How to Pick the Best Web Hosting Company

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Because a lot of thought, planning, and money goes into creating the perfect website for your business, you want to be sure it gets the traffic you are aiming for and that the website can handle everything that is thrown at it. This is where the web hosting company comes into play. The web host is the service that publishes your website so others will see it. It provides a company with the actual server space to store all its content and looks after the file maintenance involved in the site. It is easily the most important component in building your site.

So, before you just go ahead and randomly select the first web host that you find, you may want to take some time and use these tips that will help you pick the best web hosting company for your specific needs.

Keep the Three S’s in Mind

A simple way to go about picking a web host is to always keep the three S’s in mind. These S’s are security, support, and speed. Each of these plays an important role, and if even one of these is lagging, the entire site and the user experience will suffer. Each time you investigate a web host, you need to ask about the three S’s and get detailed specifics.

Of course, there is more to it than just the three S’s, these just happen to be the most important criteria to watch for.

Be Aware of Your Specific Needs

It’s also very important that you are aware of your specific needs. It’s hard to shop for a host when you don’t even know what you need. Give thought to the website you are building. If you want to use something simple like WordPress, how much web traffic you are expecting? If you need any sort of special software for the site, do you know what this is and how to get it? Certain hosts will cater to specific criteria, which will help you to narrow down your options and find that perfect fit.

How Reliable is the Server?

Web traffic is fickle in that it will only stick around and stay strong if the website performs smoothly and as it is intended. What this means is that you need a reliable server that can handle your traffic without needing to “time out”.

When speaking to a potential web host you want to ask about their “uptime”, this is the time the website will be up and running, and is reliable. When a website crashes, it’s not unusual to lose more than just traffic, you can also lose out on a large number of potential sales.

What Kind of Pricing is Offered

Budget should always be on your mind when shopping for a web host. You want to find a package that offers everything you need, doesn’t have any surprise costs built in, and fits your budget.

Picking a web hosting company isn’t something you want to rush through. It’s important to do your research, take a good look at your options, and make sure you weigh all the pros and cons before making a final decision.

3 Things To Know When Hiring A Web Hosting Firm

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There are many things to learn about operating in the online world, and some strategies are more successful than others. This doesn’t mean you should be any more or less hesitant to begin your time online because your customers will demand it long before you consider it a viable option. What matters is that you keep a solid understanding about how to best progress during this time. Not only will the following tips give you the best understanding of what to look for when hiring a web hosting firm, but they should also help you stop making bad choices when you’re unaware of all the implements a solid online strategy needs to work in the first place.

Reliability

Your firm simply needs to be as reliable as can be. Otherwise, there’s no doubt going to be plenty of issues regarding the way you firm looks to your audience. If you’re simply not online long enough for them to complete whatever they intended to on your website, you will look unprofessional, and worse, not worth doing business with. This will be all very well and good if your firm deserves this, as it can improve your service understanding. However, if this happens as a result of not being able to express your online medium because another service is failing you, that is a sad state of affairs. For this reason, reading reviews such as this A2 Hosting review before you buy can give you good insight into how well the service performs under pressure.

Support

How accessible are your web hosting agencies? Do they have 24/7 support, or are you reliant on their office times to help you out of a sticky spot if their services go down in the middle of the night? As you hope to be an engaging and wonderful platform for your customers to experience, you should also hope to be treated in the same way by the web hosting platform who are attempting to keep your good servicing upkeep by any methods they possibly can.

Advice

How much advice is the firm offering you? Are they happy to give you solid and practical solutions for problems you may be experiencing, or do they leave you in the dust to figure it all out yourself? Depending on the level of experience you have with websites, this might be better off in either intense or limited quantities. Only you will know what works best for your firm, but you must be ready to communicate it. If the advice is an option which is covered by the cost of your usage, you may be able to negotiate a better price if you forgo this service, but don’t worry if this proposal is rejected. Keeping on top and happy about your internet servicing requires that you feel satisfied with the methods being taken to keep you online, and if you feel like the first you’re using is happy to explain to you their methods, you are more likely to feel happy and able in your commission.

With these tips, you’re sure to experience customer satisfaction.

How Can a Brochure Help Your Business

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The company brochure has a rich history. It’s been an affordable way for businesses to share information about their products and services for decades. Since the days when it first became possible to run off a few hundred brochures with pictures and a few well-chosen words to inspire prospective customers to part with their money, there’s been a use for this classic sales tool.

Let’s look a little deeper at how different kinds of brochures can help market your business, event or activity better than it’s done today.

The Promotional Brochure

The most basic use of a brochure is as a promotional tool to introduce a new prospective customer to the brand or company. In many cases, they’ve never heard of your company, but something has peaked their interest. Rather than look around your showroom not knowing what to consider first, being able to hand them a ready-made brochure is an excellent way to direct their initial interest in a productive way.

Staff can flip through the pages to highlight areas of interest for them based on asking a couple of initial questions to see what their needs are. With a brochure that’s organised into logical sections covering activities, history, product lines or another way that divides up the information so it makes sense, the staff can help move prospective customers forward in their decision-making process.

The Product Brochure

A product brochure features either a selection of your best-selling or latest releases. In some cases, a full catalogue is created which covers your entire product line, but this is less common now. When walking into a UK showroom, being able to find a brochure with some of the products available is a fast-track way to see what the business offers. As long as the sales staff know their products well, they can then greet the customer and augment whatever information is already provided in the product brochure once they know which item the customer is most interested in.

With cheap brochure printing, it’s even possible to come out with a monthly brochure printed as a limited run to provide information on the latest releases which is the reason many customers visit a retail shop in the first place. Print brochures take some of the initial workload off the sales staff too which allows them to direct their energies more effectively to close a sale more often.

If you’re planning on producing a monthly magazine style brochure, you’re likely going to need a lot of copies to distribute. This means that you’re going to have to research a brochure printing company who can handle high-quantity orders. One company known for this is print24 who can print in batches of up to 50,000. If this is something you know you’ll need, you can read more about the service on their brochure printing page.

The Trade Show Brochure

For businesses that go to the expense of renting a booth at an industry trade show, it’s critical that they have both informational and promotional products for attendees to take away. The list of possible items runs the gamut from branded t-shirts to coffee mugs to several brochures covering the various brands and product lines.

Grabbing the attention of people at a trade show isn’t easy. It requires great design to get the most out of the latest brochure printing to deliver an eye-catching handout that will get the person returning to the booth to follow up later. For businesses in the beauty market, having several print magazines covering beauty tips and a few of your select products added for good measure is a good way to go. Also, don’t skimp on the trade booth design which gets people into the booth in the first place.

Brochure vs. Magazine

It depends on what you wish to share with customers whether you should use magazine printing or get a brochure printed up. Magazines tend to include more glossy photos and a greater number of pages. The binding tends to be fixed with a magazine, whereas a brochure has a variety of available bindings that all work well.

When the material is going to be browsed together, then a spiral binding makes it easier to open it up at a page and keep it there for a longer look. A salesperson wanting to point out the benefits of a product or service is aided when the page stays open where they need it so they can focus on the customer.

Getting the Ordering Right

It’s important to consider the shelf life of the brochure before ordering. Will it be used to promote this month’s special offers, contain information relevant for the current quarter or provide some historical perspective to extend its relevance? You want to order enough copies so that you don’t run out, but not so many that an extremely topical brochure no longer has much relevance. Therefore, a balance must be struck between the size of the print run, how many brochures are expected to be required, and the shelf life or usefulness of the information contained therein. Doing so maximises the value that the business receives from each batch of printed brochures.

Brochures are very useful to a business. Any company that meets customers face-to-face or has a need to send out product or company information in the mail will certainly find a brochure helpful.

Improving Your Industrial Business Climate By Reducing Your Carbon Footprint

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StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article
Photo courtesy of Pixabay

It is one of the most important aspects of running a business in the modern world, its impact on the environment that cannot be underestimated. Whether you are running a business that uses a lot of electricity all the way through to something that makes a bigger carbon footprint, like an industrial business. There are many ways to improve your business so it can be a lot more environmentally ethical in this respect, so let’s go through some of the basics and make sure that you are up to speed.

Working With Like Minded Clients

Practicing sustainability is not just something you need to do in-house, but it’s something that you need to think about on every step of the chain, from where you purchased your equipment, all the way through to your suppliers. When you look at equipment like rig mats from Northern Mat, you can see that this company are continuously working to reduce environmental impacts through the everyday processes and equipment they make. It’s important that you align yourself with the company with the right ethical outlooks, especially as the government policies and regulations are becoming increasingly stricter with every passing year. Every aspect of your equipment in an industrial framework is a potentially dangerous item of machinery that has a big impact on your carbon footprint as a whole.

Making Your Business Sustainable From The Ground Up

An environmentally conscious business isn’t just something to benefit the planet, nowadays it’s a key part of how you attract clients and how you do business, so it needs to be part of your overall business operation. Potential clients will look to see how you are dealing with sustainability, not just on the ground level, that’s all the way up the ranks, through to your business plans and processes. It’s not enough to make it appear like you are covering your bases in this respect, it needs to be part of your whole ethos.

Replacing Your Raw Materials

Running an industrial business is a big drainer of raw materials, so it’s important for you to replace those, not just because of the moral obligation, but it also sets a good example to other businesses to do the same. A very simple example of this is to offset the devastation of deforestation in the world, so if you are a business that uses a lot of paper, planting the equivalent number of trees to replenish the paper you are using is a small step to show your intentions with the future of the planet.

Long gone are the days of recycling being a cutting-edge approach to helping save the planet. It’s an automatic approach to the way everybody looks after the planet now. So you need to make sure that you are imbuing your company with the best possible ways to cut back on damaging Mother Earth. From the products to the processes, and everything in between, it’s time to put your thinking cap on if you’re working on building an industrial company.

6 Ways to Optimise a Website

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Are you unsure how to successfully optimize your website? You will be happy to discover we have all the top tips you need to transform your site for the better. Find out where to focus your efforts by reading the six ways to optimize your website.

1. Replace Flash with jQuery

It is time to say goodbye to flash once and for all. On top of a slow load time, flash can also not be viewed on various mobile devices, so it can tarnish the user experience. We therefore strongly recommend removing it from your website and replacing it with jQuery, as it offers the benefits of flash that can be viewed on every mobile device with a faster load time.

2. Upgrade Your Website Hosting

Does your website often struggle with a downtime or slow load time? The fault might lie with your web hosting service. We therefore recommending upgrading your hosting by turning to a more reliable host. For instance, Certa Hosting make it is easy to switch your web hosting for free, and they can customize a hosting plan to ensure it compatible with a WordPress, Magento or Drupal site.

3. Utilize Your Title Tags

Transform your website as soon as today with title tag optimization, which can improve your site’s organic ranking in the search engine result pages. That’s because title tags will indicate to Google what a page is about, so it can improve your results in the search engines, which can drive considerable traffic to a website.

4. Optimize Your Content

In addition to optimizing your title tags, you should also optimize your new and existing content. For instance, include anchor text to link one web page to another, and use header tags and subheadings throughout the content. It’s also advisable to write custom meta descriptions for every web page, which will appear in the search engine results pages and could improve your rank.

5. Incorporate Your Contact Information

Customers can become easily frustrated if they need to turn into a detective to find your company’s contact details – and they will not want to fill in a form to find it. Ensure they can easily connect with your business by visibly display your business address, telephone and email addresses onto your website. Adding your contact information can also aid a local search marketing campaign, too.

6. Update Your Website’s Design

Did you know you have between 3 to five seconds to impress a visitor? If they don’t like what they see, they will quickly click away from your site and visitor an industry rival. If you have an unappealing web design with poor content and a slow load time, you can guarantee you will experience a high bounce rate – and many visitors might never return to your site again. Don’t disappoint visitors and create a clean, aesthetically-pleasing and easy-to-use website that reflects your brand.

Do you have any top tips for website optimization? Please write a comment below.