Contractor Website Toolbox

We are NARI members!

Derrick — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:23:19 +0000

We joined the NARI membership in April 2008. We have worked with several clients that are NARI members and have found that they are some our most successful clients. Our plan is to help improve the websites of NARI members while they help us grow and offer new and improved services.

We are excited about our new NARI membership and plan to take a very active role in the NARI community.

Giving back to the community - CancerAngelsofSandiego.org

Derrick — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:39:28 +0000

We recently completed a website for a local charity by the name of Cancer Angels of San Diego (CASD). At first, we took on the client with intention to bill them for our services. They came with checkbook in hand and wanted a website. They had been burned by other web designers and figured they should just pay a firm like ours to get it done right. As we learned more about their cause, it wasn’t hard for us to offer all our services as a donation to their charity. It is so rewarding to see the website launch and know, in a round about way, it will actually help people keep their home and pay bills.

Here is some information about what CASD is all about. I invite you to visit their website to learn more and consider donating. www.cancerangelsofsandiego.org

Cancer Angels of San Diego was established to address the financial needs of Stage IV cancer patients who are facing severe financial hardship. At Stage IV, the cancer has spread to several places in the body and requires ongoing treatment for life. The good news: people can live for years with Stage IV cancer due to the many advances of research. The bad news: the treatments necessary to keep them alive usually cause severe side effects such as nausea, weakness, terrible aches and pains, disabling fatigue….imagine trying to work in such a miserable physical state. These people can’t. Since they can no longer work, they are unable to pay for the basic necessities of life, including rent or mortgage payments, utilities, food, gas and car repairs, etc. The reality is, this could be you, me, or someone you love. Go here to read more about CASD - http://cancerangelsofsandiego.org/about.php

Only construction website design and internet marketing?

Derrick — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 04:48:53 +0000

A question we are often asked is whether or not we will create websites for businesses outside the construction and home improvement industry. Contractor websites are our specialty, but we definitely cater to other industries as well.

We spend most of our R&D time honing our skills related to our home improvement industry related website services. Website visitor conversion friendliness, overall design, content and other internet marketing opportunities like Pay-Per-Click (PPC), relevant inbound link building, blogs and newsletters are a few of our recent areas of improvement.

Most of our services and expertise can be extended into neighboring industries. One such example would be Arezzo Salon & Spa’s new hair salon website and internet marketing. Arezzo is a hair salon based in Carlsbad, CA. Check out their website at www.arezzosalonspa.com. Along with their new website and other specialized internet marketing, we have also added a region-based pay-per-click search engine ad campaign. Here’s a snapshot of what Arezzo’s PPC campaign has done over the past 2 weeks (3/10/08 - 3/24/08):

28 inbound phone calls (tracked by our phone call tracking system)
100 new visitors
$.25 average cost per visitor

Keep in mind, their PPC ad campaign is targeting only a 10 mile radius from their business address. We could broaden the ad campaign, but we’d see diminishing returns as there are many hair salons in their area. Most people don’t want to drive across town for their hair appointments. Well, I’m sure there are many of you that would if they had a favorite salon or barber and wouldn’t dream of going anywhere else. Something else to think about… some people may commute to work and look for a hair salon from work. They may be outside the 10 mile radius and miss the PPC advertising. We need to take that into consideration as well.

We’ve extended our Pay-per-click search engine marketing from the home improvement industry into the beauty salon / hair salon / nail salon / day spa industries with great success!

I invite you to contact us so we can offer you a report on the website traffic we can help you generate for your business. Our report is based on your specific region’s historical web traffic information. We offer this report for free to anyone with the time to call us and request it. 800-258-7752 The report will show you estimated web traffic based on different monthly advertising budgets.

3 primary elements to a successful service industry website.

Derrick — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:03:06 +0000

1. Good Website Design & Content

This includes an eye pleasing design with strong content that properly explains what you offer, who you offer it to and where you offer it. “Content is king” and should actually be your primary focus when creating a website. A lot of people can design a nice looking website, but how many can create eloquent content with strong calls to action?

There are too many facets to creating good content to get into in this post. Call us and we can talk more about how we ensure your website has good content.

2. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

PPC is another way of saying search engine advertising. More people are using Google, Yahoo and MSN to look for local service providers. PPC allows you to pay to place an advertisement in front of people looking for your services. You only pay if they click on your ad. This is much like buying a Yellow Page book ad if they let you pay only when someone called you. #1 above is an absolutely mandatory part of a good PPC advertising campaign. Your PPC ad will bring them to your website where you hope they are filled with confidence and a desire to contact you.

3. Internet Marketing

This is often misunderstood. To summarize… the more important search engines think your website is, the better search engine ranking they give you. How do you make your website look important? Two things help. Going back to #1, you need good content. Search engines see your “good content” and give you “votes” for being an “expert” in your field.

The second part is creating inbound links. Other websites linking to your website are counted as “votes” by search engines. The more “votes” you have, the better chance you have of appearing on page one of search engines when they look for your services. I’m talking about the free natural listings (organic) that appear in search engines.

Inbound links can come in all shapes and sizes. Associations that you are members of may link to your website. Other websites like blogs, partner sites, industry directories, general directories and others may also link to you. The “votes” you receive from each inbound link are weighted by two things: 1) By the relevency of the website linking to you… meaning, are they in your same industry? 2) total votes that website has… or, how important the search engine thinks the other website linking to you is.

Now you know what it takes to succeed with your website. You might build a good looking website, but without #2 and #3, how is anyone going to find it? Roughly, its like buying a yellow page ad in a book that doesn’t categorize by industry. Someone looking for your service will never find you… they’ll probably just randomly flip through until they luck upon an appropriate ad. Advertising with PPC and Internet Marketing gaurantee someone looking for your service will find you.

Give us a call if you want any more detail or have questions. 800-258-7752 We’d be happy to explain how this information applies to your business.

REVIEW: Ultimate Form Mail (UFMail) - The Ultimate Webform Spam Protection

Derrick — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 19:14:54 +0000

Let me start by giving you some background on what lead to this discovery. We manage 100’s of websites for the construction contractor industry. Just about every website has at least one webform for contacting the company. Over the years, hackers and spammers have found ways to send spam through them to our customers through their websites. One particularly enterprising hacker found a way to actually use one of our customer’s forms as a mail server to send spam out to anyone they wanted. Our security systems quickly put a clamp on the breach of security, but it made us take a really close look at permanently locking down our webforms so we could sleep soundly at night.

We almost went with a Captcha implementation to protect all our customers’ webforms. However, we decided against it because they can actually deter people from using your lead generating web form.

After much research, we went with Ultimate Form Mail (UFMail). It has some amazing capabilities when it comes to transparently protecting your webforms from hackers. We also liked that it can also log all form submissions to a database if we needed.

You can learn more about Ultimate Form Mail here:
http://visionwebservices.com/recommends/ufmail

This PDF report has a gread deal of good info about protecting webforms from spammers:
http://visionwebservices.com/recomme…ail-report.pdf

We spent several hours doing research on form processors; way more time than we expected. There are so many options and it is very difficult to compare beyond actually installing and using each one. All of our R&D will pay off in the long run for our customers and us. When you manage as many sites as we do, it pays to have strong email and webform spam defenses. Many of our customers have mentioned getting less SPAM after we implemented the Ultimate Form Mail processor.

I guess the only complaint I have is how much time it took to implement. Now, allow me to clarify. All form processors take a decent amount of time to properly configure. I always had hopes of finding one that made it really easy. But alas, I think that is impossible if you want a secure form processor that gives you as many functions as UFMail. I had it up and running in basic mode within minutes of uploading it to my webserver. The real time is spent in modifying it to do exactly what I wanted it to do.

Advantages - UFMail form processor

Powerful anti-hack and anti-spam built-in.
Easy to configure by editing one text file.
Built-in auto-responder email function. Instantly send a thank you to the person that submitted the form. This is good for leaving your contact info in their email.
Can log all form submissions to a database (mySQL) on your host. Most hosting services include at least one database.
Emails sent from form include basic html template so you can format it how you wish or just leave it alone.
Cost is low for included security and overall functionality. $29

Disadvantages - UFMail form processor

Setup still requires some basic html form creation knowledge. (If you hire a pro to install, this is not an issue.)
A hosted service like www.response-o-matic.com may be easier for non-professionals. Hosted services typically offer a user-friendly wizard for designing your form and auto-responder text. However, you still need to edit a page on your website to include the code required to make the form work.
Not free

We heartily recommend the Ultimate Form Mail processor for use on all websites as we have not run into one showstopper problem.

Feel free to contact me through our website if you need someone to install UFMail for you.