Last most I got back into the business of creating websites. I did this mostly because the hardware part of my business has gotten a bit slow recently. I did a few websites for some of my customers. There are still thousands of small businesses just in my city that STILL do not have websites. It is crazy.
Anyway after doing a few of these sites I looked at my own site. It was version 3 of the Emerald Computers site, I have had it for about 2 years. It was very limiting because I was in a fixed width and fixed height template. It limited how much content I could have on any one page. I decided it did not look good enough for a company that was going to create websites, add to that it simply did not generate sales. So I spent 3 days designing and building the New Emerald Computers site. I found a nice template that I liked, but the menu was simply too small so I created a pull down menu, for the first time. I also did a few other firsts on this website. I built the entire site without using tables AT ALL. Tables are so lame and hard to work with. I also made the entire site with proper CSS, no more setting fonts in the text. Something else I did, for the fourth time is that I divided the entire site up using PHP. I have found that this makes it SO much easier to edit a site. Everything is server side includes. Most of the pages are 5-8 different PHP files spliced together, the server does all the work so the user can not even tell. But what this lets me do is change just one file and all of my pages are changed. Yes I KNOW this is not new, in fact this was been going on for 10 years, but I have only used it for 2 years.
On sunday I decided that the site was better than my old one, even though only 60% of the content was written so I deleted the old one and uploaded the new one. I did something on this page I never did on any of my other pages, I put a call to action at the bottom of all the services pages. A visitor simply can fill out a short form and then I can all them and set up a service call, it also has a link to our contact page. I just did it because I thought it would be nice, but to my huge surprise I have had over 10% of the people who visited this page fill out the form, and I called them tuesday and two have been converted into sales!!! WOW. On top of that my volume of phone calls is up over 50%, with almost half of the calls mentioning my website. This is crazy, I did not expect results this fast or this good. Google still has not even indexed the new site. I am working quickly to get the rest of the site down. Yesterday I wrote a huge page about dropshipping, and I also wrote one about how to upgrade a computer.
I hope this keeps up, I will keep my readers informed. By the way this is why I have been fairly quite on the blog, I am too busy with this to blog much, even though some really important stuff is going on.