Webnovate.net moving to Webnovate.com

When are 3 letters worth $1k?  When you move from .net to .com.

I never thought I would pay $1,000 for 3 letters, that being C - O - M.  After years of perserveriance and some cash we are finally moving over to Webnovate.com.   I never thought the day would come when I was able to purchase the Webnovate.com domain.    

However, recently I was able to contact the recent owner of webnovate.com and simply offer him $1,000.  The process actually went rather smoothly.  We drafted up a contract, exchanged emails, and within 1 week we successfully purchased www.webnovate.com.    The guy that owned it, resided in the UK and he was very professional and a pleasure to work with. 

The domain purchase is actually the easy part.  Then there are other things you have to think about as in what to do with the .net website.  Well at this point we have figured that we would be best to keep it as a Wordpress Blog and use it to blog about Webnovate.com and Utah Web Design.   

The time consuming part:  Moving this blog from its old file directory to the new root directory and changing all the links on it to point to the new .com URL.   We also had to change all the Google Adwords Campaigns and other sites as in facebook to point to the new domain.  Of course we had to add forwards fo the emails as well.  I am glad to say after a few days of work, we have successfully done this and our new domain that we will be doing business from is www.webnovate.com.  

Webnovate.com specializes in custom web design, SEO, and SEM campaigns.  In other words, we develop beautiful web sites that get results from search engines.    

I personally feel that the decision to purchase the 3 letters are well worth it.  People in the USA especially have gotten use to using .com whenever they hear something, not to say you can’t do business as a .net or a .biz, but if you can pick up the .com domain for a reasonable costs, I think the payoff will come in the future.  

If you are considering the swap from one domain to another as we have recently done, please feel free to contact us as we would love to give you some tips.  

If you are looking for clean and proffessional web design that gets results with search engines, please visit our website at www.webnovate.com.

 

Creative Marketing - Billboards!

I stumbled upon this great blog post about clever and Creative Billboard Advertising and thought I would share it.  At Webnovate, we always try to think outside of the box a little and come up with some great Web Designs.  

In my opinion, a company needs to focus on all avenues of marketing and most importantly, their website as that is were many customers end up after seeing a billboard or flyer.  

Todays marketing needs to be an eye grabber and I think these billboards do a great job!  

Check them out!

If you are looking for an Eye Grabbing Website, contact Webnovate today!

 

Web Design - Most Important Factor

Question: What is the most important factor of your website?

Answer: The Graphic Design
Explanation: Even if your website has a high ranking with Search Engines, once your prospective customers get to your website, if it displays a poor image, they will be gone within minutes.  Many people, including myself, rank a company based off its website.  I could show you many examples, but I don’t want to offend some companies.  However, take a look at our Renovated Websites as in Harris & Carter Law Firm.    Take a look at the pictures below and tell me, which Law Firm would you want representing you?

Before:

After:

A picture is worth a thousand words!  I think it is obvious on which one Represents the true character of the Law Firm of Harris & Carter, professional and excellent well rounded law firm based in Provo, UT.

If your business is looking for a rennovated website that is professional and speaks the true character of your business, please contact the Utah Web Design specialist at Webnovate by calling to schedule a FREE Consultation at 1.877.722.5381.

 

The Death of Phone Books!

I was listening to the Doug Wright Show on KSL today about Phone Books. Basically he was just pointing out that the Phone Book is slowly dying. I could not agree more!

When I need something, I Google it.  In fact, when I get one of my many Yellow Pages, it goes directly to the Recycling Bin.  While there are still those that use the Yellow Pages, it seems as it is slowly dying. Sure there are certain industries that still do reasonably well with the Yellow Pages as in Plumbers, HVAC companies, Electricians, (mainly on-call service companies) but for many companies it plain and simple makes more sense to throw your precious marketing dollars at a successful Google Adword Campaign or SEO.  Dollar for Dollar - there is nothing like it!

One caller indicated that with so many Phone Books, the price has come down to a reasonable price.  I beg to differ.  We have had some Qwest Dex Sales Representatives call and prepare bids to market our company in their books.  The price was nearly $300/month.  I guess it depends on what “reasonable price” means, but if you put that same amount of money in a Google Adword Campaign, you can get MUCH MUCH more success.  If you don’t believe me, try it out for a month and see the difference.  There is nothing out there that, dollar-for-dollar compares!

I think it is somewhat a generational thing.   Many people that used the Yellow Pages growing up, possibly still turn to them.  However, if your business has a demographic that focuses on a younger generation, then quite frankly you are really missing out if you do not put your marketing money towards a good website with quality graphic design and superb SEO and SEM campaigns. The time to invest in a Custom Website is now! The sooner you start, the better your search results are as the phone book slowly is replaced by Search Engines and the Web with the upcoming generations and technologies.

Webnovate specialized on custom Graphic Design, SEO, and SEM packages.  Please contact us today for a FREE Qoute!

 

Partyland Website

Last Friday we pushed the PartylandUtah.com website live!

Since 1979, Carnival Concessions and now PartyLand has been the longest, continuously open party store in Utah! They have the most diverse, amusing, and popular party items available for all your special event occasions.

Partyland came to Webnovate with two specific goals in mind:

1) A professional, clean, fun web design that would represent their core business of Party Supplies.

  • Webnovate designed a new clean, professional, and fun web design that portrays their company slogan, “Where Fun Begins!”

2) Re-organize their website in order to have their items more easily found.

  • Webnovate sat down with Partyland and went over the structure of their existing website and gave recommendations on how we could structure the website so their customers can easily navigate the website. We also installed a custom Google Site Search that their customers can use to find exactly what they are looking for!

3) Develop a Great Ideas Blog to help people throw the best parties possible.

  • We created a blog with Wordpress and customized its theme in order to match the rest of their website. We then instructed the customer on how to use the blog in order to get the best results from it from its users as well as in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Webnovate, specialized in Rennovating Old Websites into New Custom Websites. Partyland is a perfect example of what we can do for your business. Below is what their old website looked like prior to being Webnovated.

Partyland Before:


Partyland After:

Ask yourself, is my current website hurting our company image? If so, please feel free to contact us or fill out our online Request for Proposal.

 

Google Chrome

Google has developed their own Internet Browser called Google Chrome! While this is still in Beta, you can download this program free at http://tools.google.com/chrome/?hl=en-US.

Google Chrome was developed to be a simple and intuitive user interface and is was developed with an entirely different architecture designed for speed, security, and stability.

For more information on this browser, you can go to the Google Blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

It will be interesting to watch and see if Google Chrome can compete with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and others. For webmasters, it appears that we have another browser that we need to test websites on. :-)

 

Utah Web Design

Webnovate, is a Utah Web Design firm, located in Provo, UT.  We develop custom websites for small businesses and corporations.

While our offices are in Utah, we design and build websites for customers throughout the United States.

Why Webnovate?

We offer custom web design with affordable pricing and we are a full service web firm that can also handle your SEO and SEM Campaigns .  We offer FREE services that many others charge for as in FREE Reports and we even have a FREE consultation, in which we will analyze your company’s web presence and give you tips on how you might be able to improve your overall web presence.

We give each client a custom web design that is professional, clean, and that gets results!

If you looking for a new website, please let us win your business.  For a FREE consultation, simply fill out our online form and we will schedule a time to discuss your needs.

 

Landing Pages - Included in Google Adwords Quality Score Rank

Google recently has added another factor that they use to calculate your Quality Score for each Keyword.   It now takes into effect the time it takes to load the landing page.

Why does Google do this?

They do this because users have their best experience with fast loading pages.  We want things to come up and show up fast.  For this reason, Webnovate ensures that we program all pages, but especially landing pages for your Google Adwords to be as fast as possible.  We take into consideration size of images, make sure it is hosted on a fast server, and many other factors.  Most people have high-speed Internet these does and so most of our sites we program with this in mind.  However, if there is a website in which the target market may be more lower income individuals without high-speed Internet you of course want to make them even smaller in size or in other words faster to load.

If someone does a search for say Utah Web Design , and they see your Adwords Campaign and click on it, if it takes a while to load, then this detracts from their Adwords user experience and they will likely go back and click on a different ad.

It is important to keep your Quality Score High, so that you can keep your minimum bid price low and also to keep your ranking high.

For more information about Utah Web Design, or Google Adwords Campaigns, please contact us and we would love to help you out!


 

Yahoo Ambassador vs Google Adwords Qualified

As noted, we are Google Adwords Qualified! I have recently been researching and trying to obtain another certification, which is Yahoo Ambassador (the Yahoo Version of Google Adwords Qualified Individual. I have to say, I am a little thrown off as this certification is no longer accepting people as this time to become certified? ( https://approval.myaffiliateprogram.com/ambassador_signup.asp )

I could not figure out why they would not offer this anymore as if they want to competed with Google, you would think they would allow a program for SEM Consultants to brand and easier sale their services. It took me a while to find the webpage above that informed me of this. I thought I would take it another step and decided to contact Yahoo. I got a hold of a representative, and he gave me a number of Commission Junction, which I have had experience with years ago while running Campaigns as an Affiliate for Large Companies. So I called them, which was a dead end as well. Then I decided to contact Kowabunga!, whom runs Yahoo’s Ambassador program, which I got a hold of a nice lady, but she informed me that Yahoo was not Certifying anyone at this time. So in other words, I gave it a good effort, but overall it came back to the same page that I ran into first that indicated that you cannot become a Yahoo Ambassador at this time.

Honestly, I am not sure why they don’t offer this? Why all the 3rd parties? I have read on other website that it is because it was to easy to that there were people “using” the system. Google makes you take the test every year to make sure you are still qualified and their program seems to be pretty professional and well taken care of. In addition, you have to continually meet the budget amounts for every 90 days. So they have measures in place to keep it a valid program and to make sure that people really know what they are doing that get the qualification. I have had experience with Google Adwords and the Yahoo SEM program, and I must say that I think Google is on top of its game with Adwords and overall a much better program then the Yahoo equivalent. It is a slick program and basically is the main backbone of Google and how makes all of its money. Google’s technology is top of the crop!

It does bog my head to see a large company as in Yahoo not have a solid program for this. With the success of Google and Adwords in general, I must ask why?

Oh well. At this point, I am going to sit back, enjoy our Google Adwords Qualification and wait tell Yahoo gets the Abassador program back up and running.

At Webnovate, we run both programs, Adwords and the Yahoo Ambassador Program. If you are interested in web design, SEM, and SEO, please contact us today!

 

Google Adwords Qualified

We are proud to say that we have earned our Google Adwords Qualified status!

Google Adwords Specialist

What exactly does it mean to be Google Adwords Qualified? In a nutshell, it means that you have passed Google’s prerequisites to run and manage successful Adwords Campaigns.

To see the Qualifications, please visit https://adwords.google.com/support/select/professionals/bin/answer.py?answer=12241&hl=en_US

“To become a Qualified Individual in the Google Advertising Professionals program, you’ll need to accomplish the following:

  1. Sign up for the program successfully and be in good standing. This means that you’ve accepted the Rules of Use and aren’t in violation of them.
  2. Manage at least one AdWords account (yours or someone else’s) in My Client Center for 90 days.
  3. Build and maintain at least US$1,000 (or your local currency equivalent) total spend for your or your team’s My Client Center account during the 90-day period.
  4. Pass the Google Advertising Professional Exam. We suggest that you take the exam after you meet the above requirements. However, you can take the exam at any time.”

Google Adwords is dollar for dollar the BEST way to attract your potential customers and it gives you the possibility to develop meaningful reports on how well your Ads are doing so you can calculate a ROI on them.

A successful Google Adwords Campaign is a great tool for the following reasons:

AdWords Targeting

AdWords ads, are targeted to people’s specific interests. When your prospective customers type a keyword into Google that is relevant to the products and services you provide, they see your add appear. For example, if you are a Law Firm and someone types in “criminal defense attorney utah”, they see your firms Ad on the top or on the right hand side of the Google Searches. Go ahead and try this out, as you will see one of our clients www.utahlawinfo.com show up within the results. The advantage of this is that you get customers that are looking for your products or services at the precise moment when they are looking for your product or service.

Marketing Reach

You can run targeted, relevant AdWords ads that appear on Google properties, thousands of partner search sites and content sites (such as How Stuff Works and the New York Times) in the Google Network, and newsletters and email. Google estimates that these ads are seen by over 80% of internet users in the United States alone, and their global network provides extensive ad exposure across the entire world.

Google AdWords Costs

How much does a successful Google Adwords Campaign cost? This is a tough question as it really depends on your industry and the competition for those keywords. For example, Law Firms will most likely pay more than a store that sales rare coins as there is much more compeition for those Ads for Law firms and more people are searching for Law Services than for rare coins.

The most common campaigns run based on a cost-per-click (CPC). Howerver, you can also opt to pay for per thousand impressions with Google’s cost-per-impression (CPM) pricing.

With CPC, you only pay for the clicks you receive. With CPM, you pay per thousand impressions or times that someone sees your ad.

You can set a MAX daily budget in order to control your cost. If you have ever thought about trying Google Adwords, just start out by trying a small budget as in $5 - $10 per day and see the results. It’s our belief that once you see the effectiveness, you will want to continue the campaign.

Reports

Google allows you the ability to use their FREE conversion tracking tool in addition to using Google Analytics in order to see just how well your Adwords are doing at any giving time. You can successfully track your ROI and see relevant data to track and base your future marketing decisions on.

To Conclude, a Successful Adwords Campaign allows you to:

  • Generate leads
  • Generate sales or conversions
  • Create brand awareness

Webnovate, is a Google Adwords specialist in Utah. However, we have customers throughout the United States. If your company would like to learn more about the benefits of running a successful Google Adwords Campaign, or simply have questions about Adwords, please contact us today for our FREE consultation.