Before & After Photos - Best Practices

Some of our higher level sites include out Before & After Photo Viewer tool.
If your site includes this feature, you use our website admin to create B&A photo "Sets" by uploading a before and an after photo to the tool, giving a title to each, and a short description.

On sites that include the B&A Viewer, there will either be a link to it from the main navigation, or a link on the portfolio page. To see an example of the B&A in action, visit this Cincinnati OH Landscaper site.

The B&A Viewer is a flash based feature that is part of our pre-configured tool set, and cannot be edited on a site by site basis. It is the size that it is, and works the way it works. This means that there are some BEST PRACTICES you can apply that will help maximize the quality of the B&A viewer on your specific site.

1. The viewer works best when you take the before and after images from EXACTLY the same location.
   This may seem like a no-brainer, but we are constantly sent extremely mismatched photo sets that we're expected to "just photoshop" so that they look correct in the viewer. In most cases, no amount of photoshopping will help  a set of images that are just too different, so pay particular attention when you are shooting. It may be a good idea to use some sort of small landmark to shoot from, such as standing at a particular crack in the sidewalk, or shooting from the same fire hydrant. Anything you can use to ensure that your B&A are taken from as close to the same spot as you can.
   
   
2. Give your photos accurate file names.
   This is particularly important if you are not uploading the sets yourself, but are sending them to us to upload for you. We have no way of knowing which photos you want to match together unless you clearly label them, even if it seems totally obvious to you which pics should go together.
   When pics come out of the camera to a computer, they usually have file names like DSC00024.jpg. That means nothing to someone who is supposed to do something with that photo.
   
   For B&A photos the recommended syntax for file names is:
   name, before or after, set number
   For example a good filename set might be:
   brownhouse_before_1.jpg, and brownhouse_after_1.jpg
   
   Why put a set number?
   Because you may have several sets of the same location, such as both the front and the back of a property. So by including the set number, you can stipulate that although the pics are from the same property, they are a unique set.
   
   For example, if you had more photos of the same property in our previous example, you could call them:  
   brownhouse_before_2.jpg and brownhouse_after_2.jpg.
   
   Renaming the files will also help you keep them organized if you need them for later use on printed materials or any other reason.  You will thank yourself the first time you don't have to wade through hundreds of similar DSC000xx's to find what you are looking for.
   
   
3. The photos must be cropped to the correct size.
   The B&A viewer wants your photos to be 490 pixels high by 455 pixels wide (490px x 455px). You can use the graphics editing tool of your choice to reduce the size of and crop the photos. If you do not have a graphics editing tool, you can always use a FREE online editor such as PIXLR.COM . If you absolutely cannot edit your pics on your own, we can do it for you provided you have followed the 2 preceding steps, however it will be up to us how the photo is cropped.
   
   IMPORTANT: Make sure to make a backup copy of an image before you reduce the size/crop it, that way if you mess up, you can always have the original.
   
   
4. Save your B&A images in a separate, clearly labeled folder.
   Do not include your B&A photos in the same folder of images that you plan to upload to your site's photo gallery. This is especially important if you plan to send your B&A images to us to upload. Keeping the B&A images apart from the gallery images contributes to the organizational accuracy of our customer file for your site and also the speed at which we can complete the upload process.
   
   IMPORTANT: You may want some of the AFTER photos in your sets to also be included in your site photo gallery. In order to do this we will need a separate version of the same photo, sized and cropped to different dimensions. I will be posting a "Photo Gallery Images - Best Practices" guide at some point in the future, but for now, know that we cannot simply use the same photo for both and plan accordingly.
   
   
5. Create a .zip file of the B&A folder and send it to us via sendspace.com
   Creating a .zip file is easy. If you do not know how you can learn here. Once you have created the .zip file, go to sendspace.com and send the file to whichever developer has been assigned to your site via their email address. Sendspace is FREE, and much faster than sending a CD, DVD, or USB drive by mail.
   
   If you absolutely cannot make a .zip file, sending a CD, DVD, or USB drive is fine, but make sure to include some info about which site the images are for. Media with no info as to which site it is for is not helpful and will slow down site development dramatically.
   Address your envelope to:
   Your Developers Name c/o
   Porterware
   6710 Molly View Point
   Cumming GA, 30041

By taking these items into consideration as you gather and prepare the images for your B&A section, you will get the highest quality results with the least amount of errors and delays. I hope this information is helpful, and if you have any questions, call us and we will be glad to give you further explanation.

Creating a Great "About Us" Page for Your Landscaping or Lawn Care Website

The "About Us" page of your landscaperwebsites.com or greenindustrywebsites.com website is a great place to quickly show your customers an informative introduction to your company. It is also a great place to incorporate some things that may help your search optimization. Whether you are using our admin system to update the page yourself, or compiling information for us to enter onto the page for you, these tips will help you maximize the quality and impact of your "About Us" page.  Let's get started!

1. Change the main heading to something more SEO friendly.
   This is something that we would have to update for you, but it literally takes less than 5 minutes and we'll update it for FREE. Unless you ask us to change it, the main heading of the About Us page is simply...About Us. That doesn't tell the search engines much. Search engines like to see some keywords in the main heading of the page (also known as the <h1> tag), so use this opportunity to give your heading more ooomph.
   
   You should incorporate at LEAST the name of your company
   Example: About Imaginary Landscape Company
   
   For even more strength, incorporate your main geographic area
   Example: About Imaginary Landscape Company of Baltimore MD
   
   You can already see that in just a few steps we have told your customers, and the search engines, more about your company.
   
   
2. List your company Mission Statement.
   Here is a great way to QUICKLY explain what your company actually does while squeezing in some instances of those all important keywords you are hoping to shoe up for in search results. Most people don't read every single word of copy on a website or webpage, so an accurate effective mission statement at the top of your About Us page can be really helpful.
   
   A great mission statement:
   Imaginary Landscape Company strives to provide top quality landscape design, installation and maintenance throughout the Baltimore, MD metropolitan area.
   
   
3.  Add a paragraph about your Company History
   This need not be incredibly long, but here you have an opportunity to display how reputable your company is by listing things such as:  1.When the company was formed. 2. How your employee and/or customer base has grown. 3. Any special accomplishments/awards/achievements
   
   An example of Company History:
   Since 1992, Imaginary Landscape Company has delivered professional and beautiful landscaping services throughout Baltimore County. Starting with just a single truck and mower, servicing just the Dundalk area, our exceptional reputation for quality, timely service has helped us grow to include enough equipment and landscaping / lawn care team members to serve the entire metro area, including both residential and commercial properties. Our landscape designers utilize the latest materials and techniques to deliver beautiful results that will stand the test of time. Our attention to detail and precision installation techniques allowed our entries to win the Baltimore Tour of Homes "Best Landscaping" Award for 1997, 1998, and 2002. We bring that same level of excellence to YOU.
   
   
4. List the specific services your company actually performs.
   Here you need not be wordy and creative, a simple list will do just fine.
   
   Example:
   Our Landscaping Services include: Landscape Design, Installation, and Maintenance, Lawn Care, Lawn Mowing, Tree & Shrub Care, Core Aeration, Fertilization, Planting of Seasonal Color, Spring and Fall Leaf Cleanup, Weed & Lawn Insect Control, and Low Voltage Lighting design and Installation.
   
   
5. List the specific areas that you provide service to.
   Be thorough but do not go overboard. A common mistake is to list so many areas that your results get diluted. Remember that you can always use the website admin to create unique pages that are highly optimized for one to three areas, which may be very effective, so the "About Us" page is not your last opportunity to mention all of your service areas.
   
   Example:
   We provide service to the entire Baltimore City and Baltimore County Metro area, including: Owings Mills, Pikesville, Reisterstown, Timonium, Cockeysville, Towson, Overlea, Perry Hall, White Marsh Essex, Middle River,  Dundalk, North Point, Sparrows Point, Highlandtown, Glen Burnie, Catonsville, Woodlawn, Canton, Charles Village, and Hampden. We'll also be glad to travel to Harford County.
   
   
6. Give your customers the info they need to reach you.
   Although you have created great, search friendly, descriptive text, some people are just looking for the easiest way to reach you. List your means of contact, starting with the way you prefer to be reached. You may want to use some formatting here, such as a larger font size, to make this portion of the page more visible and attention grabbing.
   
   Example:
   Call Imaginary Landscape Company at (123) 456-7890.
   
   You may also use our online
   Contact Form or Request a FREE QUOTE.
    
   Email us at: info@imaginarylandscapeco.com
   
   Notice that the words "Contact Form" and "Quote Request" are links. All of our websites can include a preformatted Contact Form and or Request A Quote Form (they both contain exactly the same info fields), and the About us page is a great place to channel customers to those particular features. Customers may use these forms if they have would like to speak with your company, but their question or request is not so urgent that they feel the need to call.
   
   
7. Trade Associations
   If you are a member of any trade associations or the Better Business Bureau, the About us page is a perfect place to bring this to your site visitors attention. Choose whatever level of including this info that you like, from simply listing the organizations, to displaying clickable logos for each organization. If you wish to display clickable logos it is best practice for you to supply them to us. If you cannot supply the logos themselves, you must at least supply the URL to each organizations website that you wish to display. We can take care of it from there.
   
   
8. Extras
   Have a group picture of your staff? How about a picture of one of your trucks with all of your branding? The about Us page is a great place to integrate one or both of these images. If you have images you wish to include, send them to us and MAKE SURE to include the words "aboutus" in the filenames of the pics. It is ALWAYS BEST PRACTICE to rename your picture files with descriptive names rather than leave them the name the camera automatically assigns to them.
   
   If you feel the need to have customers come to your location, this is also a good space to include driving directions to your facility, or a link to a a Google Maps or Bing Maps page pre-populated with your physical address.
   
   

If you have followed these steps, you should now have an excellent plan for your About Us page, which not only conveys a LOT of information to your site visitors quickly, but also adds plenty of pertinent info for the search engines to help determine what your site is actually about.

Remember that on a landscaperwebsites.com or greenindustrywebsites.com based site, the About Us section is a USER EDITABLE section, which means that you can use our website admin to update or edit the TEXT CONTENT at any time. The About Us page does NOT have a control that allows you to add photos via the website admin unless you know how to write HTML code and have stored your photo on a storage site. If you want a photo posted to the About Us page and do not know how, we will be glad to do it for you.

Keep in mind that any TEXT edits you make to the page are permanent, and that we do not keep backups of the previous versions. If you feel questionable about making the updates yourself, we will be glad to help you. Let us know exactly what you want to do to the page and we'll do our best to get the page updated to your specs. Note that we will determine on a job by job basis whether the updates you want will accrue any billable time. Simple text updates usually will not be billable, but working with special formatting, images, etc will necessitate that we log the time and invoice you later.

HAVE FUN!

LandscaperWebsites January 2012 Review 1

Landscapers are not busy with their outdoor work from mid November til about the 2nd week of March, so that is when they take that time to focus on their marketing and promotional efforts. This means finally getting that Landscaping or Lawn Care website up and running, or for some clients refreshing the look and feel of what they already have out there. So from the start of the year til about mid-April, we are SLAMMED with work. Not complaining!

Jeff, our new accounting manager, and Sarah, our newest developer, are integrating into the workflow nicely. One really awesome thing that has happened, is that Jeff has gotten Dreamweaver set up on his machine, and has already done a few simple code level changes to some sites. Sarah has been up in the code since day one, and is learning her way around our standard code set pretty well. She got on board right when we are at the moment where a lot of our existing customers want SEO services, so I have been trying to train her in the fine art of search engine gangsterization (of the white hat variety). She seems to be catching on well, and shoud be able to pass on the knowledge to Jeff.

Bill continues to rock the living crap out of some back end code! We work well as a team because he gravitates towards more complex programming issues, while I tend to concentrate on pixel perfect front end HTML and CSS. So we are constantly helping each other out.

My continuing goal is to improve the product, the search engine visibility of our sites, and the processes we use to generate the product/customer experience.

The addition of the new team members, and the fact that they can all do at least some work at the code level as opposed to just using the website admin tool means that the workload has been split in such a way that Chris can focus more on making changes and upgrades to our CMS, and he has already rolled out some stages of what I am calling WebsiteAdmin 3.0!  Users will have more control of the look of their editable pages, and there will also be a new improved user editable Product Catalog feature, which is something that a lot of our customers have asked for.

We have launched some new sites including Sprinkler Systems of Germantown TN,  Reliable Lawn Care Today of White House TN,  B & K Systems Irrigation, Drainage & Lighting of Brandon MS, and  Koch Landscape Services of Hondo TX.

Locally, we launched Tender Lawn Care of Cumming GA.

An exceptionally fun site for me to construct and launch is Nature Coast Tree Farm of Bell, FL. They opted to NOT have a photo gallery, and instead had us construct customized Flash headers for the various pages of the site, that rotate through pertinent images. It was a lot of work, but the payoff is really nice.

Another challenging site to build and launch was Greenthumb Nursery of Ether NC. This site was actually designed by a third party, and we applied their design to our back end code. There are still a few areas we are going to refine, but we went ahead with the launch so they could start acquiring some search visibility.

Whew, we have been BUSY huh?

As we continue to upgrade the product, something I am hoping we can revamp is our Portfolio/Photo Gallery section. At the moment, it can be somewhat confusing as the main portfolio page has a set of thumbnails, but when you click into the slideshow portion of the gallery , another set of thumbs also appears. This is an unnecessary redundancy that makes the feature come off less smooth than it could.

I am also hoping that we rework our SEO package offerings to include customized geo-specific landing pages. We have added these to a few sites and seem to really get great results.

Future Forward!! >>>>