It's been a little more than 3 weeks since we switched from our wire service hosted site to an independent company. I want to share a few notes about the experience.
The switch
We originally registered our own name so changing the DNS (Domain Name Server) was a breeze. I just logged into my account at the registrar and within a few hours, the entire web knew our site was located at a different IP. Very smooth, very easy. If someone else registered your name, you'll need their help - which isn't always easy to get.
Positioning
Due to the age of our site and the quantity of inbound links, we had a decent showing of our home page in most search engines for our targeted terms (city name, florist, flowers, etc...) We preserved as much of the text from our previous home page and have seen a slight improvement in SERPs - perhaps because the content is fresher or maybe because we are no longer sitting on the same server as a whole lot of other flower shops.
Redirects
I was concerned about losing the few links that showed decently (but not tops) for a few secondary terms. We looked at having 301 Redirects put in place but decided to just let the pages default to Home and have search engine spiders find the new ones. The SEs have already found the new pages in most cases.
Traffic Analysis
The WS stats package always made me feel like I was only getting a very small part of the story of our site visitors. I was right. The new analysis tools we use has been an eye opener.
Rather than just seeing the number of visitors and page views, we now have very detailed reports. The program does not count visits by search engine spiders in with real humans as I now believe the TF program did.
Shopping Cart
The one drawback has been that existing customers need to create a new account on the site. We don't believe we've lost any sales from it but anything that inconveniences shoppers needs to be recognized. A note about the new accounts was placed on the login page.
Email Reminders
We asked TF for a complete list of email addresses they had on file for us. I did get an Excel spread sheet within a few days but all it contained was the addresses - no customer names, no occasions to which they asked to be reminded, nothing else. I called and asked for 'the rest' and was told they didn't have it or couldn't retrieve it. ::BS We most likely have the data in MAS but not the specific info provided by each customer.
Content
We now have far more flexibility and can add content on the fly. Some pages require we write them in HTML and I use FrontPage to create the tables, etc. It's easy enough.
The site does require some more work than our WS hosted one, but we no longer get surprised with products popping in that we don't have and I don't have to call anyone to change our home page.
More features will be added after Christmas. At this point we just want to get through the holiday smoothly. So far, so good.
The switch
We originally registered our own name so changing the DNS (Domain Name Server) was a breeze. I just logged into my account at the registrar and within a few hours, the entire web knew our site was located at a different IP. Very smooth, very easy. If someone else registered your name, you'll need their help - which isn't always easy to get.
Positioning
Due to the age of our site and the quantity of inbound links, we had a decent showing of our home page in most search engines for our targeted terms (city name, florist, flowers, etc...) We preserved as much of the text from our previous home page and have seen a slight improvement in SERPs - perhaps because the content is fresher or maybe because we are no longer sitting on the same server as a whole lot of other flower shops.
Redirects
I was concerned about losing the few links that showed decently (but not tops) for a few secondary terms. We looked at having 301 Redirects put in place but decided to just let the pages default to Home and have search engine spiders find the new ones. The SEs have already found the new pages in most cases.
Traffic Analysis
The WS stats package always made me feel like I was only getting a very small part of the story of our site visitors. I was right. The new analysis tools we use has been an eye opener.
Rather than just seeing the number of visitors and page views, we now have very detailed reports. The program does not count visits by search engine spiders in with real humans as I now believe the TF program did.
Shopping Cart
The one drawback has been that existing customers need to create a new account on the site. We don't believe we've lost any sales from it but anything that inconveniences shoppers needs to be recognized. A note about the new accounts was placed on the login page.
Email Reminders
We asked TF for a complete list of email addresses they had on file for us. I did get an Excel spread sheet within a few days but all it contained was the addresses - no customer names, no occasions to which they asked to be reminded, nothing else. I called and asked for 'the rest' and was told they didn't have it or couldn't retrieve it. ::BS We most likely have the data in MAS but not the specific info provided by each customer.
Content
We now have far more flexibility and can add content on the fly. Some pages require we write them in HTML and I use FrontPage to create the tables, etc. It's easy enough.
The site does require some more work than our WS hosted one, but we no longer get surprised with products popping in that we don't have and I don't have to call anyone to change our home page.
More features will be added after Christmas. At this point we just want to get through the holiday smoothly. So far, so good.
