Before the Pickwick Season: Getting a Hardin County Website Ready
Businesses around Pickwick Lake and Savannah, Tennessee, get ready for every season. The website is often the last thing looked at, if it is looked at at all. For a business that lives on visitors, that is the wrong way round: a visitor planning a Pickwick trip from out of state decides where to stay, eat and spend money weeks before arriving, and the website is where that decision gets made. Make the hours current first Hours in Hardin County change by season, and out-of-date hours cost real business. Before the season starts, check every place the website shows hours: the header or footer, the contact page, any page that mentions opening times, and the structured data search engines read behind the scenes. They should all agree, and they should all show this season’s hours. If the hours change again in the fall, put the date in the calendar now. Be findable by somebody who has never been here A family planning a trip from out of state does not know one Hardin County town from another. They search for Pickwick Lake, Pickwick Dam, the state park, or the kind of place they want: a cabin, a marina, a guide, a restaurant. A business website should name those places in plain words, say where the business is in relation to them, and tell a visitor what they need to know before they book or set off. Plan for the event weekends Savannah’s calendar has its own peaks: Salute to the Forties in spring, the Bluegrass Festival in summer, RiverFest in fall and Christmas on Main in December. Visitors coming for those weekends search for what is open and where to eat or stay. A short note on the site for each one, with any change to hours and anything the business is doing for the weekend, catches those searches. Take the note down when the weekend is over, so the site never advertises an event that has passed. Test the form and the phone link Visitors who plan ahead often send a question before they book. Before the season, send a test message through your own contact form and make sure it arrives, and tap the phone number on your own site from a phone. A form that quietly stops sending costs most in the busiest weeks. We have seen it happen: The Contact Form That Threw Every Message Away. Check your listings elsewhere If the business also has a Google Business Profile or appears in visitor guides, the owner should check the hours and phone number there before the season too, so they match the website. Get ready for what is coming Savannah has a 99-acre riverfront marina project, the city’s first hotel and a planned amphitheater in development. When they open, more visitors will be searching for places to eat, shop and spend the day nearby. A business with a current, clear website when that happens is ready for them. JM Marketing builds, hosts and maintains websites for businesses in Savannah and around Pickwick Lake. See website design in Savannah and Hardin County, or call Jeff McDaniel at 662-422-1809.
What a Locally Maintained Website Does That a Template Doesn’t
Search for web design in Florence, Alabama, and some of what comes back is automatically generated pages from out-of-state agencies, with the city’s name dropped into a template. A Florence business owner comparing options should know what the real difference is between a site somebody builds and maintains for them and a template sold from a distance. It comes down to a few things. It changes when the business changes A business changes all the time: new hours, a new service, a staff change, a festival weekend. A maintained website gets those changes the week they happen. A template that nobody looks after keeps saying whatever was true on the day it went live. Somebody answers the phone When a form stops sending or a page breaks, the question is who fixes it and how fast. With a site built and maintained by one person who knows it, the answer is a phone call to that person. With a template from a distance, it is often a support ticket. It is written about Florence A site written by somebody who works in Florence can say true, specific things about where the business is and who it serves: the University of North Alabama student population that turns over every year, the visitors who come for the W. C. Handy Music Festival or the Alabama Renaissance Faire, the downtown. A template can only swap the city name in. It is kept up to date underneath Every website needs WordPress, plugin and security updates, with a backup taken before they run. On a maintained site that happens every month without the owner having to think about it. On a site nobody maintains, it does not happen, and the first sign may be a broken page or a browser warning. More on that in An Out-of-Date Theme Is Not a Cosmetic Problem. What to ask before choosing Whoever a Florence business picks, it is worth asking who will update the site and how often, who to call when something breaks, and what happens to the site and the domain name if the business ever moves to somebody else. JM Marketing builds, hosts and maintains websites for businesses in Florence and across the Shoals. See website design in Florence, AL, or call Jeff McDaniel at 662-422-1809.
Serving Locals and Visitors From One Muscle Shoals Website
Muscle Shoals has a name known across the country, and visitors come for the music history. While they are here, they spend money with businesses that have nothing to do with music: places to eat, places to stay, shops and services. Meanwhile the people who live in Muscle Shoals still need a plumber, a mechanic and somewhere to get lunch. A business here can serve both from one website, as long as it does not try to say everything to everybody at once. Lead with what you do, not the city’s fame Opening a Muscle Shoals website with the city’s history is tempting, and for most businesses it is a mistake. A local customer searching for a service wants the service, and a page that opens with the city’s fame makes them scroll past it. Name the service first and the city second: “Auto repair in Muscle Shoals and Colbert County”. Give the visitor a section of their own Visitors need different information from locals: where the business is, how to get there from where they are staying, whether they need to book, and what to expect when they arrive. That belongs in a short section further down the homepage, or on a page of its own, written for somebody who has never been to the area. Be clear about where you are Muscle Shoals is one of four Shoals cities, with Florence, Sheffield and Tuscumbia, and a visitor may not know where one ends and the next begins. Say plainly where the business is and which of the neighboring cities it serves. That helps the visitor plan, and it helps a search engine understand the area the business covers. Keep both kinds of information current Hours change, seasonal offers come and go, and visitor traffic has its busy weekends. A site that is checked and updated regularly stays useful to both kinds of customer. One that was set up once and left alone slowly becomes useful to neither. JM Marketing builds, hosts and maintains websites for businesses in Muscle Shoals and across the Shoals. See website design in Muscle Shoals, or call Jeff McDaniel at 662-422-1809.
What Matters on a Small-Town Business Website
A small business in Booneville does not need a big website. Its customers are nearby, and almost all of them get in touch by phone. What a Booneville business needs is a site that does four things well: shows the phone number, shows the right hours, loads on a weak signal and gets found for the one thing the business does. The phone number comes first The phone number belongs at the top of every page, as a link that dials when it is tapped. Write it the same way everywhere it appears. Then check the link itself, not just the number you can see: a link with a stray space or a missing digit looks fine on the page and fails when a customer taps it. Hours that are true today Hours are the second thing a customer looks for. Put them on the homepage in plain text, add holiday changes ahead of time, and change them on the day they change. Wrong hours do more harm than missing ones, because they send a customer to a locked door. Hours also belong in the structured data behind the page, the part search engines read to answer “is it open now?”. We wrote about why in Your Opening Hours Belong in Your Website’s Code. Fast on a weak signal A customer looking a business up from a truck, a job site or a back road may have one bar of signal. Large photos and heavy page builders make a site slow to appear, and on a weak signal a slow site may never finish loading. Photos should be sized for the screen they appear on, and the page should show its words and its phone number before anything decorative. Found for the one thing you do Most small businesses are known for one main thing. Say it in plain words in the page title and the first heading, with the town and county named: “Tire repair in Booneville and Prentiss County”, not “Welcome to our website”. Then describe the work properly on the page, in the words customers use when they search for it. If the site has not been touched in years Plenty of established Booneville businesses have a website that has not been touched in years, or no real website at all. If that is yours, start with the four things above. They matter more than a new design, and a small site that gets them right does its job. JM Marketing builds, hosts and maintains websites for businesses in Booneville and Prentiss County. See website design in Booneville for what that involves, or call Jeff McDaniel at 662-422-1809.
We Took a Website Off Its Page Builder. It Got Faster and Safer.
Most WordPress sites are built with a page builder — a drag-and-drop layer that sits on top of WordPress and makes design possible without writing code. They’re genuinely useful. We use one on plenty of sites. They have two costs that nobody mentions at the start. The first is that your content stops being yours in a practical sense. A page builder stores your text in its own format. Switch the builder off and your carefully written pages turn into a mess of unreadable codes. You’re not locked in by a contract, you’re locked in by the file format, which is harder to escape. The second is maintenance. A page builder is a large piece of third-party software with full access to your site. It needs updating like anything else. When a site stops being updated — which happens to every site somebody stopped paying attention to — the builder goes stale along with the theme, and stale software is how sites get broken into. We recently rebuilt a small site that had been sitting untouched on an old theme for years. Rather than update the builder, we moved the site onto plain WordPress — no builder at all, using the editor that comes with it. The result: nothing third-party left to keep patched, the content stored as ordinary web page code that will still make sense in ten years, and a site that loads faster because there’s simply less of it. It isn’t the right answer for every site. A complex site with a lot of design in it needs the tools. But for a small site that mostly needs to say who you are, what you do and how to reach you, a builder is a dependency you’re carrying for no return. Worth asking about yours.
The Contact Form That Quietly Threw Every Message Away
A contact form that fails doesn’t announce it. The visitor fills it in, hits send, gets a thank-you message, and goes away satisfied. You get nothing. Neither of you knows. We audited thirty-four contact forms across the sites we host. Thirty-three were fine. One had no recipient address configured at all — so every message sent through it had been accepted, processed, and discarded. Nobody had complained, because nobody knew. The people sending those messages assumed they’d been ignored. That’s the part that costs money. It isn’t the lost message, it’s the customer who thinks you couldn’t be bothered to reply. Forms break quietly for boring reasons. Somebody changes the email address the form sends to. A plugin updates and resets a setting. The mail server starts rejecting messages from the website because the sending address doesn’t match the domain. An email host starts filing your own website’s notifications as spam. Any of those can happen months after the site was built and working. Test yours properly, at least twice a year. Not by looking at the settings — by filling the form in yourself, from your phone, on mobile data rather than your office wifi, using an email address that isn’t your business one. Then check whether it arrived, and check the spam folder too. If it doesn’t arrive, that’s the answer. If it arrives in spam, that’s a different problem and a fixable one. We now test every form on every site we host as part of routine maintenance, because “it worked when we built it” is not the same as “it works”.
We Found a Fake Phone Number on a Live Business Website
Most website themes ship with fake content so the demo looks full. A stock photo, a paragraph of lorem ipsum, an address in New York City, a phone number in the 555 range that doesn’t exist anywhere. You’re meant to replace all of it. Almost nobody replaces all of it. Going through the sites we host, we found a business publishing a phone number with an area code from a state it has never operated in. It had been there since the site was built. Anyone who dialled it got somebody else entirely. On another, the footer still carried the theme’s demo contact block — a street address in New York, a 1-800 number that belonged to the theme company, and an email address at a domain the business doesn’t own. That business is in Mississippi. Elsewhere we found published product pages full of lorem ipsum, testimonials from invented customers, and the “Hello world!” post WordPress creates on day one still sitting there years later. None of this is dramatic. All of it is the kind of thing a customer notices, and a competitor points at. Here’s how to check yours. Use your site’s search box, or Google with site:yourbusiness.com, and look for: example.com, lorem ipsum, Insert Tagline Here, Your Company, 555, North Main Street, Sample Page, Hello world. Then actually read your own footer, which is the part of a website nobody ever re-reads after launch. If you find something, it’s usually a five-minute fix. The hard part is knowing to look — which is why we now check for it on every site we host, as a standing item rather than a favour.