Here is how it works.

1) Select your desired site category

There really is no difference in the selection of any of the categories besides the pre-defined pages in each one. We have created it this way so you can have a head start on doing what you want to do – publish your website. Now that you know what category you are going to use, you will select the template.

2) Selecting the Template

This is where you get the chance to select from hundreds of templates to give your site the look you want it to have. When you are in this phase you will be doing 6-8 steps. Here they are:

1. Choose the category you want to browse for your theme template.
2. Once you are in a category you can then select a theme from inside that category. Each time you select a theme you will see a preview of the selected theme.
3. Select the color combination available for the theme.
4. Upload a banner to implement into the theme to give it the unique look you desire.
5. Upload your logo
6. Type in your Site Title and Subtitle along with a footer message.

This will give your site the basic look before moving on to step 3: Customizing the pages.

3) Customizing the Pages

Now that the theme is selected you will add the pages you want to have included in your website.

This is what is great about the SEMS Design SiteBuilder. Adding and deleting pages is easier then ever. Here is what needs to be done and it only takes 5 minutes max.

1. We have set up some Page Sets. These sets already have selected page names that we think would go with a category you selected in step 1.
2. Standard Pages are those that are defined in the Page Set. Once you select a Page Set you will select which pages you want and then simply click the arrow to move them to your Page Structure, #4.
3. If you want to add a common page that you can then rename, you will do this from #3.
4. This shows you the current pages you have in your site.
5. Once you have your pages you can then easily move them up and down, left and right.

You are just about done building your site. The hard part is done and now all you have to do is add your pictures and content.

4) Editing Your Web Pages

Now that the template has been selected and you have changed the banner, you can edit the content and the images you add to your website.  Looking at the above image you will see that in this step there are 4 areas to work with:

1. #1 shows the pages you selected from the previous step. Selecting any of these will show the page so you can edit the content and insert images.
2. #2 is your editor. This allows you to markup all of your page with text, links, images, etc.
3. #3 is for your search engine optimization. Here you will type in the page title, the keywords for the page and the page description. This is for the search engine spiders to index your page in the proper place in the search engines.
4. #4 is the actual page. This is where you can do all of your editing and see how it will look.

You are now done. That was not that hard at all. Once you have finished editing your pages you will click the next button on the bottom, or the Publish button on top.

5) Publish Your Website

If you are trying our SiteBuilder for free, you will see a link to your published site. The site will be available to preview for 14 days. After that you will need to sign up with us for web hosting for the site to stay active.

Done!! If you are in the mood to try your hand at building your website, this is the tool for you. As time goes on we will be making the process even easier by adding templates that are strictly for the horse world. Stay tuned on that. For now, sit back,  roll up your sleeves and have some fun.

Please contact us with any questions you might have or use our Client Help Desk for support issues.

]]> http://www.semsdesign.com/in/web-design/free-web-design-by-creating-your-own-equine-website/feed/ 0 http://www.semsdesign.com/in/website-optimization/cutting-costs-by-using-your-website/ http://www.semsdesign.com/in/website-optimization/cutting-costs-by-using-your-website/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:40:09 +0000 Rob Simpson http://www.semsdesign.com/in/?p=373 It seems as though the theme these days that is found in most industries is how to cut down on costs. This is very real in the equine industry where a high percentage of individuals are hobbyist who already spend more then they receive. Cutting down on costs can be done without having to lose out on any of the luxuries that you have been accustomed to. How is this done? By using your website to your advantage. Having a website that can do a lot of the work for you can be time saving and cost saving. Here are some ways your site can help you in cutting some of those costs down in your horse expenses.

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

1) Valid Code
Before any other practices can be considered, this has to be considered, looked at, and made the top priority. If the code that runs your website is not valid you run the risk of some of your visitors not have access to your site. If that is the case, there is no reason to have a website. Keep in mind that if you have a website for your farm or horses as a personal hobby, you are free to do as you please. If you have any interest in doing any type of business using your website, all visitors must have access to your website. I could write another complete article on what is valid code, but right now I want to make sure you know how to check for valid code. The best way to make sure your website is valid, go to http://validator.w3.org/ . This tool is great because it will show you where the errors are and how you can fix the errors. I have seen some site that have 10+ errors which is not good for making sure that all of your site is accessible.

2) Layout
Having a good layout is much more then just how your site looks graphically. Layout has to do with how your content is positioned, where your images are best used, and how a search engine will follow your content. There is huge debate these days on what is better, tables or divides, in setting up a website. That again is another article, and not a global concern in practice.

The common flow of a website is to have a header, content section, and a footer. The content area can be anywhere from 1 column to 4 columns. Be advised that it can be difficult for reading purposes when there is 3 or more columns. Reading on the internet should be re-worded as scanning. That is what people to do when they visit a website. They scan the content. There is to many websites to visit these days for someone to sit at one website and read every word on the site. So keep this in mind when you layout your columns. Also know that when a search engine visits your site, the spider will read from left to right. So if you have multiple columns, your content might look a little different to a search engine then what you think

3) Navigation
Having a good navigation system is very helpful in getting visitors around your site. Make sure when your navigation system is set up that it is clear that it is understood that they are links.

4) Images
There is a fine line when it comes to using images the best way possible. Is it more important that the image is clearly seen but is bigger in file size, or is it more important that the image does not look good but can be downloaded quickly? Having a good photo editor can help you in finding a middle ground that will help your images to be clear and not that huge in file size. It should also be noted on how to save images for the web. If you are using an image that does not have many colors involved, save as a gif file. A logo usually falls into this category. If you have an image that has many colors involved, save as a jpg. All of your photo files should be saved as jpg’s because of the colors that are involved in the photo.

5) Content
Making sure that your content is easy to read and has a clear hierarchy is important in so many ways.

The use of proper fonts can help to make your content easy to read. First you need to make sure that the font is a web standard font. If you try to use a font that is not web safe, who knows what your content will look on someone else’s computer. The size of the font is also important. Make sure that you use heading tags for your titles and headings. With the use of CSS you can do so many different styles to your headings. Try to use a different font for your headings/titles and another font for your paragraphs. Doing this will allow your visitors to scan your content much easier and to find out what is important. Headings also help the search engines in determining what is important on your website.

6) Colors
Colors can do so many different things for your website. Using colors wrong can be a huge turnoff to your visitors. What colors you use will be a personal choice for you, just know how to use them and how many to use. A good technique is to use a color triad that blends 3 colors nicely. A good tool to use is http://www.colorschemer.com/online. This will help you to try to link 3 colors that blend nicely. A couple global color practices:

• Do not use a light color on a light color. This is very important when it comes to your font and background. If you use a light blue font on a white background, think headache.
• Make sure that your links have their own color
• Try to use different colors for when a link it hovered over. If you do want to do this you can add/take away the underline on the link.

7) Final Website
Having a website can sometimes make you lose your patience. What do I mean? You want your website to go live so quickly that you put it up without it being complete. First impressions are killer. Always try to have your website complete before going live. This does not mean your site has to be finished. You can always add to the site. Just don’t put it live and then put an Under Construction image on it. Not very appealing.

8. Communication
A website is a great tool for easy communication. Try to have your contact information available on all pages.

Summary

These practices can be applied to any website. There are other practices that can be used for a website depending on the needs of the site. My hope is that this will help you in the evaluation of your current website so that you can have a successful website. What images you use, what layout technique you use, what font you use, what color you use are all your personal preferences. Just try to keep these practices in mind when building your site. Always keep in mind the visitor and what is best for them. How they see your site will in the end determine the success your website brings you.

If you have any questions feel free to contact us for help.

Download: Website Strategy Guide

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

Horse Farm Home Page

The home page of a horse farm website should have certain qualities that are displayed. In all pages, not matter what type of layout structure is used, there needs to be a header, main body, and footer. The header should be used to display your farm name so that a visitor is knowing what farm they are looking at. In the header you can use images or flash to display your logo. I say flash can be used, if it is used correctly. If fash is used without having an alternate image to display if the visitor does not have flash installed can lead you to not showing a logo at all.

The main body of the home page should be a short opener that lets the visitor get to know who you are and what you do. This gets a visitor comfortable with you and knows that they are at the right place. For example, if you are a Quarter Horse farm and you do not make this known to a visitor who is looking for a Morgan horse, this will cause to confusion on the part of the visitor at your site.

The footer of the home page can have a copyright and some contact information. By having some sort of contact information available on the home page will allow someone to learn how to get in touch with you right away. If someone is in a rush visiting websites, they might not have time to find out how to get in touch with you.

Some good layout tips for a home page would be that you have the whole page displayed on a screen, you have your meta headers set and that you make sure technology is used that is cross browser. In regards to the display, most people do not like having to scroll far down a page, so having the page displayed in the browser will help from annoying your visitor. If you have a good amount of information you need to add to your home page, think about using some cross browser code to hide and show content.

In regards to cross browser technology, I am talking about not having your site set up to only satisfy a certain browser type. You should always keep in mind ALL of your visitors and make sure that every person that comes to your website will see the exact same as everyone else.

When I say meta headers, this refers to your web page title, keywords, and description. Having all of these set is important to search engines and how people find your site. If you do not have a description set, a search engine will pick up the first words it can find to use as your description. This might not be the description you want for people who find you on a search engine search. Keywords will help search engines in indexing you in the correct places so that your site will come up in relevant search phrases. I see some websites built in the Arabian horse world where the sites have no keywords or description. The company says they are the leader in online marketing, yet they do not do the simple things for online marketing for their clients.

One final note on the home page, stay away from splash pages. A splash page is a page that has some sort of flash on it that is fancy and not useful. The worst of those are the ones that do not even have a link for you to skip the flash presentation. Do not let someone bother wasting your time and money building a splash page. In this day and age nobody has time watching an intro splash page.

Navigation

The navigational system for your website is VERY important. Just as we have signs on highways to lead us in the right direction, so we have a navigational menu on our website. There are various ways to implement a menu and it all depends on how your design is set up. You see above we have condensed the menu to a drop down menu that puts proper pages under proper headings. This is helpful in leading a visitor to your website in the right direction. The two most common displays of a menu is horizontal and vertical. The horizontal menu is above or right below your header. The vertical menu is on the right or left of your body content. If your page scrolls down off of the screen, it is wise to have menu links in your footer. This is optional but sometimes courtesy to your visitors.

Sub Pages

Here are some idea pages for your horse farm website. Each farm will very on their sub pages depending on their needs and what they have to offer. These are only for you to get ideas with.

Farm Information

It is important that you have a farm information page, often called “About Us”. Visitors often have a sense of needing to know who they are dealing with, especially if you are trying to sell horses online. With the farm information page, you can tell more about yourself, your farm philosphy, farm mission, farm background, and more. This is a great way to warm your visitor up to you and your horse farm.

News & Events

Horse farms love to tell people about their successes and what they have going on. A News & Events page is great for this. You can tell people about your horse show success, new foals born, etc.. You can also tell about what you have coming up in the future. Open houses, horse shows, and more can be added to this section.

Sale Horses

Having a list of your sale horses is a great way for people to see the horses you offer for sale. There are various tools you can use to get your visitors to promote your sale horses for you. Examples of this would be a Tell A Friend feature that allows a visitor to send a page of your certain sale horse to a friend by email. You could have the option of someone downloading a PDF brochure or a PDF pedigree, both having information about the horse and your contact information. Another could be a printable pedigree that when someone goes to print could have additional information on the printable page then what is on the web page. With technology any of these can be added to each sale horse page to save you on the costs of marketing possibly. Having a video available for someone to watch is also helpful. The more information available will be helpful in the pursuit of selling a horse.

Horse Page

Presenting your horses is a great way for visitors to know more about your interests, ideas, and more. This givrs you an outlet to tell visitors about your mares, stallions, show horses, broodmares, etc..

Photo Gallery

Everybody loves pictures, and most people, lots of them. Having a photo gallery that gives you the ability to add albums and as many pictures as you like in each album, right from your own computer, is fun and helpful. Pictures/Photographs can help give a visitor more information about you, lets you show off your horses and your farm, as well as anything else you want to add. Having the ability to do this at your convenience can be fun for you.

Contact Page

The web is an easy way to get your information out to people. Having a contact page will lead someone to the place to find this information. On a contact page you can have your mailing address, phone number, fax number, email address, and anything else that can be used to contact you. To help your visitor with an easy way to contact you, a form that they can fill out on your website that goes to your email is very helpful. This is for ease of use and can help you in time management, in that you can reply at your earliest convenience.  Some sites I see that are created by “Horse Marketing Companies” that only take the time to put down your regular information and do not bother to give you the online form. If someone is not able, or willing, to offer you an online form, rethink them doing the work for you. Just my opinion.

Summary

Having a well built horse farm website can work for you in many different ways. Having a badly built horse farm website can do you major harm, maybe your reputation. When working on your own, be sure that you look at your work and your farm without blinders on. Be open to your good and your bad, your positives and your negatives, your strengths and your weaknesses. If you are having someone build your website, make sure you keep these tips and ideas in mind when they offer you a proposal to build your site. There is a fine line these days between graphics and programming on the internet. They are getting closer and closer tied together day in and day out. Do not let someone build you a beautiful website that cannot perform for you. Do not let someone build you a website that can perform for you but is down right ugly.

Try to keep these ideas in mind and my best wishes to you on the success of you and your horse farm on the internet.

Rob