Ayni Media Blog - Affordable Small Business Websites & Digital Marketing

Duda vs Wordpress: Best Website Builder For Small Biz

thomas.connery@yahoo.com (Thomas Connery) — Sat, 12 Feb 2022 15:35:20 GMT

This article summarizes a brief comparison of sorts between WordPress vs Duda. This topic tends to generate some heat from ardent WordPress supporters and that's ok. I'm not bashing WordPress as good ole' WP has use cases that can surpass other website platforms BUT I do think that there are thousands (likely millions) of WordPress websites on the internet today that could easily become Duda sites. Why? Because web design and web builders have changed for the better and most small businesses do not need to use WordPress in order to have a successful website that ranks or converts. That's our topic.

Should you stop using WordPress for your small business website?

For many of you, I believe the answer is yes. Let's explore some myths and truths.

Hi I'm Tom and I build 'most' of my websites on the Duda platform. What's Duda? It's the secret web design platform that many agencies use to provide responsive and affordable websites for their clients. Who typically uses Duda? Anyone who wants to DIY or build their own website, as well as anyone who wants to make money building and selling websites - whether you want to do so as a freelancer or start an agency.

Let's examine why people say or think they 'NEED' WordPress . Focusing on the word "need" because I've had small business owners come to me and state that their website had to run on WordPress because someone told them it was the best. Well, best for what?

You Need WordPress Because of its SEO Strengths

This is MOSTLY FALSE. For standard site pages, Duda allows for easy page title management, meta description, alt image tags, and Google structured data additions. I have personally improved the Google ranking of small business

websites that were on WordPress but transitioned to Duda. So, generally stating that WordPress is required in order for a business to rank well on Google is incorrect in my opinion. I have seen people complain about not having plugins or tools such as Yoast for Duda but none of that bothers me and I don't think it should concern you. In fact, bloating your WordPress site with plugin after plugin only slows down the site or adds upgrade complexity and security risk. With Duda, I try to minimize complexity and modernize the user experience, all while focusing on SEO on-page and off-page ranking factors in order to help small businesses succeed.

When it comes to SEO, where does Duda fall short as compared to WordPress? Blogs. Duda still has some limitations when it comes to building and ranking robust blogs, and generally speaking, Duda blogs cannot compete with WordPress. For example, Duda does not give you access to dev mode for blog posts which greatly limits customization. The blog layouts can be tailored for your business but still have some design limitations. You can't easily link to an existing blog post from the main nav menu or anywhere else on the site as you need to manually add the url for each specific blog you want to link to. Duda blogs also do not use categories similar to WordPress BUT Duda does leverage tags. You can use tags to organize and display blog content, and I think it works well overall, but there may be an added advantage of having formal categories, especially if the category names are SEO or keyword driven and appear as part of the url structure. Duda doesn't have a permalink setup option for blogs currently either. Because of that, it makes it difficult, but not impossible, to add a folder structure to the url. Like website.com/blog/category/blog-title or whatever permalink standard you want to use.

Does this mean that Duda blog posts can't rank well? Absolutely not. I have written blog posts that are getting many views per month but can Duda blogs compete head to head with WordPress blog content. Na, not at this time in my opinion.

Wait a second... Maybe we should ask, who cares? Well, if you are a small business owner who uses blogging on occasion to turn out new content, promote products or services, and educate people on your products, services, or local community, then Duda should meet your needs just fine. BUT what if you're not selling a service or products. What if your goal is to make money on Google Adsense and affiliate marketing primarily? If that's the case, WordPress is still king. Can you add affiliate links to your Duda blog and begin making money - yes you can. I've been doing it for a while now. Can you add Google Adsense to Duda blogs - yes and no. There is a current limitation where you cannot upload and leverage ads.txt.

The point I am trying to make is. Most small businesses do not need WordPress in order to rank their business on Google. If they work with the right Duda agency or freelance builder such as Ayni Media , they should have complete confidence in their website's ability to rank and perform well from a conversion perspective. And instead of worrying about the website platform, what the business should care about is their desired outcome. What are you trying to achieve and can the right freelancer or agency help you achieve it? They may even be able to save you money at the same time.

You Need WordPress Because of its SEO Strengths

This is completely false in my opinion. Duda was built as a native drag and drop builder. There is no plugin or 3rd party support required. No template or theme to buy, well you can optionally buy templates from other Duda designers, but my point is, Duda is architected as a CMS or content management system with drag and drop. WordPress, was not built to be a drag and drop blog or website creation tool but has been customized over the years in order to support that trend. With Duda, they make site building a priority. Why? Because Duda caters to supporting agencies who want to sell and provide websites... and agencies need to work at scale.

Likely one of the biggest advantages to Duda, as compared to WordPress, is that Duda includes collaboration and a site dashboard. This means that you can easily communicate and record notes directly within a website project but also access all of your customer sites from a single dashboard. It's very easy to add clients to specific sites and manage their permissions as well. Duda even offers a one-page site link that you can send to a client, allowing them to easily populate their business information, social media links, and other key site attributes. This saves time during the build process and if you have questions or require client feedback, you can record action items and status updates using the collaboration tool so you don't have to scan through email after email looking for the client's responses. Ok, I sidetracked a bit, let's get back to the needs...

You Need WordPress Because its Customization Ability

Duda does require you to start from a template, you can't avoid it. I've seen many agencies bash templates when it comes to using them for website design and it makes no sense to me UNLESS someone is rolling out a template without making it their own. Every single Duda template can be changed. I'm talking about every color, image, row, section, column, - everything. When I'm done with a client's design their site only resembles the original template if they want it to. Duda even offers very stripped down templates to use as a starting point if you do not want to go with one of their more robust designs. This gives you much more creative freedom.

Now what about WordPress? Trying to customize WordPress can be a nightmare for most DIY people. This is why there are so many 3rd party and premium WordPress plugins, builders, templates, and services. Because WordPress is heavily customizable, it can do a lot, and you may need the right expertise in order to build exactly what you are trying to achieve — and the odds are — it's going to cost you more money than it would to build that same site on Duda. Will you have to make some compromises if you use Duda as an alternative? Maybe. It depends on the required site features, wireframe, or widgets. There may be certain elements that are difficult or impossible to reproduce in Duda that can exist in WordPress.

My biggest issue with building and managing WordPress sites is that every time I login to support a customer who has a WordPress site, they often use different 3rd party builders like Elementor, Brizy, Divi, Beaver Builder, or pro.photo. As a website builder and support resource, I don't really want to learn the ins and outs of every different type of WordPress builder. It slows me down. As an example, I helped a photographer setup their pro-photo based WordPress site and the project went well overall. A few months later the client wanted to make updates and neither of us could remember where to navigate to in the builder menu system to make certain changes. Then, pro-photo would roll out updates that can alter where content is managed. And like many other builders, you need to pay for upgrades and premium features. Pro photo is just one example. Again, it's not a bad service for photographers who want a WordPress site but the time it takes to set up and manage such a site is too high. Updates should be intuitive and fast in my opinion.

You Need WordPress Hosting for Your Website

Sure, if it's built using WordPress code, you need to host it somewhere . But with Duda, the site fee includes hosting AND it's unlimited hosting meaning there is no penalty to how many site or page visits you receive, how much disk space you consume, etc. Duda's pricing model is simple. There's less to worry about and less to manage. For my customers, I have two key services they require. A domain provider and Duda. That's it. I use namecheap.com for all of my domains and Duda for most of my customer sites. Of course, most customers already bought their domain name anyway, and it's usually very simple to connect their domain to Duda with simple A record and CNAME record DNS updates.

I recently examined WPEngine which is a very well known WordPress provider and host. They list page visit and data limitations right up front and their starting fee for small business sites is $30 per month. What is my agency's minimum small business website fee? $25 per month. And I can pretty much guarantee that your design or build fee will be less expensive and that the site will require less maintenance and be more secure.

Another bonus for Duda is uptime and availability. Just visit status.duda.co any time, 24/7 for the most recent incident information and to see if Duda services are up and running as expected. When I was on Bluehost WordPress hosting a few years ago, there were multiple times when my site went down or I couldn't login to manage my site. Not only that, Bluehost was slow and their management interface was not intuitive. Duda excels here and they are very transparent when it comes to ongoing issues. Their support team is amazingly responsive and they proactively send out emails if major outages occur. Better yet, Duda updates are being released every week or close to it. I can't even keep up with all of the new features, fixes, and abilities they are adding.

I hope my words are painting some type of picture for you. Haters are gonna hate on Duda. And you know who most of the haters are? Wordpress-only web designers or strict WordPress agencies. They want to stick with WordPress and they want to tell you that web design is complicated and difficult. That you need a web developer to design a website for you and that you need WordPress in order to compete on google.

Well, I'm here to tell you that you don't need a web developer. Not anymore. Some of you listening can even build Duda websites yourselves. Others may want to find a Duda certified pro, like myself, or many others.

Oh, if by chance you want to sell Duda websites, when you pay for a Duda agency plan, 4 monthly websites are included in the membership fee. Duda has three tiers when it comes to pricing. Basic, Team, or Agency. Basic includes one website and is ideally suited for a single DIY designer who wants to build a site using Duda. The Team plan will allow you to add other team members, manage permissions, and includes two websites as part of the fee. Agency is the ultimate though because you get 4 websites included in the plan fee as well as access to the premium app store, data collections, dynamic pages, and more. Would you like to watch a detailed video as it pertains to Duda pricing? Check out the below video on YouTube!

You DO NOT Need WordPress For Your Small Business Website

I only touched on some high-level differences in this article between Duda and WordPress but there are MANY and my point with this whole thing is — give Duda a chance . In fact, try building your next website on Duda FIRST instead of using it as a backup or alternate solution. It's a no-brainer if you sell websites to clients.

If you would like to start a free 14-day Duda trial today, please click here - ' Free Duda Trial '. I am a proud Duda agency customer and am also a Duda affiliate and as such would receive a commission only if you ended up activating a Duda plan after using my signup link. The trial is completely free, requires NO CREDIT CARD, and will let you fully experience what it's like to work with Duda as a website builder. If you prefer to work with a Duda agency or get a quote for your business's website project, I welcome a discussion. Please visit aynimedia.com/contact to submit your information today. You can also reach out to me on Twitter @ThomasConnery . OH!! If you purchase an annual Duda plan, use my personal discount code, TOMCSAVE to save 10% off on your first year subscription.

If you found value in this article be sure to share it via social media. It will help spread the good word of Duda! Thank you so much for your time.

Best Review Management Software For Agencies 2022 [VIDEO]

thomas.connery@yahoo.com (Thomas Connery) — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 22:43:17 GMT

Whether you run a digital agency or manage your own website and digital marketing, showcasing customer testimonials or reviews represents proof of success. In this article, I will share with you an amazing platform that will enable you to, not only beautifully display customer reviews or testimonial widgets but also help you increase them! The bonus? It's classified as white label review management software. This means that you can brand the software with your logo and colors and invite customers to manage their own reviews if you wanted to. It's a wonderful solution to resell if you run a web design business.

What if you could funnel reviews into a system that helps to prevent less than five-star grades or reviews?
How would your review counts increase if you added a unique email signature to your outgoing emails?
What if you or your clients could manage all of their reviews or social feedback from one single source?

As a bonus, you can customize the solution so it uses your own domain name. How would you like to showcase, only the reviews you or your customer have approved, using multiple widget designs that are easily customizable?

For all of those reasons and more, is why I recommend Repuso.

Why You Should Collect & Display Customer Reviews

Evidence is proof. That's why we use evidence in law in order to prove guilt or innocence. The same concept applies when it comes to company products, services, or reputation. According to data from Spiegel Research Center, nearly 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase . (kinsta.com) This holds true for EVERY business. When it comes to discovery, the majority of people carefully consider customer reviews, how companies respond to those reviews, and what their aggregate rating or grade is, especially on Google My Business.

Full disclosure, I am an affiliate for Repuso because I believe in the product. I use it for myself and I use it for multiple clients. This article was created to serve you, whether you run an agency or your own business, you can leverage Repuso. If you click on links within this review, I would likely receive a commission only if you activate or become a Repuso customer. For those of you that do, I am truly grateful. Now, let's get back to the why. Why you should use this software for your business. We will do that by exploring common questions that people have as it pertains to growing and managing customer reviews online.

How To Sell Review and Reputation Management Using Repuso?

Convincing your customers that great reviews correlate to increased revenue should be easy. They themselves are likely doing this right now! Most people, when searching for a service or product, research reviews as part of their buying criteria or decision making. As a business owner, they should understand that this same behavior is happening to their own business on a routine basis and there's a likely chance that they may be losing business due to lack of customer review volume and quality.

Review management, and specifically Repuso, helps businesses grow by focusing on the following disciplines:

Helps to collect and route feedback in order to build reviews on the service of your choosing.
Organizes customer reviews where you, or your customer, can easily filter and approve or reject incoming testimonials.
Showcases only the reviews you have approved in beautiful and easily customizable widgets for your website.

Possibly the best part? Repuso currently connects to 29 online services (shown below) where reviews or mentions are commonly collected and shared. That's right, Repuso can listen to, not only formal review and recommendation sites or services, but it can also 'listen' on Twitter or other social media channels where you could potentially display positive mentions or feedback. The simplicity of showcasing customer feedback within a single review widget but from multiple sources (or channels) is amazing!

Does It Work With Your Website Platform?

Repuso widgets were specially created to work on most website platforms. For example, WordPress, Duda, Squarespace, Wix, and any platform that allows for custom HTML embedding or access to the header or body-end code sections. As far as WordPress goes, Repuso does offer a WordPress plugin so you can easily leverage shortcodes to embed your widgets when needed. Most other web platforms simply need to copy and paste their widget's unique code into an HTML widget. That's why I use Repuso heavily with the Duda website builder. ( What's Duda? )

Not only will Repuso work on virtually any website platform or service, they also have integrations to Slack, Joomla, WordPress, and can connect to custom 3rd party applications thanks to webhooks. Although Repuso usage is very limited in Zapier today, you can still manually create webhooks based on events such as new approved posts or new post notifications and you can do so across multiple websites.

How Easy Is It To Customize The Widgets?

Currently, you can build nine types of widgets with Repuso and each one allows for customization so the font and or colors can align to your brand or website's settings. The 'Layout' menu under the widget's configuration screen allows you to optionally add Google rich search results, modify the description, review height, rows, button text, font, color, rows per click, borders, and much more. The configurable fields slightly differ based on the type of widget you are customizing. We've included a brief video below that shows all of the different configuration options for each widget. Also, take a look at the 9 examples below that demonstrate what a typical flash, masonry, floating, grid, inline, photoset, and badge widget would look like once embedded into a website.

How Do I Implement a Widget On My Site?

Every website builder is different but the concept for adding or embedding a custom widget is the same. Once you've configured a widget within Repuso, within the setup tab you'll find a snippet or section of HTML code with script that you copy and paste into a specific web page or HTML widget within your website. That's it. Copy, paste, and click save and then go preview your page.

In Duda, they recently updated the platform to auto-disable 'Enable AJAX Page Changing' which used to be manually controlled under SETTINGS - HEAD HTML. This page changing option was enabled by default and benefits quick navigation BUT if you begin to add custom code, such as HTML review widgets, it would prevent them from loading properly. The good news is, this is no longer an issue on Duda.

If you happen to be using Squarespace and want to embed a Repuso review widget, open up the page of your choice and click the Edit button within Page Content. From here you'll click the '+' sign in the upper right corner to add a new block. Select 'Embed' under the BASIC blocks and then position the block where you would like it to display on your page. Lastly, click the </> button to open up the embed data box, paste in your widget's code, then click Set.

Overall, adding Repuso widgets is very simple and anyone can do it. You do not need to be a web developer in order to copy and paste. If you are using WordPress for your website, simply add the available Repuso plugin. Other website builders simply need to copy/paste their widget's code into embedded HTML widgets. Example widget below!

What Types of Widgets Are Available?

As of the time of this posting, Repuso has seven (9) available review widgets. My favorite is their masonry widget. Very similar to a traditional grid widget, the masonry design offsets and stacks reviews. In typical Repuso fashion, it can easily combine reviews from MULTIPLE channels. This way, you can showcase Google, Yelp, and Facebook reviews in a single widget. Check out the example below:

Whether you are looking for a floating aggregate badge for your page or an inline testimonial solution, Repuso offers many different options when it comes to showcasing customer feedback. There is also a very cool option to add rich results using your Repuso widgets. In the screenshot below, we've displayed all nine of the available review widgets available in Repuso today.

How Much Does It Cost?

Current annual plans and pricing for Repuso begin at $9 per month and can go up to $33 per month for agency level services. Pricing is lower if you choose to pay annually vs. monthly. Most small business owners who would like to use Repuso for themselves can try it for $12 per month and if they are happy with it, they can then switch to an annual Basic plan for a total of $108 annually. As you jump up into the Enhanced tier and Agency tier, you unlock more features and capabilities. If you are an agency, you definitely want to enable white label services. This would allow you to provide your customer with a login where they can manage their own reviews, approve what get's added to their existing website widgets, add tags, etc. It's quite powerful.

Something else that is VERY IMPORTANT to know is how many sub accounts you have available at each tier. When you setup your own agency account, you'll want to select a pricing tier based on how many customers you want to add to Repuso initially. This sets your standard plan rate and as you add new customers, a small monthly or annual fee would apply for each sub-account your add. Think of a sub-account as a new client account. This is all clearly defined on Repuso's pricing page and their support people are very helpful. If you have questions or need guidance on pricing, simply use the chat option on their website.

At the lowest Agency tier rate, each new sub-account you add would cost $6/month. If you are an agency, you should be selling Repuso review and management as an add-on service anyway or you can include this overhead in your own website service or subscription plans. Either way, I have no doubt that your customers would receive exceptional value in this amazing review management solution. The best part is, you can test out Repuso for free for 10 days, NO CREDIT CARD required.

Please reference Repuso's current pricing model below but keep in mind the $24 annual fee per sub account, once you go over having 10 customers on Repuso:

Start Using Repuso Today!

At this point, if you're still not convinced, the only thing I can recommend is that you signup, and at a minimum, start the 10-day free trial. As an added bonus, I've embedded a brief video below that walks you through some of my own channel and widget configurations. This should give you an idea as to how the interface works and what it's like to manage reviews, work within the console, etc.

Our Step By Step Guide On How To Create A Duda Website!

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 16:02:59 GMT

There is an awesome website builder that you probably don't know about. It's not Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, or Wordpress and it's fantastic!

It's completely free to signup and begin creating your own website on the Duda platform. The cost occurs after the 14-day trial period or when you are ready to publish and activate your account. In this post, we will share our signup link and overview the basics on how to get started. If you're interested in our webinar design sessions or online course, please contact us today !

Create Your Duda Account

Why are we telling you to create your own website when most agencies DO NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS? It's simple really. Website design and hosting is only a small fraction of what we can help small business owners with and we recognize that some people prefer to have more hands on control of their website and also prefer to save costs by paying the web host or platform provider directly. Who are we to stop you from doing that? We are more than happy to do all of the design and hosting for you if you prefer, just like any other web design or digital marketing agency, but this article is directed to entrepreneurs and solopreneurs who prefer to design their own website and perhaps outsource a little help when needed. It is also meant to serve anyone who wants to begin building websites and making money as a freelancer. If that sounds like you, lets get started! If this does NOT sound like you, please review our services on how we can help.

Since we are sharing this information for free and are providing you a direct line to the website hosting company, the only thing we ask is that you use our unique signup link as provided in the button below. When you click this button and begin creating your website, we will ONLY receive a small commission once you activate your plan. This means that you can do all of the work and try designing your website for FREE and then only activate the site if you are happy with it. That's a WIN-WIN so long as you set aside some time to learn and build. Just note that Duda has a 14 day trial period and you will need to activate your membership in order to continue working on your website draft after that period.

*The signup page will open in a new tab. Please stay on this page to keep navigating through our instructions in parallel.

Start By Choosing A Template

The first thing you will see on the signup page is an orange button to begin building your website. In the new browser tab or window you just opened, click this button to get started. It likely reads, "Let's Build Websites!" or something similar to the below:

At the sign-up screen you'll notice that you can try Duda free for 14 days. Complete the form and be sure to use the appropriate " What description best fits you " option depending on your specific need or situation. I'm assuming that the majority following this blog would select "I am looking to build a website for my business" as displayed in the image below. Once your account has been created and you've validated your email, you should be taken to your Duda dashboard. This is the hub to everything Duda. If you create multiple sites, they'll all be listed here. It's also where you can access Stats, Resources, and your Account information.

Once you click the get started button you will be taken to the available starter templates. It's super simple to use the categories on the left side menu to filter the results BUT keep in mind, these templates are just guides. You can change everything about them and they are meant to save you time! If you see a design that you like or could picture your own website looking similar to, then go with it. The color scheme, images, menus, etc can all be changed easily. Also, even if you pick a template now and decide later you'd rather try an alternate template, that's no problem. You can begin creating a second website design draft if needed. If you plan to run an eCommerce store, you DO NOT HAVE TO use the 'Online Store' filtered results. All Duda websites can include both digital and physical product sales so don't think you are limited by only those Online Store templates if you plan to sell products online. Want to preview the template on tablet or mobile view? Just click the appropriate preview icon to see those alternative views. Once you've found the template you'd like to start with, hover your mouse over it and click the ' Start Building ' button.

Before you go any further, let's quickly review Duda's current cost structure . Yes you can work on your initial website draft for free for 14 days but after that period, you'll need to select what membership plan you want to join. Seriously. This is not going to be hard so have an open mind and don't be afraid of this. As an experienced Duda website builder I have completed entire multi-page websites in a few hours. You 100% can do this in a few days or a couple of weeks at the most. Lastly, don't let the "14 days" term scare you. Your free unpublished website will NOT expire! You simply have to pay for and activate your account in order to continue using the platform. It's important to think of Duda as a membership that includes the ability to activate or publish one or more websites.

Duda offers three membership alternatives to pay for your plan and the memberships are based on your role. Are you building a website just for yourself and maybe you might build another for someone else or do you plan on building many websites over time? The first (Basic) membership option is monthly at $19. You have the option of paying an annual commitment that saves you 25% which comes to $14 per month or $168 annually. Duda used to offer a 'Site for Life' option for $299 but removed that late in 2019 . Many people took advantage of the site for life option but is there really any such thing? Not anymore. The future of quality service is subscription based. It's better for the software company or provider and it's better for you, as they need to continually earn and renew your business. The Team and Agency memberships include additional features for growing a website business.

Please note that if you require any eCommerce services, Duda does not typically offer the ability to sell products for free or as part of the initial membership plan. Duda uses Ecwid to manage and deliver ecommerce products (either digital or physical) and you will have to pay an extra monthly amount depending on the store features you desire as well as the number of products you need to list or manage. Either way, adding eCommerce is not expensive and depending on your needs, will involve an added monthly commitment, typical to how the websites are sold. Want to read more about the eCommerce details? Visit this link . The table below shows Duda pricing as of May 2021 for ecommerce. Can you find and embed alternative ecommerce solutions that work with Duda? Sure. I've used e-junkie and gumroad. I believe you can also manually add Ecwid's limited free store BUT it would be managed through Ecwid's website and not Duda's.

As an example, if I am creating a new website that is going to require ecommerce in order to sell yoga mats, clothing, or accessories and I do not want to commit to a long term Duda plan, it will cost $41 per month for the website and include the advanced ecommerce options that allows for up to 2500 products. That's $492 annually. If you purchased and activated this same website using the annual billing, it would total $399 if you were on the Basic membership. Keep in mind, this scenario is not typical for most DIY customers that Ayni Media works with. The majority of small businesses and entrepreneurs we support require the basic website and typically commit to the $19 per month rate or $14 annual plan. We just wanted to share this detail with you. We often recommend E-Junkie as an alternate ecommerce solution that works with Duda for people or businesses who only want to sell limited digital products. Lastly, since we are an agency level subscriber, we offer people to USE OUR DUDA SERVICE as an alternative. We are able to provide additional features and widgets that are NOT available to you in the basic plan. If you would like to ask about our website design services, please use this form on our contact page . Why use us? We are pro Duda designers who can support your business with very affordable plans.
*Note prices listed above are subject to change via Duda

The Planning Phase

Ok, you know all of the detail now. You have an account, you selected your template, you understand the price structure, and you are ready to begin building your website. Hold on! It's likely best that you grab a notebook and write down the high-level structure that you feel your website needs to consist of. Is it just supposed to be a landing page? Does it require an about page, contact page, services page? For every website we've created, it was always much more efficient to identify these requirements up front. You may even find it helpful to experiment with a wireframe tool such as wireframe.cc (free) or use a premium product such as LucidChart. Building a wireframe, whether basic or advanced, will also help you save time later because you're establishing requirements and identifying what the website must consist of and can even include a scratch idea of what you may want the site to look like. Don't want to use an online tool? A notebook and pencil will do just fine. At this point in the process, you were likely taken into your newly selected website template screen. Let's now move onto describing the tool menus in edit mode where you'll be spending most of your time.

From left to right:

Search the Editor (CTRL-K) - A great way to find any widget, text block, and more!
Info and Tools - Allows you to enable experimental features, get your preview link, stats, and more.
Checkmark - This icon changes to ellipses or ... when auto-save is occurring. The check means it's been saved.
Left Arrow- Quick undo button. Don't like you last change? Click here. Can be used to backtrack multiple changes.
Right Arrow - Redo button. The opposite of undo and lets you restore something you did undo by mistake.
</> - Access HTML and CSS by going into developer mode. Most people do NOT need to use this.
Preview - Allows you to enter a preview mode to demonstrate what your website would look like on browser, tablet, or mobile.
Publish/Republish - Saves or commits your changes to the internet. The first time you publish will kick off the payment options.
Help - This will provide a link to access the Duda knowledgebase or open a new support ticket. Use this to help yourself when stuck.
Home - The home button will take you back to your Duda dashboard.

From top to bottom:

Design - Access global site settings like fonts, buttons, backgrounds, mobile layouts, and more.
Pages - Open the pages and popups menu. You can also add other site languages from here!
Widgets - Super powerful, drag and drop website building blocks. Use these to create your content.
Content - Import content from your current website, manage images, files, and more.
Personalize - Powerful way to target users and generate leads. Read more about personalization .
Ecommerce - Manage your store subscription, page, products, taxes, orders, shipping, etc.
Blog - Add a blog to your website, create posts (like this one), and more!
App Store - Only available to agency level members. Duda offers premium add-ons for their agency customers.
Settings - SSL, URL, favicon, header html, privacy, 404 settings. There's a lot to go through here.

In the top-most menu section you'll notice 'Home' followed by three icons displaying a monitor, tablet, and phone. The Home drop-down button provides a simple way to switch into edit mode on different pages. This can save some time if you continually find yourself clicking on the Pages menu on the left and then selecting which page you'd like to open in the editor. Because Duda is a responsive website builder, it allows you to edit and customize the user experience on browser, tablet, and mobile. By using these three icons at the top, you will switch each page into these other modes to continue editing. Our recommended best practice is to to ALL of your website design on the browser version first. When you feel it's 100% done, move onto the tablet version. Then finally, move onto the mobile version. The mobile version typically requires more unique changes to ensure all of the content fits properly. Since iPads using Safari now mirror the desktop version, customizing for tablet is not as important as it used to be. If you find some section on mobile not fitting very well, don't be afraid to 'hide on mobile' certain sections or build a custom row just for mobile use. Just be sure to then hide those custom sections on browser and tablet! Tricks of the trade. ��

Make It Your Own

Wow! If you made it this far, congrats. You really are a DIY champion. From a text stand point, we can't write out how you are going to make the website your own but we can guide you into some best practices. We already mentioned that you should build the browser version of your website first before moving on to the tablet and mobile views. The very first thing you should do is access the Design menu and go through the global text and buttons sections. Here you will select your fonts, colors, header sizes, button colors and options, etc. It will save you time if you can establish all of these settings now, before going into edit mode and creating content for the website. Second, goto the Content menu and populate your business information. Add a phone number, email address, social media profile links, and your location's physical address if applicable. Next, you may want to bulk import content if you already have an existing website and would like Duda to attempt to import the images and assets that may save time from manually downloading them and uploading into Duda. To do that, goto the Content menu and click the orange Import content button. Type in your current (or old) website url and cross your fingers. Some sites allow a decent import of content while some are restrictive.

Publish Your Website

Being new to Duda, I assume it took a few days to get to this point (or maybe the entire 14 day trial period) but you made it! Practice will make you a pro. Having designed 50+ Duda websites we're able to complete some customer sites in one day or less. Once you've previewed your website in browser, tablet, and mobile, you're ready to click the orange 'Publish' button in the upper right corner. Clicking publish will bring up the activation screen where you will have to make your purchase decision (if you haven't already) as to monthly or annual. Once published you do not have to immediately connect to your custom domain. Duda will provide you a standard url and you can visit the Settings menu to setup your custom url, request an SSL certificate (for FREE), add a favicon, connect to Google Analytics, backup your website, configure a custom privacy policy, create a 404 page, and more!

Thank you so much for reviewing the Ayni Media get started with Duda guide! As a helpful reference, the below link will take you to the instructions on how to connect your personal or business domain: https://help.duda.co/hc/en-us/articles/115015720488-Going-Live-Publishing-and-Setting-up-your-Domain

We love to help business owners, entrepreneurs, and solopreneurs with their websites and digital marketing. Please contact us today and let us know how we can help your business grow! Did you know that Tom Connery of Ayni Media makes Duda videos and tutorials on YouTube? Please checkout the video below and be sure to subscribe for great Duda related content!

Did this blog article help you? Are you ready to create your free Duda trial and learn this amazing website builder for small business? If so, please use my affiliate link. It really helps and is pretty much a way you can provide a gratuity tip or simple thank you for receiving this helpful free guide from Ayni Media!

Interested In a Duda Video Overview?

> 16,000 Views!!! Trust me, you need to check out Duda as a website builder

An Affordable Website Design Solution For Small Businesses

thomas.connery@yahoo.com (Thomas Connery) — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 00:20:05 GMT

This article is going to tell you all about the Duda website platform. You may not have heard of it because it's primarily marketed toward agencies and freelancers who want to build and sell websites. What you also may not know is, YOU can use Duda to begin building an affordable and responsive website for your own business! Keep reading and I'll cover the most common questions people ask about Duda.

Duda is a website builder, similar to Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace . The platform caters to agencies and freelancers who want to provide white-labeled websites for their clients but surprisingly, Duda can also be leveraged as an easy to use and affordable website design solution for small businesses.

What does this mean? It means that anyone can build their own website using Duda and in this article, I will highlight some of the common questions people have asked me as well as review some of the features that even a basic, non-agency subscriber would receive when choosing Duda as their website builder.

As a non-agency, you can build and purchase a Duda website for $168 annually or $19 per month if you do not want to commit to an annual plan. The best part? Duda commonly offers discount codes 3-4 times per year that can knock off 20-50% on new website annual activations! Seriously. That's $84 for the first year activation when you use one of their half-price coupon codes. If you required their integrated e-commerce solution, there would be a monthly upcharge or addon.

How's that for affordable website design for small businesses?

I'll introduce myself briefly. I'm Tom Connery and I've been building Duda websites for digital agencies and small businesses since 2016. How did I discover Duda? Well, a friend and small business owner of mine had a WordPress site that he wanted to replace with something that was easier to update and maintain. He also wanted to sell his physical products online, so I began searching for white-labeled platform that could host this type of scenario. Duda quickly made me a believer that you don't need WordPress in order to have a successful website. Now, I've made it my mission to share Duda in an attempt to help people discover, learn, and use Duda as an alternative to other website platforms so that they can either make money or save money online. For me, Duda is the best website builder on the market, and in this article, I'll share some of the reasons why I believe that to be true. Please note, I always announce Duda discount codes via my email list. If you would like to be the first to know when coupons are announced, you can signup here.

In addition, I created a Duda overview video that has nearly 10,000 views on YouTube. If you'd like to get acquainted with Duda, see what it looks like, how to navigate, how the designer works, what it's like to drag and drop widgets, and more, then please watch my overview video on YouTube:

Will You Own Your Website Once It Has Launched?

The first question you may be asking is, will I own my website once it has launched? As long as you continue to pay the platform subscription fee, either monthly or annual, your Duda website can be live on the internet. Does Duda include a domain as part of the subscription? No, they do not. The good news is, the majority of people research and purchase domains prior to building a website and with Duda, it's super-simple to connect to whatever domain you own. Duda also provides a free SSL certificate that they setup and renew on your behalf. Agency level customers do have a site export option that allows them to move a site from Duda to a self-hosted web server but I have not yet tried that yet myself.

Not 'owning' the website can really bother some people but here's the reason why I think it makes sense. If you enjoy manually updating plugins, themes, widgets, service packs, security vulnerabilities, etc then please, by all means, do not use Duda. But if you want a turn-key, drag and drop, website builder, that includes amazing yet customizable templates, makes it easy to manage multiple websites from a single dashboard, and requires virtually zero maintenance, then keep reading.

Full disclosure, I am a proud Duda affiliate , and some of the links on this page and within this article are affiliate links. If you click on one of these links, I would likely receive a commission if you created a free trial and later purchased or activated your Duda account. If you prefer to skip the Q&A below and want to jump right to my quick-start guide, please click here .

How Long Will It Take To Build Your Small Business Website?

If you are new to website design or using website builders, it can take some time to create a website from start to finish. Even as an experienced builder on the Duda platform, my own delivery times vary for completion and it's primarily due to one very important topic. Planning.

As much as humanly possible, plan out every piece of your website. The colors, images, logo, navigation, number of pages, what content you require on those pages, etc. The better your requirements and the more thorough your planning, the faster your website build will go. I've built websites with 40+ pages in a few days and I've also built 5-page websites in a few days, mainly because there was very little direction or too few requirements in order to be efficient.

If you need a guide of sorts, you can try out the draftium.com app for free. It will help you plan out your entire website, including all pages, how the rows or sections are designed, contact forms, and more. If you provide an experienced Duda website builder a wireframe or draftium example, they will most likely be able to turn around your website quickly.

If you're serious about learning how to build Duda websites, I highly recommend you visit learnduda.com where premium courses and resources are available. At a minimum, you should consider joining the free user community where you can ask questions and collaborate with other Duda website builders.

How Many Pages Should My Website Have?

Most small business websites have 4-6 pages upon initial design and delivery. I would say this includes: Home, About, Contact, Services, Gallery, or Projects, etc. There really is no 'one size fits all' scenario and the number of pages required should be clearly outlined while planning for the website build. The good news is, once you are live on the internet, Duda makes it easy to clone existing pages so you can repurpose them for a new service, product, offer, or message.

Another thing you may want to consider when it comes to pages is, how many pages does your average competitor have? Are they building specific pages aligned to services or products? Are they building pages that target specific locations? Do they have a blog? I'm not saying you should copy a business that may be similar to yours, but it's a good idea to know how such websites may be configured.

Duda allows you to create up to 1,000 pages and for most businesses, I'd say that more than meets their requirements. This includes blog posts as well as landing pages that may need to be imported or manually created for the website. Duda does have a blog import tool that leverages RSS feed data in order to create blog posts from an existing website. Pages, however, would need to be manually built within Duda if you are converting from some other website builder or service.

How Do I Choose A Small Business Website Builder?

Which features or factors are most important to you when it comes to building, editing, managing, and maintaining a website? Which platform makes it easy to run your business, so you don't have to worry about plugins, widget updates, or security vulnerabilities? Which platform makes updating content fast and intuitive so you don't need to reference a help document each time you login? Which platform allows you to login from your smartphone to make minor updates and changes? Which platform responsive updates easy? What I mean is, can you quickly and easily customize the mobile or tablet version of your website?

For all of those reasons and more, is why I use and share Duda with others. When you move beyond the basic website plan and upgrade to a team or agency plan, you can unlock additional features such as: team collaboration, client management, an app store with 3rd party premium services, phone or live chat support, a widget builder, discounted website pricing, and more! Duda is also releasing new updates and enhancements faster than they ever have before. This demonstrates that they are continuing to invest in the platform and provide exceptional service to their customer base.

Oh ya, unlike some other website services on the market, Duda does NOT have any bandwidth or storage restrictions and the websites are served via Amazon's Cloudfront CDN. This ensures fast loading of content and the platform is built on Amazon AWS which guarantees a 99.999% uptime. It's a very reliable platform for website availability and speed. I'll insert some detail on Duda's current pricing model below:

Is The Duda Website Builder Only For Business Sites?

Duda Agency Members: To Buy This Custom Blockquote Widget - Click Here

If you would like to use this same blockquote widget above with your Duda website, you can order it right here . In fact, another cool thing about Duda is that there are 3rd party resellers who offer custom widgets that may not be available in the default Duda widget list. If you can't find the exact widget you need, there's a chance you can have one built by a pro or purchase a widget that's ready to go.

Ready to preview a sample Duda website that is "not so template typical"? Meaning it is 100% unique and will not mimic ANY other Duda website on the internet today? Check out clearstonemktg.com (built by Ayni Media). Although I believe Duda was built to help serve local small businesses in your area and even some franchises, Duda can be used for pretty much any individual, freelancer, creator, consultant, or business owner.

If you have designed some unique Duda websites, please consider sharing them as a comment below!

How Do I Ensure My Website Is SEO Friendly?

With Duda, SEO is very easy to manage and maintain, and the platform's architecture is very SEO friendly meaning you will not require any type of addon widget or plugin in order to manage SEO for a Duda site. You can add Google Tag Manager within site headers or link to Google Analytics right in the site settings. "Dev mode" makes it quick to access site body-end code, headers, CSS, schema markup, and more.

Is it all sunshine and rainbows? There is no perfect platform. I'll share a couple of blog-related cons below. Currently, Duda blog posts restrict dev mode so you would not be able to add schema markup or structured data on blog posts specifically BUT other page types can be customized without issue. Also currently, you cannot use ads.txt for Google Adsense as there is no way to validate the file without access to the root directory. The good news is, you can still embed Google Ads via Adsense using the basic HTML widget in Duda but not having ads.txt could impact ad revenue.

Being responsive and providing dynamic serving is essential for today's websites in order to improve user experience. Google is pushing user experience more and more from a ranking perspective and with Duda, you can quickly jump from desktop, tablet, and mobile designs. This makes it fast to customize and hide specific elements based on device type so the mobile experience can truly stand out. Now that iPads leverage the desktop experience, tablet design and management is less and less important BUT it is available for customization.

You can control page urls, titles, and meta descriptions from each page's settings menu. On-page SEO is a breeze when it comes to adding alt-image tags, H1, H2, H3-H6, and paragraph copy. Robots.txt is automatically included as is the sitemap xml. Overall, Duda sites can rank very quickly once connected to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The lack of dev mode for blog posts is worth noting but I wouldn't be surprised if Duda removes that limitation somewhere down the road. I've seen clients increase SEO scores by 20-30% once we moved them over to Duda. Every site is different.

Can You Build An E-Commerce Store Or Site Using Duda?

Yup. Adding e-commerce through Duda will require an additional monthly fee and the current shopping platform is built on Ecwid. Even if you do not want to leverage the integrated shopping solution, you can manually add HTML widgets that allow code embedding. That means you can add PayPal buttons or sell digital products with solutions such as E-Junkie if you'd prefer. You could even create a free Ecwid account on Ecwid's website and embed that if you only required minimal online store capabilities.

Duda's premium integrated store solution allows you to sell on Facebook, Instagram, and other sales channels. Track inventory, leverage 40+ payment gateways, offer gift cards, view abandoned carts, track payment and shipping status, sell digital products, and much more. Depending on which subscription level you choose, your capabilities for e-commerce improve. I've built multiple online stores using Duda as a solution, and in my opinion, it's very well suited for small businesses that want to sell a small collection of products. Although it can support thousands of products, I am not yet convinced that Duda is the perfect solution for large, robust, online stores.

How Can You Easily Backup And Restore Your Website?

Sometimes your changes don't go quite as planned. I recall researching WordPress backup and restore solutions in the past and it got complicated. Sometimes it involved added fees and more plugin management. No thanks. With Duda, it takes SECONDS to create a backup or restore your site from a previous backup. Instead of me typing out how it all works, check out how fast it is to record a new backup and then restore from a previous backup in the video clip below. Like I said. Seconds! The best part? It's all built into the platform with no added fee and you can have as many backups as you'd like. There are also times when the platform creates automatic backups as well. Either way, I teach every Duda user I work with to get into the habit of creating manual backups before they make changes.

Where Can I Download Or Access Small Business Website Templates?

There are currently 100+ website templates to choose from as a starting point when creating a new Duda website. Once you login to your Duda dashboard, you would simply click the Create a Responsive Site button in order to be taken to the template selection screen. If you did not want to use one of the fully populated templates, you can always start with a blank template or canvas. I've done this multiple times, especially when a client provides a wireframe where the entire site needs to be built to custom specs.

Overall, creating websites on Duda is a fantastic alternative to WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix. More people really need to know about the power and capabilities of Duda as an affordable website design solution for small businesses. Whether you want a DIY website builder or want to begin building and selling websites as a freelancer of a full-fledged digital agency, Duda is a fantastic solution that you should seriously consider.

Ready to get started? Please click this link to create your Duda account right now or go visit my FREE get started guide where I'll walk you through the process, step by step.

Looking for more Duda website builder information? Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel where I create how-to videos and also share information on related digital marketing topics and services.

Where Can You Find a Duda Website Builder to Help With Your Website?

If you would like to review our portfolio or inquire about our current Duda website pricing, please use our contact form . We have pricing models specific for agencies and also models that best-serve small businesses directly. Whether you are looking for a completely new website design or just need a refresh of an existing website, we can help. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this article. I truly love working with the Duda website builder and want to help as many people as I can. I hope this information has helped you!!

Conclusion

These website building questions were commonly asked online and I wanted to use them in such a way that would help you see the value and potential for using Duda as your website builder. Whether you want to build or DIY your small business website or begin offering website design services to clients, Duda is an amazing platform and will serve you well. They continue to invest in the platform, have thousands of supporters as well as passionate agency customers, and are growing year over year. The time to create your FREE Duda trial is now. Click here to get started or you can always review my step-by-step guide .

How To Easily Add Website Color Charts Using Google Charts [VIDEO]

thomas.connery@yahoo.com (Thomas Connery) — Sat, 29 Aug 2020 11:57:52 GMT

In this article I'm going to show you how to leverage Google Charts on your Duda website. It's easier than you might think AND if your website needs to display data along with charts or graphs, I highly recommend you embed a Google Chart rather than simply uploading a screenshot or image of a chart. ( Video walkthrough at the bottom .)

Hi, I'm Tom Connery , and I build websites for digital marketing agencies and small businesses on the Duda platform? What's Duda? It's the secret web design platform that many agencies use to provide responsive and affordable websites for their clients.

Before I get started, I want to shout out and thank all of the new members of the Learn Duda Community. That's Jeremie, Ewhyn, Kathryn, Cara, Harvey, Todd, Max, Lacey, Brian, Raj, Leighton, Ramy, and more! If you're curious about learn duda, please visit community.learnduda.com where my goal is to support and promote Duda as a website builder. Learn Duda is all about education and support to help people with Duda website building.

So, google charts or graphs - what is it?

Google chart tools are powerful, simple to use, interactive, and free.

The charts are based on pure HTML5/SVG technology where NO PLUGINS are required in order to display them. Charts can be dynamic as you can ingest data from Google Sheets as well as from other sources. And what I love about it, is you're using code to embed data and information that's interactive. Not only is this better from a user experience perspective, but it's google code! Do you think google chart data might help in ranking if you're trying to communicate specific data points or information that people are searching for? Sure, it should. And it has to be better than simply uploading a screenshot of an Excel chart or some other image and using only an alt image tag to describe what the user is seeing.

Let's add a simple Google chart. Please note that in this walkthrough, you'll need to access dev mode in Duda ( look for the </> icon ) where we'll be making additions to the home-head-section.html file. We will also be going into the dev editor for the HTML widget.

In order to leverage Google Charts, you'll need to add some script code to the head section for whatever page is going to have Google Charts embedded within them. In my example, we're using the home page of the website.

First, you'll need to copy/paste the loader script into your page header. This is the same no matter what type of chart you want to use. Please click the </> icon or button now up toward the right side of the Duda header or top row menu to enter Dev Mode.

Copy/Paste:

Next, you'll want to locate or identify a chart that you'd like to initially embed or test with. In my example, I'll use a Google's basic pie chart .

Click on the pie chart page and you'll see another script that you'll need to embed in the page header. Note, you do not need to include the loader script more than once so leave that code at the top of the header.

For this second snippet of code, you only need to copy/paste the script portion just below the loader.js line. Check it out in the example below:

At this point, you should have copied and pasted two separate scripts into the page header. These are required in order for the chart to load properly. You can now optionally modify the chart's variables if you want to replace Task, Work, Eat, etc as well as it's associated numeric value. The screenshot below shows what you should see in Duda.

How To Display Your Google Chart In Duda

Ok, finally - let's add an html widget so we can embed our custom chart. Using the left-side menu in Duda, locate the HTML widget and drag it onto the screen where you'd like to embed the Google Pie Chart.

LEAVE the default ' Add your custom HTML here ' text in the html widget. What we need to do instead, is locate the div ID of the container . We're going to completely ignore the text or code in the widget and instead, tell the container to load the Google Chart.

Click the "Dev Mode" oval shaped button in the bottom left corner of the HTML widget. Once in dev mode, get the id="" value for the HTML container or widget you just added. The dark grey highlighted line is the one you want to use! Copy and paste this id value to a temp notepad or textedit file or make note of it somewhere if you need to. I'm just going to copy/paste it.

Now, go back into dev mode for the entire site and access the page's specific header html again. We are using home-head-section.html in this example. Locate the var or variable line where getElementById('piechart') is located. Simply paste in your div ID to replace the word 'piechart' but keep the single quotes there!

The below is an example id for a specific html div.

Click Save and go test out your chart!

There you have it folks. Get out of dev mode and go test out your page in preview mode. Your Google Chart should now render properly! I hope this article has helped you with how to add website color charts to your Duda website. If this post did help you, please leave a comment below and let me know. It would also mean the world to me if you shared this article with anyone who might benefit from this information on Google Charts.

OH and finally, if you are new to Duda and would like to sign up for their free trial please consider using my affiliate link where I would receive a small commission ONLY if you did end up purchasing and publishing a plan or website. It's complete free to try for 14 days.

Prefer a video walkthrough instead? Checkout my Google Charts video on YouTube!

How To Increase Email List Subscriber Retention Using Video

Sun, 10 May 2020 20:50:44 GMT

Email is a pain for so many people today. Hundreds, even thousands of emails all vying for attention. As a business, how do you increase open rates, boost engagement from your subscribers, and also provide them a unique experience as compared to your 'attention' competitors? You do so by leveraging personalized video, and today, I'm going to introduce you to a solution that not only works for freelancers, entrepreneurs, or small business owners, BUT can also be used by the enterprise.

Whether you work as a professional customer success manager or are in a related sales role, you've likely experienced a time when one or more customers have stopped responding. Maybe they were ignoring emails, not picking up the phone, and overall, are ghosting you when it comes to checkpoints, status updates, or renewal discussions. Software is transforming the world we live in today, and there are affordable tools and technologies available that will boost engagement, increase open rates, and support an influential relationship .

What if I told you there was an affordable solution to personalize your messaging in such a way that it could transform your customer engagement and relationships?

But wait! What if you're a freelancer, run a digital marketing agency, or build websites and want to personalize your lead and client experiences? That's exactly the point of this article! Personalized video messaging is an amazing solution for MANY BUSINESS TYPES and it's something many of your competitors are not using right now. That means that as an early adopter, you could set yourself apart and begin delivering a unique customer experience. Ready to learn more The answer is Bonjoro !

Onboarding, client check-ins, thanking clients or donors, and nurturing leads will never be the same!

Ok so, how does it work? Once you create your account you'll want to complete your profile in detail. That includes setting up your DNS to ensure your emails will safely reach your contacts without getting lost or dumped into spam folders. Next, you should build your first campaign based on what goal you'd like to achieve. For example, the moment you get a new lead, course signup, email subscriber, or community member, Bonjoro can be configured to add tasks to your to-do list where you can either send individual or bulk private video messages. When you login to your account, either on mobile or desktop, you can quickly record a personalized video message and send it off to your new contact! With all of the cookie-cutter auto responders out there today, personalized video messaging can really start off a relationship on the right foot. Take a look at some of the screen shots below!

How about the workflows and what services does Bonjoro work with? Right now, Bonjoro has twelve (including Bonjoro) services it can inter-connect with in order to build wokflows or task automation. The BEST part is, you can easily use Zapier to build custom workflows for services that are outside of what Bonjoro includes. Take a look at the next two screenshots. I'll show you a list of the default workflows available in Bonjoro and then I'll show you the 'Zaps' I've built in Zapier. Oh, if you think building zaps is difficult, it's not! Just know that you are only allows 5 zaps and 100 tasks per month on their free plan. Overall, I have been thrilled with the result and my new contacts are digging the personalized video messages I've been sending. For all of my Duda website builders out there, Zapier can build automations for you also BUT you must have access to Duda's API. This will depend on your subscription plan but it's good to know!

*Please note, the two free trial buttons on this page contain affiliate links and if you pay for and subscribe to Bonjoro, I would receive a commission. I REALLY want people to know about this service, I love using it and am happy to promote it as it could benefit you too!

So, what about your current email subscribers? If you already have just a few or even thousands of contacts, you can import those folks into Bonjoro by uploading a CSV. Create a campaign, upload the contacts, and then send out a single video message to the entire list in one shot! How amazing is that??!!

Overall, Bonjoro is a fantastic solution for any individual or team who wants to leverage personalized video in order to build influential relationships with their customers or community . You'll have to review the pricing tiers and may be able to negotiate pricing based on your business needs as well. You can group your contacts once they are in the system, then send out seasonal notifications, promotions, thank you's - whatever you want. Record one video and use it many times or record individual videos for each person. It's all up to you. LASTLY - and brand new! Bonjoro just added screen capturing where you can record your desktop or screen and then easily share the clip all while using a branded viewing page or portal. Bonjoro is an impressive tool and I can't wait to see how it continues to develop. Signup today to begin your free trial! Even if you stick with the free tier, I highly recommend you begin leveraging personalized video.

Stay informed on all of my Duda, side-hustle, freelance, and agency related videos that will help you either make money or save money.

Duda Website Tutorial: How To Fix The Blog Title H1 Header Defect

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 19:27:19 GMT

Are you blogging on Duda or are you creating websites on the duda platform that require blogs? I've heard many complaints about blogging on Duda and I'm in the process of putting together an in-depth course or series on how to master blogging on Duda BUT in the meantime, I found an important defect that I wanted to share with you because this may be impacting your Duda blog right now! Let's examine how to fix a Duda blog title or H1 defect.

Hi, I'm Tom Connery, and I build websites for digital marketing agencies and small businesses on the Duda platform? What's Duda? It's the secret web design platform that many agencies use to provide responsive and affordable websites for their clients.

Duda began as a mobile-only website service because trying to build mobile-friendly WordPress sites was difficult a few years ago. The platform grew to provide fully responsive design, meaning that their websites could be customized for browser, tablet, and mobile. They branded themselves as a WordPress killer, and rightly so. The reason I discovered Duda was because I had a friend who owned a business, wanted to move off of WordPress, and also sell products online. I chose Duda as a white label solution and the rest is history.

When it comes to most small businesses, there is no reason they should be required or obligated to use WordPress anymore. Not with powerful builders such as Duda on the market. Please notice I said MOST small businesses. There may be some requirements or use cases that Duda is simply not best suited for.

You do NOT need WordPress in order to rank your blog posts on Google!

So.., the blog. Duda blogs are made up of a handful of areas or settings.

You have a blog landing page which typically contains one or more blog widgets and often a search widget.
Within the blog menu, you can manage posts, update blog settings, edit the default post layout, and also leverage the import posts tool.

For this article, I only want to focus on two key areas of the blog. The first part is the Title. By default, in most Duda templates, the title of your post is mapped as the heading text of your post. Meaning, the large text at the top of your post mirrors whatever your blog title is. It's important to know two things about this header:

First, the header text does not have to mirror your blog title . You can disconnect or delete the header text that was there in the template and create a new one that is left blank or use dummy text like 'Replace with H1'. Just be sure you add a Large Title text widget for the H1.

Now, this second one is critical so listen carefully. I've seen multiple Duda blogs use the Small Title widget as the default header text in the edit layout mode. Why is this bad? Well, your blog article most likely has no H1 text on the page if there is no Large Title widget present! So, go check your blogs and make sure the Large Title text is setup properly within your edit layout mode .

Let's jump over to a screen-share now and I'll demonstrate this for you. (video demo)

There you have it folks. The Small Title widget in most Duda blog templates may be causing you some SEO pain. There's a chance that you may be missing H1 text on all of your blog posts so be sure to check for that and correct it if needed. Lastly, remember that you can optionally use Connected Data to map your blog post title to the Header text on your page. Of course you don't have to do that, but by separating the two you can differentiate your blog title from your header text. On my current blog, I'm using connected data by mapping the post title to the Large Title widget and am trying to write long-tail keyword driven page titles. Overall, it's working pretty well.

If this video helped you and you found this exact issue, please leave a comment below and let me know. It's nice to hear when my content helps someone in the Duda community.

Speaking of the Duda community. I just launched something that may interest many of you. I purchased a license for a user community platform and built a collaboration hub for everything Duda . Yes, Duda has a good support site, there are some existing groups online you can participate in, BUT I wanted to create a formal user community outside of a social network platform. A place that could have a memorable domain. Where Duda customers can connect with peers, ask questions, partake in quality discussions, write detailed articles if they wanted to, and find the help they need that may not always be available in the Duda support portal. This community is for you. Well ya, I own the domain, but I bought the license for us. I'm learning the community administration and configuration so it can serve us best and it would mean the world to me if you create an account and give it a try. Sure, there is very little content at the moment but we need to start somewhere. Obviously, I'm going to be in there answering questions so don't be shy. I may not know the answer to everything but that's the great thing about a community. As more users join, more experience and knowledge will be added collectively.

Ready to join? Signup here!

Also I should have said this earlier but PLEASE note, you do NOT need WordPress in order to rank your blog posts on Google. In fact, some of my blog posts are getting more traffic than my home page or any of my site pages for that matter. I've proven to myself that Duda blogs can rank.

If this video helped you, please be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you're interested in growing a side hustle or starting a business in website design. Hit the little bell icon when you subscribe and you will be notified every time I upload something new!

Stay informed on all of my Duda, side-hustle, freelance, and agency related videos that will help you either make money or save money.

And finally, if you are new to Duda and would like to signup for their free trial please consider using my affiliate link where I would receive a small commission ONLY if you did end up purchasing and publishing a website. It's completely free to try and although it's primarily marketed toward agencies or freelancers who want to sell and build websites, there's nothing stopping a small business owner from purchasing a Duda website to build a site for themselves.

Thank you for your time and attention. I'll be back with more Duda magic soon!

How To Manage and Display Customer Reviews On Any Website

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 14:54:55 GMT

How To Add Customer Reviews To Your Website

Customer testimonials! Love em or sometimes hate em, when building a website for a client, or for your own small business, you may come across a scenario where the business has multiple reviews online that you'd like to feature on a website BUT they're all from disparate sources. How can you create a collective review or testimonial widget that pulls in the best feedback from multiple sources and easily aligns to your sites color scheme?

Hi, I'm Tom Connery of Ayni Media and I build websites for digital marketing agencies and small businesses on the Duda platform. What's duda? It's the secret web design platform agencies use and most of them don't want you to know about it. Initially built as a mobile-only solution, Duda morphed into a fully responsive website builder, added Ecwid for ecommerce, and then began to devour WordPress as a solution for small business websites. Today, Duda is also well suited to convert users from Squarespace, Wix, and other popular DIY website platforms.

Now, I've been building Duda websites since 2016 and just recently began using an addon service that, not only can it help collect customer feedback, but it also adds a layer of governance and will organize and display hand picked reviews on your website or anywhere you can embed div and script html.

The Solution... is Repuso!

Prefer a video version of this content? Watch on my YouTube channel instead!

You start out by connecting to channels that you'd like to monitor. Take for example, Facebook, Google, Thumbtack, and Yelp. Once you have setup the channels, Repuso will begin importing your current reviews where you can then either auto-select all 5-star reviews or hand pick which exact reviews you'd like to use for widgets. The Posts tab displays your review or listening inbox. From here, you can continually check or monitor channel feedback on a routine basis and manually approve feedback or comments you'd like to share. Why is this helpful? Well, not every positive comment comes in 5 star reviews. If you're monitoring Twitter for example, people may @mention you with something positive and if you've connected Twitter as one of your channels, then you can share that mention within a Repuso widget.

Once you've configured one or more social channels to display what you want and you have 'Approved' content ready to go, you then navigate over to the widget setup screen and begin designing your widget.

It's super easy!

At the time of this post you can currently create flash, floating, grid, inline, photoset, and badge widgets. Flash widgets are essentially floating boxes that cycle the reviews as they appear and disappear in the bottom left or right corner of your website. The floating widget is similar but permanent and stays present in either the bottom left or right as the user scrolls down the page. The grid widget is my favorite so far and it simply lets you choose how many rows and columns of reviews you'd like to display in a table form. It looks really good embedded into a live page and if you pair it up with a "Click here to leave a review" button above the grid it can inspire more customers to leave reviews which can sometimes be difficult for some small businesses. The inline widget is also nice to embed on a page or within a blog post and it cycles the reviews or feedback either automatically on a timed basis or by manually clicking the next or previous arrows. Lastly the photoset widget will let you display feedback with photos but I personally have not yet tried that widget.

Are you a Duda team or agency customer? If you'd like this custom blockquote widget , please let me know! - Tom C

Each widget's configuration area has three tabs to go through. The Setup tab will provide your embed code and preview what your widget will look like. If by chance your widget preview area is blank, you may have an issue with the channel configuration or you may not have any approved content so double check your channel configuration. I have seen a slight delay sometimes, right after you create a new channel so you also may need to give the app a minute or two to ensure the reviews are coming in and are populating. Again, all of that can be confirmed in the channel config.

The second tab is for the layout. Here you can set the widget as active or not, change fonts, colors, sizing, remove Repuso branding if you're on the premium plan, as well as a number of other attributes. There's even a custom CSS section if you need it.

In the third tab, Content, you can easily add a filter to your widget using tags. Tagging is a cool option because if you want to label specific mentions or reviews with a tag, you can then build a widget that only displays the reviews where those tags are being used. For example, if you are a dentist who sells a teeth whitening service and you have total of 20 online reviews - 6 of which are related to whitening - I'd label those 6 with a whitening tag in Repuso so I can build a widget that only shows whitening feedback because I want to use it on a specific whitening page or within the website where we're showcasing the whitening service.

Affordable Customer Review & Testimonial Widgets

Ok, I know what you're thinking. Tom! What are the services that Repuso currently works with and can import information from? CHECK OUT THIS LIST! Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Zendesk, Delighted, iTunes, Google Play, Google or Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Capterra, GetApp, G2, Thumbtack, Trustpilot, Yellow Pages, Airbnb, Healthgrades, Vrbo & HomeAway, Booking.com, GetYourGuide, Expedia, and Zillow. WOW! Umm, just a few….

Oh, and if you use Slack for collaboration, you can integrate Repuso to post to one of your Slack channels. This is cool because as new reviews or mentions hit the channel's inbox, new slack posts automatically come into you slack channel feed. It's a nice way to be in the know.

There's even more to Repuso that I won't cover in this video. You'll have to try it out for yourself to see how it can benefit your business or your customer.

And now the big question! What does it cost? Repuso has three tiers currently. FREE, $6 per month, and $12 per month. The FREE tier is perfect if you want to kick the tires. They allow you to share up to 10 reviews from one channel leveraging one widget. At the $6 per month tier you can use the collect routing feature, jump up to 2 channel monitoring and can build 2 widgets. At the $12 per month tier it's basically unlimited everything and you can even add additional users to help you manage posts, setup channels, etc. The catch for agencies at the $12 per month tier is that each new customer account you add will cost $2 per month. To me that's not bad though. $144 per year to leverage the service for your own business and then an added cost of $24 per year for each customer you want to sell review monitoring and custom review widgets to? I think it works.

Monitor Your Business Reviews With Collect Routing

Wait? Review monitoring? You may have heard me say the term 'collect routing'. What's collect routing? If you're on a paid tier, Repuso, will provide a unique url you can add to your email signature or send to customers to request feedback, or add a 'leave a review' button on your website. That specific feedback gets routed to a webpage where the reviewer is offered two choices. Did they have a good experience or could it be better? The press either the green button or the yellow button. If it was good, the next screen will prompt them to leave a review on the channel of your choosing. If it could be better, the reviewer is taken to a form where they put the number of stars, leave a comment, and their name. This adds a basic level of control or governance in your review process and allows you to follow up with a less than thrilleds client to see if you can win them over and it prevents their not quite 5 star review from being published.

To me, this is a lot of value that most small businesses or agencies would appreciate which is WHY I had to make a video about it. It serves both of my audiences very well.

You may have guessed it and YES, I am an affiliate for Repuso and my unique signup link is used on this page if you'd like to try it out. Of course, for any of you who do signup using my link and subscribe to the service, I will receive a small commission. One of the key reasons small YouTubers or bloggers create content is to share information, to educate, to inform, and to help you discover and leverage new products and services that can benefit you (or your customer). Or at least, that's the way I'm doing affiliate marketing. I hope Repuso will be just as valuable to you as its been for me and my customers. Thank you!

Whether you're building a website for yourself or you build them for many agencies or small businesses, Repuso provides an excellent service for organizing and showcasing customer reviews.

Why You Should Upgrade To Premium DNS For Your Duda Website

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 15:48:08 GMT

Should You Add Premium DNS Service?

You may or may not have heard of it before, but Premium DNS is definitely something you should consider activating for your domain. Premium DNS offers advanced DNS management services that enhance the speed, security, and reliability of your website's DNS infrastructure. Not only is Premium DNS meant to protect your website from going down during major DDoS (Denial of Service) attacks, but it also offers advanced DNS services that enhance performance, security, and reliability by cutting DNS lookup times in half, making it a no-brainer from a performance perspective. In this article I will capture a few response tests for aynimedia.com before I enabled Premium DNS and then we’ll examine average response times after.

How Much Does It Cost?

As someone who has built websites consistently for a number of years, I made the switch from Bluehost to Namecheap a while back and couldn’t be happier. While free DNS services are available, they often lack the advanced features and performance improvements offered by Premium DNS services. Premium DNS is an available add-on for many DNS providers, but in this article I’ll primarily focus on Namecheap, Bluehost, and GoDaddy.

GoDaddy = $2.99/month | Namecheap = $4.88/year ($9.98 Renewal) | Bluehost = N/A!

Overall, it generally does the same thing, regardless of which provider you choose. Premium DNS will add a layer of security or protection to ensure your website can remain online when DDoS attacks occur, it will improve performance and redundancy, often provide advanced reporting and analytics, and more. DNS information gets distributed on multiple servers around the world. This means that visitors searching for your site will connect to the closest server, resulting in a faster response time. DNSSEC protects the look up process and verifies that your visitor is truly arriving at your website.

Ya, a lot of that may be TMI for many of you so to summarize, Premium DNS provides faster performance, greater reliability, and better security. Who doesn't want that for their website?

The information in the above table was last updated on May 16, 2016 and was taken from namecheap.com. The information for each competitor in the comparison table may not include certain features, functionalities, or quantities.

Performance Test Before Adding Premium DNS

As promised, lets examine a few different tests from a Sunday evening and Monday morning of how aynimedia.com was responding before I activated Premium DNS using namecheap. Namecheap uses Verisign DNS for its Premium DNS offering and what we want to review is the average response times to see if they've improved once I setup Premium DNS. At the time, all tests were run using solvedns.com which is no longer in service. If you'd like to capture your before and after results now, I recommend: DNSPerf .

Average DNS responses for Sunday evening and Monday morning:
Sun. = DNS1 ( 112 .68ms & 111.99ms | DNS2 ( 64 .8ms & 64.67ms)

Mon. = DNS1 ( 114 .32ms & 114.19ms | DNS2 ( 62 .44ms & 63.08ms)

Tue. = DNS1 ( 108.64 ms) | DNS2 ( 61.7 ms)

Performance Test After Adding Premium DNS

Ya, I get it, we all want to rush to the results! Have a look at the average response times in milliseconds below and you’ll see how Premium DNS has improved the performance and reliability of DNS records for aynimedia.com. Premium DNS services distribute your DNS information across multiple DNS servers, improving performance and reliability. The only concern I have is how New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles are impacted. Ironically, response times are slower on pdns1 than the default dns1 before adding Premium DNS. I know there are different factors that could impact this but it’s something I’m going to keep an eye on. My two cents, even if you buy it at $4.88 for one year to try out the service and then renew annually for $9.98, I still think it’s a bargain. So many business owners stop at just buying their domain. Do yourself a favor and add Premium DNS! It’s a small investment that should benefit your website.

Are you a Duda team or agency customer? If you'd like this custom blockquote widget , please let me know! - Tom C

DNS Providers: Namecheap's Instructions Are Easy To Follow

For activating aynimedia.com on namecheap with Premium DNS it was fully automated. During the checkout process, the system asked if I wanted it enabled now and I approved. Namecheap provides a web-based control panel for managing DNS zones, making it easy to configure and monitor your DNS settings. Overall, if you follow the instructions provided from namecheap it should be very straightforward. I did wait 24-48 hours until running my next response or performance tests before recording the results. It feels good knowing that I have a ‘young’ domain that now has an extra layer of security, is guaranteed to remain online if any major internet attacks occur, and is responding faster to requests on average. Additionally, the dynamic DNS feature allows real-time updates to DNS records, making it easier to manage dynamic IP addresses and hostnames.

Overall Conclusion and Results

The results for aynimedia.com speaks for itself and namecheap.com makes it super easy to add Premium DNS to your domain, even if you want to add Premium DNS to a third party domain! Premium DNS services often include domain name system security extensions (DNSSEC) to protect the integrity of your DNS records. At a price tag for $4.98 for the first year, I think it’s well worth the investment. Speed and security go a long way in supporting your overall domain authority so why not add premium DNS services? Do yourself a favor and stop overlooking premium DNS services. Especially if you have an ecommerce site!!

Please note the two banner images on this page contain affiliate links. If you used these links to access namecheap, and open an account, I greatly appreciate your support! Trust me. Try namecheap.com and you'll never want to go back to another domain provider.

Why You Should Stop Using Stock Photography For Your Website

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 01:24:18 GMT

This article examines why small business owners and entrepreneurs should move away from using excessive stock photography and instead use original content to build competitive advantage and increase conversion!

Say No To Stock Photography When Possible

The convenience and affordability of stock photography can't be argued against but what you may not know is that NOT having unique or personalized imagery on your website or blog may be negatively impacting your website's performance. In addition, it may not clearly separate you from your competition and influence your unique components. In this post we'll examine why original photography is important for your business.

Whether you've built your own website or if you build websites for others as an agency or freelancer, you'll want to pay attention to this blog post. We know how easy it is to leverage free stock photography in order to find images that relate to your brand, products, or services and with tools like Duda, they even integrated both free and premium stock photography options within their website builder to make your life even easier at finding quality content. No doubt, this is the fastest way to populate your website with quality imagery but does it come with a hidden cost?

The Hidden Costs of Stock Photography

Put yourself in the customer's shoes. I try to do this as often as possible. Have you ever visited a website and knew right from the beginning that the photos used were not unique to the location? They did not reflect the brand that the company would prefer to present. Did the website have photos of the key team members or owner? Does it show their office, trucks, work area, or images in the field or on the job? How about images of their building, office, or a street view? All of those are extremely popular and will help you in providing original content that is unique to your business. Not having cookie-cutter images makes you more personable, and most likely, relatable.

Images are important for small business websites. Not only do they make your site appealing, but they also provide context about your products or services. It's super convenient to obtain free as well as premium stock photos today but please understand that stock photos can’t convey your brand identity as well as original images can.

According to an article from The Marketing Garage , there are five key reasons why you should STOP using stock photography as often as you can. Let's break those down below and expand a bit on each one.

What Happens With Unique Images

Brightlocal published this article in April 2019 where they tested two web pages built in a nearly identical fashion except one featured original photography while the other leveraged only stock photos. Why? for some time now, search engine optimization experts have wondered how the unique, tracable, meta data might impact websites when the same image is discovered across multiple domains - sometimes hundreds and thousands of domains! Long story short, the page with the original photography ended up making it to page 2 on Google while the other page sat at position 54. Still think original photos don't matter when it comes to ranking your website pages? Experts are beginning to disagree.

What Should You Do As An Alternative?

Hire a professional photographer! Yes, I know that can be costly but your website is going to cost you when you can't convert those visitors! If you know your way around a camera or have the latest mobile phone tech, you might be able to capture a great image on your own. Odds are, there are photographers in your local area specializing in this service. Not only do many photographers offer one-time services as needed but many also offer subscription packages so you can obtain fresh, updated images for your business on a scheduled or routine basis.

Not only are original photos going to help your brand online, you can leverage them for paid advertising and for social media. Canva is one of my favorite platforms for customizing both stock photos as well as original photos . Add graphics, text overlays, build animations, and resize them for nearly any specific platform. Canva is an amazing tool if you create a lot of content, ads, or are very active on social media. The pro subscription ins $12.95 per month or you can same money when paying annually.

I hope this article helped to convince you that you should be working on building an original photograph content library for your business. Not only is it essential for your website, but these photos can be used over and over again, and even customized, to boost your social engagement. Stop using cookie-cutter stock photos on your paid ads today and increase your CTR!

So ya... I know, I'm guilty of using stock photography but I understand the importance of focusing on original photos. Going forward, I plan to make a conscious effort to use unique photos as much as I can and hope you do too!

Dig this blog post? Please consider sharing it!

New to Duda or ready to begin building websites at scale? Check out our Get Started Tutorial Here!

How To Speed Up Your Ecwid or Duda Store Design Widget

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 00:14:08 GMT

Is your Duda or Ecwid online store widget loading slowly? With Google Pagespeed being so important today, this article shares two vital tips that will improve your product page speed and also allow your end users to leverage a custom way to access product categories.

Tip #1 - Optimize Your Images For Page Speed

The first tip is the most obvious. If you expect products to load quickly on any website, you need to ensure that they are optimized for page speed. From our experience, it's great to included multiple images for each product BUT the initial product image, or the one that is loaded by default, needs to be a PNG image on a transparent background.

Your transparent PNG product image should have a resolution of 72 pixels per inch and should be less than 1000x1000 pixels in width and height. In this example we'll use a 700x700 pixel image in order to keep the filesize as small as possible but still keep the image size large enough in order to get a good visual overview of the product.

No Photoshop? No problem! Visit Pixlr.com and resize your oversized product images for free. Most professionally shot product images will be delivered at 300 pixels per inch and can exceed 3000x3000 pixels. You certainly do NOT want to upload those to your website. Shrink those babies down in order to ensure your product page speed doesn't crawl.

Example: Original 3.9MB product image delivered to client at 300 pixels/inch with a width and height of 4000x4000.

Now, opening that same file in Pixlr , we will resize it for web use. From the main menu in pixlr, click Image - Resize. You'll notice that the pixels/inch setting is not visible. Bummer! But don't worry. Continue to resize the image to 700x700 pixels, make sure 'constrain properties' is checked, and click ok. If your image isn't square, just ensure the long side is set to 700px. Next, click File - Save. Ensure that PNG (transparent, full quality) is selected and rename the file so you don't overwrite your original. Now, go into Finder or Explorer and check out the file size. I'm sure it's drastically smaller but let's do ONE MORE THING to shrink it.

Open a new tab in your browser and goto https://imageoptim.com/versions.html . Download the proper app depending on if you use a Mac or a PC. Once you've uncompressed or installed the app, open it up and you'll notice a very simple interface. For Mac, you just drag and drop the new PNG you exported into the window and it will shrink it down just a bit more. How much? In our example we chopped off 29% and took the file down from 165k to 116k. Odds are, if we dropped the file size to 500x500 or 600x600 pixels, which is still very much acceptable for online product sizing, we'd get the image below 100k. The smaller you can make these file sizes, the better!

Bottom Line - Shrink your images with tools such as Pixlr and ImageOptim before uploading your product images and it should boost your page speed. Do you have to use transparent images as your primary product image? No, but if you can, you should be able to keep the file sizes small enough so they don't negatively impact page speed. Last but not least, it's a good habit only to use PNG files for images with transparent backgrounds. For any other non-transparent image type on your website, use JPG (JPEG). Once again, pay close attention to file size.

Tip #2 - Hide Product Categories And Manually Build Category Links

When configuring the store widget you'll notice that categories and products are displayed by default. What I've found is that by disabling or hiding the categories within the widget, you can instead manually add a text and image section above the store with category specific links that then take the visitor to the proper filtered page result.

It makes sense to try this workaround if your store widget is loading slowly and you've already optimized your images. Displaying the categories within the store design widget may be slowing down the page speed and by disabling them and instead using Duda icons, text, buttons, or small images, you can still drive visitors to the categories. As an added bonus, you also have more control in how the categories are displayed, rather than using the widgets limitations.

Another reason to consider having a custom category link section above the store widget is that the category section may be be partially above the fold and should load almost instantaneously while the store widget is normally delayed. Your site visitor may not notice the slow store delay as they normally wait 1-2 seconds while viewing the header and category section before scrolling.

How do we do this? First of all, make sure you have created your store categories and have aligned your products to the proper categories. This way, you can obtain the category specific urls and begin testing the result in order to ensure the proper products are being displayed.

Find Your Category Specific Urls

Assuming that your categories are being displayed right now using the default settings, open up the formal or sharabble preview window from Duda that you would typically send to a client. One at a time, hover over each category, right click, then copy and paste the unique urls into notepad or some other text editor. Save this file for later reference as 'product category links' and make sure you documented which category aligns to which link.

Hide Or Disable Shop Widget Categories From Displaying

From my experience, applying the CSS to hide the categories is easier if you access the code specific to the widget you want to update. For this example, I'm going to click on the store design widget on my home page and then click on the config or sprocket button then click Edit HTML/CSS from the menu.

Now, copy the code in red I've provided below and paste it as shown into the widget's CSS section for all devices.

.grid__categories {
display: none;

}

Now, click update to apply the css and then go check out your widget. No more categories!

But Wait!??! How do you disable or delete the custom CSS? Ironically, if you go back into the widget's specific CSS, your code may be stripped out. In the next section I'll show you how to remove the CSS if you no longer want it applied but we'll do that by going into developer mode at the site level and not at the widget level.

How to Restore Your CSS And Display The Categories Again

Before we do ANYTHING else. Goto SETTINGS-BACKUP and create a new backup of your website. It's a good habit to get into, especially if you plan on going into dev mode to customize anything. Now, instead of accessing the widget specific CSS, we're going to open your full site CSS and HTML settings by entering developer mode. Click on the </> button in the Duda header as shown below to enter DEV mode:

Once developer mode is opened, you'll notice a bunch of code on the screen and a navigation section on the left side showing different pages, folders, html, and css files. Click on the page specific css file you want to update. In my example, the shop widget I wanted to modify was on the home page so I am going to update the home.css file. Your case may be different and perhaps you want to update store.css or shop.css depending on how you named your store page where the store design widget is being used. See my example below that shows I currently have the home.css file open for editing.

On the right side, or code side, scroll down to the very bottom. You should see the custom css code you pasted in at the very end. Go ahead and delete the code (see sample image below). NOTE!! If you happened to paste in custom CSS multiple times using the store widget, you may see multiple CSS entries impacting .grid__categories. If so, you will need to delete each instance in order to reset the widget to its default configuration.

Awesome! Now, click the Save button up top (and as shown below) and you will commit your updated CSS changes. Once you've clicked Save, you will then need to click Close to go examine and test your store widget.

Manually Create Category Links On Your Page

In the final step you would create a new section above your store design widget that contains the buttons and/or links to the store categories. Use the specific category links you obtained and saved in the text document earlier. If you have six categories, create six new icons, each with their own link or url to open that specific category. This section, row, or rows, can be completely customizable so use some creativity! Depending on how many categories you are using, icons may work well, or perhaps buttons will do the trick. If you do want to create an image grid, just ensure the images are super-small so they load quickly. We're doing all of this work, after all, to improve page speed and showcase our categories in a more efficient and custom way. Take a look at the section I added below that highlights four categories using icons and I think you'll see how much better it is vs. the default store widget. Have any additional Duda or Ecwid store performance tips to share? Please leave a comment!

New to Duda or ready to begin building websites at scale? Check out our Get Started Tutorial Here!

Ayni Media Blog - Affordable Small Business Websites & Digital Marketing

Duda vs Wordpress: Best Website Builder For Small Biz

Should you stop using WordPress for your small business website?

You Need WordPress Because of its SEO Strengths

You Need WordPress Because of its SEO Strengths

You Need WordPress Because its Customization Ability

You Need WordPress Hosting for Your Website

You DO NOT Need WordPress For Your Small Business Website

Best Review Management Software For Agencies 2022 [VIDEO]

Why You Should Collect & Display Customer Reviews

How To Sell Review and Reputation Management Using Repuso?

Does It Work With Your Website Platform?

How Easy Is It To Customize The Widgets?

How Do I Implement a Widget On My Site?

What Types of Widgets Are Available?

How Much Does It Cost?

Start Using Repuso Today!

Our Step By Step Guide On How To Create A Duda Website!

There is an awesome website builder that you probably don't know about. It's not Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, or Wordpress and it's fantastic!

Create Your Duda Account

Start By Choosing A Template

The Planning Phase

Make It Your Own

Publish Your Website

Interested In a Duda Video Overview?

An Affordable Website Design Solution For Small Businesses

How's that for affordable website design for small businesses?

Will You Own Your Website Once It Has Launched?

How Long Will It Take To Build Your Small Business Website?

How Many Pages Should My Website Have?

How Do I Choose A Small Business Website Builder?

Is The Duda Website Builder Only For Business Sites?

How Do I Ensure My Website Is SEO Friendly?

Can You Build An E-Commerce Store Or Site Using Duda?

How Can You Easily Backup And Restore Your Website?

Where Can I Download Or Access Small Business Website Templates?

Where Can You Find a Duda Website Builder to Help With Your Website?

Conclusion

How To Easily Add Website Color Charts Using Google Charts [VIDEO]

Google chart tools are powerful, simple to use, interactive, and free.

How To Display Your Google Chart In Duda

Prefer a video walkthrough instead? Checkout my Google Charts video on YouTube!

How To Increase Email List Subscriber Retention Using Video

What if I told you there was an affordable solution to personalize your messaging in such a way that it could transform your customer engagement and relationships?

Onboarding, client check-ins, thanking clients or donors, and nurturing leads will never be the same!

Stay informed on all of my Duda, side-hustle, freelance, and agency related videos that will help you either make money or save money.

Duda Website Tutorial: How To Fix The Blog Title H1 Header Defect

You do NOT need WordPress in order to rank your blog posts on Google!

Stay informed on all of my Duda, side-hustle, freelance, and agency related videos that will help you either make money or save money.

How To Manage and Display Customer Reviews On Any Website

How To Add Customer Reviews To Your Website

The Solution... is Repuso!

Prefer a video version of this content? Watch on my YouTube channel instead!

Affordable Customer Review & Testimonial Widgets

Monitor Your Business Reviews With Collect Routing

Why You Should Upgrade To Premium DNS For Your Duda Website

Should You Add Premium DNS Service?

How Much Does It Cost?

GoDaddy = $2.99/month | Namecheap = $4.88/year ($9.98 Renewal) | Bluehost = N/A!

Performance Test Before Adding Premium DNS

Performance Test After Adding Premium DNS

DNS Providers: Namecheap's Instructions Are Easy To Follow

Overall Conclusion and Results

Why You Should Stop Using Stock Photography For Your Website

This article examines why small business owners and entrepreneurs should move away from using excessive stock photography and instead use original content to build competitive advantage and increase conversion!

Say No To Stock Photography When Possible

The Hidden Costs of Stock Photography

What Happens With Unique Images

What Should You Do As An Alternative?

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How To Speed Up Your Ecwid or Duda Store Design Widget

Is your Duda or Ecwid online store widget loading slowly? With Google Pagespeed being so important today, this article shares two vital tips that will improve your product page speed and also allow your end users to leverage a custom way to access product categories.

Tip #1 - Optimize Your Images For Page Speed

Tip #2 - Hide Product Categories And Manually Build Category Links

Find Your Category Specific Urls

Hide Or Disable Shop Widget Categories From Displaying

.grid__categories { display: none; }

How to Restore Your CSS And Display The Categories Again

Manually Create Category Links On Your Page

.grid__categories {
display: none;

}