Silver Buckle Services | Equine Web Design and Marketing | Design for Equestrian Businesses | Web Design and Graphic Design for the Horse Industry
 
Time and time again, we are being asked by clients for websites that they can update themselves. Silver Buckle Services has been building websites for over 10 years and for 8 of those years, we have been building them by hand and completely manually. If clients wanted slide shows, drop down menus or photo galleries, we had to custom code them by hand. This is not only time consuming on our side but expensive on the client's pocket book. It used to be that if a client wanted to update the website themselves, they would have to buy expensive software and have to learn how to make updates and ftp files back and forth to the webserver. If a client wanted to do it themselves, it required quite a learning curve.

Thankfully, times have changed. In the last two years, we have been working with several web based content management system tools out on the market that allow users to maintain their own websites right from the web with no software on their computer. We have set up tools like Wordpress and Joomla for our clients that wanted to update their own sites. While these tools are powerful and flexible with free available plugins, they are not the easiest to work with. Many clients have become frustrated with the quirky behavior that these programs can exhibit.
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Bailey's 8 Page website
On a mission to find a better solution!
We have been on a mission to find a better solution for our clients, lucky for you, we found it! We now have a easy to use web based system to offer clients and both Kasha and Melissa can set them up for you. Clients can not only add pages themselves, they can add their own drop down menus, and control the order of the menu items & menu titles. Adding photos, photo galleries (with click to enlarge features) and slide shows is a matter of dragging and dropping an element into the page and presto they appear! Clients can add paragraphs with photos and control the angle, border and size of the photo that appears. Some templates allow for custom headers graphics on each page and the client can add any photo they want to in the header and can write text on top of the photo. Videos and downloadable files also can be added easily. There are also elements for adding Google Maps, audio files and simple shopping buy now buttons.

My 12 year old daughter, Bailey wanted to learn what I do for work, she was very interested in building a website for her animal collection, did I mention we have a small farm in her room? I signed her up for a account with the new website system we offer and she was able to create a 8 page (Bailey's Farm) website to display her photos of her fishes, chickens, hermit crabs, horses, dogs and lizards with custom headers, slide show and photo gallery all by herself, without me teaching her anything. Trust me, if my 12 year old can do the updates, you can, is just that easy! If you aren't comfortable with doing your own updates, we can always do them for you. The beauty of this system is it is web based so we can log into it anytime and help you.

Silver Buckle Services is offering special website setup packages for the new system. We design the website to match your marketing materials and come up with a custom look and feel for you and enter in all your content and set up the pages. Then we let you do the updates from there. Contact us to get started!

Author: Melissa Berschens


 
 
Submitted by: Kasha Ford

Have you seen those funny square bar code boxes that seem to be showing up everywhere from CNN to fashion magazines, to a smattering finding their way into the horse world?  They're called "QR Codes."  QR Codes have been popular for many years in Japan and then made their way throughout Europe before landing here.  Though they have been around for some time, they've only increased in popularity in the United States in the last couple of years.

QR Codes are fascinating!  Codes are electronically generated via special software and can be printed in or on virtually anything flat(ish).  QR codes are scanned by a special "app" that is typically downloaded free on most systems.  These universal app's work over a number of tablet and smartphone platforms, and as would be expected, work particularly well on iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones.  QR codes take the "scannee"  to a specific message (e.g. Chaps on Sale at ChapsR'Us) on a voyage through cyber space straight to a particular website, to a Facebook/Twitter or other social media page, or (drum roll please) to Youtube video's or video's imbedded in websites.

Yeah, that's cool... so how does that help us horse people?  It helps us immensely! Unfortunately we now live in an instant gratification society, QR Codes work right into that-marketing wise.  These little codes can be placed on your next Stallion ad.  Said ad can be put up at your next show or published in a mazine (either print or digital).  Mare breeder comes by, see's your stallion ad/flyer, notices the code, scans it and is taken to voila: an amazing video of your horse.  This is also a great tool on horse-for-sale-flyers.  Take a potential buyer directly to your sale horse's video placed either on a website or, on Youtube itself.  No more emailing back and forth or hunting for a link.  As a trainer or clinician you can drive potential clients to a cool video of your last win, or your last clinic or fun event.   For products and businesses it's a useful method to include coded messages about sales and make an ad more fun and interactive.  And best yet, they can take a "scannee" directly to a "Buy Now" or Paypal button on your website.  Talk about shortening the sales cycle!

Yeah, but are they reliable? These codes work surprisingly well.  I have a Blackberry Torch and as a test all summer long I've been scanning every code I find on various platforms to see if they'll work for our market.  So far, I'm glad to report I've had excellent results.  I have scanned codes off my computer monitor, off my TV (it was dusty, too), off a t'shirt, glossy print brochures, newsprint ads, and last night off the back of a ketchup bottle during dinner.  Bottom line, they work pretty darn good.  I'm a believer.

If you're ready to start promoting that Stallion for next season, have a horse for sale, or want to offer an interactive experience in an upcoming ad or promotional campaign, consider adding QR Codes.  Let us know if we can help you get started on a marketing project!