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We are closed on Jan 1st in observance of New Year holiday. Happy New Year!
A couple of weeks ago we asked our Facebook friends what their Valentine’s Day ideas and plans were on how to boost their sales for the holiday. If you were among the many that responded, we'd like to thank you! Some of you shared their strategies, but the majority of our clients who sent us emails asked us for advice. There is only 2 weeks left until the holiday, and if your business could benefit from it, there is still enough time to prepare and execute a successful Valentine’s Day campaign by following these 7 useful tips.
1. Make sure your website is relevant to Valentine's Day. If you consider capitalizing on Valentine’s Day, the first and most important thing to keep in mind is that not every business is going to see an increased demand for the holiday. If you're offering business-to-business services, don’t set your expectations too high. But if you're selling chocolates, beauty products or services, jewellery or other desirable Valentine's presents, putting a little bit of extra effort into your site might get your sales to really peak this holiday.
To best promote your holiday-themed products and services, make sure your presentation has a strong Valentine's Day look and feel. You can achieve this by simply changing your background color and applying relevant background ornaments.
All our modern designs (Atlas, Atria, Chara, Electra, Kuma, Meissa, Mira, Pasta Arc, Pasta Oval, Polaris, Sirius, Vega) support Site Background and Site Background Ornament customization. We've even pre-loaded some Valentine's Day ornaments.
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2. Create a prominent feature area. Next, pull all of your Valentine's Day merchandise or offers to your home page, so customers don't have to search through your entire website to find the perfect gift.
If you haven’t already done so, setup a Page Image Slideshow on your home page and use relevant images to link to your product or service pages.
3. Create your own special offers and packages. Gift Certificates are a great way to turn services or even a vacation package into a Valentine's Day present. Why not create a promo package by pulling several related products together? Don't forget to add a gift-wrap option and promote this package as the perfect grab-and-go Valentine's Day gift.
You can easily add gift certificates to your site with our new Local Promotions application. Even though it is not officially released yet, you can get access to the application by joining our Early Access program. Just fill out this form today, and we'll send you all the instructions you need by email.
4. Help your customers offer creative gifts. Many customers will visit your website looking for a unique and special present, but without a clear idea on what that would be. You can sell more by thinking up creative gifts around your offerings. When creating your special gift packages, think of a story that goes with them.
Fairy tales and romantic movies are always a good source of inspiration for Valentine’s Day gift ideas. Why not create a “Sleeping Beauty” gift box of evening flavored teas that you already sell, or a “Romeo and Juliet” selection of beauty salon treatments for two.
5. Get the word out. So you’ve gone through all the tips so far and you have the site decorations, the gift packages, and the gift certificates ready. But still, if nobody knows about it, it won’t get you the results you’re planning for.
Send out an e-mail to your customer mailing list and invite everyone to your website for some great Valentine's Day gifts. Let them know about the special gift packages you’ve selected for them, the special deals you’ve set up and don’t forget to mention it if you’ve started offering gift certificates.
6. Use social media to drive more traffic. Don't forget social media and third party blogs to announce your Valentine's Day offers. Use your Facebook Page and Twitter to remind all your fans and followers why you are the place to go for great Valentine's Day gifts. If you have a large fan base on Facebook you may want to go the extra mile and create a special Valentine’s Day page tab.
7. Be prepared for increased demand. After you've followed through all the tips above, make sure you are ready to handle any increased demand. Nothing is worse than running out of stock on your themed merchandise or offers and lose precious holiday sales. If you’re offering beauty services for example, it will be easier to keep track of your appointments by using SiteKreator’s built-in Appointment Scheduler application. The application will not only prevent double-booking which may ruin your clients’ holiday, but will also help you fill-up all your available slots.
One last tip from us: don’t forget to do your own Valentine’s Day shopping in time for the big day so you won't have to resort to desperate last-minute purchases, that will leave you with nothing to choose from, but cheesy greeting cards and overpriced carnation bouquets.
What this means in practice, is that you now have a much wider range of news and event feeds that you can add to your business website. Atom feeds can be found in Blogger, Google News, Gmail, on Wordpress.com and in many other places around the web.
It's been quite a busy weekend! We held our first company hackathon and today we will be releasing two of the new features that have been created during the event.
We are enabling swipe support for galleries on mobile devices and tablets, and we are releasing Social Sharing, which lets you control how your content is shared on social networks like Facebook and Google+.
In just a few short years, swiping through a set of images has become a standard gesture, and is now pretty much expected behaviour for image galleries. Today we are releasing support for swipe gestures on mobile devices and tablets that run the iOS or Android Operating Systems.
Support for swiping is automatically added to any galleries you have already published.
Swiping is supported by the Slideshow, Filmstrip and Mosaic visualisations, as well as in the Large Image Viewer and in Animated Page Images.
This feature has been tested on iOS on iPads and iPhones, and on Android 1.5 and 2.2. We will continue to test and support more devices and platforms. If you have a device that is currently not supported, please don't hesitate to contact support at sitekreator dot com and let us know.
Take Control of Social Sharing
Has this ever happened to you: you are excited to share your freshly published website or page with your Facebook friends, but when you paste the URL into Facebook's status box, Facebook does not find all the images or gets the title or description wrong?
Today we are launching Social Sharing, which gives you full control again over your page titles, page descriptions and thumbnail images as your content is shared on Facebook and Google+.
You can define Social Sharing settings for each page individually in the Page Options Panel, or for your entire site in the Site Properties Panel. As with Search Engine Optimisation, Page Options will override site-wide settings.
What's even better is that if you have already defined titles and descriptions in Search Engine Optimization, Social Sharing can directly use those. As you can see, you are in full control of how your content gets shared!
SiteKreator's Social Sharing uses a technology called Open Graph, which was originally published by Facebook but has since been adopted by Google for its +1 sharing, as well as by one of the largest social networks in Japan; Mixi.
We are currently working on an update of our Text and Image Editor and we are so excited about how it is turning out, that we would like to share a preview with you. The current editor is already quite powerful, but we are going to really jam-pack it with power in this update. Here's a quick overview of what is coming up.
The first thing you will notice when we open the new Text and Image editor is its enlarged size. We have designed the new editor to take better advantage of larger screen sizes, giving you more space to work with your content.
Above the new edit area, you'll see an updated and re-organized toolbar. One of the most noticeable difference is the grouping of the alignment and list buttons into menus. In addition to that, we have done a complete overhaul of the Insert Link interface, giving you much more control over how links on your site will work.
The Insert Image sidebar has also been revamped. The new layout gives you, among other things, more control over Alt-tags for images, which is immensely valuable for Search Engine Optimization.
Also new in the Inset Image sidebar is the image library. We'll have a large collection of high quality stock photos and icons for you to chose from.
The Insert Table sidebar layout has also been redesigned. You will be able to chose from several different table Background Styles, including setting an image as the table background, or setting different colors for odd and even rows of a table.
As you can see, this is an important update of the Text and Image Editor. But these are just what is available in the standard layouts. When you switch to Advanced mode, additional powerful options appear in each of these layouts!
We'll tell you all about those in the official release. Meanwhile, we hope that you are as excited about this coming update as we are.
We normally do not talk about politics on the SiteKreator blog but we feel that now is an important moment. Two bills have been making their way through Congress that could change the way we all use the internet to publish and find information, and to do business.
Reddit's announcement this week that it would use "the nuclear option" and black out the site for a 12 hour period on January 18 in protest of the two bills has led to lots of speculation about what other services would 'flick the switch' that day. At this moment we do not have plans for SiteKreator to join a possible wider blackout on January 18, but we do want to express our concern over this legislation and we want to share with you why we think these bills are bad for you and your business.
The two bills in question are the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP, S. 968) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, H.R. 3261) in the House. SOPA is currently awaiting a final vote in the House Judiciary Committee.
Supporters claim that these bills aim to take down websites that host or point to pirated intellectual property. To do this, the bills would give far-reaching powers to rights-holders to stop online advertising networks and payment facilitators like PayPal from doing business with allegedly infringing websites, to stop search engines from linking to these sites and to require internet service providers to block access to these sites. Opponents of the bills, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), have compared the way these powers are granted to "handing out chainsaws in an operating theater".
What is the Problem with these bills?
The PIPA and SOPA bills have a long list of serious problems that have been pointed out by industry experts and others. Some of the most important that directly affect many of our customers are that the bills are:
Expensive Estimates by the Congressional Budget Office show that PIPA alone would cost US tax-payers $47 million in the first 5 years.
A threat to online free speech Harvard University professor of constitutional law Laurence H. Tribe published an open letter, saying that SOPA violates the First Amendment.
A threat to online security Former Homeland Security Assistant Secretary and former General Counsel for the NSA Stewart Baker has argued why the bills thwart efforts to make business online more secure.
A threat to online business Several experts have pointed out that the vague definitions and severe penalties in the bills could seriously hurt e-commerce and investments, and lead to a loss of jobs.
Most of all, the bills are widely expected to be ineffective in fighting online piracy.
What is happening on January 18?
As said, SOPA is awaiting a final vote in the House Judiciary Committee. Ahead of that vote, Representative Darrell Issa of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee has announced that it will hold a hearing on January 18 to hear technical experts, technology job creators, Internet investors and legal scholars.
Among those invited to the hearing are Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit), Stewart Baker (former Homeland Security Assistant Secretary and former General Counsel for the NSA), Brad Burnham (founder of Union Square Venture investment firm, which invested in Twitter and Foursquare, among others), Lanham Napier (CEO of Rackspace), Dr. Leonard Napolitano (Director of the Center for Computer Sciences & Information Technology), Daniel Kaminsky, and Michael Macleod-Ball (Chief of Staff and First Amendment Counsel for the ACLU).
If you want to do more, or if you are not in the US but want to voice your opinion, American Sensorship has a full action checklist to get you started.
People in different locations use different formats to display date and time. Though these difference may sometimes seem minor, being able to provide them in a familiar format goes a long way to making your site visitors feel at home.
Today, we have released a Location setting that lets you control the way date and time appear on your site with just a single mouse click.
You can find the Location setting in Control Panel > Site Properties > Special Features.
Select one of the locations from the pull-down menu, or select Custom if your location is not in the list or you want to have full control over the way date and time are displayed on your site. Currently, the Location setting provides presets for a limited number of countries, but we will be expanding this list in the future. Send us a note if you want to see your location added to the list.
The Location setting affects how date and time are displayed in many different places of your site. Applications like News and Events, and the Appointment Scheduler, as well as building elements like the File Area will all now display date and time according to your Location setting.
The Form editor will use the setting to determine the format for form fields that use the $date$ and $date_time$ default values.
Clicking on the Insert Date icon in the Text and Image editor, will insert today's date and time at the current cursor location in the text.
Where dates can be set in various places in the Admin view, we have added date-pickers; small popups that let you select a date with the click of a mouse without having to worry about the formatting.
Lastly, the new setting also controls the way date and time is formatted in Control Panel > My Account, as well as in any emails that are sent to you concerning your account.
All our future applications, like our upcoming Database Editor, Gift Certificates, Daily Deals and Email Marketing, will, of course, fully support the new localized date and time settings.
You may have noticed over the past couple of days that we made changes to the design and functionality of the Page Published status messages that appear in the bottom-right corner of your browser window after you publish a page on your site.
The new status messages now include 1-click social share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. In addition, they also let you share your freshly published page by email.
We have also made all other status message that appear when you add, edit or remove different kinds of content on a page more insightful.
Besides providing feedback on what action has been successfully completed, they now also contain a reminder of what to do next, like publishing the page.
Use the new free feature to spot and optimize pages with longer loading times for better website performance and happier clients
We all rely on the Internet for a huge part of our daily activities: from getting our work done to running personal errands like online banking and shopping. As more and more routine tasks become available online, our expectations on the responsiveness of the websites we’re trying to access have increased drastically. In short, we all hate to wait. Read on, as we show you how to use the site speed reports to improve the on-page experience you provide to your clients and improve your conversion rates.
Understanding the technology: Where do I start?
When you log in your Google Analytics account, locate the Content menu. Click on it to expand it and you'll see Site Speed between Site Content and Site Search. Here you can access everything from the average page load time for your site to individual page load times.
The information comes from a sampling of 1% of the site visitors by default, though you can adjust this. You'll see the sample size for each specific page. Note that if you have a site with less traffic, you might see disturbingly high load times in some areas. Check if you have lower load times overall, as the sample size for some of the pages may be too small and thus provide inaccurate results. The 1% sample works well for sites with more than a few thousand users. So the more visitors your website gets, the more precise statistics will show on your report page.
Understanding the numbers: How do I know if my site is fast or slow?
First, the good news. Being a SiteKreator client immediately gets you on the fast track, thanks to our advanced Content Delivery Network (CDN). It is designed to load your content faster than traditional hosting solutions. Read our blog post on this to learn how relying on SiteKreator gets you literally ahead of competition.
But let’s get realistic. You will notice that even though you’ve used the same design and platform for all of your pages, many of them show different load times. Relying on technology alone is not enough. You have to take into account the content you load on your pages, your visitors’ location, the type of operating system and browsers that they use.
There are several attention thresholds in terms of an average visitor’s expectation for a page to load. According to a recent study* 40% of all visitors will wait no more than 3 seconds before abandoning a site, while online shoppers will wait no more than 2 seconds before getting frustrated. Google sets the bar even higher, considering anything longer than 1.5 seconds slow loading time.
If your Site Speed reports show that some of your pages are slower that the recommended response time numbers, do not get discouraged. Statistics should not be taken all black and white. Loading times affect us differently, based on where we are in the process of exploring a website. For example, all entry pages like landing pages, the home page, search results, and the product catalog really need to be fast. Slow loading times on those pages may have a significant impact on client experience and conversion rates.
On the other hand, once a visitor has decided to complete a purchase and has started the checkout process, slower response time is more tolerable. There is no need to worry if your login process takes even 5 or 6 seconds to complete, or if it takes 10 or 15 seconds to finalize the conversion.
Understanding the possibilities: How do I optimize my page load speed for increased conversions?
First start with optimizing your entry pages. As we mentioned above, your home and landing pages need to be really snappy. To keep them fast, get rid of the clutter. Do not use large images or galleries on those pages. It is strongly recommended to switch off the auto-play mode on your audio or video files as it may slow down a page significantly. Make sure to always scale the photos before uploading them to your product catalog. If you have the photos already uploaded and want a quick fix, then use the integrated Picnik editor that we provide free of charge, rather than using SiteKreator’s built-in editor to drag and resize them. You will make them fit on the page, but it won’t decrease their actual file size. Minimize the number of steps needed to accomplish a conversion to speed up the checkout process.
Another thing to consider is the location of the most important part of your audience. Google also shows the load time by region, so you can drill down and see how fast pages load anywhere in the world. If you serve mainly non-US audience, you should really take the time to check this report. You can also switch to the convenient Map Overlay tab of the report for a visual representation of the data. To help our customers with international client base, SiteKreator, unlike many other platforms, is not US-centric in terms of connectivity. Our CDN is a network of servers around the world, each of which has a copy of your website. Whenever a user loads your site, the files will be automatically sent from the server that is nearest to the user.
Is your website targeted at senior audience? Then make sure your pages load fast on older versions of the different operating systems and browsers. You can access this information by selecting the Technology option on the Secondary dimension drop-down menu.
Summary
Google has long been known for its obsession with speed. We hope that through experiencing the positive results that come with fast load times, you will start sharing the same idea. You can always stay assured that thanks to SiteKreator’s optimized platform your website will benefit from faster load times, but keep checking on your Site Speed reports. Make sure that your most important pages have not become slower due to heavy content. A slow-loading landing page not only impacts your conversion rate, but can also impact AdWords Landing Page Quality and ranking in Google search.
*eCommerce web site performance and its correlation with an online shopper’s behavior by Forrester Consulting
SiteKreator Forms can now display customer submitted details in the To, From, & Subject Form Fields, by applying $xxxxx$ wildcards for the special values of the corresponding Form Field Name.
NOTE: Replace xxxxx with the Form Field Name.
For example, using the Send to Email option, in this case, the special string $email$ is used in the From field. The email address submitted by the customer will display as the "From: address" of the email.
Add our Page to your circles to receive automatic updates and announcements that we will be posting there, and become part of our SiteKreator community on Google+.
If you are interested in setting up a Google+ Page for your own business, you can start at http://plus.google.com/pages/create. To get a head start on how Google+ Pages is different from Facebook Pages, read this excellent article on AdAge.
Our News and Events Application is used by thousands of our customers to automatically add fresh and up-to-date content to their business website.
