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Marketing Your Website Once your website is finished, you must market it. Just because it is on the internet doesn’t mean it will work for you. If you don’t promote your website, you will see very minimal results. Mann Print & Design will register your website with the Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search engines. It can take some time before these search engines index your site. We will make sure your website is optimized for these search engines. However, you cannot simply rely on the search engines for all your marketing. Tell your friends, co-workers, family, and whomever about your new site. Use social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to promote your site. E-mail everyone in your address book and tell them the news. Do a mailer or two. Also, scan the internet for web directories that pertain to your website. There is a web directory for just about everything… sometimes many. Find them and get your website listed and linked. The more, the better. Anywhere you have your business name, list your website address underneath it. On your business sign, your stationery, your marketing materials, business cards, email signature… everywhere. When they see your name, they should also see your website address. Few people see immediate results with their website. Keep in mind your website is an investment and it takes time to see a good return. Don’t be disappointed if you have your site up for a month and you get no response. It takes a lot of time and patience, just like starting your own...
Read MoreChoosing a Domain Name Choose a short domain name. Will it fit nicely on printed materials? A domain such as www.ThisDomainNameIsWayTooLong.co.nz will have trouble word-wrapping in paragraphs and fitting in marketing materials such as business cards. This is especially true if your e-mail address is JohnDoe@ThisDomainNameIsWayTooLong.co.nz. A domain like www.ShortDomain.co.nz is far better. Use your name or keywords. If you sell cars, we wouldn’t recommend a domain like www.WeSellForLess.co.nz. You need a domain like www.WeSellCars.co.nz. Also, if your business name is Johnson Automotive, you’ll probably want to use www.johnsonautomotive.co.nz. We would only recommend keyword-based domains if there were no domains available which contain your name. If you are a New Zeland only Company, always try to go with co.nz so your client can see you are a NZ based company. If you are planning to sell your products overseas then go with the most widely-recognized top-level domain (TLD) .com. If you can’t get a .com, consider changing your domain so you can. Sleep on it! If you are uncertain about a domain name, don’t jump and register the first one that comes to mind. It is best to give it a day or two to think things...
Read MoreWhat Are Hits? While Dictionary.com defines hits as: “a connection made to a website over the Internet or another network”, this definition is actually quite vague. A hit is actually a successful request to your web server from a visitor’s browser for any type of file, whether an image, HTML page, an MP3 file, or any other type. A single webpage can cause many hits – one for each image included on the page. If a single web page contains 20 images, that’s 21 hits – 20 images plus 1 for the page itself. If one single person looks at 10 web pages which each contain 20 images, that individual is responsible for 210 hits. Some websites will say things like “our site gets 2 million hits per month.” That sounds impressive, but it can be completely misleading. A website could have an average of 50 images or other elements per page, while another website could be all text-based. Or worse, a particular website could have hundreds of tiny 1×1 (pixel) transparent graphics that are invisible. Fifty people in one month could easily accumulate two million hits if they visited just five pages on that website every day. Traffic reported as “hits” should be open to skepticism. However, the problem is when someone uses “hits” as a phrase to talk about real people visiting their website (a.k.a. “visits” or “sessions”). In these cases, you don’t know if they are really talking “hits” or actual “visits”. “Visits” or “sessions” is the best method of measuring traffic. Typically “visits” or “sessions” are a series of clicks on your site by an individual visitor during a specific period of time. A “session” is initiated when the visitor arrives at your site, and it ends when the browser is closed or there is a period of inactivity. This method is a good way to know how much real traffic your site is getting. If a website says “we get 2,000 visits per day,” that’s impressive. But if they say “we get 2,000 hits per day,” you just can’t be sure. “Pageviews” is another great method of gauging your website traffic. “Pageviews” are a request from a visitor’s browser for a displayable web page,...
Read MoreWebsite Ownership Rights Some web companies retain full ownership rights to your website and domain name, even after you paid for those services. Mann Print & Design tries to give our clients as much ownership of their website as possible. If we register a domain on your behalf, you are the administrator and registrant of the domain. That means it is yours, not ours. Many other web companies will place their own contact information on the domain’s administration and registrant fields. This means they technically own that domain. When Mann Print & Design designs websites, we release all rights to you for the graphic work we did on the site. The code we develop is not quite yours, however. We have the right to use that code we develop for you on other sites, unless you specify otherwise. Sometimes third-party scripts are necessary to enhance features of your site, such as drop-down menus or slide-show banners. These scripts are usually general use licenses but must maintain a copyright notice from the script’s author. In this case the script doesn’t belong to either of us, but we have rights to use the script on your...
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