7 Things To Think About Before You Host Your Site

It’s time for a new website. And if you’re thinking of doing some of the work yourself, you’ll have to invest in a great hosting company. Before you make your selection, remember all hosting companies ARE NOT created equally. Yes they pull you in with those low, low prices and those great sounding guarantees. But if you get with the wrong company, you may wind up paying the price down the road.

Before you make your selection, keep these things in mind.

What are the contract terms?

A hosting company may wave great prices in front of you. Yet in some cases it may come with the condition of hosting with them for a set amount of years. Do you really want to be tied in with a company for an extended period of time? Especially if you are new to this company and have no idea how reliable they are and if you will truly be getting quality hosting?

Do they provide you with backup?

Yep, stuff happens all the time. Networks can be hacked, power failures can wipe out data, a fire could start, or someone may press a wrong button. Uh oh. There goes all of your work and data. A great hosting company thinks about those things too. They make sure your data is backed up at on and offsite locations. (That doesn’t mean you still shouldn’t do your own backups on a regular basis.)

Are they a reliable company?

Before you go with a hosting company, make sure they will be there for you. Do a Google search and look at ratings. A site that is planning for the future will be out there and have reviews not just on their site, but will be on other sites as well. While you will always be able to find some type of negativity about almost all companies, it is important to find one that has a positive future.

What details do they offer?

Every hosting plan comes with a variety of details. Make sure you look at the 3 big ones – bandwidth, memory and disk space. You may also want to check on other features for future growth, such as programming language support, email accounts, server operating systems, etc. If you will be working with WordPress, we have found cPanel is one of the easiest ways to get your site online – its highly worth it as its “push a button” technology. Also consider if you will be integrating other features in the future, such as shopping carts, credit card transactions, and other secure data. [Read more…]

A Guide To Optimizing Your Website For Mobile Use

How are your potential customers finding you online? Are they sitting down at their desktops, searching sites like Google? Or are they sitting in a coffee shop, searching from their mobile devices?

As the amount of mobile devices continues to grow, so does the need for mobile friendly websites. You can’t expect your graphically enhanced site to appear the same way on an iPhone or Android, and Flash sites simple don’t work. The last thing you want is your potential customer looking for you, and all that comes up is a “non-compatible” sign. That’s like saying, “I don’t want your business.”

Dig Deeper: Love Your iPod iPhone or iPad? Not with a Flash Website

But simply taking your existing website, and converting it into a mobile friendly site may not get you the results you are looking for. Searching on mobile devices is continuing to grow as technology improves, yet people aren’t searching in the same ways they do for conventional sites. Therefore its essential to think SEO for both your traditional sites, and for your mobile sites in slightly different ways.

Shorter Keywords

When a person sits down at a desktop computer, they have a full sized keyboard, and are usually dedicating a fair amount of time to find what they are looking for. They are willing to type out keyword searches again and again until they find what they are looking for, lengthening what they are searching for each time. Since mobile devices are used for more on-the-go functions, people aren’t as patient with their searching. With the smaller keyboards and smaller screens, people want to find what they are looking for in the quickest way possible. [Read more…]

18 Reasons Why They Leave Your Site In Under 10 Seconds

Have you ever entered a site and you can’t hit the back button fast enough? Something about the page is an instant turnoff, and you back out or get out of the browser window as fast as possible.

I did that this morning when I entered a new page from an email I received. And it got me to thinking about all the reasons a site doesn’t work. And by understanding what doesn’t work, you can reassess your own site, and determine what you can do to make it work – to make it more attractive to the people that are coming there for the very first time.

1. Autosound. This is what got me this morning. I entered a page and started looking around, and a voice started to talk with music in the background. The only problem was I couldn’t find where it was coming from – no audio or video button was noticeable on the page, so I had no way of turning it off. I backed out of the page as fast as I could. I work from a home office, so sound doesn’t really matter. But imagine if I would have been in a busy office. That sound – whether its voice of music – would have made me hit “delete” even faster.

2. Popups. Popups are a dying breed, but they are still around and visible on some sites. I don’t mind an occasional popup asking me to sign up for a free report – once. What really bugs me (and a lot of other people too) is when the popup appears again and again, every time I click to a new page. I get it – you want me to sign up. But that’s not a way to motivate me to the next step.

3. Slow load times. Everyone online has what I call online-ADD. If something doesn’t happen FAST, we move away. We won’t wait 15 seconds for a photograph to load – it’s either there now or I move on. If you load more than thumbnails, or have a slow server, you risk losing your best customers.

4. No purpose. What do you want people to do when they visit your site? That should be obvious from every page on your site. Don’t make a potential customer search for your contact information, block them from sending you an email, or making it difficult to find what city you work in. Think of your ultimate goal, and make every page lead directly to that conclusion.
[Read more…]

Using Your Photographs The Right Way In Your Blog

Do you blog on a regular basis? One of the things I love about blogging is how easy I canWedding At The Ritz Aspen Colorado share information with readers. But that doesn’t mean I only think about the text. I also think about the structure of the post as well. While my ultimate goal is to write quality content for my readers, there’s nothing wrong with attracting a little Google attention as well.

As a photographer, you should be inserting at least one photograph in every post you do. And when you insert a photograph, you need to make sure you do it in the right way, and use these three steps every time before you hit the publish button. [Read more…]