ATILUS - Web Design | Internet Marketing

Standard Homepage Content Practices

A website’s homepage is one of the most crucial aspects to any site. It can, a lot of times, make or break whether someone stays or goes. Every homepage should be made up of certain elements to draw in the user to want to dig deeper in to what that site has to offer. You should know what content to use and how to use it.

Homepage content usually consists of a variety of things that your site has to offer. The whole idea of the homepage is to tell/show the user what you have to offer without telling them everything; a teaser if you will. At the same time you want to highlight/feature what your services/information/products are that the user is truly looking for and what you what them to find. So with this in mind we have come to what a homepage may consist of:

Featured content

What you want them to notice most (products, services, blog posts, etc.) is usually shown in a large banner area at the top of the page.

Welcome text/images

This text/images welcomes the user to the site to what you have to offer.

Services

This is what the user most likely came to the site for in the first place. I recommend highlighting these to be a main focal point.

Blog/news posts

List of recent posts or a snippet of most recent blog/news post is a good source of content to be displayed on the homepage.

“Call to Action” Buttons

A highlighted button/text that can easily direct people to important places on the site. This could be places that users will be going to on a normal basis if they are using your site for a service. Sometimes used for quick direction to a contact page.

About us

Sometimes companies will like to place a small teaser about who they are if they don’t have much other content to work with.

Here are some examples of sites that have content and how it was used for the homepage.

These are just a few examples of standard content and placement most likely found on a homepage and are good practices to be aware of. What do you have on your homepage?

Fort Myers, Naples Court Reporting

We are proud to announce our new client Gregory Court Reporting Services. 

After being introduced to Laura Gregory, the owner of Gregory Court Reporting Services, and a few meeting regarding strategy and marketing, we have officially begun work together in order to further market and promote the GregoryCourtReporting.com website. Initially we will be marketing the website via search engine optimization as well as making a few small adjustments. In the near future we hope to totally redesign the website and further market the website using our other tools (including pay per click marketing and social media). I’d like to personally thank Laura for taking the time out of her busy schedule to meet with me and to trust that Atilus will deliver increased visitors, leads and sales through our strategic search engine optimization package. For more information on the firm please continue reading…

About Gregory Court Reporting Services

Are you looking for court reporting in Lee County? How about court reporting in Collier Countyf?

Whether your law firm is located in Southwest Florida or your case brings you here, Gregory Court Reporting Services has 5 locations throughout Southwest Florida to help meet your needs. You can rely on Gregory Court Reporting Services’ years of experience to deliver accurate legal records. No matter what you need, all of our records, transcriptions and other services are fully documented and archived. In addition to conventional fort myers court reporting Gregory Court Reporting Services also offers other transcription services including:

• Medical Examination Transcription
• Expert Witness Testimony
• Depositions
• Corporate Meetings (held in our gorgeous offices throughout Naples, Fort Myers, & Part Charlotte)
• Sworn Statements
• Private Conferencing (via state of the art video and audio conferencing equipment)

Gregory Court Reporting employs the latest technologies to produce prompt, precise transcripts, while ensuring the integrity of the testimony.

For over 20 years Gregory Court Reporting Services has been providing transcription and legal court reporters for thousands of clients throughout Southwest Florida.

LinkedIN Advertising First Impressions

A couple of days ago I received an email from LinkedIN.

Background on my Experience With LinkedIN:

I have been a member of LinkedIN since day 1, but honestly, up until recently I thought it was complete rubbish. It just tries too hard to be everything else, although I’m starting to appreciate some of the directions it’s gone in. What do I mean by “everything else?” Well, it has an update bar - like twitter (and more recently Facebook), it now allows “friends” not just business connections ala Facebook, it has a whole question/answer section (a great idea), but it too closely mirrors Yahoo Answers system. And much more (blogging, pictures, etc.)...

But, amid all of this social media gobalee-gook it does have some awesome features:

• Interactive Resume - Your profile is MUCH more like a resume than other social networks and allows you to always have an updated copy - an do some personal branding should someone Google you.
• Recommendations - This is perhaps the greatest feature. You can quickly solicit others to write a recommendation on you or your company. Anyone on LinkedIN can quickly see how much love you have.
• Business-Centered - Regardless of the features, everything is more “business-centric.” I receive almost no spam, and this is a great place to keep in touch with business contacts. I don’t want to befriend clients on Facebook so they can see my drunken debacles (just kidding - “or is he?”).

So a few days ago I got an email advertising LinkedIN’s own advertising network. Truth be told I had no idea this existed, and expected something akin to Facebook’s own advertising platform. Because the ad featured an enticing coupon, we decided to jump in. Before recommending any products/services to our clients we like to try it out ourselves in order to understand it both technically as well as financially (does it REALLY WORK and will it provide a return?!).

Below is a list of first impressions, good and bad, as well as a quick summary. 

LinkedIN Advertising Pros

• Easy to Setup - Setup took about 2 minutes which involved logging into my existing account, creating 1 small text ad, uploading Atilus’ logo, targeting certain groups/areas, and then inputting credit card and coupon information.
• Targeting - I love this about Facebook and now too, about LinkedIN. You can target people based on their position, demographic, geography, and much more. 

LinkedIN Advertising Cons

• Limited Targeting - You can only target people by a few categories at a time (I believe it was 3) even though they offer the ability to target by much more, they get blurred out once you’ve selected three target groups. What does this mean? Well - our ad will be shown to nearly 3,000,000 people. I don’t want this, it’s far too many. I’d really appreciate the ability to further drill down to the exact people that should be seeing the ad. As it stands I had to make a sacrifice in terms of what department I wanted to show it to in exchange for a geographic location. Additionally, only a few major metropolitan areas are currently target-able (IE, you can’t just select “Florida” but instead must select Miami/Fort Lauderdale or Tampa/St. Pete). 
• Expensive - VERY expensive compared to similar offerings on Facebook and even much larger PPC networks like AdWords. To give you an example LinkedIN suggests a price per click during the setup process and it recommended $6/click. Even with the $250 coupon, that amounts to only about 40 clicks. Similarly, they have a very high daily budget - $10/day or a minimum of $300/month (if you calculate it that way). 
• Reporting - Jury is still out on this one, but the reporting seems pretty rudimentary. How many people saw the ad, and did they click?

LinkedIN Advertising Review Conclusion

At the end of the month I will review everything and do a larger recap/review once we have some actual data to present to you. But, for now, the major advantage, as I see it, that LinkedIN offers is targeting. I always felt that, although performance on networks like Facebook, was always not as good as other advertising solutions like conventional PPC advertising (via Google AdWords) they do answer the question:

“How do I get in front of an audience that usually needs my services or products, but may not be looking for them at this moment?righ”

AdWords, gets you in front of that audience the moment they are searching, but every other opportunity is lost. If they’re not searching, you can’t get to them. With this kind of advertising, where you target them based on their position, employer, etc. NOW YOU CAN. For the future I see this being a tool great for B2B businesses, IE if you sell printers, computers, consulting, and any other products or services to businesses, this could be huge AND you don’t have to deal with (and waste your money on) the riff raff that are on other social networks. 

It still has a ways to go (targeting needs to get better), but it looks like this might be an amazing advertising tool for businesses targeting other businesses down the road. 

As an aside, because of the nature of the site, as well as the advertisers I do think LinkedIN will always be much more expensive than Facebook ads or even pay per click advertising. However, that may be a moot point if the people you target purchase or sign up more. 

We’ll see…

And Then There Was 9…IE9

So recently there has been some buzz about the new Internet Explorer that will be coming out in the near to distant future (no real launch date yet). Yes Internet Explorer might just be catching up with the times. IE9 previews have been opened to the public and things look promising.

Internet Explorer 9 is boasting improved graphic capability, faster load/run times, and next gen HTML 5 competence (of course everything a browser should have).  IE9’s improved graphics range from full (to near full) CSS3 selector/attribute support to added color profiles.  Speed improvements were made to make the user’s hardware work better for them. Faster Javascript run times and accelerated text and video rendering are some of the speed improvements IE has made to their latest installment. HTML 5 support will give developers the tools necessary to help launch design and development into the future.

Of course these are general improvements that Internet Explorer has been given. Plus IE9 is still in a preview/development phase that will still take some time to tweak to a beta release. And we all know how we love to get our hands on a beta release so we can talk smack about what is still wrong with it.

Till that day comes keep up-to-date on the full line of what IE9 has to offer by going to their preview site: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/. Here you can find a list of demos and test ratings that IE9 is currently getting.

The real question is, “Will this finally mean the end of IE6 for good? Will its eternal hold over some designers out there finally end with the birth of IE9?” I would hope so. I’ve long set that ship sailing and you should have too.

Does My Website Hosting Matter?

You damn right it does! (and Google’s here to back me up)

When it comes to hosting we’ve done and seen it all. From both perspectives - your perspective as a client, you want your website to “just work” operate, come up, and your email to work. And as a development company, working with servers, with hosting reseller companies, etc.

A quick back story on Atilus’ hosting:

Initially we started out with the cheapest solution we could find. We could buy a large amount of space at discount host XYZ company and then resell to our clients for hundreds of percent profit! Unfortunately, it came back to blow up in our face - MORE THAN ONCE! Our first server went down - along with around 20 clients (only 20!) and was down for days. ALL of their emails were down - and what business doesn’t collapse now a days with out email? None, every business runs on email. We spent nearly 100 hours on the phone with support over those few days trying to correct the problem. We decided to switch hosts… but again, to a cheap host. And then it happened again! Despite all of these nightmare scenarios, this cloud had/has a silver lining. It was a slap in the face and a wake up call - don’t get greedy, offer a solid service at a competitive AND profitable price. Switching, and changing our prices has allowed our business to scale and our customers to remain blissfully ignorant of the nightmare of NO EMAIL.

Back to you and your question: “Does My Website Hosting Matter?” 

We are often asked about hosting. We talk about hosting at EVERY new meeting with a client and most have purchased, or are planning to purchase hosting, but have questions. Occasionally, we have a client that hasn’t heard about hosting. Hosting is simply where your website sits, the computer that serves it up when you type in your address. Your website has to live somewhere - your hosting is where IT (your website) is stored.

Hosting Matters

Hosting matters for 1 major reason:

1) Crappy Hosting Costs You Money - Subpar hosting will ALWAYS cost infinitely MORE than the price of a premium hosting service. 

Here’s a tiny example, we lost email using a bad host a number of years ago and is reflective of what we experienced:

If you lose email for 4 days

and your company only has 3 people…

and those 3 people (making $10/hr) can’t work because email is down

you will lose roughly $720!

This is a tiny company, with poorly paid employees. For a conventional website and email hosting a whole year will never cost $720. Even if you have hosted exchange (a much more conventionally expensive form of email) for 3 people it won’t cost anywhere near $720!

I’m probably boring you with technical details. But… that’s not all… 

Bonus Reason: Your Hosting Affects Your Marketing

“Say what? How can hosting effect my marketing”, you’re probably asking? Well it’s simple, Google, and other search engines want to provide a quality experience for searchers… so if your website is NOT consistently up, you’re not going to provide that kind of experience. You will be ranked lower. Google has said this before, and Matt Cutts just reiterated it, your hosting affects your search engine results!