What’s involved in moving my business website over to an Alloy website

Scenario 1: If you have had a website for several years and are ‘due’ for a brand new website, then fantastic!

  • Our statistics show your new completely new redesigned site will help to convert around 10-25% more visitors into enquiries than your old website
  • Building from your text and any photos on your old site, your new one can be put together faster than a website for a new company
  • Any further online marketing investments in your Alloy website, build upon the strongest of foundations, to create an impressive tool for converting customers and also to build a valuable online presence for your business on the major search engines (Google, Bing, Ask, Yahoo).

Scenario 2: Possibly you have a more recently-built website, that does not perform well in terms of converting customers, or attracting visitors from search engines. It’s the same in every trade, and as you may expect – all webdesigners/ SEO / Marketing Consultants are not made equal, so if you have any doubts your current providers are not giving your business the best possible chance online – (whilst online marketing channels offer small businesses a phenomenal potential), then it’s up to you to act for the benefit of your business.

  • In some cases it’s possible work with your current website to make improvements and additions
  • But often edits to a 3rd party website will incur extra costs, and if you intend to make a major push for increasing online visibility and lead generation, it often becomes far more cost efficient to move over to an Alloy CMS website which from just £250, offer the strongest possible website platform to build upon.

What’s so great about Alloy websites?

  • Edits to your website are cheaper than you may be used to
  • Alloy sites can be upgraded to have a built-in blog publishing platform – regularly publishing news and testimonials, tips and advice, helps to keep your website and online presence ‘fresh’ and topical to benefit from even higher rankings and more leads generated from search engines.
  • Your website is linked up with Analytics visitor tracking software – goals are created & conversions are tracked from day1
  • Your website is coded to perform in harmony with the search engine algorithms, who sweep through on a regular basis to judge your site and determine it’s ranking potential on the search engine results pages (SERPS)
  • You get an premium quality and high reliability web+email hosting service

So hopefully, after weighing up the pros and cons, you will come to the conclusion that an Alloy website offers both your business a visually appealing and high performing interactive brochure, but also acts as a highly tuned ‘engine’ that can power your online marketing activities, moving forward.[hr]

So, what’s involved in the move?

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1. Your Domain Name

Your domain name (www.mycompanydomainname.co.uk) is the most valuable online asset to your business.

  1. Before you contact your current webdesigners, you need to find out if you are the legal registrant of the domain.
  2. Enter your web address here to see who is the registrant of your domain http://whois.domaintools.com/
  3. If you have your domain printed on stationery, or even your van, it would (of course) cause problems if it was disconnected from your website by a disgruntled webdesigner or company.
  4. If you are not the registrant of your domain then you need to be very careful asking to gain legal ownership (of what you thought was your property after paying-for, but possibly isn’t)
  5. Even if you are listed as the domain registrant, you need be cautious asking to gain control of the domain, and move your business elsewhere, as there are several things 3rd parties can do to slow down or complicate the move of your business away from them.
  6. Once you are ready to make the switch, we can either gain control of your domain and point it to your new Alloy hosting + email account, or we may have to move your domain away from your previous conmapny, to a new domain registrar of your choice. This process is usually free, but requires a renewal of your domain for a year or 2.
  7. All the details are completely managed for a seamless move with minimum hassle

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2. Your website

Your website text and images can be grabbed from your old website before it is taken down, and used in your new design. Your new website can be prepared, ready to go, so that once you give your old company notice, you can have a seamless transfer over to your new Alloy website and premium hosting account.Features of Hosting from Alloy Marketing

  • Premium quality UK based hosting
  • Servers are based at the premium Blue Square data centres in the UK
  • Expected uptime is an outstanding 99.95% uptime
  • To give you an idea, there hasn’t been 1 single hosting / uptime complaint from customers in 2012, and it’s mid-April!

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3. Your emails

When you enquire about your specific requirements, we can find out how you are currently receiving and sending emails. The identical email accounts and redirects will be recreated on your new Alloy hosting. If you are just using 1or 2 accounts this service is free.If you have more than 2email accounts, there is a nominal admin fee to cover the small costs of setting up the extra accounts on your new hosting and providing the configuration details you need to change if any.

  1. If you are using hotmail, gmail, yahoomail or another free service, and you receive emails forwarded from your website, then you will not need to change anything at all and your transfer will be seamless.
  2. If you are using your business email address to send/receive via POP or IMAP, using a desktop email browser such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail Desktop Version etc. We can setup the same accounts on your new hosting, but with new passwords, so you will just need to open the options panel for your email software and enter your new email server passwords and details. This is a very easy process that we can provide clear illustrated instructions so that you can complete at your end within about 10 minutes.

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4. Timescales

Once your new website is designed and ready to go, and you are ready to make the move, we initiate the process by gaining control of your domain name and then pointing over to the new Alloy webhosting. Unlike many conventional agencies, we have the flexibility to be able to initiate your transfer at the weekend, so if there is a few hours when your website is not available, it’s at the weekend.

  1. If you have control of your domain, the transfer time will be between 2-24 hours.
  2. If you don’t have control of your domain, and we need to transfer it to a new domain registrar, so that we can gain control of it and point it to Alloy webhosting, then the process can take between 4 – 48hours.

 

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