1) Brochures

Have you ever taken the time to see how much you have spent on ink and paper making brochures? How about the time you have had to spend making the brochure? Did you know that with server side scripting you can have your brochures created for you. This takes away from the time you would use to make the brochure. Once the server has created the brochure, a person could then request the brochure in PDF format that they could download. Once they have the brochure on their computer they can then print it out, using their ink and their paper. This process alone has saved you time and money that you can then use in other areas of marketing. We can also take it a step further by having a database set up so that when someone requests the brochure there is an entry put into the database to count the download. This can keep track of how many times your brochure has been downloaded. Much easier then keeping track of how many times someone has picked up your brochure at a horse show or an expo. This can also help in targeting a specific audience as you will know only those who have an interest will download your brochure.

What are some possible uses for a brochure on your website? Let’s look at some.

a) Stallion brochure – For our example we our going to go with the fact that you do not have time or money to spend on making a stallion card. If you are not familiar with a stallion card, it is double sided and on one the front side is the picture of the horse and on the back side is the pedigree with some information and contact information. We could put all of the information into a database so that the stallion card is created automatically when someone requests the download. Then using some dynamic PDF coding we can have the PDF stallion card created dynamically without having to do anything. Just to expand our creativeness, let’s say someone wants to print the stallion card and have a fantasy pedigree on the back. They simply would fill in the dam information of the pedigree and the stallion card would not be unique to what is of interest to them.

b) Sales Flyer – This concept would pretty much be the same as the stallion brochure with a couple extra twists involved. Their is the possibility that you have multiple sale horses available. We can set up a database to handle all of the information for each horse including photo, horse information, pedigree, show results, history, etc. Since all of the information is in a database, each horse will now have an unique id associated with them. This will help when you have a list of horses for sale on your site. When someone finds a horse of interest and they want to click on the link to download the flyer, the unique id will be added to the link and the PDF that will appear will be for that horse. So all we have to do is create a template that would be for your flyer and the rest will be inserted for us.

We can even stretch this out so that a visitor can download a pdf that is created that lists all of the horses for sale with a short description of each one with the price tag and contact information.

2) Contact Form

Having a contact form on your website can be helpful in saving both time and money. If your site has a form that a visitor can fill in to send you a message, this can save you time and money. How will it save you time? It is a helpful way in screening requests so that you can decide who is important to contact by phone, or who can be answered by simply replying to the contact form via reply mail. How can it save you money? If you get requests from out of town, or out of your country, and the request is not an important issue, you can reply via email. This can help you to cut down on long distance phone costs

3) Google Maps & Driving Directions

I can’t say this falls to heavily in either the saving costs or saving time category, but it can be of use to you when it comes to ease of use. Having a Google Map of your location on your website allows a visitor to find out exactly where you are located. If it is someone who you have invited to your place, you can send them to your website to get exact directions to your place. Google Maps is very highly configurable, even to the point to where someone can find out where all the traffic lights are and how heavy traffic is. If you are an equine professional this can help in cutting down office time that I am sure you do not have time for.

4) Knowledge Base

This is the technical term used, but you can call it what you will. I am sure you find a lot of time you are answering questions over and over. Having a knowledge base on your website will allow you to have defined questions and answers that can be answered for someone who goes to your website. This is not only helpful for professionals but also for farms. You might save a non important phone call from someone if they can find the answers on your website. A well built knowledge base will allow you to enter questions and answers into text fields and the program will create everything else for you.

5) Newsletter

So long for the days of having to send out newsletters by mail. You want to talk about spending money, look at what you have to pay for ink, paper, envelopes, and postage these days. Having a newsletter system on your server will allow you to send personalized newsletters to members email boxes whenever you want. And the program will do all of the work for you. We have set some newsletters up for as little as $100, and one of them has 2500 members they send to.

6) Word of Mouth Marketing

I have talked about this in other articles, but it is so helpful. Having a way for visitors to refer your website to their friends is powerful. It is very easy for them to do. They simply fill in their name and email, along with their friends name and email, and done. Behind the scenes there is already a pre-made message that is ready to be delivered. The email not only will refer the friend to your website, it will also give a brief summary about you. Easy and free marketing.

7) Printable Forms

Using your website as your secretary can be a huge benefit when it comes to saving time and money. Before websites you, or your office secretary, had to put together forms for a prospective client, put it in a package, mail it, and then wait a couple days for it to be received. Not any more. Having any and all of your important forms on your site will cut down on those costs. For professionals it will cut down on sending out new client forms, and for farms, it can be an easy way to get out contracts. These are only a few examples of forms.

Summary

As you can see from the list above, the website is now your new secretary. For most people, if you don’t get screwed, it can be your cheapest. Using your website as a tool for communication can save you money and time. This can help those who are trying to cut costs or those that are trying to save time. This is always something you should be striving for, as there are always others areas that could use your attention.

This is only a small scale of what a website can do for you. I suggest you take a look around and see what others are doing on their site to help them. You should always strive to have your website up to date with not only content, but with the newest technology and newest trends.

Rob

There is a Web Standards checklist that you can use to make sure that your website is set up in a manner that will allow it to maximize your benefits of having the site. Using this list will allow you to check off what you have and what you do not have. If you find something that is missing in the checklist, you can present it to your designer to fix the issue. If your designer can’t take care of the issue, you might want to think about getting different services somewhere else.

Here are the categories in the checklist:

1) Quality of code for horse and equine websites

This allows you to take a look at different parts of your site to make sure that there is nothing that is preventing different people from seeing your website as you see it. Not all web browsers get along, and if the code is not set up to meet all the needs of different browsers, you might not be happy with what others are seeing.

2) Degree of seperation between content and presentation for horse and equine websites

I believe the title explains most of this section.

3) Accessibility for users at horse and equine websites

Having your site set up for every person is crucial in the success that your website brings you. This part of the checklist will help you to make sure that all visitors to your website will have no problems while visiting your site.

4) Accessibility for devises at horse and equine websites

Making sure that your website can be accessed by anyone and everyone is important. This part of the checklist will check to make sure that people on different browsers can all see your website just as you want them to. It also checks to make sure your site looks right when it is printed, and if need be, check to see if the content on your site looks right on a hand held devise. There are a couple other checks that are included in this section.

5) Basic Usability of a horse and/or equine website

Basic usability is used to check that all of the site is easily navigated and that visitors will have no problem getting around your website.

6) Site management of a horse and/or equine website

Site management refers to the proper use of a 404 error page, friendly URL’s, favicon, and more.

Download: You can download the Web Standars Checklist to start checking your website today.

Summary

Making your site accessible to all of your visitors is important to your online success. This checklist will help you in making sure that there is no visitor that is having problems at your site.

Hope this is helpful for you.

Rob

Web Hosting Factors

1) Price

With the amount of traffic that is on the internet these days and those people with websites, finding a website hosting company for a reasonable price is not hard. Most website hosting companies will offer hosting of your website for as low as $5/month. Our hosting prices are $6/month. This is very reasonable when you look and see what is offered with the packages. If you are using a company that has you paying more than $10/month you might want to start shopping around for a new company. Now keep one thing in mind, I do not want to tell you to leave a company that is meeting all of your needs. If you are paying a good chunk of change a month for hosting, and they are meeting your needs, don’t be so quick to want to get out. The old saying, if it is not broke do not fix it, should apply here.

2) Uptime

Making sure that your website is visible to visitors as much as possible is very important. Finding  hosting company that can guarantee your uptime being close to 100% of the time is critical.

3) Disk Space & Bandwidth

Depending on your needs will depend on how much disk space and bandwidth you will need. There are hosting companies out there that offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth for a higher price. Most of the website hosting companies have different plans that you can choose from that will let you decide how much disk space and bandwidth you think you will need, each at a different price. The lowest plan SEMS Design offers is 25MB disk space with 100MB bandwidth for $6/month. We have only had a couple website go over this amount and they had well over 100 pages.

4) E-mail Addresses

Having an e-mail address that reflects your website name is helpful when it comes to marketing. What better way to let people know the address of your website. Every time you send out an e-mail someone will have your website name. So if your website name is myhorsewebsite.com you could have info@myhorsewebsite.com. Most companies will offer multiple e-mail accounts that you can use.

5) Control Panel

Having access to the control over your website is important. Have a control panel that you can use to take care of the website is very helpful. We use cPanel which allows you complete control over your website. When you log into the control panel you can manage the following areas:

• Mail – Allows you to add/edit/delete e-mail accounts
• Webmail – Allows you to read mail from your e-mail accounts.
• Parked Domains – Allows you to put register domain names on top of the current domain name. Then you can redirect the domain name to a certain folder so that when someone visits that domain name, it will go straight to the content in that folder.
• FTP Manager – Allows you to manage the accounts that have access to upload files to your server.
• File Manager – Allows you to add/edit/delete/move files on the server.
• Backups – Allows you to backup your website in case of outages or lost information.
• Password Protect Directories – Allows you to password protect certain directories so that only people with the username and password can enter.
• Subdomains – Allows you to add a subdomain name to your website. For example, if you have a folder called sale-horses, it would usually be called in the browser as http://www.yourhorsewebsite.com/sale-horses/. With a subdomain you can give the subdomain the name salehorses and then someone can type in saleshorses.yourhorsewebsite.com. Useful in marketing as it makes your website name cleaner.
• MySQL Databases – Allows you to add/edit/delete a database for your website.
• Scripts Library – If you want to add interactive features to your website, we have a tool that will automatically install the desired script on your server for you. Then all you have to do is give it a look and feel that you want it to have. Here is a list of scripts in the library:
  1. Blogs
  2. Classifieds
  3. Content Management
  4. Customer Relationship
  5. Discussion Boards
  6. E-Commerce
  7. F.A.Q.
  8. Image Galleries
  9. Mailing List
  10. Polls & Surveys
  11. Project Management
  12. Site Builders
  13. And More

6) Customer Service

If you are having your website hosted by the company that also manages your site, it is important that they have a quick turn around time in getting updates done for you. If you are having problems with getting your information added to your site in a timely manner, contact me. My turn around time is 24 hours or less with minor updates, 1-2 days on minor additions, 2-3 days on major additons. Most content and image additions fall into the category of 24 hours or less.

Summary

Be sure you are smart when it comes to deciding on a website hosting company. Do not go with the first one you come across unless you are completely satisfied with what they propose to you. Be sure you can be guaranteed of all of the above when it comes to access of the backend of your website if you are going to do the work. If you are not going to do the work, make sure you can get an e-mail address, or multiple addresses, with your account. Most importantly, make sure the customer service is number 1. Knowing that your website is going to be cared for in the best way possible goes along way in the success you have on the internet.

Rob

On the other side there are new ideas being brought into the website marketing strategy monthly. Most of this revolves around how a website is created for to maximize search engine optimization. This is where a designer will make sure that the site is not only beautiful and informational, but it also is coded correctly for the search engine robots that come around to the website to determine where to index the site in the search engine.

I am not for sure what side you are on, but it is best to know both sides so that you can determine if your website is a full functional search engine optimized site. These ideas are not tied to any particular industry as it relates to all websites. Having an idea of what your website should be doing for you in the search engines will help you in your pursuit of getting the exposure you are looking for from surfers of the internet.

Let’s go over some of the ways a website can, and should be, optimized for a better search engine placement. These are in no particular order of priority or importance.

Keywords

Having an idea of what keywords someone would be using that you want to visit your website is important to have. Keywords can be placed in different places in your web page to help a search engine robot have a better idea of your website content and relevance in particular searches. One place keywords are put is in the head of a web page. For those of you who do not know, this is important information for the web page that a visitor does not see. In the header of the site you can list keywords that instruct the robot on the relevance of the site. You list your keywords in the meta tag with a comma following each keyword. For example:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”horses, horse, horse sales, horses for sale, equine, equine sales, equine breeding, stallion breeding, horse breeding” />

Now if you did not take the time to properly put the correct keywords in here and instead you used dogs, cats, mice, pigs, you would not be helping the search engines have a better understanding of your site.

Website Title

In my opinion the title is the most important factor in getting better results from search engine visitors. With a properly titled title you can pursuade people to click on your result from their search engine search. It is one thing to do good with your keywords and get a good ranking, but if you do not have a good title that catches attention, you will find that people will go right by your listing. Some good ideas for a website title:

1. Use your farm name, stallion name, or your horse business name. This is important in that it tells someone who they are getting ready to visit.
2. Use your keywords in your title. Make up a sentence that can integrate your keywords or use your keywords with a comma in between just as you do in your keywords. To me, I think it is better to make a sentence that summarize you so that a person has a better idea of the site they are getting ready to visit.

Description

Another meta tag that is used in the header of the web page is the description tag. With this, you will add a short description of the website. When I say short, I think 1-2 sentences if plenty. Anymore and the search engine robot will not even use it, and sometimes can be knocked against you.

Headers

When a search engine robot comes to your site it does not have all day long to be there. So it will look for certain information and collect the information that is found. One of the places it looks for in your web page content is in the header tags. These are used for titles that can be above paragraphs. They are put in the <h1> – <h6> tags. So your header would say:

<h1>Horse Farm News</h1>

Search engines know to look inside these header tags and think that this information must be important. There are some other techniques to get better use of the header tags that we will not discuss here.

Content

It is wise to plan out your content before it is added to the website. When you are planning the content you should try to focus on using your keywords. Of course you want to find a happy medium between your keywords and content that is useful for someone who is reading it. It is one thing to get your keywords in there for the robots, but if it is not enjoyable to read, what is the point? Try to find someone who has good writting skills that can help you on this.

Folders

When you have a link that in a sub page to your website, put that page as a index page and put in a sub folder. Then name that sub folder with your keywords and phrases. So for example, you have a horse sales page for your Arabian horses You would save the page as index.html and put it in a sub folder. Then you would name the folder arabian-horses-for-sale. These folders help robots gather more information about your site and this tells them that the pages inside this folder are related to Arabian horses for sale.

Clean Code

Having a beautiful site is always a goal of all website owners. Be careful though that you watch the download time of your pages. If the code that runs the web page is not clean and easy to read, it could slow down the speed of the page load. Not only this but it is helpful for the robots that have to look in the code to find your content.

Image Alternates

Images that are displayed on a web page has an “alt” tag which stands for “alternate”. This is text that is used to explain what the image is for those who can not view the image. This is more code that a robot picks up on but is not seen by the viewer if the image is displayed. So if you had a horse with a picture in your horses for sale page, you could add alternate text to the picture. So for example, you would have something like this:

<img src=”yourimage.jpg” alt=”Arabian Horse For Sale” />

Be careful with this as you want to make sure that the “alt” text is helpful for those who are not able to see the picture.

Linking

Something you need to try to do outside of your own website is to connect with other sites and try to establish a link connection. This is where they will put your website link on their page. What works best here for website optimization is if you find sites that are high on the rankings of your keywords to establish this link with. Of course you will probably have to add a link on your site for them, but sometimes this is not the case.

Summary

Day after day the algorithms used by search engines is changing and getting more complicated. Staying on top of this is important and helpful in your search engine placings. Having a well designed site will help in making sure that the robots can gather as much important information as possible about your site to put you in the right place for surfers. This is only a short list of what the search engines look for when visiting your website. Do a search on one of the search engines to find more information or contact me and we can talk about optimizing your website today.

Rob

Below are a few ways you can try to prevent stealing of your images on your website. There are other ways that are more advanced, and if you want to find out more about these ways you can contact me and we will discuss them.

Hotlink Protection

Hotlink protection is direct linking to an image, video, etc. This is when someone uses code in their web page that links directly to your image on your server. Not only is this stealing your image, it is also stealing your bandwidth. I have decided I will not show examples of any of these image stealing ways as it could encourage someone to take the example and use it. Just know that your web host, control panel, or designer that is hosting your site should be able to tell you if anything on your site is being hotlinked to.

In order to prevent hotlinking, you need to add or update your .htaccess file. If you do not know how to create an .htaccess file you can do a search on Google and find out more. Here is code to add to your .htaccess file to prevent hotlinking to your image files:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [NC,F,L]

In the code above just change yourdomain.com to your domain name.

Flash

In my mind, flash is the way to go to prevent image theft. This is not a full blown prevention tool, but it is a better way to prevent the common visitor from deciding to take your image. In order to use flash to manage your images you will need Adobe Flash program to create the flash file to store your image(s). If you do not have this program you can search around the internet for pre-made templates that you can integrate into your website. Using flash will prevent hotlinking to a specific image, stop someone from saving the image to their computer, and can help in the display of your image.

Watermark

Watermarks are tough to go against when it comes to the protection of a photograph on the internet. There are 2 sides of the coin though. One side is that it helps in the protection of the photo and the other side is that it takes away from the beauty of the photo. That is not what we are going to discuss right now. We are going to talk about how to watermark if you decide to take this approach.

There are 2 ways to watermark a photo. The first way is to do it manually to each photo you add to the internet. This is not difficult to do if you have a small collection of photo’s to put on the net. Simply use any image editing program to add a layer on top of the photo somewhere that will copyright the photo so that anyone who see it will know who it belongs to. Depending on your editing program and your skills in using it will depend on how fancy the watermark is. If you are a photoshop user you can create an action that will add this easily to any photo you desire.

The second way is to have a program that adds a watermark to any photo you put on the internet. Some programs can watermark and photo in a particular folder, some watermark any photo you add through a control panel that is set up on your server. If this is something you have an interest in you can contact me and discuss what you are wanting to accomplish and we will see if we can work together to get it done.

Transparent Image

This little trick is a good one that really makes the work hard for the thief. Again, if someone wants your image they will find a way to get it. But this trick just adds extra time to the process to the beginner thief.

What you do is create a table or div that is the same size as your image. With the use of CSS you can make the image the background. To make it harder for the thief, put the CSS file as an external file so they have to go searching further. Then inside the table or div you can add a transparent gif and give it the same size as your image. Not giving it the same size will prevent the full image from showing. By doing this, when somone goes to download the picture to their computer, they will be confused when they go to open it up and they see a blank image.

Not a full proof trick, as none of them are, but this makes the work harder for anyone trying to take your image.

Encrypt Source Code

I am adding this because I mentioned I would show some ways to prevent stealing of images. This is the least of the ways when it comes to security. It is the least because it is very easy to get around this trick. Just thought I would add it so that you could search for more information if you find it to be a way you want to try.

Summary

If it is your goal that nobody, I mean nobody, takes your image/photo online, the best method for this is not to put it on the internet. Right now there is not a full proof way of preventing this. You can hire a programmer who can try to eliminate some of the ways someone can take your rights, but make sure you do not put to much into this project when it comes to money because it still will not help.

The above mentioned ways of prevention can help to decrease the possibility of a image being jacked from you. If one of them turns on a light bulb in your head, research it more and find out if it is the right way for you. If not, go searching around for image theft prevention tools. Google is a great resource that will broaden your mind.

Hope this is of some help to you today in your internet education.

Rob

What you see above is the Dashboard of the Google Analytics page that you will have. This area gives you a summary on many areas of traffic that is coming to your site. Some of the key areas that should be watched would be the Traffic Sources Overview and the Content Overview. The reason for these 2 areas is that the Traffic Overview gives you an idea of how people are finding you and then the Content Overview gives you an idea of what pages people are looking at when they go through your site.

Once you have an idea of how people are finding your site and what pages they are looking at, you now will want to take a look at the Bounce Rate. The Bounce Rate is a percentage of people that leave your site without going any further then the page they started from. So for example, if they start on your home page and they then leave, this is a bounce. Below you will see a picture of the Bounce Rate:

Over time you will get an idea of how the trends are used and what are the important stats to look at daily, weekly, monthly. Google updates the stats every 24 hours. After you have a good idea of how to use the Google Analytics you can start to use Goals. Goals are used in helping you to try to do just that, meet goals that you set on your vistitors.

If you have someone running your website and they are not giving you very detailed stats, you should contact them and ask them to install Google Analytics to all of your pages. If you are doing websites yourself, Google makes it easy by giving you one main Dashboard where you can take care of all your websites.

If you are new to using Google Analytics, here is what you need to do at bare minimum. When you sign up a site with Google Analytics you will be given a website number. Seeing that you would already have a Google Analytics account, you will already have an account number. So right above the end of your body tag, you will add this code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER-WEBSITE NUMBER”);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

All you need to do is change the YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER to your account number and the WEBSITE NUMBER to the number Google gave to the site.

This ends a quick summary of the importance of Google Analytics and keeping a close eye on your visitors and what they are doing when they come to your site, while they are at your site, and when they leave. This is very helpful in how your website in built and updated.