Why Headlines Matter More Than Ever

With millions of blog posts published daily, standing out requires more than quality content—it demands compelling headlines. Studies show that 80% of readers never make it past the headline, and traffic can vary by up to 500% based solely on the headline’s effectiveness.

The Evolution of Headline Strategies

Platforms like Upworthy revolutionized headline writing by tapping into emotional triggers and curiosity gaps. Their approach demonstrated that well-crafted headlines could drive massive traffic. However, as audiences become more discerning, it’s crucial to adapt and refine these strategies.

Key Psychological Principles for Effective Headlines

1. Curiosity Gap: Craft headlines that pique interest without giving everything away. For example, “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next” leverages curiosity but should be used judiciously to avoid seeming clickbait.
2. Emotional Triggers: Use words that evoke emotions—be it surprise, fear, or joy—to create a connection with the reader.
3. Specificity and Numbers: Incorporate specific numbers or facts to add credibility and clarity. Headlines like “7 Proven Strategies to Increase Website Traffic” are more compelling.
4. Urgency and Scarcity: Phrases like “Limited Time Offer” or “Only 3 Spots Left” can prompt immediate action.
5. Negative Superlatives: Surprisingly, headlines with negative words like “worst” or “never” can outperform positive ones, as they tap into readers’ desire to avoid mistakes.

Best Practices for Website Owners

• Test and Analyze: Regularly A/B test your headlines to see what resonates with your audience.
• Align with Content: Ensure your headline accurately reflects the content to build trust and reduce bounce rates.
• Stay Updated: Trends evolve; stay informed about what headline styles are currently effective.

Final Thoughts

Your headline is often the first—and sometimes only—chance to engage a potential reader. By understanding and applying psychological principles, you can craft headlines that not only attract clicks but also foster meaningful engagement.

The post The Psychology of Headline Writing: What Website Owners Need to Know in 2025 first appeared on SAJE.

When we build our websites we try to use the best plugins and resources that we can. Over time we have chosen what we consider the best to use on our clinets sites. It is interesting to see so many of the tools we use being voted as the best in class.

There are some differences (especially SEO and Caching plugins) but we believe our set of development tools works best for both us and our clients.

Here are the winners in full:

• Astra – Best WordPress theme
• Elementor – Best page builder
• Gravity Forms – Best form plugin
• ACF Pro – Best dynamic data plugin
• Kadence Blocks – Best Gutenberg addon
• Crocoblock – Best Elementor addon
• All-in-One Migration – Best backup migration plugin
• RankMath SEO – Best SEO plugin
• Wordfence – Best security plugin
• MemberPress – Best membership and courses plugin
• FluentCRM – Best marketing automation plugin
• Automatic CSS – Best developer tools
• GiveWP – Best WooCommerce tools
• Cloudways – Best hosting service
• WP Rocket – Best performance plugin
• WPML – Best content tools
• ManageWP – Best WP support and service
• WP Beginner – Best WordPress blogs
• WP Builds – Best WordPress podcast
• The Admin Bar – Best WordPress community
• WPTuts – Best YouTube channel
• Website Owner’s Manual – Best WP learning and resources
• The Events Calendar – Best event and planning plugin
• WP Social Ninja – Best niche plugin

The post Winners at the WordPress Awards 2022 first appeared on SAJE.

Getting more out of your website with Online Forms

What are online forms?

Online forms are digital version of things you might fill out on a piece of paper.

You have probably already used them for a variety of things such as:

• Sending a enquiry via a website
• Buying something online
• Answering a questionnaire
• Filling in an application form

There are a wide range of uses for online forms that for small business has only really scratched the surface.

Setting aside traditional shopping carts (these are generally handled in their entirety inside a process on your website) we will delve into a few ways online forms can help your business.

What makes online forms so useful?

By using online forms, you can improve your workflow, speed up processing of applications or other information gathering forms.

One of the biggest benefits that has been reported back to us from a client who went paperless in their office with our online forms was that it reduced mistakes when written applications can be difficult to read and therefore open to mistakes in transcribing the entered information.

Let's look at some example uses

Here are a few uses for online forms that might help your business.

Book a job forms

If you are forever getting phone calls and emails from people looking to book your services, an online booking form could be the solution.

There are external full service options out there that you subscribe to such as Timely or you can use form builders on your website to take simple bookings.

Application forms

Wther it is por insurance, a car loan, self storage units or a myriad of other reasons, you can offer the ability to at least start the signup process with an online form.

There are plenty of great form plugins for WordPress that will allow for great forms. 

There are many things that these forms can do apart from gather basic information including: upload documents or images, allow for signatures, take payments and more.

Request a quote forms

Rather than relying on incomplete information, you can use an online form to ask specific questions you need before you respond, this can save an amazing amount of time getting to the point of closing a sale.

There are also other workflow options where you can have the data captured saved into a CRM such as HubSpot or Zoho or into other systems using an automation service such as Zapier to connect disparate systems and make your website part of a wider sales and marketing tool.

In Summary

Online forms are great way to make it easier for people to do business with you. There are so many opportunities to integrate a form into your site.

If you have an idea on how a form might improve your website and business, get in touch and we can let you know what is possible. Go on, use our Contact Form or our Request a Quote form 🙂

The post Online Forms first appeared on SAJE.

We have known about the good work that Thérèse and her team do in and around the community supporting and caring for those in the community.

When Thérèse approached us in December, Christmas was quickly approaching and with the website showing the signs of it\’s age, we readily agreed to take on the role of their web people.

Our first job was to move the site to our hosting and fix up some of the issues that were causing problems with purchases on their shopping cart. Fortunately they were already using WooCommerce (our ecommerce platform of choice) and we were able to iron out some issues quickly.

Once the Chrsitmas rush was over, we met and discussed rebuilding the site using our preferred tools so it would make it easier for us to work on and support them ongoing.

After choosing a template to complement their branding, we made a start moving the existing content into Elementor (Page builder) and formatting it for the new design.

Then we received a phone call to let us know that Thérèse was making an appearance on TV and so we got down to urgent business, getting the rest of the site complete in time for the show.

Now the site is up, we are now providing some advice, consultation and training to help Therese and her team make the most of their web presence.

We recently conducted a training session with Thérèse and Amber and we are certain that they will continue to do amazing things both with and through the website in addition to all of the fantastic work they do with their campaigns and projects.

Kerikeri and Northland are lucky to have Bald Angels and their host of volunteers and donators making a difference.

The post BRAVEweb Proudly Sponsoring Bald Angels first appeared on SAJE.

In this issue: SEO Workshop / SEO Review Special / WordPress Meetup Group

Well summer is mostly over and we are now into the new financial year. Things are moving along here at Deepweb where we are working on a number of projects large and small.

We have been involved in the start up of a WordPress Users Group in the north, for those developers, designers and users of WordPress to facilitate discussions about the use of WordPress on the web. You can find out more about this group here on the Meetup Website. We are thankful for the support of Bizspace in Kerikeri for hosting our events.

SEO Workshop:

On the 14th of May, we are running our SEO workshop, this gives you the opportunity to learn how the search engines work and what you can do on your site to influence where you appear in the rankings
Date: 14th May
Time: 9:30am to 1:30pm
Morning Tea provided (and yummy coffee)
Cost $99+gst

Half Price SEO Review Special:

If you can\’t get to the workshop, or if you want to leave it to us, we are having a special on SEO reviews and updates.

We can look at your site and update the SEO to look to improve it\’s performance on the search engine.

It\’s a 2 hour review, normally costing $320+gst, but you can get this done for $160+gst

Get in touch if you want a review done or call us on 09 4016656

Tips and Tricks

A great tool for managing tasks on the web is Todoist. We use it to keep track of things and it is a great free or paid tool. You can categorise your tasks and put due dates to keep everything on track.

There is an app as well that synchronises between it and your computer, meaning you can add items to your list when you are out and about and see them at your desk when you get back to the office.

Thoroughly recommended

Get in Touch

If you want to chat about anything web related, drop us a line at webmaster@deepweb.co.nz or give us a call on 09 4016656

Have a great May
Joanne and Steven

The post Spiderbyte May 2019 first appeared on SAJE.

We have turned to Really Simple SSL

It is really simple and it takes care of the redirects and also the mixed content issues (when you have content that is both SSL and non SSL)

What does it do?

• It handles most issues that WordPress has with SSL, like when you’re behind a reverse proxy/loadbalancer, or when no headers are passed which WordPress can use to detect SSL.
• All incoming requests redirected to https. It defaults with an internal redirect, but can be done as a .htaccess redirect.
• Both site url & home url are changed to https.
• Insecure content is fixed by replacing all non ssl http:// urls with https://, except links to other domains. It\’s done on the fly, so no database changes are made (except for the siteurl and homeurl).

With AutoSSL now on most hosts, it makes sense to do this final step to make you site secure

The post Best SSL Plugin for WordPress first appeared on SAJE.

(Currently in Beta form, here is the link to the latest info https://wordpress.org/news/2018/11/wordpress-5-0-beta-4/)

Whenever you see a piece of software tick over to the next major version (in this case 4.9.8 to 5.0) it can be nervous times for website owners and website developers like us.

In this upgrade WordPress\’ editor is up for a rejig. This time though it is not a small change, but a significant change with the way most WordPress users generate and edit their content.

Gone is the old \”classic\” editor and in comes Gutenberg, the new block driven editor.

To be fair WordPress is playing catchup with other Content Management Systems in the market like Squarespace and Wix in the way their users interact with the websites in a more visual and intuitive way.

To bridge the gap a range of Page Builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Composer and SiteOrigin have forged a large section of this space. It will be interesting to see how each of these builder integrate themselves into the Gutenberg editor. So far many of them are releasing their own blocks as Gutenberg blocks so users can continue with the system they are used to using.

The day of release is currently set to November 27 and time will tell how bug free the initial release will be.

Our recommendation is to NOT upgrade to version 5 as soon as it is release. Generally there will be two or three patches (5.0.1, 5.0.2 etc) fixing bugs and sorting out teething problems.

Only after this will we contemplate moving our clients onto version 5.

We are testing the migration at the moment to see what issues will be thrown up and this is something that will need to be done with all clients before they make the leap.

Change is necessary, but in some cases it might be a bit messy. We\’ll have to test and find out

The post WordPress 5.0 – The Big Upgrade first appeared on SAJE.

We have just finished Phase 1 of a website using Elementor as the page Builder inside a template called Phlox. It took me a good 10 days to get my head around all the functionality available and even more time to learn how to use it! However having worked out most of the Blocks that I needed I am now keen to build more websites using this massive system. It has Blocks for almost anything you can imagine and a few more things I didn\’t know I could do! There are so many layers that can be added to an image that you can quickly become lost trying to revisit what you have created. However, I started off unable to make anything work, I even broke the template and had to start again to now, loving how much I can do with this combination of template and builder that I even think I can now fix the first template that I broke! It is not a cheap option, with a starting package near the top of our range but it has created a sleek, almost magical website that I can\’t wait to show everyone!!!

Walker & Co Real Estate – Check it out!!!

The post A Different Way To Build Websites first appeared on SAJE.

In this instance we are talking about a secure web.

It sounds like a good idea and now Google is taking steps to encourage everyone to move in that direction.

From earlier this year, the Google Chrome browser would identify all pages like login forms and other pages requiring passwords and credit card numbers were flagged as \”Not Secure\”

This was done as a gentle nudge to website owners that Google would like all pages on the internet to be secure. (Secure in this context means that the pages are protected by SSL or Secure Sockets Layer, and information passed between your computer and the website is encrypted so that anyone snooping on your communications couldn\’t read it)

To further this objective, it is reported that in October all pages with forms in them (and if you include a signup form on every page, then all pages will be flagged) will be marked as not secure if the page is not secured using a SSL certificate.

The end goal is that all website across the internet will be secure and any without SSL certificates will be highlighted as being insecure.

From a trust perspective it is important to make sure you move to SSL relatively quickly

To this end we will be ensuring all of our clients\’ websites are protected by SSL and we are going through this process at the moment.

If your site is not SSL protected, you need to talk to your host or webs designer about getting it done.

The post The Inevitable Move to Secure Web Pages first appeared on SAJE.