One of the biggest mistakes that happens so often when it comes to web design is that a website is built from the eyes and mind of the owner of the website. Every thing- color, photos, text placement – is the vision of the owner. Sometimes this is the fault of the owner, sometimes it is the fault of the web designer. You can’t always blame the web designer as he/she just wants to get paid. But the problem here is that the websites has to, and I say this again, has to, be built with the idea of who your audience is. Having a clear visual of who this audience is will allow your website to help you achieve the goals you have for your sight. Oh year, I forgot, you also need goals.

Goals are the backbone of the success of any project. Without having the goals in place you will always be frustrated with your website. Even if you have a clear definition of who your audience is you will not be happy with your website. Why is this? It is because there is no measure of the success without having the goals in place. Let’s say you have the targeted audience pinned down, now what? Well you need to make sure you know what you want to happen when this audience comes to your website. And once they come and they do as you hope they will, you need to have a way of telling if they have reached what you have set out to be the goal.  Taken the old approach that has been used in marketing will allow you to handle all of this before you even start to design your website, on your own or with your webmaster. This is the AIDA approach. Let’s talk about this.

A = Attention

The first goal  you should have with your website, as far as the design and placement of objects, is that it should grab the audience attention. Having the targeted audience in place will allow you to put objects in the right places to try to grab this attention. For example, if your main goal is to sell more breedings to a stallion you have, yet it takes a visitor 30 seconds to find information about this stud, more likely than not they will be gone. This stallion should be visible and stand our more than any other object in your design. Same can go for your sale horses. If you have a goal of your website being an avenue to potential buyers, your sale horses should stick out like a sore thumb to grab the attention of those visiting your website. Now that we have their attention, what do we do next……

I = Interest

We get them interested. How is this possible? You need to have some good copy, that is captivating and easy to spot, that will make their eyes go right to this object. When I say you need good copy, I am saying you need to have some type of headline that is easy and quick to read and right to the point. Why should it be easy to read? Because it will lead to the next step…..

D= Desire

If you really want to grab potential customers/clients, you need to put a desire in them to want what you are offering. This can’t be done in any boring fashion. This needs to be done with captivating objects, whether it is with images and/or text, this needs to grab them and pull them in. The desire we are usually looking for is for the visitor to want to go further into the website to find out more. This is part of the goal you have set. And with good analytic software you can easily set up analytics to find out if you are getting the desire you want the visitors to have. Which in turn will lead to the last step….

A = Action

If you have your visitors this far to your website you are doing good. If there is a desire to learn more about what you are offering you have a good chance at leading the visitor to action. And this is the result you want from the goals you have set. What would the action be? Most likely it would be someone communicating with you to find out more about your stallion or your sale horse. This communication is what you can expect to get from your website. I would recommend not making goals that your website will sell the horse for you, but it will be an avenue to lead people to you that will then give you the door open to make the sale.

In summary, the most important tip I can give you today is that you must do the important planning before you even start to think about the design and look and feel of your website. Once you have done this you can then start to create the look of your website that will produce the goals you have set forth in the beginning and in return get the communication and actions you hope for from your visitors.

Take this and run with it.

The forums are geared towards two groups of individuals. The first is the site owner(s). If you are working on your own website and have questions that you need answered when it comes to designing your website – you can get the answers in the forums. All facets of the design process will be discussed ranging from simple HTML design to advanced programming. In between you can find help on graphic design, search engine optimization, and more. We are happy to help those who have decided to tackle their own website, and we hope to be of help to any and all.

The second group is the web designer. There are numerous designers who work on equine related websites that doing wonderful work and we want to learn from you. We also want to lend our knowledge to you on any topics that you need help with. If you are a web designer you know that there is plenty to have in building state of the art websites. Some of us have better skills in one area as opposed to others. We can all lend a hand to help each other so that all horse websites in the future look the best they can.

We hope you share in our passion and mission of marketing the horse on the world wide web. If we can be of help to you please let us know by posting in one of the forums. We will try our best to answer all questions so that your horse website is top knotch.

Enjoy!

Rob

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

Steps for URL Rewriting

How easy it is to set up making memorable links will be determined by the software that is running on your server. Some web hosting companies offer you a control panel that will give you access to your .htaccess file and URL rewriting. We do offer this in our control panel so that you can easily handle doing something like this without having to do the following hard coding.

Step 1: Alter your .htaccess file

If there is already a .htaccess file on your server you should be able to find it in your root folder. If you do not find it you can open a text editor to create the file. Once you have your .htaccess file open you will want to add the following code:

RewriteEngine On    # Turn on the rewriting engine<code>
RewriteRule    ^johnny/?$ johnny_be_good.php    [NC,L]    # Handle the request for Johnny
</code>

Here is the explanation of what has just been entered.

• RewriteRule – Tells Apache that this like refers to a single RewriteRule.
• ^/johnny/?$ – The “pattern”. The server will check the URL of every request to the site to see if this pattern matches. If it does, then Apache will swap the URL of the request for the “substitution” section that follows.
• johnny_be_good.php – The “substitution”. If the pattern above matches the request, Apache uses this URL instead of the requested URL.
• [NC,L] – “Flags”, that tell Apache how to apply the rule. In this case, we’re using two flags. “NC”, tells Apache that this rule should be case-insensitive, and “L” tells Apache not to process any more rules if this one is used.
• # Handle the request for Johnny – Comment explaining what the rule does (optional but recommended)

Now you can save the file as .htaccess. If you are using a text editor make sure you save as “All Files” and not “.txt”. Then you can upload the file to your root folder.

Now you can open your pages and change your links to www.meadowhorsefarm.com/johnny. If you are doing offline advertising you can simply use the same URL, www.meadowhorsefarm.com/johhny for example, to help make your link memorable.

Please note that the .htaccess file is very sensitive as is URL rewriting. If you are unsure about these steps you can check out Apache URL Rewriting Guide.

If you can get the hang of rewriting you will start to get creative in the way you link to your pages. This will help with making your links attractive in online and offline marketing, and help in search engine optimization. For example, let’s say we have the same website, www.meadowhorsefarm.com. We also have a folder for salehorses and a page for Johnny Be Good. Keeping search engine optimization in mind you can create a rewriting rule that would change www.meadowhorsefarm.com/salehorses/johnny_be_good.php to www.meadhorsefarm.com/western-pleasure-sale-horse/johnny/. Seeing that search engines have a high criteria on picking up keywords in the URL, this would help if Johnny Be Good is a western pleasure sale horse.

The above example is a basic example. There are other ways to create patterns for more dynamic websites. You can go as high as your imagination will take you. You can even go to the point to where the link will read www.meadowhorsefarm.com/horses-for-sale/quarter-horse/western-pleasure-sale-horse/johnny/. You can see from this link that there are numerous keywords that have been added to the URL. Great for search engine spiders that come to your site.

There are millions of ways to improve your links and your search engine optimization with URL rewriting, and all it takes is some practice and a good imagination. Please note one more time that you have to be careful with the rewriting of the links and the .htaccess file. Any incorrect code will result in fatal errors.

If you would like more information on this please let me know. I can give you some tips by email, with the discussion below, or you can hire me to re-do your website and the way the links are shown. Have fun and I hope this is helpful in your online and offline marketing.

Rob

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

Download: Website Strategy Guide

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

iStockphoto

iStockphoto is the internet’s original member-generated image and design community. Find your inspiration on the world’s leading royalty-free stock destination. Search for over 3 million photographs, vector illustrations, video footage and Flash files.

Shutterstock

Shutterstock is the largest subscription-based stock photo agency in the world. Every day we add thousands of photographs, illustrations, and vectors to our outstanding collection of premium, royalty-free images. You can choose a 25-A-Day Subscription for the greatest savings (get 25 downloads every day — that’s 750 each month) or select an On Demand Subscription for the greatest flexibility (use downloads whenever you need them for up to a year).

Getty Images

Digital Stock Photography – On-line Stock Photography.

FotoSearch

Fotosearch Stock Photography and Stock Footage helps you find the perfect photo or footage, fast! Our search engine features 3,100,000 royalty free photos, 60,000 stock footage clips, digital videos, vector clip art images, clipart pictures, background graphics, medical illustrations, and maps.

Big Stock Photo

Search and download high quality low cost stock photos and images. Use these royalty free stock photo images for templates, web sites, print, ads, products and more.

Every Stock Photo

We are a search engine for free photos. These come from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo’s license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos. Membership is free and allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos.

Photos.com

Smart choice for creative professionals who need instant access to premium quality photos, illustrations, Flash, audio and more, including over a million images from Jupiterimages’ Stockxpert collection.

Dreamstime

Stock photography community providing high quality stock photos and stock images. Free photos added weekly.

Corbis

Millions of images online, featuring the finest in historical, fine art, business, technology, celebrity, travel, sports and nature photography for advertising, publishing and multimedia design.

123RF

Find that perfect photo with our vast content of 3.3 million images here. Our friendly group of professional account managers worldwide are always ready to serve you anytime, round-the-clock.

Fotolia

Buy and sell royalty free stock photos on Fotolia.com. Affordable Royalty free stock photos, cheap stock images and stock pictures.

Snap Village

SnapVillage is an online marketplace that connects photographers and illustrators with creatives and professionals looking for high-quality royalty-free stock imagery.

Blend

Blend Images is the world’s leading multiethnic commercial stock agency. Founded by a consortium of the most talented and respected photographers within stock photography, and managed by key industry veterans, Blend Images has established itself as the premiere destination for ethnically diverse business and lifestyle imagery.

Sale Horse Title

If you are posting your horse for sale on classified ad websites you will want to make sure that your title is very captivating. With the amount of horse being offered online in these horse classified ads websites, your horse can easily get overlooked if you give them no reason to look at your horse. Most of the websites list the horses for sale with a thumbnail and a title that links to the information about the horse. With a poorly written title, your horse will get passed by everytime. Take a look at this title for a horse for sale:

Howdy ! I’M “BUCK OWENS” Beutiful Buckskin !!

First off, I do not know what Beutiful means? You have to watch your spelling in your title. Second, this does not captivate me to look any further into buying your horse. I am sure I could have waited till I was in the specific page to find out the name of the horse. I also am not sure I needed the horse telling me hello. Now, here is what I consider to be a quality title for a horse for sale:

Beautiful Buckskin Ready For Good Home

To me, this is telling me a little about the horse I will be looking at. It is telling me that it is a buckskin, must be ready for something and is being sold to a good home. This helps to summarize the horse and weed out viewers that do not have any interest in looking at this horse. Obviously an olympic type trainer is not looking for a horse that is ready for a good home. But we do know that a family is looking. So we want to try to get families that are looking for a ready made home horse to purchase.

Pictures

Giving a potential horse buyer a good visual of your horse is so important. Use of bad quality taken pictures will hinder any chance you have a selling a horse online. If your photo is not clear and does not show the full quality of your horse, take a new photo. Taking a photo of your horse with your cell phone just shows how much you really want to sell your horse.

Try to keep the area where you are taking the photo as clean as possible. Do not take the photo with a barn halter on. That does no justice to your horse. Taking the photo with other horses around does not do any good. This only takes the eye away from your horse. This also can be in the way of showing your horse to the viewer.

Give your horse and bath and show that you are really trying to sell your horse. If you do not put the time into bathing your horse, brushing your horse, and more, you are not giving yourself any better of a chance in the sales process.

Horse Pedigree

Most all of your classified ad websites offer you the chance to add a pedigree. Take the time to fill this in as much as possible. Not doing this only puts you on the phone longer with someone requesting more information. Worse then that, it ruins a potential lead when they find out that the pedigree is not what they are looking for. If you, or your web designer, add a pedigree to your website, add as much information as you can for each of the horses listed in the pedigree.

Disciplines

Any part of your presentation should be very open and honest, especially with the disciplines. Seeing a list of disciplines for a horse like the following does not help me out much:

• Western Pleasure
• Trail Horse
• Three-Gaited
• Show
• Park
• Parade
• Great For Kids

• Field Trial
• Eventing
• English Pleasure
• Endurance Riding
• Competitive Trail
• Cattle Work

If I was to see a horse listed with these disciplines and read that the horse could do all of these at a higher end level, I would be expecting a major price tag on this horse. Do not confuse the potential horse buyer with a listing of disciplines that most horse can not accomplish. I am not saying that a horse is not capable of doing all of this, I am saying that if a horse does all of this, that horse will not be on the internet being sold. On top of that, the horse will be on the internet being sold for $6500, which leads to the next section.

Description

Most of us love a good fictional story, but not when it comes to buying a horse. Using a description that goes beyond the scope of what the horse really is can damage any thoughts you have of selling your horse on the internet. The description is a great place to give background information about the horse that will save you time from having to answer when the person contacts you in person. Listing a history of the horse, show records, medical records training records, etc. can really be helpful in getting someone to have all of the facts about the horse. Listing a description that was used for the title and disciplines above, here is what it read:

HAVE TEAMED-UP TOGETHER TO OFFER THIS GREAT HORSE TO ALL OF OUR DISCRETE AND MOST PARTICULAR CUSTOMERS, HE’S A KEEPER IN EVERYWAY, AND IS AS GOOD AS THEY COME *

***** 30 DAY MONEY BACK GAURANTEE !!! *****

*** CHECK OUT THIS GUY HE’S “FANTASTIC”***

SUPER NICE 4 YEAR OLD GELDING, THAT IS BROKE AND TRAINED BY THE BEST. HE DOES “EVERYTHING” LIKE ONE IS SUPPOSSED TO DO AND MORE! HE IS STUNNING TO LOOK AT, AND TO RIDE. HE BEHAVES LIKE YOU WANT ONE TO, AND HE IS AN EXPERT IN THE CROSS TIES. LOADS AND TRAILERS LIKE AN OLD PRO, AND BESIDES ALL THIS, HE IS AS LOVING AND FRIENDLY AS YOU COULD ASK FOR.

*** WE ARE “PROUD” TO OFFER HIM FOR SALE  WITH A 30 DAY MONEY BACK GAURENTEE, SELLER WILL FURNISH COGGINS AND HEALTH PAPERS, BUYER IS TO FURNISH TRANSPORTATION, THERE IS A 10 PERCENT RESTOCKING FEE IF HORSE IS RETURNED. AS ALWAYS “HAPPY TRAILS”

Lets look at how this does not make much sense.

First, this is being offered to popular customers.

Are they saying that anyone who goes to a website offering horses for sale is there customers?

Second, a 30 day money back guarantee and a re-stocking fee.

When you buy this horse make sure you also buy a computer that you can also re-stock. I am not for sure if re-stocking is something that is done with horses. That is as far as I will go with this statement.

Third, read this description and tell me if this type of horse is sold on the internet? Answer, NO. This type of horse is sold before there is even a chance to consider putting it on the internet.

Enough of that description. When putting together a description, be honest stating the good and the bad. Use this as a place to tell a history of the horse. Stay far away from a fiction story like this or you will be throw into a class that other frauds are in that try to take your money with online scams.

Price

Having a realistic price tag can only be accomplish by the quality of the horse and the presentation used. I have seen plenty of horse sold for price tags way beyond what the market calls for, but because the way the horse was presented, the sale was made possible. Staying with the example title, description, and disciplines used above,  here is the price tag: $6750.00. After reading the description and seeing what disciplines the horse does, I would be going along the lines of $50,000 and above. Then I get let down with a price tag of $6750. I am not telling you to raise the roof on your horse price, I am telling you to keep it in line with the way you present your horse. When I read this description and saw the rest of the information I was thinking major price tag. Then I see that price. My first thought was that the person is lying to me or that it is a scam. Stay away from this or the rest of the potential buyers will be thinking along the lines I was.

Summary

The presentation of your horse on the internet is very important in how far the potential buyer goes into signing a check. One thing you can be guaranteed: They won’t do it from seeing a horse online alone. The internet is a new avenue for researching horses for sale. All it is, and should be used for, is a means of getting a potential buyer to contact you and request more information. The presentation and how you tell the story of the horse will determine if that request is ever made.

There are other factors in presenting a sales horse online, both visually and psychology, that is not talked about here. Take what I have offered here and use it, blend it, mash it, throw it away, however you see fit. Just keep in mind that the quality of your horse alone will not sell your horse. Just because you have a great horse and you put it online does not mean your horse will be wanted by everyone, if anyone. Present the horse the best you can, with the greatest of presentations, and you will increase your chances of someone becoming interested in your horse.

Mash it over.

God Bless,
Rob

The Stallion Web Page

This is what is seen on the web page when someone looks at the stallion information. Here they can get all the details about the stallion from a full description to a send to friend feature. Different content is put in different tabs so the content does not force the visitor to scroll down the page. Now lets say someone wants to print this information to keep the stallion in mind for breeding their mare to. If they went to print this page as is it would be broken apart and not very pleasant of a print out because the web page is structured differently then a print page. So we created content that is not seen on screen that can be seen when someone goes to print.

The Stallion Print Brochure

If you went to File >> Print Preview, you would see what you see above. This is much cleaner and easier to print and has been formatted for printing purposes. This allows visitors to easily print information that they can keep long after they have left your website. Again, if you have any business you do in the horse world, what better way would there be to get a brochure in the hands of your visitor. So how do you do this? Below is the explanation with code you can copy into your webpage if you manage your own site.

How To Set Up Horse Brochure

In the header of your web page, or in your CSS file, add the following code. You can copy and paste the code right into your page:

@media print {
 
.unprintable {
display: none;
}
.printable {
display: block;
}
 
}
@media screen{
.printable {
display: none;
}
}

The code above tells what should be displayed in the printable page and what should be displayed in the web page. Then it says what should not be shown in the printable page.

After this you will add the following to the body of your web page code:

<div class="unprintable">
<!--This is where all of your web page code is inserted-->
</div>
<div class="printable">
<!--This is where all of your printable brochure goes-->
</div>

How you lay out your web page, or how it already is laid out, is up to you or your webmaster. The same goes for the printable brochure. But adding the CSS code and the classes before and after your code will allow you to seperate what someone sees on screen and in print. This method will help you in creating a free brochure.

I hope this is helpful in your horse marketing needs. Anyway we can promote the horse is of benefit, and my hopes are this benefits you.

Have a great day.

God Bless,
Rob

Video is not doubt the best way to present your horse to possible buyers. But what if they can’t see the video? What if the video is choppy? What is the video cuts in and out? These are factors we need to keep in mind when making video for the web. Here are some tips to keep in mind when saving your video for the web for other horse enthusiast to see:

1. Take all of the fancy graphical transitions of the video out. The reason for the video is to present the horse to prospective buyers. Keep it to a minimum of what is needed. When someone is buying a horse what do they look for? The look at the horse from the front, each side, and the rear. Take video of these angles for the person to see the horse just as they would in person. Let the person see the hooves, the front legs, the back legs and the body as a whole from all four sides.
2. Show the horse moving. Whether it is in hand or on a lunge line, either of those is fine. I am not for sure if the horse doing liberty is the way to do it, especially in a field. Most fields have distractions, trees, tall grass, dirt, holes, etc.. that can take away from a person watching the horse move. Keep the horse in an area where the view of the horse moving is the only thing being watched.
3. If the horse is broke to ride show the horse under saddle doing all the gates. Stay away from temptation of showing off the horse, keep it to a minimum and show what is needed.
4. If you are promoting the horse as a family safe horse, show the horse doing activities that a family would do with the horse.

For the sake of knowing that the video can be seen by all possible buyers, make different sizes of video. You can make one of the videos 3mb in size, another 6mb in size, and another 10+mb in size. Then using flash technology you can let the flash program detect the connection speed and show the correct video. You can contact me if you would like to know more about this flash technology or you can google for flash video software.

Speaking of flash, this is a great tool in presenting your video on your website. If you do not have a website you can take advantage of youTube and myspace along with other video sharing services. If you do have a website, using flash allows you to embed the video right into your website so visitors can watch your sales horse without having to download the movie. You can contact me for more information about this feature if you desire to have flash added to your site to present your sale horse videos.

In the end, it is all about selling the horse. There are many skeptics still out there when it comes to buying horses online. Do not try to make the internet the end all to selling your horse. Allow it to be another avenue of marketing. Make sure there is constant information in front of all visitors on how to contact you in regards to buying the horse. The internet has come along way and is becoming a mainsteam marketing tool. But you must make sure that you keep all visitors in mind with your video and that you know your audience. At this time the average shows that the horse industry is still behind when it comes to the internet connection of choice.

If you need any help with marketing your horse on the internet please feel free to contact me for more information, some even free.

Hope this is of some help in the marketing of your horses on the internet.

Rob