Now, we’re telling the story of Yana – the unstoppable force behind SiteGround’s cyber security measures. As our Information Security Officer, Yana’s passion for protecting our community is unmatched. But there’s more to her than meets the eye – athlete at heart with a pinch of love for painting and gaming, let’s dive into her story.
Join us as we embark on another chapter of our ON & OFF THE CLOCK series, where we celebrate some of the remarkable women of SiteGround. You already met Sophia and Velina whose curious and creative natures know no bounds.
Today, we’re thrilled to introduce you to Dobromira, fondly known as Dobby – a DevOps engineer who fearlessly navigates the predominantly male-dominated profession with her inquisitive mind and problem-solving skills.
We started our ON & OFF THE CLOCK series with a heartfelt gratitude to the dazzling women of SiteGround who bring boundless creativity and expertise to our team and community. First, we introduced you to Sophia – one of SiteGround’s web & graphic designer powerhouses that brings our content to life.
Now, we want you to meet Velina – one of our human resources experts who carries an adventurous spirit with her wherever she goes.
March is here, and with it comes an amazing celebration of womanhood – International Women’s Day. This year, we’re turning our spotlight to the incredible women at SiteGround who bring professionalism and personality to everything they do. We believe that a supportive workplace that values each individual leads to a ripple effect of positive energy that extends far beyond the workspace. In our series, “ON & OFF THE CLOCK,” we’ll be showcasing the stories of some of the women who have been instrumental in SiteGround’s growth, sharing their experience of navigating work and life with a smile.
Meet Sophia – SiteGround’s web & graphic designer powerhouse who brings creativity everywhere.
The new year is here, and what better way to start it off right than turning a business idea into reality? You can do just that with SiteGround’s new email course – Start Your Business Online in 2023. This comprehensive course will teach you everything you need to know to get your business up and running – from ideation to execution.
What does the course cover?
This email course provides a step-by-step blueprint for successfully launching a business. Over a month, you’ll receive eight in-depth emails that will teach you how to:
Validate your idea and define your target audience
Develop your brand identity
Craft your SEO strategy
Build, customize, and optimize your website
Launch your project and start growing
The email course comes with a bundle of downloadable assets and additional resources to help you throughout the learning process. By the end of the course, you’ll be ready to launch your dream project.
Who is this course for?
This course is perfect for entrepreneurs of all experience levels looking to start their own business. Whether you’re starting from scratch or need guidance on where to go next with your existing project, this course will provide invaluable insights tailored to help power up your inner entrepreneur.
Win free hosting!
We believe in the power of new ideas to drive business success. That’s why, as a special bonus, five people who sign up for the course in January will receive one year of free hosting from SiteGround.
So don’t wait any longer – start your business in 2023 with SiteGround’s email course and make your dreams a reality. Your future success is just a few clicks away!
This blog post outlines SiteGround’s Journey of an Online Buyer infographic. Download the full guide to learn about the shifts in customer behavior and how to prepare your website for them.
With consumers changing the way they shop, have you changed the way you sell? Buyers today are more informed, involved, and connected than ever before. And in today’s digital landscape, the buyer’s journey has taken on new shapes and forms. It is no longer a linear process but a complicated web of touchpoints and interactions. To keep ahead of the competition as a small business and website owner, it’s critical to grasp this new buyer’s journey online.
What is the buyer’s journey?
The buyer’s journey is the process consumers go through, from initial awareness to final purchase. It illustrates how each step leads to the next to ensure you are aware of the actions that cause potential clients to either make a purchase, or back out of it. By understanding the buyer’s journey, you can better anticipate the needs of your customers and provide them with a seamless experience from start to finish.
The three stages of the buyer’s journey
It’s up to you to observe how potential buyers react to your selling approach and determine precisely where to focus your marketing and sales efforts. The buyer’s journey is mapped out in three stages. Each stage allows for distinct interactions between you and your users.
Awareness stage
During the awareness stage, the buyer becomes aware of a problem or challenge they face. They will then begin to search for solutions to that problem. Your job during this stage is to make sure you are visible to the buyer and that they are aware of your product as a solution to their problem.
Consideration stage
The consideration stage is when the buyer narrows their options and compares different solutions. Usually, this happens on your website. During this phase, it is your responsibility to give the customer the best user experience possible, which entails having a fast and secure website. Also, give them more information about your product and how it compares to competing products.
Decision stage
The decision stage is when the buyer finally chooses a solution. Your job during this stage is to make the purchase process as easy as possible and address any final buyer concerns.
Your website’s role in the buyer’s journey
While the buyer’s journey may start elsewhere, such as with a Google search, a large part of it will happen on your website. This is why it’s essential to have a website optimized for SEO that provides a great user experience, including ultrafast website speed, security, and reliability. If you can do this, you’ll be able to guide the buyer through the journey and ultimately convert them into a customer.
The 2022 online buyer’s journey highlights
Online shopping has evolved beyond simply being more convenient
Online shopping has come a long way since its inception. What started out as a convenient way to search for items has evolved into a major part of the retail landscape. Consumers around the world were once skeptical about online shopping, but that has changed dramatically over time – especially after the pandemic. Statista reports that in 2021, retail ecommerce sales were 5.2 trillion US dollars globally. They estimate this number will grow 56% in the next years, amounting to 8.1 trillion by 2026.
Seasonal shopping now starts much earlier
In the past, people would wait until the last minute to do their holiday shopping. However, people now do their seasonal shopping much earlier. They have many more options to choose from online, and want to take their time to find the perfect purchase. This is due to several factors, one of which is the growth of online shopping. With the shopping season starting earlier and earlier each year, small business owners need to be prepared to accommodate early shoppers.
As advertising costs soar, brands prioritize building customer lifetime value
Building customer lifetime value is more important than ever. As advertising costs rise, brands are increasingly focused on creating long-term relationships with their customers. And that’s okay because we’re also seeing a shift in the way consumers choose from whom to buy. They’re much more likely now to purchase from companies with strong brands that identify with their consumers. It’s important to remember that sustainable growth comes from focusing on your customers. So you need to build a brand that customers can trust and foster a sense of community.
Download the full guide below to explore the changes in customer behavior and learn how to get your website visitors a step closer to the “buy” button on every step of their online journey.
Did you know that even your website makes an impact on the environment? To celebrate Earth Day, SiteGround launched an educational campaign that helps website owners calculate their site carbon footprint as well as offer optimization tips and tricks to help reduce CO2 emissions.
However, our efforts did not stop there. It’s important to remember how all our individual everyday actions add up to a cleaner and healthier Earth. We invited our client, Michelle Li, to share her insights on how we can live a greener life. Hosted on SiteGround, she founded clevercarbon.io with a mission to build a carbon literate society and help people make clever carbon decisions for themselves and our planet.
Learn About Carbon Footprint in a Simple and Hip Way
In her quest to understand and reduce her carbon footprint, Michelle was unpleasantly surprised that most of the websites she visited were full of confusing technical data. How can someone understand their carbon footprint when it appears that the majority of educational websites are overly complicated?
That motivated her to start Clever Carbon, with the mission to educate people about their carbon footprint in a fun, hip, and relatable way. The Clever Carbon team manages to simplify the complexities of carbon footprint data so that everyone can understand the problem and implement solutions. At the heart of their work stands the carbon footprint quiz which helps people understand the things in their daily lives that generate carbon footprint.
3 Tips to Reduce Your Personal Footprint
A person’s highest individual carbon footprint comes from their home energy use, their diet and transportation choices. Together with Michelle, we prepared a few day-to-day actions that you can take to limit your impact on the environment.
First you can start by calculating your carbon footprint here.
Smart energy consumption at home
While electricity generation is shifting toward more renewable sources, home energy consumption still accounts for the majority of our emissions. Some simple actions you can take to reduce the consumption are:
Unplug your phone charger, monitor or any other electrical device when it isn’t in use.
Use energy-efficient light bulbs.
Turn off lights when you’re not using them.
Choose renewable sources when possible.
Plant-based Diet
Did you know that emissions are directly related to what we eat? When it comes to food, we must examine what happens during manufacturing as well as transportation. Here’s what you can do:
Fill your plate with vegetables, fruits, grains and beans.
For meat-lovers, swap a few meals per week to vegan or vegetarian.
Choose local and seasonal food.
Commuting
Carbon dioxide emissions from transportation are a well-known issue. There’s no need to get rid of your car just yet, but here are several things you can do better:
Choose public transportation or even biking when possible.
Consider switching to an electric vehicle.
Carpool to work to split the emissions between the number of people in the car.
3 Tips to Reduce Your Website Footprint
It may surprise you, but on average, a website generates 1.76g of CO2 per visit due to all of the processing power required to load and deliver to users all over the world. Don’t worry, there are several things you can do to create a more sustainable website. The good news is that most of the actions are based on best website practices, so it’s a win-win situation for both the planet and your business.
Choose a Green Web Host
Start by choosing a host committed to minimizing data centers energy consumption and is running on renewable sources. On top of that it offers blazing-fast speed for your website success with top security measures in place, like SiteGround.
Optimize Your Website
From caching to media and front-end optimizations, your website will get lighter and page load faster, saving energy from the processing time. Here are some actions you can take:
Enable Full-page Caching: Caching is a sure way to speed up your website. Our powerful full-page (Dynamic) caching solution can make your website 5 times faster with no additional settings required.
Optimize media and front-end: Your website is the face of your business and you want it to stand out. But media and front-end files can surely slow your website. With our easy SiteGround Optimizer plugin for WordPress, you can enjoy powerful website optimizations with a click.
Use a CDN: The purpose of a CDN service is to reduce the distances between server and user. With SiteGround’s free CDN, you’ll be able to speed up your website for users who are browsing from all over the world.
Write Clear Web Content
On-point content and user-friendly experience will help your website get easily found. This way, you’ll save users time from surfing the internet all day and lower their energy consumption.
Make Better Decisions for Our Planet
“Starting our carbon literacy journey is an important way for each of us to make small, but better decisions for our planet.” It creates a pattern where each person can make smarter and healthier choices in our daily lives.
We dedicated the month of March to inspiring women entrepreneurs who turned their ideas and passions into full-time businesses. Our Women-owned series features amazing women from various industries, including hand-made pottery, web development and design, and tour photography. And all those powerful females trusted SiteGround to host, build, and grow their websites.
We’re excited to share the story of another one of our customers. Alisha Kumar, founder of thesocialproject.ca – an all-in-one creative agency. As part of our mission to inspire people worldwide through the power of the web, we wanted to share her story so that you can learn from her experience. Let’s dive in.
The Start of The Social Project
From a business aspect, Alisha found a gap in how businesses use social media to achieve their marketing goals. So she took that opportunity and founded her creative agency specializing in helping brands with their marketing efforts through social media to increase brand awareness and sales.
However, The Social Project was inspired by one leading personal question: “How do I break the barriers of being in rooms where nobody else looks like me.” Being in the marketing industry for over 12 years now, Alisha struggled to find a way to stand out in the industry as a woman, and more notably, as a woman of color. She aspires to change the marketing industry “because it doesn’t look like me at all.”
Your Website is Your Storefront
When people are browsing, you want to be that one website that they stop at. Looking back on her brand identity back in 2017 – being all rose gold with a heart in the logo – Alisha didn’t find it authentic; instead, she felt she was trying to fit in with the current scene. She had to rethink her branding “because I can’t show up for a business that isn’t representative of me.” As a result, she returned to the drawing board and refined her brand into an edgier look that fully embodies her.
Initially, Alisha was hosting her website with another company. However, after the rebrand, her web designer suggested using SiteGround, and after the switch, “I honestly haven’t had a problem at all.”
Tips for Social Media Engagement
Being a social media expert, Alisha remarks that “social media isn’t about you, it’s about your audience.” Listening to your audience, learning what they want to see, and knowing what they want to learn is essential for success. There is a lot of social listening to do.
Social listening refers to monitoring your brand’s social media channels, explicitly tracking mentions of your brand, customer feedback, industry trends, and more. With social listening, you can produce the kind of content that followers want, develop new ideas based on trends, have a better customer experience by interacting with customers directly, and consistently adjust your strategy to best fit their needs.
On Being a Good Leader
Alisha believes that good leaders should be good listeners. They should listen to what their team has to say and contribute to their ideas. Working with a team means you will use the strengths of each member, making the whole better than the individual.
As for being a good leader to your business, Alisha says, “remember why you started.” It’s so easy to get lost in the little things, and businesses should go back to why they started in the first place. Focus on your company’s original mission and what you hope to achieve with it.
Create Your Agency Website
If you have been thinking of starting your own agency, you have to have concrete ideas of what type of services you would provide. Ideas, while important, are not enough. Start a business plan for your new agency, which includes picking a niche, defining a target audience, creating a value proposition, and considering how you’ll earn money. Then you need to go online! Most of all, give your ideas a chance and as Alisha says, “no risk, no story.”
Your branding is influenced by your personality, which in turn influences the tone of your copy, your color scheme, and your fonts. With SiteGround, you can have that complete freedom, coupled with amazing tools to build, host, manage, and launch your successful business website that reflects who you are. Our high-performance platform will make your site load up to 500% faster thanks to our proprietary technologies crafted for top speed and security. We also crafted our own account management software that provides an outstanding user experience, along with superior efficiency when managing one or multiple websites. With the right partner you can take that leap without thinking “what if” down the road.
In our Women-Owned series, we partnered with four female entrepreneurs who host, build, and grow their websites on SiteGround platform.
This is the story of Anna Lee, a music, tour and brand photographer living in Los Angeles and the webmaster behind annaleemedia.com. If you’re a photographer, aspiring to be one, or interested in how to build your online portfolio – dive into Anna’s story and find valuable tips that might be just the thing you need to read.
Entering the Tour Photography World
Anna Lee was that one child who constantly carried a camera, documenting the surrounding world. Following a very natural path, her love for music and photography fueled her journey as a tour photographer.
Tour photography connects the audience with the artist’s experience and documents moments that otherwise can’t be seen behind the scene. Anna describes the feeling of being on tour with musicians as “incredibly special, a little bit surreal and totally comfortable at the same time.”
Reflecting on her 10-year journey as a tour photographer, Anna attributes her success to curiosity and bravery. As a photographer, you must constantly challenge your creativity. You must also work up the courage to reach out to your customers without the fear of being rejected. Once you liberate yourself from that fear, the horizon of opportunities becomes far broader. Stir in a bit of patience, and you’ll be on the way to steady growth in what you’re doing.
Building An Online Portfolio
It’s easy today for people to rely on social media as a place for their portfolios. However, social media gives you limited control over what’s getting viewed and how your content is presented. Contrary to that, a website gives you the freedom to express your unique style as a photographer and curate your work. Expanding on this, Anna explains that “a photographer’s website is such an important home base for all of your work because you actually own your website.”
Before SiteGround, Anna hosted her website with another provider. Even though she wasn’t satisfied with them, she felt intimidated to transfer her websites with another host, feeling it would be messy and complicated.
Unlike her fears, Anna found migrating her website to SiteGround to be “pleasantly super easy.” She was also excited by the speed SiteGround offers. Anna was being very precious about her website. She wanted something really unique and different from what other photographers were doing. And the decision to switch to SiteGround completely transformed her previous experience and made it possible for her to realize exactly what she wanted.
Being an Early Adopter of Full-time Tour Photography
Being one of the early women adopters to enter tour photography as a full-time job, Anna occasionally faced certain setbacks. Initially, she encountered the uncertainty of musicians about bringing a woman into the tour, “some viewed it as a challenge rather than an asset to have a woman on their team.”
However, she eventually found the artists and the clients who were not afraid of embracing women into their camp. She worked with people who wanted her there and were excited about having her on their team, “Those ended up being the best working relationships that I had and that I still continue to work with to this day.”
Anna believes that we are reaching a point where photographers, visual artists, and content creators are viewed, approached, and treated with the value that they merit. Specifically, women photographers are finally being attributed the value they deserve for what they provide.
Word of Advice For Young Photographers
One of Anna’s mantras is “don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.” That’s something that she wishes she had realized right from the very beginning.
When she decided to pursue tour photography, what helped her breakthrough was realizing that she had to create her own job. Naturally, like many others, she didn’t know how to approach clients. She had to pitch herself to other people and overcome the fear of feeling like she was being intrusive. However, she chose a different approach – she pitched her clients by presenting the opportunity and the value she could add to what they’re doing.
Anna’s second piece of advice is to do what you want consistently and with as much authenticity. If you’re creating for what you think other people want or what you think is popular, you will get burned out. But if you create what you want to do, the right people will find you, and they will compensate you for doing the thing you love to do. That will keep you excited as you continue into a specific career.
Build Your Own Portfolio Website
No matter how skilled you are, SiteGround enables you to start easy, build fast, and manage your website effortlessly. For those who are just starting out, we have a helpful tool – the WordPress Starter. You can go through our pixel-perfect customizable templates, some with incredible photography options. But to have a successful portfolio that generates leads, you’ll also need a contact form, SEO optimization tool, performance analytics, and a calendar. With SiteGround, you can add these with a click of a button. Suppose you prefer to have a designer build your portfolio site. In that case, SiteGround makes it easy for you to give collaborators access, keeping the ownership and privacy of your website to you. With the right hosting provider, you can overcome technological limitations and build a powerful online presence. After all, your website is the go-to place for your potential clients.
Now, we introduce you to Laurel Brown – the self-taught web designer and developer behind laurelbrownmedia.com. Laurel started her web design and development agency dedicated to helping small businesses prosper online. Laurel has helpful advice for others who want to take the same journey as a designer and developer.
One Failure Can Lead To a New Opportunity
We need to rewind a bit to get to the heart of how Laurel got into web design and development. She had another business before starting Laurel Brown Media. Even though she didn’t have any experience in website building, she opted to create her own website for it. Beginning as a hobby, she gradually expanded into designing websites for her friends who owned small businesses. After her first business came to nothing, Laurel saw her newfound interest in web design and development as an opportunity to start over.
Speaking about her mindset of trying again with another business, she explained, “this other business failed massively. Nothing can be worse than that. So let’s try it again. That’s why I decided to go for it.” She discovered the intersection of value and passion in web design, which laid the foundation for starting her small agency.
Selling Services Online
While e-commerce grows in popularity, service providers, such as web agencies, are confronted with the issue of selling intangible “products” like their time and knowledge. So how is one supposed to start selling their services online?
As with every business, you must first define your niche. Consider where your service fits in the market and how you may differentiate yourself from the competitors. Are you going to specialize in one service or offer various services? Who is your target audience? Take into account every detail from gender, age, income level to career, education and spending patterns.
Laurel, for example, focuses on web design and development for small businesses. She also provides graphic design and copywriting services to complement her business. Interestingly enough, Laurel’s earliest clients were predominantly female. It seemed like her clients were relating to her because she was just like them – a female who runs her own business.
Once you’ve identified your niche and target audience, you need to drive traffic to your website. Your freelance or agency website serves as your online professional representation. Expert website designer Laurel shares that a website builds credibility. Having a website shows people that you are a real business with valuable services or products to offer. When people research their desired products, your website will likely be one of the first things they look into. And to this she points out, “It’s just so important to have a website because if you don’t, someone else does.”
More and more of a company’s sales happen on their website. Regardless of the industry, most customers will first visit a company’s website before making a purchase, even if the business does not have an online store, mainly for credibility and product/services research. Consequently, having a strong website presence can substantially impact the success of your business and help you generate more income.
Setting Up Your Clients to Success
When designing a website, it is critical to consider the client’s interests. Laurel advises designers to put their preferences aside and listen to their clients to get a pretty good idea of who they are and what they are trying to share with the world.
As a website designer, Lauren admits to feeling like she’s empowering business owners to take control of their online presence, including managing their websites, so that they can evolve on their own.
When it comes to multi-site development and management, freelance developers and agencies need to consider a partnership with a trusted hosting provider that meets their needs. Laurel trusts SiteGround with many of her web projects. She points out that SiteGround performance optimization tools really win her over during our conversation.“There’s a lot of amazing site tools that I feel like other hosting companies don’t have.”
Furthermore, SiteGround allows freelancers and agencies to access and manage all their sites from one dashboard. With our service, web creators can add collaborators to a site such as designers, developers, content creators, each with their own and limited access. If you build sites for clients but want to continue maintaining the site after handing it off, you can choose to stay on as a collaborator when the main site management has been transferred to your client.
To maintain professionalism, you need to do things right from the start till the end. Incorporating a smooth handover process will bring many benefits to you and your clients. Delivering a finished site is a nice experience, and transferring ownership is simple with SiteGround’s Transfer Ownership tool.
Seeking Change in the Web Development Industry
As a small business owner in the web development industry, it’s hard to be noticed when everyone is fighting for that attention. Laurel believes that having more collaboration would be a remedy to this. She knows firsthand how it feels to start on your own, working by oneself and not having any support system or community.
Eventually, over time, she found a stronger support system. As soon as she started to work with other creative, supportive people like web developers, SEO experts, graphic designers, she really felt a sense of relief. It was like she could learn much easier and work so much better, since she was around people who shared her work.
Owning a Successful Business
When it comes to creating websites, the pure joy from her work comes from knowing a website can have such a huge impact on the business. If someone gets a client because of their website or sells a product because of their website, it makes her feel part of their success.
To be successful, Laurel believes that you need to be dedicated, motivated, and passionate about what you’re doing. Your idea needs to ignite you. She wakes up every day and she’s excited about her work. She also reminds us that people should take care of their mental health, balance rest, and be business owners.
We all know that tons of great women want to build their own creative agencies. What is your advice for these aspiring entrepreneurs? Tell us about it in the comments below, and keep an eye out for more women-owned business stories!
