anoadmin - Old City Web Services

New Website Launch: Sandy by the Sea Designs

May 16, 2012 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

Old City Web Services launches new eCommerce site.

Bring seaside luxury to your home with handmade pillows, aprons, beach bags, wine totes and more created by local artist Sandy Powell. Old City Web Services recently launched an online shop for Sandy's creations where visitors can purchase retail and wholesale items. The secure site features complete checkout with shipping selection and allows Sandy to keep track of her orders, manage inventory and add new products.

After a bad experience with another web designer, Sandy came to us in search of peace and tranquility for herself and her website. We gave her a custom design perfectly tailored to her brand plus the functionality she needed to expand her business online. She was so excited about the final product she came in to celebrate the website launch with a champagne toast!

Visit SandyByTheSeaDesigns.com to check out the new site and Sandy's beautiful work.

Domains: What you need to know for your business.

May 2, 2012 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

1. What IS a domain?

Your domain name is the address of your website. Just like your business might be located at 123 US1 South, your website has to have a unique address so people can find it online. Our domain name, for example, is oldcitywebservices.com.

2. How do you purchase a domain?

Domains can be purchased by the year for up to five years at a time. Reserving your domain for multiple years is better for the search engine optimization of your website. A search engine like Google looks at a site that has a domain reserved for multiple years and sees a reliable business that plans on being around for a while.

3. What domain should you choose?

Picking a domain name can be a tough choice. You want something that is relevant to your business, memorable and also search engine friendly. It shouldn't be too long and you should avoid dashes and other characters than can confuse people. Where possible, try to stick with your business name as your domain name.

4. Is it okay to use multiple domains?

You can register multiple domain names and use them to point visitors to your main website. However, search engines (and people) can sometimes get confused if you have multiple domain names. Most of the time, simpler is better.

5. How often should you check your domain registration?

It's CRITICAL to keep your domain name registration info up to date. If you have an old email address listed on your domain registration you will NOT receive a notice when your domain is expiring and could lose your domain name for good. If your domain is registered with OCWS you will periodically receive an email from us asking if any of your information has changed. We will also contact you personally when your domain is within 90 days of its expiration so that we can take care of the renewal for you, leaving you free to focus on your business.

Old City Web Services can register a domain for you! Call us and we can get your domain registered in a matter of minutes. All domains registered through OCWS include privacy protection to hide your name and contact information from basic searches. We also lock the domain so that it cannot be transferred without your knowledge.

Email: 5 Things You Should Know.

April 18, 2012 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

1. We have a step-by-step tutorial for setting up your OCWS email on the iPad.

Our Help Desk on OldCityWebServices.com was recently updated with the addition of a step-by-step tutorial with screenshots to help you set up email on your iPad. Click on the link to check it out!

2. Old City Web Services has a new mail server.

We are in the process of moving our email clients to a newer, faster email server. If you'd like to move over to the new server sooner, give us a call and volunteer to make the switch!

3. You can have your email forwarded to another address.

OCWS can set up an email address at your domain to forward to another email address so that you don't have to check multiple email inboxes. This gives you the professional appearance of an email address at your domain but the convenience of one inbox.

4. Up to 10 email addresses are available at your domain.

If you host with OCWS, your monthly hosting charges include up to ten email addresses at your domain. Use them to divide your reservations and customer service inquiries or set up email addresses for your employees. It's free!

5. Clear out your junk and trash folders once a month.

Once a month, go through your junk and trash folders to delete old email. Performing this small maintenance task will make your email run faster!

Advertise Your Business on OldCity.com

April 11, 2012 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

Summer is almost here! Are you ready?

Open the Door to St. Augustine!

Leave expensive print advertising in the past where it belongs with cassette tapes and acid wash jeans; it's time to step into the future. Online advertising has proven more effective not just for your business, but for your wallet, too. And if you have a business in St. Augustine, there's no better place to spend your advertising dollars than OldCity.com.

OldCity.com March Stats:

- 67,587 visits

- 177,087 pageviews

- 55,781 unique visitors

- 35,305 visits from Florida

- 8,950 visits from the Jacksonville-St. Augustine area

But you don't have to take our word for it!

Thanks to our monthly statistics reports, you can see exactly how effective your advertising with OldCity.com is. If you have statistics tracking software on your website (like Google Analytics) you can also track your ad's success by watching OldCity.com climb to the top of your referral traffic sources.

GET STARTED TODAY: Choose the advertisement that fits your needs and budget, the page

(or pages) that will maximize your exposure and watch your traffic increase thanks to OldCity.com!

Advertising options for every budget.

Super Expanded Listing

Minimal competition, maximum impact.Grab their attention with an embedded YouTube video or 5 large photos of your business plus 100 words of text and a link to your website, located at the top of every interior page.

Buttons & Banners

Grab'em with a graphic.Colorful banners & buttons created by our professional designers jump off the page of the

clean and uncluttered OldCity.com design.

Expanded Listing

Most popular, perfect for any budget.Share up to 60 words of information and an eye-catching photo with an expanded listing, our most popular type of advertising on OldCity.com.

Listing

Test the waters, boost your search rankings.A simple link to your website and displayed phone number from our top-ranked site will help boost your search engine rankings and traffic.

OCWS News & Notes: April 2012

April 4, 2012 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

OldCity.com received 67,587 visits in the month of March!

Things have been going very well for St. Augustine's most popular web portal since we relaunched the site with a fresh, new design and new advertising opportunities on January 10th.

Traffic has been on the rise, pushing OldCity.com to reach 67,587 visits and 177,087 pageviews for the month of March. That's an average of almost 2,200 visits and 5,700 pageviews every day!

We will be sending out more information very soon on how you can take advantage of our growing traffic by becoming an OldCity.com advertiser.

Candidate Mike Davis has a new home on the web.

Old City Web Services recently launched a brand new site for Mike Davis, a candidate for state representative from District 17. The new site features a built-in content management system, blog and custom contribution page where citizens can make a donation to the candidate's campaign.

Visit website »

Viva Estilo! Celebrate the launch of Estilo Salon's new website.

Estilo Salon, a full service hair styling, makeup application and skin care salon in St. Augustine Beach, recently finished its first website with the help of Old City Web Services. In addition to a custom design by Old City Web Services, Estilo Salon also received content writing and search engine optimization.

Visit website »

The Beauty of SlideShowPro

March 21, 2012 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

SlideShowPro: An elegant way to display your photos.

Powerful photos can be the best tool to engage customers on your website. A great image leaps off the screen, gets the visitor's attention and makes your business memorable.

So how do you display photos on your website?

If you have a lot of great photos that highlight your products and services, SlideShowPro is the best method for showcasing your images with style and movement.

This professional program features transitions between photos, captions, links, optimization options and thumbnail images for easy navigation.

Best of all, SlideShowPro includes a built-in, user-friendly uploading tool that makes it quick and easy for you to upload and manage photos in your gallery from any computer. You can rearrange, remove or add photos with ease.

SlideShowPro can also be integrated with WordPress, our full content management system, to make adding new slideshow galleries and albums even easier.

We can install SlideShowPro for you!

Are you interested in adding this feature to your website? Old City Web Services can add a custom slideshow styled to match your existing website design.

To get started, just give us a call at 904-867-4112 or send us an email (letusmarketyou@oldcity.com).

Make your website more user-friendly with forms.

March 15, 2012 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

Imagine that one evening after dinner, a potential customer is taking a few moments to surf the web and stumbles across your website... He's interested in your services and wants to contact you, but it's after hours. He could write down the number and call in the morning, but he might forget about it by tomorrow, in which case you've lost a potential customer without ever knowing about him.

But what if instead you had a contact form on your website?

Contact forms go beyond a phone number or even an email address to make it simple and easy for a customer to get in touch with you. Even if you had your email address on your contact page, the customer would need an email program (like Outlook or Entourage) installed on his computer to use an email link or he would have to log-in to his webmail program (like G-Mail or Yahoo) to copy and paste the email address in.

With a contact form right on your website, in just a few seconds that potential customer could have submitted his name, phone number and his question about your service without ever leaving your website. You would have received the message via email and followed up with a phone call the next day to engage the client and make a sale.

This is just one of the many ways in which forms can help you get more out of your website.

Here are a few other suggestions where you could use forms to help your business:

1. Registration Forms: Do you have an upcoming event that requires people to sign-up to participate? Encourage people to visit your website where we can create a custom registration form for your event. We can even link the form to PayPal so that participants can pay their registration fees at the same time!

2. Employment Forms: Are you hiring new employees? We can create a basic employment form on your website where you can direct potential candidates to fill out their information and apply!

3. Request a Quote Forms: Would you like to encourage potential clients to contact you for an estimate? A custom form would allow your website visitors to input their information (not including secure details such as credit card numbers, social security card numbers, etc.) to receive a quote from your business on providing services.

Simple, easy and emailed to you!

Each time someone fills out one of the forms above, you will receive an email with the information that was provided so you can take the next step to reach out to the client.

We can also add a page that thanks the customer for their submission and redirects them back to your website for more browsing.

If you would like to add a form to your website or if you have questions about using forms to communicate with your customers, please give us a call 904-867-4112 or send us an email (letusmarketyou@oldcity.com) and we'll be happy to answer your questions!