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If you are only relying on Weebly's statistics about visitor traffic to your website, you should probably consider using Google Analytics as well. Afterall, Google is the leading search engine and they are very advanced in tracking website activities - including who's visiting your website and what they are doing.

We use Google Analytics and monitor our data all the time. This allows us to understand which pages are doing well, and which needs more work (evidenced by low amount of time on the page, and higher exit rates, for example). This can result in your visitors staying longer on your website, and also be more engaged with your website.

This also provides massive insights into your visitors' website surfing habits, and what matters to them. These are really important information for you to understand your audience.

In this Weebly video tutorial, I'll walk you through a live demonstration of how to successfully set up your own Google Analytics, the key difference between Weebly and Google's statistics, and an important tip on how to filter out your own IP address so the statistics won't count your own surfing activities - most people forget about this which is a huge mistake!

Watch the Weebly tutorial video here

 
 
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What’s the big deal about SEO when you're building a website using Weebly?  Well, it doesn't really matter if you have the most beautiful website in the world, if nobody can appreciate it because they can't find it, then it's pretty much pointless, wouldn't you agree?

This is why SEO or "Search Engine Optimization" is very important to getting your website masterpiece discovered by people. 

There is plenty of literature about SEO on the internet and one simple blog post cannot possibly cover all the techniques used for SEO. 

But one wonderful thing about Weebly is that they allow you to quickly and easily insert important components that major search engines look for when they index or crawl websites.

Weebly allows you to insert a site description and also insert keywords that best describe your website. 

In our Weebly tutorial video, we'll show you how the tools work, and where it shows up in search engines.  Paying attention to these tools is the first step towards SEO. 

Click here to watch the Weebly tutorial video.


 
 
Did you know that you could easily change your Weebly fonts and links styles?  Weebly has a tool within its Editor that allows you to change or adjust your entire website's font styles, colors and link colors. 

You can elect to make specific font style or color changes to either the header element, paragraph element, and so on. 

One benefit is that if you have hyperlinks throughout your website (or words or phrases that are linked to another webpage), you would want your visitors to know which webpages have already been visited.  One very easy way to communicate this is to have the links’ color change when the destination webpages have already been visited.

This way, your website visitor can distinguish between pages that he or she has yet to visit, and those that have already been visited.  This subtle detail can really enhance your website visitors’ experiences. 

In this Weebly tutorial video, we'll show you a Weebly tool that allows you to accomplish this.

Click here to watch the Weebly tutorial video.

 
 
Have you wondered how to create a Weebly website that really showcases beautiful images?  If you are a photographer, or just someone that appreciates beautiful pictures, Weebly has exactly the tools you need to build a very special website.

Within Weebly's arsenal of website building tools (called "elements"), there are two particular elements that you could use to build an awesome website to showcase images.

The elements are "Slideshow" and "Gallery".  Slideshow basically allows you to sift through and showcase images.  You can control whether you want the images to change by a fading effect of a shifting effect.  You can also control how long each image is displayed before the next image is shown.  You can also hyperlink each image to different website pages.  A very useful tool for sure!

For Gallery, instead of showcasing each image one at a time, this element allows you to display all your favorite images all at once so your website visitor can appreciate all of them together.  The visitor could also click on the images to enlarge them on screen.  Alternatively, you could also hyperlink the images to other webpages. 

Very useful tools for image oriented websites! 

In this Weebly tutorial video, we'll show you how to best use these two elements to build your website.  Even if you don't have an image / picture oriented website, you can be sure to pick up a couple of tips on how you can use these elements to build your own website to make it stand out.

Click here to watch the Weebly tutorial video.

 
 
Did you know that Weebly has a tool for you to group or edit your Weebly navigation bar or menu bar?  If you have a lot of different categories / pages in your website, your navigation or menu bar can get very cluttered, very quickly.

One thing that Weebly allows you to do is "group" the categories into a "More" category.  This "More" group will appear at the very end of your Weebly navigation bar, and it will consolidate all your pages or categories that didn't fit within the pre-set length of the navigation bar. 

When you point your mouse cursor over the "More" group, all your other pages will show up.

However, you can actually turn this off if you want all your categories or pages to show up on your navigation bar.  What this means is that Weebly will stack your menu bar to two or more layers so it can fit all the pages. 

Some designers may not find this appealing, some may.  But the option is there for you to choose.

We'll show you in this Weebly tutorial video how to switch this option on and off.  Try it out for yourself to see if you like it!

Click here to watch the Weebly Tutorial Video.

 
 
There is a very useful tool created by Weebly that can allow you to backup your Weebly website.  We do this regularly for our websites that are built on Weebly's platform. 

You can never be sure what can happen to your website.  Have you ever had a computer crash on you?  If so, did you backup your important files?  I certainly hope so. 

The same concept applies here.  It is a very good habit to backup your Weebly website at least once a week.  Especially if you are very active with your website. 

The size of the backup file is directly correlated to the size of your website.  If you have a lot of graphics and pages, the larger the backup file.  But don't worry, the amount of hard disk space on computers nowadays is plenty.

One quick tip is that you should save your backup file in an external drive if you can.  Even a USB key / thumb drive will do the job. 

Backing up a Weebly website is very quick and easy.  We'll show you exactly how to do this in our Weebly tutorial video.  

 
 
Want to know how to change or customize the Weebly background of your Weebly template?  It's actually not too difficult - we'll show you how.

I’m sure you know by now, it's not easy to find the "perfect" Weebly template to use for your Weebly website.  A core part of all Weebly templates is the background images.  Having the perfect background image for your Weebly website is in a way, a "life or death" matter…. At least from a designer's perspective!

The background image for your Weebly website speaks a lot about what your website represents.  Your mission, message, whatever it is. 

Having said that, understanding that you can actually change your Weebly background image is a critical part of building out your website.  Weebly has set up tools that allow you to quickly and easily do this. 

All you have to do is find the perfect image or pattern and you can quickly swap out your existing background image for your custom one.  We'll show you in our Weebly tutorial video how to accomplish this. 

It may take a few tries to get it just perfect, but the approach is actually very simple.  No coding is required, just replace certain files inside Weebly Editor will do.

Click here to watch the Weebly tutorial video on how to change Weebly background

 
 
If you want to change the width of your Weebly website, you can do this on your own and you actually don't need to seek out professional assistance.  

Why would you want to adjust the width of your Weebly website?  Well, different webmasters prefer different looks and feels to their websites.  Some people like wider content area, some like skinnier.  

It is really up to you how you would like to build out your Weebly website.  But one thing is for sure, it's not as difficult as you think to adjust the width of your website.  

Although Weebly is wonderful in creating tools or engines to help you build websites, unfortunately, they didn't teach you how to adjust certain aspects of your Weebly template.  

All of Weebly's generic templates are unique, so there really isn't any "one method fit all approach" to adjust the width of your Weebly website.  But don't worry, we'll show you the core fundamental method so even you can do it yourself.

In this Weebly tutorial video, we'll go into an example Weebly template and show you where to look for the right areas of the codes to adjust.  From this video, you can try out the same approach with your own Weebly website.  

Just keep in mind that there is no one single set way to change anything with websites.  Remember, each Weebly website is designed and coded differently.  With this in mind, I can only show you the core idea of how to do it, but you'll have to go through the "trial and error" approach to accomplish what you want. 

Click here to watch the Weebly tutorial video.
 
 
Did you ever think about changing the header height of your Weebly website?  If you are using a standard Weebly template, you will notice that there is a horizontal, rectangular header image on the top area of the template or website.  This is where you could insert your own custom image to give your website a customized design.

However, you may want to adjust the height of the header image to customize the overall design and "feel" of your website.  Everybody has different preferences, right?  Some Weebly users want shorter header images, some prefer a taller images.

The next question is, what if you don't know how to adjust the codes?  Although Weebly is awesome at allowing non-technical users in building websites quickly, they didn't design their templates to allow users to easily adjust the header heights.  You'll have to go into the codes....

Fear not, in this Weebly tutorial video, we'll show you exactly where to find the codes, and within the codes, what to adjust in order for you to "play around" with your header image heights.  

Keep in mind that every single Weebly template is different, so the codes of your template may look slightly different than the one we used for illustration in our video.  Nevertheless, the concept is similar, and if you are willing to give it a good go with a "trial and error" approach, I'm fully confident that you will be able to do it.


Watch our Weebly Tutorial video here
 
 
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At the time of this article, our understanding and the broader Weebly user community's expectation is that Weebly will "hopefully" release a search bar tool with their new themes.  

A search bar is no doubt very useful for all Weebly users.  Allowing your website visitor to quickly search for what they want always enhances their visiting experiences… or does it?  Not all the time.  I'll explain why towards the end of this article.

But firstly, for Weebly users who can't wait for Weebly to release search functions in their new templates, for reasons of (1) you just can't wait or (2) you don't want to change themes, here are a couple of quick remedy to satisfy your needs.  

Google has a very powerful search bar that you can quickly install into your Weebly website.  It's free, and an additional benefit that you may not have thought of, is that if you install Google's custom search bar into your website, this implies that Google is aware of your website and your content.  

For those who want another option other than Google, we'll show you in the video another search bar tool that you could insert into your Weebly website.  

As mentioned before, about the downside of having a search bar, is that this raises your website visitors’ expectations of finding what they need.  You see it's more of a psychological issue.  When you see a search bar, you expect the search results to return some goodies.  

What if your visitors don't find what they are looking for?  Your content could very well be there, but they might just have searched with different keywords.  If they are immediately disappointed, would they leave your website instead of spending some time browsing through your content to discover what they need?  

Just something to ponder about.  Having a search bar while is useful, this is also a drawback.  

In our Weebly tutorial video, we'll show you step-by-step of how to install a Google search bar tool into your website.  We'll also show you an alternative tool at the end of the video.  Click here to watch the video.

 

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