Jun 16th

By Heather

Posted in Uncategorized |

Sep 2nd

Featured Client: Fox Test Prep

By Heather

Fox Test Prep offers expert LSAT test prep in San Francisco as well as GMAT and LSAT  tutoring.

Nathan was previously using a WordPress template for his site but found that it didn’t give him the professionalism that he wanted to portray. Being that Nathan teaches classes in San Francisco, geo-targeting was critical when redesigning the website. We decided to use lots of local San Francisco photography to bring that local feeling into the website. Being that his students are various ages from 22 to 65, we wanted to present a clean site that had some “school house” qualities without being juvenile. We did this by adding chalk board images, hand written fonts, and images of books and other subtle accents.

Visit Fox Test Prep to find out how you can increase your LSAT or GMAT scores.

Posted in Clients |

May 13th

Showcase of design styles

By Heather

There’s this great site out there called Smashing Magazine. I go to the site daily to learn about the latest trends in web design and development. I’m especially impressed by the wonderful design showcases that they put together. I’d like to point you to some of my favorite ones. When you’re thinking about your own website and what kind of impression you want to give, maybe some of these design styles will help you.

Posted in Web Design |

Mar 15th

Idaho Web offers Constant Contact email marketing services

By Heather

Idaho Web Solutions and Four Dog Interactive offer Constant Contact email marketing services to all of our clients. If you already use Constant Contact and love its ease of use, we can help you with custom email templates to spice up your email campaigns. If you’re new to email marketing, let us help you create your e-newsletter or other email promotions.

We offer the following services:

  • Custom email templates
  • Custom campaigns
  • List management
  • Report compilation and delivery
  • Strategies to improve conversion

We can also help you:

  • Customize Constant Contact pages
  • Implement subscription features via your website

Or generally help you answer any questions you may have regarding email marketing, it’s advantages, restrictions and options.

Not interested in Constant Contact? We offer other email marketing solutions that give you more control over your campaigns. Contact us for more details.

More about Constant Contact
Email Marketing by Constant Contact® is the easy, effective, and highly affordable way to get your message out to your customers, clients, or members. You’ll create high-impact, professional-looking emails—quickly and with no technical expertise. And, most importantly, you’ll build strong connections with your audience that lead to referrals, repeat business and loyalty.

With Email Marketing by Constant Contact, you can:

  • Choose from more than 300 easily customized email templates—or create your own from scratch.
  • Create highly visual, professional-looking email newsletters and promotions in just minutes.
  • Drive more traffic to your website with focused, targeted email communications.
  • Build and manage your email list: import existing customer lists, add names individually, or capture contact information from website visitors.
  • Measure your email campaign results instantly-check click-through rates, review new subscribers, and see who opened and clicked on each link so you can tailor your follow-up communications.
  • Send automated communications to new sign-ups via an autoresponder tool.
  • Communicate with your audience with confidence, knowing that Constant Contact will take care of getting your email delivered and keep you CAN-SPAM compliant.

Discover how the power of Email Marketing by Constant Contact can help you better connect with your customers, strengthen your relationships with them, and grow your organization.

Posted in Email Marketing |

Mar 14th

Latest Client: Private Pet Sitters

By Heather

Private Pet Sitters

Private Pet Sitters

We recently launched a website for Private Pet Sitters. Private Pet Sitters is located in Star, Idaho and they offer pet sitting and dog walking services in Star, Eagle, Emmett and North Meridian. The owner, Shannon Babcock was a pleasure to work with. After attempting to setup a site herself using a free template site, she called us for help.

The site is built using WordPress so that she has the ability to add new pages when she wants as well as edit content on the existing pages. We also took advantage of the blog posts to allow Shannon to post announcements and news on her own.

We also took advantage of sIFR to use custom fonts for the headline text without the creation of images. This is a great utility that converts the fonts to Flash. It’s great for search engines because they still read the original text and great for designers because we’re no longer limited to boring screen fonts.

Please check out the site and if you’re ever in need of a pet sitter, keep Shannon and Private Pet Sitters in mind. As dog people ourselves we will certainly be using her services the next time we go out of town.

Client Information:

Private Pet Sitters
Pet Sitting and Walking Services
Owner: Shannon Babcock
Tel: 208-559-1502
www.privatepetsitters.com
info@privatepetsitters.com

Posted in Clients |

Mar 14th

Protecting your domain name

By Heather

Do you know who owns your domain name? You may think you do but are you sure?

Every few months we start a project with a new client and one of the first things we ask them is if they have access to their domain name. You’d be surprised at how many people have no idea. Your domain name is one of the most important assets your company has. Make sure you know who owns it and have access to control it at all times.

Not sure who owns your domain name? Do a WHOIS on your domain to find out all the information regarding the registrar and registrant.

The Registrant
The registrant is the person who owns the domain name. If you’re not showing up as the registrant and you should be, you need to get that fixed immediately (BTW, we can help you do that). The registrant of your domain should always be the individual person who owns it, business owner,  or the highest level officer of your company. It should not be your web developer, an employee or your sister’s husband’s cousin’s nephew.

The Registrar
This is the company you registered your domain name with. You should hopefully have a login to manage your domain on their website. If you don’t, this will tell you who you should start contacting to get the information you need.

Dates
Take a look at the expiration date of your domain. If for some reason you don’t have ownership or control over your domain, you should make sure that happens before it expires and you lose it to someone else.

Additional Contacts
Administrative and Technical Contacts are those people that you want to put in control of managing your domain for you. These can be employees and your web developer.

If everything looks good in your WHOIS listing, then you’re good to go. If there is a red flag, you should address it immediately. Each situation is different but here are some steps you may need to take transfer the domain:

  • Contact the person whose name it’s registered in
  • Contact the registrar and show proof of ownership
  • Transfer to a new registrar
  • Contact the registrar to get your login
  • Contact Idaho Web Solutions to help you out

Here are just a few of the horror stories we’ve ran into over the years:

No job referral here
A company we worked with had a shady IT consultant buy their domain name and build their website. He charged them a ludicrous amount of money each month to maintain and host the site. When we were brought in to redesign the website the guy refused to give up the domain name stating that it was “his” and at some point down the road he might sell it to them when it was necessary but he didn’t see that it was that time yet.

TIP: If you request that a person act as your agent and buy your domain name for you, it is yours and not theirs. If he had bought it on his own prior to the relationship he would of had a case, but he had not. We finally got him to release the domain name after several months of back and forth communications and threat of legal action.

Missing in action
We started work with a non-profit client and offered to host their website for free. Unfortunately the domain name was in a person’s name who they had been out of contact with and the email address associated with the domain registration was no longer active so a transfer was not possible. After several months they were able to track down the guy and he was able to contact his old employer to activate the email address. We were able to finally transfer the domain name to the non-profit.

On a related note, the organization had been paying for web hosting for several years to a company, only to find out that the website wasn’t actually pointing to their server but to another hosting company. The hosting company refused to refund them any money.

Domain hostage
A client of mine had his IT guy help source a web designer for his professional web site. The company he found purchased his domain name on his behalf and then proceeded to build the site. They charged him over $3000 and delivered a 5 page site built in Frontpage. The client was shocked and horrified by the site. Now being behind on launching he came to us to rebuild the site. The previous company was kind enough to point the domain to the new site but refused to give up the domain name until they were compensated for the entire $3000. I’m not sure who did the ripping off, but it was not worth that amount of money. After 2 years, we are still trying to get the domain name transferred into the clients name. The registrant has agreed to the tranfer, now just trying to make it happen.

So again, make sure you register your domain name yourself or trust the person acting on your behalf to put it into your name. Too often developers will put it in their name and then use it as leverage if something goes wrong later. This may be business smart on their end, but isn’t very moral when they are acting as your agent.

Posted in Domain Names, Your Business |

Mar 13th

Promote your business with merchandise

By Heather

Every business needs to have their own logo merchandise but who wants to think about purchasing large quantities from a screen printer or other provider to just have it sit around in the garage. If you haven’t yet heard of it, there’s a great company out there called CafePress that allows you to put your images onto their merchandise mix and sell it (or buy it) from their website. You can get a free store or pay about $5 a month for a premium shop which you can make look exactly like your website.

You don’t pay anything for the merchandise, you just add your designs and mark up the price depending on how much money you want to receive (If you’re buying for yourself, you just pay the base price of each item). So for example, if the base price on a t-shirt is $13.99 and you sell it for $$18.99 you keep $5 off each purchase. Some may say that’s not very much but as a former screen printer myself, I know the amount of effort it takes to get shirts printed. You a minimum order amount, setup fees, and a huge loss if nothing sells.

CafePress offers everything from t-shirts and sweatshirts to bumper stickers, books, cds and yard signs. Here’s a list of some great ideas you can do with CafePress to promote your business:

  • Open a shop to sell logo merchandise to your customers. Don’t just put your logo on the t-shirts, make them unique and graphical so people will WANT to wear them. Did I mention with a premium shop you can add as many designs as you want for free? This lets you have fun and experiment with different designs.
  • Buy small ticket items to give away to your customers. Stickers, magnets and buttons can be bought in bulk so you save money.
  • Create custom items targeted at specific customer groups. Since there are no minimums you can create custom mugs targeted at just your ballet students vs your jazz class.
  • CafePress also offers custom printing. Make custom Greeting Cards or Postcards to promote your business.  Did I mention no minimums? So again, you can create several designs to target customers.
  • Create a company calendar and send to your top clients or have in your place of business.
  • Outfit yourself in logo merchandise (shirt, bag, hat) so that everyone sees your name, and url when your around town. Throw on a bumper sticker as well.
  • Host a design contest and let your customers create the “next” shirt design. Award them with a shirt of their own (that promotes your business).
  • Did I mention the amount of traffic CafePress gets? You can promote your designs in their marketplace and actually make money off them. Getting hits to your store doesn’t hurt your search engine ranking either when you have back links to your company website.

Chekout the quick store we setup for Idaho Web Solutions. We went with the free basic shop and only added a limited number of shirts to begin with. Took less than 10 minutes and now I can go buy one for myself to promote my company and website.

Posted in Your Business |

Mar 13th

Welcome to Idaho Web Solutions

By Heather

Welcome to our new site IdahoWebSolutions.com. Though we have been doing business in Idaho since 2005, we felt it was finally time to get a website up. There is an old saying that the cobbler’s children have no shoes. This has been equally true with us, the web developers without a website. That ends today.

IdahoWebSolutions.com is a service of Four Dog Interactive Studio (our official business name). While usually we work on sites all over the country, this site is designed to offer affordable web solutions to our neighbors here in Idaho. A lot of out of state (and out of country) businesses are trying to get your work by offering cheap rates and then delivering cheap work. We want everyone to know that you can still get quality work at an affordable price, right here at home.

Please, explore our site, check out our offerings and contact us if you’d like to discuss your website (or even if you have questions, we’re here to help).

Check back often to read new articles to help your website succeed.

Look forward to speaking with you.

Cheers,
Heather

Posted in Misc. |