A regular guy named Taylor and his dog Madden want to help you move your furniture, and their website couldn’t be clearer about this.
“Just a regular guy who can move your furniture and his regular dog who’s just darn cute,” says the tagline for the 1 Dude and His Dog business.
Their information is clearly displayed, and the websites loads quickly on a smartphone, where more than 28 million Canadians are expected to access the internet from by 2021. It’s a picture-perfect website, according to Jill Schoolenberg, country manager of GoDaddy Canada.
“Being mobile first today is so important,” she explains.
(Un?)Fortunately, the 1 Dude and His Dog business doesn’t exist – not yet, anyway – but the website certainly does, and it was created in less than an hour by GoDaddy Canada. During its #GetItOnline campaign which kicked off two weeks ago, GoDaddy Canada has been scouring Twitter for people’s million dollar ideas and creating websites for them in under an hour. The purpose is to show how easy it is to build a website through the company’s website builder and educate people about website creation in general. To date, GoDaddy Canada has built 22 websites, all of which can be found at sitesinunderanhour.ca.
“People tend to think it’s too hard or too expensive,” Schoolenberg told ITBusiness.ca. “We want to encourage people to take that leap.”
When people do take that leap, Schoolenberg says there are a few common mistakes being made.
“You don’t need that many pages … but there are a few basic things you need that people forget,” she says.
One of them is contact information.
“You want to make sure people are able to reach you,” she says, adding at the very least, include a form people can fill out so you can contact them.
Another overlooked part of website building is the name. Schoolenberg says an idea’s name should be creative and closely resemble the domain name.
“And obviously being in Canada, put yourself on “.ca” to place yourself higher in search rankings,” she says.
Schoolenberg suggests even if an idea isn’t fully thought out, but the name of it is, purchase the domain name.
“A lot of people get a domain name when they have an idea that they want to follow through with in the future,” she says, while stressing the importance of search engine optimization.
And lastly, don’t force e-commerce tools into your website if you don’t need it. Think of it as an advertising vehicle or a lead generator, says Schoolenberg.
“I think a lot of people get confused and think websites are all about e-commerce,” she says. “It’s actually a very small portion of Canadians who have e-commerce sites in Canada.”