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You can write your website copy: mastering the structure, style and process of web writing

It’s a funny thing, writing. Thanks to compulsory education and the invention of a movable-type printing press, most of us can do it. If you’re reading this, chances are you can string together enough words to form a semi-coherent email or scribble a few well wishes on a birthday card. So why is writing website content so darn hard? ...

New Features: Edit the design of specific stacks

Now you can edit the design of a specific stack and all of the content inside it to create a different looks down your page. There are endless ways this can be used to help improve the design of a website and it helps break up content, instead of your whole page having the same background colour and content styling. Check out the specific features below and get thinking of how you can use this on your own Rocketspark website. ...

Waipa Business Awards: Rocketspark clients in the business of winning

Nothing inspires us at Rocketspark like our clients. Why? Because they’re a bunch of winners—officially! Following on from the success of our client Rob May Builders in taking out the supreme award last year, a huge number of our clients were recognised at this year’s Waipa Networks Business Awards. The Awards, put on by the Cambridge, Te Awamutu and Raglan Chambers of Commerce, honour the best businesses in the Waipa and Raglan regions in our home base in New Zealand. Longtime Rocketspar...

Tools that Rocketspark uses for website design and build packages

This post has been updated, please see the latest version here >As our design partners add more clients to their Rocketspark Design Studio, they need tools that can help streamline their workflow to support this growth. At Rocketspark we have always used software to solve problems and streamline the way we work and this post is an overview of what we use and how we use it....

Making cool buttons with the Rocketspark picture block

If you’ve read many of our other posts you’ll know that have a good call to action button is a key part of any website journey. The Rocketspark picture block is beautifully simple to use but it also has a great range of design settings, so you can create great looking picture buttons with overlaid text and nice hover effects that add a little sophistication to your website.. In this blog post we’re going to showcase some of the real Rocketspark customers that are using unique picture eff...

Size matters: Make your homepage long, not short

We are the ADD generation. If we want political news, we’ll take it in 9-second soundbites. When a celebrity dies, we expect our eulogies in 140-character tweets. And reading a book?? Well, TL;DR. Which makes it all the more surprising that, when it comes to page length, longer is better. I know you just got distracted by that Facebook ping that just came in, so let me say it again: when it comes to page length, longer is better....

Tourism website design best practice with Rocketspark and Waikato River Trails

The Waikato River Trails are a 103km cycle trail along the edge of New Zealand’s longest river. The trails officially opened in 2011 and since then thousands of people have run, biked, walked and raced the trail’s remote (but never too far from a cafe) riverside terrain. Despite having spectacular scenery and being a short drive from major centres and tourism attractions like Hobbiton, The Blue Spring and Rotorua, the Waikato River Trails are still a somewhat undiscovered tourism gem. ...

New Features: More font, size and colour options—and a whole new engine under the hood

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Accountant & bookkeeper websites best practice guide

You're accounting professionals—but does your website show that? Does it clearly communicate what you offer and convert visitors into leads? ...

Bookkeeper websites | best practice guide

So, you’re a qualified bookkeeper, a proven performer in the industry. Does your website convey that? Does it clearly communicate the professional standard you offer? And, most importantly, does it convert your website visitors into leads and new clients? Here’s a few things to think about to make your website work hard for you. The world of websites can be a challenge but if you do the basics well you can set yourself apart from the crowd with a great website. In this guide we cover off t...

Why your “About Us” page is so important

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Why growing your online business reputation is critical for sales & overall growth

This post has been written by Ryan Haidinger from Trustspot. Trustspot is a Rocketspark add-on for ecommerce website owners where you can set up an exit survey for your customers after they make a purchase from your ecommerce website. When it comes to growing your business, sometimes the easiest ways to increase sales are often overlooked by more cumbersome solutions – which end up costing you a lot of time and money, which can better be spent elsewhere. Simply by googling “ways to grow my ...

How to make your bookkeeping website rank highly in search engines

Have you ever wondered how to get your website ranking number one in the search results when somebody searches for bookkeepers on Google? There’s no failsafe way to get that coveted top spot, but there are lots of methods for trying to get your website to rank highly in search results. Souping up your website so that it ranks well is called search engine optimisation (SEO). It’s a massive topic and can quickly become overwhelming. But, since most small businesses don’t do any SEO, even do...

Rocketspark Graphic Designer SEO Support

You might’ve heard of search engine optimisation (“SEO” for short)—but what is it? SEO is about getting more people to your website by being able to find you easily in search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. The aim of the game is to optimise your site so that it ranks well—ideally high up on page one—for relevant search results, so that ultimately people click through to your website. We have created some helpful guides and blogs that will help you to get a better understanding ...

How to make a great contact us page on your website

Visitors will arrive at your site. Hopefully they visit some other pages on your site. Then if they like what they’ve seen, they will either want to buy from you (if you’re an online shop) or if you’re a service business, they will want to get in contact with you. Contact us pages for online shops are still important, as it gives potential buyers an avenue to ask you questions in case there’s something they want to know before buying. ...

SEO health check – Is your website getting found in Google?

If your website has been up and running for a couple of months or more, an SEO health check is a good idea (search engine optimisation – the process of optimising your website for search engines like Google). Take a step back and see how your website is performing in Google and how much traffic you're getting to your website. If you're only getting a handful of visits each day or less, you might have a SEO problem! If you're new to SEO, check out our SEO Basics series first. To measure your t...

26 new font families added to Rocketspark

Beautiful fonts are key to good design and that's why we've curated and added a list of 26 new font families to the Rocketspark website builder – thanks to Adobe Typekit, who supply all of our fonts. Most of the font families we've chosen to add also have a range of different weights, giving you the spectrum of font weights from really light to really bold. View the full list of new font families below. ...

Email Marketing for E-Commerce

This post is a chapter from our e-book Getting Started With E-Commerce – The Beginner's Guide to Starting an Online Shop.Download your own free copy to learn how to start an online shop ...

Social media for ecommerce – how to build a following

This post is a chapter from our e-book Getting Started With E-Commerce – The Beginner's Guide to Starting an Online Shop.Download your own free copy to learn how to start an online shop ...

Long-tail SEO - Part 2: How to find and write to your keywords

Jeff Bezos built Amazon into a retail behemoth on the power of the long tail. And by applying long-tail principles to your SEO, you too could turn your own little website into something big; maybe not Amazon-big—but still big! (What is long-tail SEO? Check out Part 1 of this blog series to find out.) So, how do you actually do long-tail SEO? Think of it in two steps: ...

Long-tail SEO - Part 1: What Amazon can teach you about search rankings

Amazon.com just turned 20 years old. That’s right—the Little E-tailer That Could is now officially an adult. After going live on July 16, 1995, Amazon rapidly grew into the king colossus of online retail, and the secret fuelling its two-decade reign could boost your website’s search rankings. The genius of Amazon, or at least part of it, is that it turns conventional business wisdom on its head. Instead of trying to sell massive amounts of a small number of products, it relies largely on ...

Staff Profile: Harvey Kane

Every team needs a veteran. That’s why developer extraordinaire Harvey Kane is a major asset to the Rocketspark crew. His vast experience and serious skill mean that, when looking at a big job, Harvey knows how to get ‘er done.Harvey’s first contact with Rocketspark came when he answered a message we posted on a developers’ forum. It was an SOS call for help with a project using Concrete5—a content management system that he happens to be pretty handy at. We outsourced the job to the Wa...

5 Point Website Health Check

Put colours, fonts and design aesthetic to the side initially. Website first impressions are important but start by focussing on things that can be easily measured and aren’t subjective. That’s the fastest way to check if something’s not right with your website. Here’s our 5 point website health check as a starting point. ...

Rocketspark Integrates with eWay and Stripe payment gateways

At Rocketspark we have been hard at work putting together our latest feature set. This time it's more payment gateway options for our online shops. Our latest additions includes eWay and Stripe. It's also possible now to have more than one payment gateway connected to your online shop. So you can have Payment Express and Paypal enabled as well and let your customers decide which payment gateway they would like to use. We show these options in a tidy popup at the final step of the checkout proce...

Introducing the all new Rocketspark picture editor

The new picture editor is now live for all Rocketspark customers and trial users.  Now you can edit all of your pictures directly on your website, without the need for graphic design software – then see how it looks in real-time on your page.  The video above gives a 2 minute overview of the new picture editor but for a full list of what's included, keep reading. ...