Web hosting: do you know who you’re sharing with?

 Do you know what other websites are hosted on the same server as the one that is hosting your website? And why does this matter?

Visitors love to quote

I provide website design services for a wide variety of insurance brokers and IFA’s. Fundamental to the success of these websites is in implementing calls to actions. One method we employ in getting visitors to their website to go beyond the stage of just browsing and probably moving away to a competitors offering is to use calculators and quotes engines.

Google wants fast web page design

If you’re using Google adwords for your pay-per-click campaign then you need to read this post on their official blog.

Why should I give a blog?

At Areoff we’ve only just got round to setting up a blog to comment on the website design industry and to give our visitors expert opinion and information on making their websites generate more income for their company but it is proving to be both a fruitful and cathartic task.

I have a passion for the website design industry as well as making my living from it. Every day I come up with inspiration for new blog posts as I see things good and bad across the web. If you have a passion for the industry you are in and you can talk with some knowledge about your products then a blog is well worth considering.

Why should I blog? Well, it is a great way of marketing your business online since it gives your visitors a wealth of information about your products, services and the industry and shows that you are an expert in your field – most customers want to deal with specialists as they feel this will result in getting good advice when they want to make a purchase. This is perhaps the most powerful reason for blogging and this is clear from a payment protection insurance blog section we run for one of our clients. I would feel confident in placing my insurance with this company (even if they are my clients).

Blogs also draw a bigger audience as your posts as submitted and displayed in blog directories like Digg.

This means that your website will have improved SEO rankings and the likes of Google often display blog results in as little as one day. True, your visitor will end up at your site via a blog directory, but it’s better for a larger volume of visitors to come to you through another site than a lot fewer arriving direct.

The pages and pages of unique (because you’ve written it yourself or paid a content specialist like Areoff to ghost write for you) will help boost your website’s SEO rankings too since search engines are looking for relevant, targeted content to enable them to differentiate between the vast number of sites that may be selling exactly the same products and services.

So get ranting, I mean blogging today and be an authority on the web for your product and service.

I shall return to blogging soon with a post along the lines of ‘top 10 tips for blogging’.

Do you have a favourite icon?

Does your website have a nifty little icon to represent your company logo or brand that appears in the address bar of an internet browser?

This little icon is called the ‘favicon’ and is a small file that is uploaded to your website directory and displays alongside the web address, bookmarks and tabs for your website across various browsers.

So why do you need a favicon if you don’t already have one?

The obvious one is that your competitors have it and this means that their website will stand out more against yours if they bookmark both your website or have several sites open at one time. If the user has several tabs open in say, Firefox and they are switching between your website and a competitors to check prices or features, if their brand or logo is represented in the tab whereas yours is merely represented by the generic browser image, you may not get noticed and get forgotten in the competition for visibility and attention on the web (which is very brief and tenuous).

Just open your bookmarks list in your browser. Which sites get noticed first? Certainly not the ones with generic logos provided by the browser. It’s the ones that have their own brand or logo represented.

This image is easy to add and your website designers should be able to install a nice 16 x 16 pixel which represents your site. Because it is a very tiny image it’s not always easy to add your exact logo but as long as the colour scheme, design or an abbreviated version of your logo is displayed you will be visible and have a subconscious effect on visitors to your site. Remember your website is probably just one of a range that a user will typically visit in order to get the information they need or buy the product they want. You can even create your own custom favicon and upload this yourself if you have access to your webspace.

For more information about this and the many small but fundamental ways in which you can increase your visibility and compete to attention amongst other websites your visitor views, contact us today.