Do you have questions about using Facebook to promote your business? We have answers!

Join us on Thursday, May 10th at 10:00 a.m. for the Facebook Business Clinic Made Easy featuring guest speaker, marketing specialist Erica Van Dyke. This interactive workshop will help you understand a variety of Facebook topics including:

• Working with the new timeline
• Creating a custom cover photo
• Adding tabs to your page layout
• Building a fan base
• Engaging followers with status updates

Bring your laptops along so that you can create and edit your page as we go!

This 90 minute workshop is available for just $25 per person and includes a 30 minute networking session prior to the event and a 30 minute question and answer session afterward.

Class size is limited to just 12 participants so sign up soon to reserve your spot!

Sign me up! »

Our Help Desk on OldCityWebServices.com was recently updated with the addition of a step-by-step tutorial with screenshots to help you set up email on your iPad. Click on the link to check it out!

2. Old City Web Services has a new mail server.

We are in the process of moving our email clients to a newer, faster email server. If you’d like to move over to the new server sooner, give us a call and volunteer to make the switch!

3. You can have your email forwarded to another address.

OCWS can set up an email address at your domain to forward to another email address so that you don’t have to check multiple email inboxes. This gives you the professional appearance of an email address at your domain but the convenience of one inbox.

 4. Up to 10 email addresses are available at your domain.

If you host with OCWS, your monthly hosting charges include up to ten email addresses at your domain. Use them to divide your reservations and customer service inquiries or set up email addresses for your employees. It’s free!

5. Clear out your junk and trash folders once a month. 

Once a month, go through your junk and trash folders to delete old email. Performing this small maintenance task will make your email run faster!

Candidate Mike Davis has a new home on the web.

Old City Web Services recently launched a brand new site for Mike Davis, a candidate for state representative from District 17. The new site features a built-in content management system, blog and custom contribution page where citizens can make a donation to the candidate’s campaign.

Visit website »

Viva Estilo! Celebrate the launch of Estilo Salon’s new website.

Estilo Salon, a full service hair styling, makeup application and skin care salon in St. Augustine Beach, recently finished its first website with the help of Old City Web Services. In addition to a custom design by Old City Web Services, Estilo Salon also received content writing and search engine optimization. 

Visit website »

Powerful photos can be the best tool to engage customers on your website. A great image leaps off the screen, gets the visitor’s attention and makes your business memorable.

So how do you display photos on your website?

If you have a lot of great photos that highlight your products and services, SlideShowPro is the best method for showcasing your images with style and movement.

This professional program features transitions between photos, captions, links, optimization options and thumbnail images for easy navigation.

Best of all, SlideShowPro includes a built-in, user-friendly uploading tool that makes it quick and easy for you to upload and manage photos in your gallery from any computer. You can rearrange, remove or add photos with ease.

SlideShowPro can also be integrated with WordPress, our full content management system, to make adding new slideshow galleries and albums even easier.

We can install SlideShowPro for you!

Are you interested in adding this feature to your website? Old City Web Services can add a custom slideshow styled to match your existing website design.

To get started, just give us a call at (904) 829-2772 or send us an email (letusmarketyou@oldcity.com).

But what if instead you had a contact form on your website? 

Contact forms go beyond a phone number or even an email address to make it simple and easy for a customer to get in touch with you. Even if you had your email address on your contact page, the customer would need an email program (like Outlook or Entourage) installed on his computer to use an email link or he would have to log-in to his webmail program (like G-Mail or Yahoo) to copy and paste the email address in.

With a contact form right on your website, in just a few seconds that potential customer could have submitted his name, phone number and his question about your service without ever leaving your website. You would have received the message via email and followed up with a phone call the next day to engage the client and make a sale.

This is just one of the many ways in which forms can help you get more out of your website.

Here are a few other suggestions where you could use forms to help your business:

1. Registration Forms: Do you have an upcoming event that requires people to sign-up to participate? Encourage people to visit your website where we can create a custom registration form for your event. We can even link the form to PayPal so that participants can pay their registration fees at the same time!

2. Employment Forms: Are you hiring new employees? We can create a basic employment form on your website where you can direct potential candidates to fill out their information and apply!

3. Request a Quote Forms: Would you like to encourage potential clients to contact you for an estimate? A custom form would allow your website visitors to input their information (not including secure details such as credit card numbers, social security card numbers, etc.) to receive a quote from your business on providing services.

Simple, easy and emailed to you!

Each time someone fills out one of the forms above, you will receive an email with the information that was provided so you can take the next step to reach out to the client. 

We can also add a page that thanks the customer for their submission and redirects them back to your website for more browsing.

If you would like to add a form to your website or if you have questions about using forms to communicate with your customers, please give us a call (904) 829-2772 or send us an email (letusmarketyou@oldcity.com) and we’ll be happy to answer your questions!

Last year, we had the opportunity to partner with Pedro Menendez High School to help their digital design students learn more about the real world careers available to them in the design industry. The students designed a campaign to promote their school and invited us to join them in the classroom for a constructive evaluation of their work. We were very impressed with their designs! We also shared some copy writing advice with Menendez Yearbook students who were working on creating captions and body copy for the school’s annual book.

After such a wonderful experience with Menendez, we were thrilled when the Florida School for the Deaf & Blind here in St. Augustine asked if some of their students could visit our offices to learn more about marketing. The group of budding young designers, computer experts and marketing strategists joined us in the office on March 9th to learn more about what we do for our clients and how they can start their career path in the industry.

OCWS owner Cecile Nusbaum told the students about her experience and how important it is to keep your mind open to new ideas and opportunities. Marketing coordinator Shannon O’Neil showed the students examples of the branding work OCWS has done for clients like Jack Ward Fire, Little Looster, and the Chicago Bears. Bobby Jones, OCWS Art Director, gave the students an idea of the kind of programs, computers and other technology tools we use to create our work.

After a short presentation, the students were eager to ask questions about internships, teamwork and the reach of Old City Web Services. We provided some additional answers before taking the students on a tour of our offices.

It was a wonderful morning for us, we enjoyed it just as much as the students did. Since the meeting we have kept in touch with the students and their teachers with the hope of furthering our connection in the future.

All of that begins with giving your website a purpose.

Instead of having a couple of pages on the web that tell people the name of your business, how long it’s been around and what the phone number is, your website should drive people to take action.

Here are four of the main functions a website usually serves (and some websites can fulfill more than one of these functions):

1. Information: If you’re a service provider, your website should drive people to learn more about the services you offer by providing them with text and photos that describe what it is that you can do for them. The text should be informative without being boring or verbose. Use bulleted lists, short paragraphs and headlines to keep people from getting turned off by big blocks of text that they won’t read.

2. Contact: To make a sale or answer questions, sometimes you want customers to contact you directly. Your website should give them multiple options for doing this including a phone number, email address, contact form and a map to your location. All of these methods of contact should be easy to find so that someone can reach you right away.

3. Sales: If you’ve got an eCommerce shop or sell tickets, ask for donations or want customers to make any other kind of payment, your website should drive clients to make purchases. In this case it is critical that your website is professional and secure so that your clients can trust that making an online payment is safe.

How can we help?

If your website is not driving people to do one of the above functions, we can come to the rescue! 

We can assist you in getting information to your clients through our content writing services, set up contact forms and Google Maps links to make it easier for customers to contact you and we have a secure eCommerce system that allows you to sell your products safely online through a payment gateway.

Call us for more information, pricing or with any questions you have about creating a purpose for your website. Why do more work when your website can do the work for you?