heartharmony.com.au

Have you ever looked at your website in different web browsers? Many people use Internet Explorer, but many more use things like Firefox, Flock, Opera, Navigator (the list goes on). There are also many more people checking out websites from their mobile phones and PDAs.

What looks brilliant in Explorer may look like a pile of dog food in another browser (or a mobile phone) which means you are losing sales and customers.

I have 3 different browsers installed on my work computer and check out pages on each of the three browsers to make sure the site looks OK across the three of them. It may not be perfect – but at least it gives me an idea of what I am up against!

Recently I have had a few clients whose websites just didn’t work across the 3 browsers – which meant they were throwing away at least 10% of all site visitors before they even had read the first word on the page (for a copywriter that is just straight sacrilege!).

If your site doesn’t look great across different browsers, it is time to visit your friendly web developer to get your site updated.

While you are there – ask them to put in a permanent 301 redirect for your website. There is a historical quirk that means Google (and other search engines) index both www.heartharmony.com.au and heartharmony.com.au. When they do that you could get hit with what is called “duplicate content penalty” and lose Google rank as a result.

The simplest way to fix it is a permanent 301 redirect so that heartharmony.com.au automatically redirects the search engine to www.heartharmony.com.au.

Does all of this sound weird? Go to your browser and type in your website without the www. in front of it. What comes up? If it is anything other than www.yoursite.com.au you are losing valuable Google rank. Talk with your developer or if you are a closet geek go to your cpanel (if you have one) and put in a redirect yourself.

Ingrid Cliff
Heart Harmony

Putting your business into words