Has Never Been Easier Than With EverWeb Preview QR Code! first appeared on Website Building for Mac OS X | EverWeb Website Builder.

As we start the new year, for many of us it is a time to look towards new challenges or to update and refresh things in our lives. When it comes to your website, the holiday period can also be a time to inspire you to update your own site for the new year. If you have not kept up with the updates to EverWeb in 2024, check out our EverWeb’s 11th Anniversary post and also our post on the recently released EverWeb version 4.3!

One of the new features in EverWeb may be something that you would want to add to your own site – scrollable Textboxes! This is a great new feature that can help you save space on your page, giving your page a cleaner appearance rather than been cluttered with text.

Before You Begin…

You can add Scrollable TextBoxes to either fixed width or responsive pages in your site. The only other requirement is that you are using EverWeb 4.3, or higher, for macOS or Microsoft Windows.

Creating a Scrollable TextBox For A Fixed Width Page

First let’s look at adding a TextBox to a fixed width page, typically this will use the Centered Layout page layout type. You can find out what type of Page Layout you are currently using in the Page Layout section of the Page Settings tab in the Inspector Window.

Add a TextBox to your page using the TextBox button in the Toolbar. Next, either type in the text that you want in to the TextBox, or copy and paste the text you want in from another source.

To make the Textbox scrollable, you will need to size the TextBox so that some of the text within it is no longer visible. By default, when you add text to a TextBox it will always resize itself so that all text is displayed. Usually this is what we would want, but in this case we do not want this as we want to hide some of the text so our visitor has to scroll the TextBox.

To achieve this, first make sure that the TextBox is selected. You can see if it is already selected if there are grab handles displayed around its edges. If not, simply click once inside the TextBox.

With the TextBox selected, go to the Inspector Window and click on the Text Inspector icon. At the bottom of the Text inspector, you will see the Export Options section. In this section check the option for Scrollable Text.

After setting the Scrollable Text option, go back to the TextBox and take one of the grab handles and resize the Textbox so that some of its text is no longer visible. That is all you have to do! Once you have resized the TextBox, you can try out the scaling by previewing the page. When using Preview, place the mouse cursor over the TextBox and use the mouse to do the scrolling action.

Adding a Scrollable TextBox to a Responsive Page

The basics of creating a scrollable TextBox are the same for both fixed width and responsive page layouts, but with a responsive page layout there are a couple of things that you may need to bear in mind.

If you add a Textbox to your page as a full width object, you can resize the height of the TextBox using the grab handle at the top center or bottom center of the TextBox. If you want to reduce the width of the TextBox, go to the Metrics Inspector and use the Maximum Width and Margin settings to constrain the TextBox width.

Alternatively, you may have placed the TextBox within a Responsive Row widget. In this case, you may want the TextBox to be of a fixed width. In this case, you will have to make sure that the Full Width option is not checked. This will allow you to use the Width field instead so that you can fix the width of the TextBox within the Responsive Row. For best results in this case, you would probably fix the width of the TextBox to about 320 pixels so that the TextBox will be able to display on any mobile device.

Test out your Scrollable TextBox page using Preview. If you are using Fixed Width TextBoxes within a Responsive Row widget, you might want to use EverWeb’s new Preview QR Code Mobile feature to make sure that the fixed width, scrollable TextBox looks correct on a mobile device.

Scrollable TextBoxes are super easy to create and their versatility can help you save space on your site’s pages and make it easier for visitors to scroll text on mobile devices.

The post Add Scrollable TextBoxes To Your EverWeb Website! first appeared on Website Building for Mac OS X | EverWeb Website Builder.