Business Strategy

We just went live with a new website for St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School.

The St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School is a private Preschool, Elementary and Middle School located in Carson City, Nevada. The School was founded in 1957, and has a great reputation for academic excellence.

St. Teresa School contacted Bullsprig about redesigning their current website. They wanted a fresh look and feel, more functionality, and a website they could manage themselves.

The web design goals for this project was to give parents, students and faculty a website where they could interact with the school, download documents, check schedules, read news and announcements and much more.

In addition, the St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School website had to function as marketing tool for future students and parents. The School has a lot of fund-raising activities throughout the year. They wanted a website where they could advertise these great events easily.

This was a great project for the team at Bullsprig to work on! I grew up in Carson City, and actually went to school at St. Teresa. I have fond memories of playing football in the dirt playground, and not-so-fond memories of being called to the Principle's office for discipline. I'm happy to say the playground is no longer dirt, and I haven't been to the Principle's office in years!

The St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School website was built entirely on the Bullsprig Platform, integrating numerous key business indicators, including:

• Custom Web Site Analytics - Custom website reports are generated weekly, and sent via email to St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School every Sunday. The custom website reports illustrate top performing pages, most popular website content, searches, web form submissions and more. Our custom website statistics provide everything St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School needs to know to improve their online business and stay on track.
• Lead Management Systems - We built custom web forms that capture every inquiry, seamlessly updating the customer database in real-time.
• Workflow Notifications - We built multi-step work-flows to notify the St. Teresa staff of new web form submissions, verifying steps as they are completed, and remind and escalate to management if need be.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - We put special effort into making sure St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School can get found on the web. Every 24 hours, we automatically generate the sitemap.xml file for St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School, ensuring maximum visibility in Google, Yahoo and Bing.
• Content Management System (CMS) - Utilizing the Bullsprig Platform, the staff at St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School can maintain every aspect of their custom website. The staff at St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School can update web pages and edit content, upload files and communications, add and change photos with a click of a mouse.

About St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School: Founded in 1957, St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School has established a reputation for giving parents exactly what they desire when it comes to their children's education. St. Teresa's provides exceptional education in a faith‐based environment.

Click here to view St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School's website.

Search engine optimization is a never-ending job. All the time and money you spent designing and developing your website means nothing if people can't find you!

It's important to make sure your website design company optimizes your site during development, but there is always room for improvement. To get those precious leads coming in, you must ensure your prospects can find your website via search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Tip 1: Write Better Page Titles
At the top of your browser, on every web page, there is a title. Make sure each title is very specific, and is different than any other web page on your site. Search engines scan this data when indexing your site. Being specific counts! Do not use generic page titles like "About Us". Include targeted keywords in your titles.

Tip 2: Use Keywords Generously
Incorporate top phrases you want associated with your website. Do your keyword research, find out what keywords you want to target. Try to have your keywords appear a few times on your site. But, do not "keyword stuff". Keyword stuffing is putting A TON of keywords on a single page. This is a red flag.

Tip 3: Develop an XML Site Map
Site maps are a major component for search engine indexing. There are many tools that generate xml site maps for free... use them! Websites designed by Bullsprig submit an xml site map to all the major search engines every 24 hours. You need to do the same.

Tip 4: Broadcast Your Links
There are many ways to get your content out there to the world. Focus on social networks and trusted websites within your industry. Tell the world about your business, products, services, employees... everything!

Tip 5: Tweet About It
Twitter is a wonderful tool that has become an important part of search engine optimization. Tweets are now indexed in Google! If you have a Twitter account, include Tweets about your business and useful tips that your customers would like to hear about. If you don't have a Twitter account, get one!

These tips will help you get better traction with your search engine results. SEO is a never-ending job! The sites that rank highly in Google are there for a reason... you can be too.

In business, nothing happens until a sale is made. Leads equals sales. Without leads, your business will not survive long.

We consult our clients often about the importance of conversion rates. A conversion can be many things... a product purchase, information gathered from interactive forms, a contract signed, and so on. Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who actually do what you want them to do. For example, if 10 people visit your online store and three people buy something, your conversion rate is 30 percent.

Tracking conversion rates on your website is a very important key business indicator.

Your ultimate goal is to convert clients, make a sale and keep your business growing. After the initial conversion, you need to make sure you keep getting repeat sales from your customers. The way to do this is to create marketing and sales systems that work.

With our website design clients, we first determine what their business goals are, then create conversion funnels to support these business goals.

Too many business owners focus on getting their "look" right before they start to generate leads. At the end of the day, leads are far more important than your brand. Again, leads equals sales, and without leads, your business will not survive long.

If you're in the market for a website redesign, or brand-new custom website design, make sure your website design company focuses on your business goals first, website look and feel later.

I live and work in Reno Nevada. I think it's the best place in the world to live. There are so many options and fun things to do in and around the Reno area. This fits me perfect because I really enjoy spending time outside doing the things I love. One of my passions is skiing.

I am 45 minutes away from the best ski resort in North America: Squaw Valley USA. For the past 5 years I have been a dedicated pass holder and lover of Squaw. I consider myself an expert skier... although, nowhere near as good as some of the guys ripping it up at Squaw.

Recently, I found a website that offers everything I want to see and read about Squaw Valley, and other things skiing. This website is: Unofficial Squaw.

The team behind Unofficial Squaw are doing an incredible job of online marketing and delivering a website people love and visit quite often (myself included).

So what's their secret? Well, first, the layout and design of the site is really nice. They spent some time putting everything together, and either have in-house designers, or they hired a great web design company. The website is visually pleasing and has a nice grid-based layout making navigating the site very easy.

They've also incorporated some really great technologies in their website, including: weather widgets, Twitter, Vimeo video technologies, Slideshow Pro, Flickr and others.

But what really makes Unofficial Squaw so popular among ski fanatics is the content! They are delivering exactly what their visitors want: great content!

I am sure you've heard, "content is king." Make no mistake, this is absolutely true! If you want to have a website with tons of traffic and visitors... deliver great content with an easy to use website. Give your audience what they want!!

At Bullsprig, we consult business owners and individuals every week about how they can get more traffic to their website. Besides having a custom designed website, you must give users what they want. What are you selling? Do you have products, services, ideas? What about those products or services makes them "sellable"? Talk about it. Help your audience see the benefits of your offerings.

You started your business because you were passionate about it. Tell the world why and success will follow!

I received an excellent email this morning from the Google Apps team:

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,
The Google Apps team

This is fantastic news for web developers and clients alike! IE 6 is the thorn in every web designer / web developers side. It simply doesn't play by the rules. Internet Explorer 6.0 is filled with bugs. What makes it so frustrating is that, as web developers, we have to work-around these bugs with hacks and crazy code.

This news is great because once a big company like Google decides to quit supporting IE 6.0, everybody else can follow suit! Thanks Google!