Category:

Creating A Website

Blogging Creating A Website SMBs & Freelancers

Save Yourself From Shame – 3 Free Grammar Check Tools

by Erez Zundy March 6, 2014

One of the biggest problems that many websites face today is a decline in the quality of the written content on the page. In particular, many websites contain grammar errors that range from distracting to downright embarrassing. While it might not seem like a big deal to use “to” when you mean “too” or to put an apostrophe in every plural word, these errors can really affect how your visitors interact with your site. Therefore, it is essential to make sure that your page content is free from grammatical errors.

When your website content contains grammatical errors, there are many potential problems. Bad grammar tells your customer that your website lacks authority and credibility. If you can’t correctly convey information about your product or business, then your customers are likely going to go elsewhere for their needs. Similarly, a grammatical error might cause confusion in your visitors. Instead of buying your product, they will be scratching their heads and leaving your page with an empty cart. If your grammatical mistakes are egregious enough, your website might just end up going viral as a gag. Unfortunately, this won’t be a case of “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

In addition to causing you to lose customers, your bad grammar might make it so that your customers never even find you. The search engines often punish sites with poor content and grammatical mistakes. If your site ends up ranking poorly in the search engines because of your sloppy content, then you will find your business tanking faster than you can find and correct your grammar mistakes.

There are many reasons why grammar mistakes have become so prevalent on the internet today. Part of it is lack of attention to detail. Many people don’t bother to proofread their work closely. Others aren’t familiar enough with the rules and don’t seek out extra help. There are also many websites that end up with bad content because they got what they paid for. While it’s important to avoid spun content and buying cheap articles, you don’t necessarily have to spend a fortune to get quality content that is error free. Fortunately, there are many great tools out there to help you catch those grammar mistakes before they show up on your website and on someone’s Twitter feed.

Use These Free Grammar Check Tools

Grammarly

While Grammarly isn’t a completely free tool, it is one of the most powerful grammar checking options available. Grammarly instantly checks your content for over 250 types of grammatical mistakes, including common word usage errors that are detected by an adaptive spell checker. The site offers vocabulary suggestions to help optimize your content, and it also checks your content for plagiarism by cross-referencing with over 8 million web pages. This web-based program requires a subscription to get the full features, but it also offers a quick sample check on the home page. You can also get a free 7-day subscription to the site. This can really come in handy right before you are about to launch your website. You can check all of your content for mistakes and get it live before your free trial expires.

PaperRater

Like Grammarly, PaperRater provides instant online grammar check, proofreading, and plagiarism detection. Unlike Grammarly, this tool is completely free. The site doesn’t require a user to create an account or log in to use the features. Created and maintained by linguistic professors, this tool claims to catch grammatical mistakes with up to 50% more accuracy than paid services. PaperRater also provides readability statistics, style and word choice analysis, and an auto grader. When you submit a paper for evaluation, you can even input the type of paper you are writing and your education level. This gives a more accurate evaluation of the quality of the content. You can submit as much content as you want and get instant results without ever paying a dime.

Online Text Correction

This is a no-frills website that provides a quick check for grammar and spelling issues. Unlike some of the more “powerful” resources, Online Text Correction doesn’t analyze your writing style or offer more sophisticated synonyms. It simply scans your text and tells you if there are any perceived mistakes in your grammar and spelling. To use it, you enter your text and submit. Within seconds, your text will be marked up with red and green to indicate potential errors and suggestions for improvement. There are no subscriptions and no bonus features here. This is a simple tool that gets the job done quickly if you just want to double check your text before publishing it. Unfortunately, this tool seems to have some bugs when trying to process large chunks of text, and it’s also distracting that there was an ad for Grammarly during our entire visit to the site.

No matter what tool you decide to use to check over your web content, it’s essential that you read it over several times before publishing. If you don’t, you may end up as somebody’s social media joke of the day. Even worse, you’ll end up without any customers.

March 6, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website Design Tips IM Creator features

Design a Winning Navigation Menu

by ruthie February 27, 2014

written by ruthie

Each site has its own needs when it comes to how many tabs it needs in its navigation menu. But one thing all websites have in common – they need an easy to navigate, uncluttered and clear menu.

Visitors to your site should be able to find their way quickly (just like in real life, 😉 ), so here are a couple of examples to inspire you to help them do so.

No funny Business

Clean&Simple navigation bar – Wayne Rodrigues, music producer, chose a very straightforward approach to his navigation menu. With 4 tabs, his visitors know exactly where they are and can navigate easily between his bio, discography and most

Music to my ears

Dan McClew is a musician and his website and navigation menu is all about that – his art. The home page features a picture of Dan at work and the navigation bar easily directs visitors to his music, shows and bio.

Holding all aces

DDC Creative Design has a gorgeous website that shows what they do best – design. Same goes with their navigation menu which fits with the black and white, fresh and modern design of the site.

Where’s Waldo?

YourKitchen‘s website is a clever one. And so is their navigation menu. YourKitchen is a creative workshop and as such, not just every ordinary visitor will be able to find their navigation menu.. Can you find it? 🙂

Pure and simple

Guillermo Meza, is an up-and-coming brilliant Industrial Designer. His website is all about his work and products so it is only natural that his menu is out of the ordinary as well. His website is a one-pager so each menu tab is an anchor. Once clicked, you are redirected to the area in the page that the tab links to.

In the bag

Ana Beatriz Valladares is a unique artist from Brazil. Her website is has vertical elements to it and so is the menu navigation tabs. They’re clear, simple and direct visitors to her work and info.

Don’t miss a beat

Dennis J. Riggs provides accounting, consulting and tax services. His website is very chic and trendy, explaining the visitor immediately what he does. As his homepage has a lot of verbiage, Dennis made sure no visitor misses the navigation menu and added it twice – at the bottom and top of page.

February 27, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website IM Creator

5 Tips to Choose The Best Template for Your Site

by ruthie February 20, 2014

written by ruthie

IM Creator has many beautiful and unique templates. No more cookie-cutter templates and dull and outdated websites. The creative revolution is here.

Who am I? Why am I here?

Well, these are not exactly the first questions you need to ask when choosing a website template. What you do need to first ask yourself is what kind of a website you need. Are you creating a website for you or for your business? Do you need a site that will host many pictures and videos or are you in need of a more text oriented site like the one below?

Now ask who am I…

Many templates have a specific theme – artists, designers, service providers, hotels, restaurants, event planners and more and more. A themed layout will guide you through the specific needs of the website you need. At IM Creator, all of our templates look like real websites (no lorem ipsum mumbo jumbo), so it’s easier to choose the best template and to add your content in the best spot on the site.

Bound 2

After figuring out who we are (it’s hard, I know :-P), it’s really important you connect to the visual aspect of your site and what it represents. Although all IM Creator templates are custumizable, we’re pretty sure that when you see a template you like, you’ll know it. An instant connection to the color palette, fonts and images is something that’s bound to happen. But remember, a good website is a website that people visit and browse through… Try to understand what kind of visual language will speak more clearly and be most effective to your target audience. Will your audience connect to a more vintage look or a more modern look? Are you building a Liverpool FC fan site and the color palette is blue? Fail 😉

Consider the content you need on your site

Now that you’ve pinpointed the goal of your website, its look, and know your target audience, what is the information and content you need on the site? No need to add everything immediately – you can start small and grow. But, there are some basic things you need before the site goes live. If you provide services or want people to contact you for your work, you must have some kind of contact details – whether it’s a link to your email or a contact form – you want people to be able to contact you.

If you also want to tell a little about yourself, so that visitors to your site will understand exactly where they are, add an “about” or “bio” page.

If you are an artist, designer, model, actor, a portfolio is always something important to have. No need for a full one of course, just one that showcases a selected part of your work – you can always add more later.

Have fun!

There are so many templates to choose from – finding the one you love and building your website should be a fun experience – so enjoy it!

Remember, with IM Creator, you can switch templates if you want to refresh the look of your site or rebrand it. So it’s not a life or death decision – pick the template you like now, that answers your current website building needs.

February 20, 2014 0 comment

Creating A Website IM Creator IM Creator features

Found my image! Now what?…

by ruthie December 11, 2013

written by ruthie

You found a great image to place as an icon, background or just add it to your site for great design. Now what?

Here are a few simple steps on how to add them to your new site:

Adding a background

Step 1: We need to save the image to your computer. In this case, I chose a pattern from our blog post.

Click on the source of the background. In this case, “Grass Pattern”

Step 2: Save the file of the pattern to your computer. As you want to add it as a background, it’s better to save the highest-resolution file if you have an option to download several sizes.

Save As

Step 3: When you are logged in the editor, click on Settings > Background, choose “Picture” as background type, upload the picture you saved and voilà!

grass pattern

See here to learn more on how to set your background.

Adding a Favicon

Choose a picture you like or your brand’s logo and upload it as your site’s favicon. Let’s take for example one of the logos from our post http://imcreator.com/blog/40-creative-negative-space-logo-designs Logo

Right-click on the picture to save it (make sure you can use it in your site if it’s not your logo :-))

When you are logged in to the editor, in your site, click on Settings > Favicon, choose the file and that’s it.

See more in our 30-sec video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxnlz5n_xZE

December 11, 2013 0 comment

Creating A Website IM Creator IM Creator websites

4 Simple Steps to Turn a Template into your Unique Website

by ruthie September 17, 2013

written by ruthie

Building an eye-catching and unique website can be really simple and should not involve more than a few steps!

Here’s a great example of how in only 4 steps, you can turn one of IM’s templates into your unique site.

There are dozens of templates to choose from. You can also search by categories to make sure the template will reflect you or your business best. Each template can be customized – add text, pictures, widgets, change colors and more.

Phia Photography chose our Fedrer_Simple template.

1) The template comes with 3 default page but since Phia needed another one, they added a “Video” page through Main Menu > Manage Pages > Add Page.

If you need to add a page to your site, you can either add a duplicate of an existing page (to keep layout and design) or add a blank page.

2) Then, Phia changed the default font in the title to Ariel Black and of course changed the text to Phia Photography.

3) Moving down in the template, it has a 2-picture slideshow. To customize the template as they like, Phia deleted the default template pictures by clicking on the slideshow –> manage and added 5 pictures of their own. The text box below the slideshow remained and only the text was replaced.

4) Lastly, the social media icons at the bottom of the template’s home page were removed by clicking on the elements and hitting “delete”. The contact info below it was replaced with Phia’s.

And here’s the beautiful final product (click it to check it out live)!

September 17, 2013 0 comment

Creating A Website Design Inspiration IM Creator IM Creator websites

It’s All About the Modus Operandi…(IM Creator Legal Websites)

by Lisa Carter August 11, 2013

written by Lisa Carter

Building a website for your law firm is extremely important nowadays. There are so many restrictions on lawyer advertisement that a website is an absolute must.

As a lawyer, you know how important it is for your firm to stand out in the ocean of firms. Clients today research before they reach out to firms and most of the research is done online. A solid, informative and appealing website will help you stand out and attract more clients.

Here are the 3 must-haves for a law firm site:

1) Bio – dealing with legal matters may turn into a very personal matter. It’s important that your prospective clients get to know you and learn about who you are. Share the Law School you graduated from, where you are licensed to practice law etc. Any information that you think is important and relevant to your new clients.

2) Areas of Practice / Past Cases – when a prospective client is looking for a lawyer, they have a specific issue/problem. Visiting your site, they will want to make sure you are the best lawyer for the job. Add all your areas of practice. Rather than mentioning vague areas of practice such as “Tort Law”, mention the specific fields, for example “property tort”, “medical malpractice” etc.

3) Contact information – this may be a “duh!” one but is super important – add a link to your phone number as the vast majority of internet searches are done via mobile; add an address and a map of how to get to your office if you accept walk-ins. Make sure your contact information is current – visitors to your site are there because they want to learn about you. Make it easy to call you or visit your office.

As for the design of your site, the website can be a classic or contemporary one. There are many designs to choose from, here are 12 great sites we collected for you:

August 11, 2013 0 comment

Newer Posts

Older Posts