Spring Cleaning
A New Coat of Paint
Taking a fresh look at your site
Here in St. Louis, spring is a brief and ambiguous season. Spring is when we need the furnace at night and the air conditioner during the day. Summer is when the air conditioner is never turned off.
Regardless of the climate in your neck of the woods, spring is a good time to take a fresh look at your surroundings and tidy up a bit. And that includes your website. Maybe you have new stock to offer. A slide show might be the ticket. Or perhaps you want to update the design because it’s been awhile or because your competitors have a new look. Or you’d like to add a blog so you can put tips and news out on a regular basis. Maybe searching isn’t quite up to snuff. Perhaps you want to be able to analyze your traffic – Google Analytics is easy to install. Or your inventory of goods or services has changed over the years to the point that some rearrangement of categories is in order. Maybe you would like a portfolio of pictures or video or audio clips to showcase your offerings. Perhaps you would like to add a spot on your site where folks can sign up to receive newsletters or other email from you. If you want to send out newsletters by email like the one you are reading, we suggest you look at Express Email Marketing (under the marketing tools tab).
Whatever the need, give us a call (866-HENS-NET) or send us email to find out what might be involved to get you what you want. Sometimes small efforts can make a huge difference.
Customers in the Spotlight
Cool Features, New Sites
A site we may have mentioned before (and most likely will again) is Doyle & Doyle. They have a user-friendly and technically complex interplay between individual products and jewelry history pages. Try searching for ruby earrings, for instance. Select a pair you like and notice the period of the piece (this pair is Retro). Press that hot-linked term and you will be put on the history page for the Retro period and the piece you were viewing is the piece in focus. On this Retro page you can press a link to see all the inventory for the Retro period. Pretty slick.
We recently launched a WordPress-based site for a really fun industry (making actors fly). It is for the North American Association of Flying Effects Directors and they are having a conference. We like how unlike a blog this site looks.
A completely different look for completely different needs is found on Sea Change‘s site, another WordPress-based site we launched some time ago. In this case, the aim is to put a variety of current media files at the fingertips (and ears) of visitors.
Looking Out for Your Site
Over the next month, we will be surveying customer sites, looking for any infrastructure that is outdated or vulnerable to security issues. If we should find any point of concern for your site, we will be contacting you about the situation and will suggest steps you might want to take.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns about your site, contact us.
Are Your Products in Google Shopping Search?
Profits Plus, our add-on product for PDG Commerce, is a dynamic, easy way to make sure the answer is Yes.
The newest module in Profits Plus includes the Google sitemap and Google Base data feed. Between them, they assure that your products (and images, prices and links to your store’s product pages) are loaded into Google without you having to worry about whether the bots will crawl all your pages.
We have recently configured the Google sitemap and Google Base data feeds for several sites and the results are pretty impressive. To see how much Google knows about your site, search site:yoursite (for instance, site:pierceandparker.com or site:stampamania.com). What you see for results is the piece that the sitemap influences.
Now go to the “Shopping” link on the top of this results page – you may find it listed under “more” in some browsers. What you see now is the piece that the Google Base data feeds influences. For PierceandParker.com or Stampamania.com you can see their products, complete with image, price, and links to the product page.
If you want results like this for your products, order Profits Plus today.
As a final check, search for some particular product you offer – is your store listed? If you don’t have results like this for your store yet, order Profits Plus and start using its sitemap module.
May Hosting Special
If your site feels a tad sluggish, now is a great time to move up the hosting family into a VPS (virtual private server). They start at $59/month and give a noticeable speed improvement to large or complex sites, particularly e-commerce sites.
The first 30 days are free for new accounts opened in May.
If you aren’t sure whether a switch will address your needs, call us (866-HENS-NET) to talk about it.
