Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

Does your website sizzle or fizzle? Do you convert visitors into customers, leads, readers, followers, members or donors? Or do visitors abandon your site in search of something… well… BETTER?

Whether you have a simple brochure site or a complex ecommerce storefront or anything in between, you need your website to WORK for you.

Here are 7 elements of an effective website that you can easily put to work on your own site.

1. Compelling Headers

Create H1 headlines that are keyword rich, but also clearly define the content on the page. Unlike an ad headline, site headers need to be more descriptive than suggestive.  But that doesn’t mean they have to be lifeless.  Keep headers to one or two lines, generally less than 10 words.

2. Quality Content

Content is King!  But make sure the King is speaking to humans first and search engines second. Use keywords appropriately, not excessively. And go back to basics: First, tell’em what you’re going to talk about. Second, talk about it. Third, tell’em what you talked about.

3. Engaging Imagery

Friends don’t let friends use bad clip art.  Whether you use royalty-free stock photos, your sister Sue’s scribbles, or custom illustrations commissioned from a professional artist, the imagery on your site has a lot of work to do.  It needs to engage, to add visual interest and assist in telling the story. If it’s not doing this, dump it and find something that does.

Some great resources:

Fotolia*             http://www.fotolia.com

Stock.Xchng     http://www.sxc.hu/

morgueFile        http://www.morguefile.com

Dreamstime      http://www.dreamstime.com

*Be sure to check out the special Fotolia offer exclusively for Appliedi.Net customers at http://www.appliedi.net/marketplace/default.html

4. Intuitive Navigation

Is it easy to get around your site?  Can new visitors find what they need quickly?  Here are some basic recommendations for good site navigation:

• Navigation should be available on all pages… no “dead end pages.”
• If you provide links to other sites, always designate the links to open in a new browser window or tab.  Don’t artificially boost your abandon rate by bouncing users off your site unintentionally.
• Use a combination of header tabs, drop-down menus, side navigation buttons or tabs, contextual Call to Action buttons, Anchor Text and footer navigation links. Group navigation tools together logically.
• Don’t overuse Anchor Text, but DO use intrasite links wherever necessary to provide clarity and substance.
• Make sure your Site Map is organized intelligently, so a visitor can easily see how information is categorized on your site.

5. Rapid Page Loading

Nothing makes a website fizzle faster than a long page load time. Make sure your site measures up to expectations.  Go to Alexa.com and enter your URL. See whether your Average Load Time is available.  If Alexa can’t access the speed, try WebsiteOptimization.com. Just enter your URL and you will get a detailed analysis of your page load speed.

6. Elegant Meta Data

Make sure your Meta Descriptions, Title Tags, Keywords (if you use them) and ALT tags are optimized for BOTH search engines and humans. Don’t just look at the trees (keywords) but see the forest (the whole story you’re telling.)  Think of the Meta data as an opportunity to validate and classify the content on each page.

7. Clear Call To Action

Don’t forget to tell your visitors what you want them to do.  Do you want them to sign up? Call you? Buy something? Fill out a form?  Whatever it is, be sure to make it utterly impossible to miss, and really, really EASY.

Whether your site has been online for 10 years or 10 days, it’s a valuable exercise to take a fresh look every so often. If you glean even one good take-away from this article, it was well worth the 5 minutes it took to read!

Popularity: 17% [?]

Applied Innovations has rolled out an enhanced Helm Control Panel that allows you to specify a separate authorized Technical Contact for your account. This means we’ll be able to more efficiently communicate information to our customer base by separating technical communications from billing and account management communications.

Prior to this update, you had the option of designating multiple contact emails, but there was no way of designating the type of information each contact would receive. So everyone got the same communications, be they technical, billing or account-related. Makes for a lot of unnecessary and duplicate email.

Now, just go into your Control Panel and add the appropriate data for your Technical Contact, and we’ll be able to get information directly to the people who need it.

Thanks to all of you who suggested this improvement!

Popularity: 10% [?]

Earlier this month, SmarterTools announced the release of SmarterTrack 5.x and SmarterMail 6.9. If you’re using earlier versions of these products, you’ll definitely want to check out the Release Notes to review all the features and improvements. Links for the Portals and Release Notes are available below:

SmarterTrack 5.x Release Notes Portal

SmarterMail 6.9 Release Notes Portal

Last year, SmarterTools announced a new Upgrade Protection plan.  If you elected to purchase this plan, you just need to download the upgrades from the SmarterTools Portals. However, if you don’t have Upgrade Protection, you will have to purchase a license in order to take advantage of any new release.  And we definitely recommend you sign up for Upgrade Protection, while you’re at it.  This way, you’ll stay current for the next 12 months, no matter how many upgrades are released.

SmarterMail 7.x Public Beta

In addition, a Public Beta for SmarterMail 7.x was just announced. New planned features include improved searching and indexing, message flagging, a synchronization center, file storage, multiple system administrator logins, a redesigned webmail interface, and more. Information is available in the SmarterTrack 7.x BETA forum, where you can find instructions for participating in the BETA, release notes, and download information.

Popularity: 7% [?]

The PHP 4 End-of-Life Announcement was nearly three years ago but Appliedi.net has continued to offer it because some of our customers are still running legacy applications that require it. However, we will no longer be deploying PHP 4 to new servers moving forward. We want to encourage our customers to start migrating those legacy applications from PHP 4 to PHP 5, which has been out for nearly six years.

Please rest assured that Applied Innovations is committed to providing you the best tools, technologies and innovations available.  Applied Innovations will continue to provide full support for all versions of PHP 5 as well as PHP 6, which is rumored to be on the horizon of release. Get the most current information from PHP.net , including detailed migration instructions and links to a variety of support resources.

Popularity: 3% [?]

At Applied Innovations, we’re constantly expanding and improving our network performance and reliability. We want to keep our customers informed, so we’ve made it easy for you to stay current with everything going on behind the scenes by creating a designated network status portal at http://status.appliedi.net.

You’ll want to bookmark this address, since this should be your first check point to investigate network status, or to ensure the network isn’t being impacted by a maintenance window. It will be updated 24/7 with any and all network-related information. In addition, you should follow our Twitter and Facebook pages, as these sites are also updated in real-time as updates are posted to the status page.

This is just one of the ways Applied Innovations is delivering on our commitment to total customer satisfaction, complete reliability and superior security.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Applied Innovations is delighted to announce support for .Net 4.0 on all our Dedicated and VPS Hosting plans. A few of the highlights of ASP.Net 4.0:

• With ASP.Net 4, WebForms controls now render clean, semantically-correct and CSS-friendly HTML markup.
• Built-in URL routing functionality allows you to expose clean, search engine-friendly URLs for increased traffic to your website.
• ViewState within applications is smaller and is now more easily controlled.
• Other new controls, such as rich charting and data controls are now built-into ASP.Net 4 and enable you to create applications even faster.
• ASP.Net MVC 2 is now integrated into ASP.Net 4, providing a great way to build sites and applications using a Model-View-Controller-based pattern.

ASP.Net 4.0 on Shared Plans

We have been extensively testing ASP.net 4.0 integration with our Shared Hosting Control Panel and hope to have it ready to release in early June. However, for those customers that absolutely, positively MUST have it today, we have excellent deals available on VPS plans. Just call us at 866-706-8691 and mention “.Net 4 VPS Offer.”

Get more info about .NET 4.0 from the ASP.Net Home Page or Microsoft/Web.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Applied Innovations first launched VPS Hosting as a production offering in 2007 utilizing the Virtuozzo OS virtualization platform. Since that time, technology has continued to evolve, leading to new innovations in virtualization and cloud computing.

In 2009, we partnered with Microsoft and built out a managed Virtual Dedicated Server offering around Hyper-V and the System Center suite of products. This placed Applied Innovations at the core of the Dynamic Datacenter Initiative, and we became one of the founding members of the Dynamic Datacenter Alliance.

In order to continue to provide superior levels of service, performance, reliability and innovation to our customers, Applied Innovations will be migrating all of our Virtuozzo-based VPS servers to our newest Hyper-V based platform. Migration is planned to begin in early June.

Our new VPS Hosting accounts based on the Hyper-V hypervisor and managed using the System Center suite of products provide a cost effective platform for an IT infrastructure at a fraction of the cost normally associated with this level of performance.

The Hyper-V-powered Windows VPS Plans will deliver the following managed services and advantages:

• Increased Server Uptime: With our Hyper-V powered plans you’ll see an improved level of reliability and stability as you’ll have full access to your own isolated operating system install and no longer share a common kernel.
• Increased Security: You’ll have a wider level of control over your VPS including the ability to load custom drivers and install new updates and features when you want, without waiting for a third-party vendor’s approval process.
• Increased Disk Performance and Reliability: All Hyper-V powered VPS plans utilize Dell Equallogic SANs for increased disk performance, allowing your VPS server to scale from gigabytes to terabytes of storage. Should a hardware node fail, you can quickly be migrated to a new node thanks to the storage network.
• Managed System Updates: One of the most tedious tasks any Systems Administrator faces is keeping the base operating system up to date and secure. By leveraging Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, each VPS will be automatically updated as new system updates are released.
• Managed Availability Monitoring: Servers will be monitored and tracked using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM/MOM). In the event a VPS becomes unresponsive or begins to show a trend towards a potential problem, our team of Administrators will be alerted and take action promptly.
• Managed Anti-Virus: Anti-Virus is no longer seen as just recommended but is required to maintain security on any server. Utilizing Symantec Endpoint Security, every VPS will always have the latest anti-virus signatures and protection.
• Capacity on Demand: By utilizing Hyper-V and System Center monitoring, we’ll be able to make real-time recommendations based on actual monitored resource usage and performance, promising optimized performance at minimal costs.
• Experts on Demand: As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Applied Innovations is able to offer the highest level of support and service. Our team of Systems Administrators and Engineers are available to customers 24/7 and can assist with all aspects of planning, deployment and management of Managed IT infrastructure.

But we’re not just stopping there.  We’re constantly innovating new technologies and offerings around our Hyper-V-based Managed VPS platform and before long will be launching a beta of our new Control Panel.  For more information about Applied Innovations’ Hyper-V-powered Windows VPS Plans, call us at 866-706-8691.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Applied Innovations is committed to delivering quality service with integrity and accountability. And this pays off with some of the most devoted, loyal customers a company could wish for.  We wanted to share what a few of these customers have to say about us. Because nothing we could claim would ever trump the testimonial of a real living, breathing human being.

Rating:
By Abby F. 4/24/2010 9:24:07 AM
Just moved to AppliedI from another hoster and I was a little worried because I’m not a sys admin and wasn’t sure if I’d know how to set everything up but it was amazingly straight forward to find and do everything I needed. One click to install WordPress with the application packs, 2 seconds to set up my domain aliases, easy access to my files & the database. Thanks, Applied Innovations!

 Rating:
By dvdbglw   4/23/2010 9:07:06 PM
I have worked with AppliedI for a few years now as a support manager for our company. Our company has over 200 domains hosted with AppliedI. If support issues come up, the people at AppliedI respond in a timely manner. Being in the support role for our clients, it’s a secure feeling knowing I’ll be able to get back to our clients with good solutions thanks to AI.

 Rating:
By John D.   4/23/2010 6:32:26 PM
Applied Innovations is unparalleled in web hosting for the .Net platform. I’ve been with AppliedI for four years, hosted as many as five sites with them at the same time, and every day, I’ve enjoyed world-class customer service, cutting-edge server technology, and ironclad, near-perfect uptime. As long as they’re around, I will never need another web host. You can’t go wrong with these guys.

 Rating:
By Dave N.   4/23/2010 6:06:12 PM
I’ve been really happy over the past year with Applied Innovations. I was able to move 1/2 dozen sites from another shared hosting environment with no problem. I like the control panel and can access multiple servers and domain packages with one login.

 Yep.  That’s what we like to hear. And we’ll do whatever it takes to keep the kudos coming.

 And if you haven’t already, you should definitely look into Applied Innovations’ Affiliate Program.  It’s free to join, and you can start earning money right away for referring new customers to us! You know we’ll take superior care of them, just like we do all our customers. Pretty soon you’ll be the one taking a bow.  And rolling in dough, besides.

Popularity: 3% [?]

iContact makes email marketing easy. And AppliedI has partnered with iContact to make this application available directly to our customers.

Why iContact?

• Easily set up, organize and leverage your mailing list to boost your email marketing into overdrive!
• Use one of iContact’s 250 professionally designed email newsletter templates or one of your own for beautiful email marketing campaigns.
• Track the performance of your email blasts at a glance with iContact’s charts and graphs that are populated in real time.
• iContact combines sophisticated features such as surveys, autoresponders, and RSS feeds into one easy-to-use all-inclusive product.
• Friendly, professional phone, email and chat support is available to help you create and maintain the best possible email marketing campaign.
• Over 25 email marketing articles and resources to help you maximize your impact and refine your messaging strategy
• In-depth Email Marketing Whitepaper provides insight into developing a comprehensive Customer Communications strategy
• Message scheduling allows you to plan and control when emails are deployed.
• SpamCheck™ helps you avoid the pitfalls that could make your emails undeliverable.
• Open and Click-through Tracking gives you visibility into the reach of your campaigns.
• Subscription management and bounce-back handling features take the hassle out of managing your mailing lists.
• Integrated survey feature lets you engage your customers, solicit feedback and opinions.
• Industry leading deliverability: iContact has whitelist agreements with major ISPs so you can enjoy email deliverability rates of between 98%-99%.

iContact Incorporates an Array of Sophisticated Features into a Single, Affordable Product

 iContact is trusted by over 60,000 customers worldwide to deliver their mission critical communications! Take advantage of iContact’s FREE 15 day trial to see just how easy it is to stay connected with your customers and prospects.

Visit iContact Now >>

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]