Weekly Links Roundup – CRO, Hosting Matters, Online Security

The top website and marketing links of the week.

Here’s a great case study showing how UX design and visual hierarchy can improve conversion rates of a web page. Simple changes can bring you noticeable results! If your site is not converting as well as it could be, a brand new year is a great time to improve. Get in touch, Red Kite can help.

Where you host matters. Why would you relegate your business website, which hopefully is helping you earn a living, to a $1.99 hosting account? Here’s the latest big outage news from EIG, who bought up dozens of small hosts like HostGator, BlueHost, HostMonster and many more. I was with HostGator for about 7 years after I started Red Kite and loved them to death. Their support fell through the floor when they sold to EIG, with many unacceptable outages and far too much downtime. I left them shortly after for Knownhost (an awesome dedicated and VPS host) and now am with WP Engine (best host I’ve ever used). When you pay nothing, that’s pretty much what you can plan on receiving in return. Do yourself and your business a favor and get a better host if you’re with one of the EIG providers listed in that article.

There’s so much Internet security noise out there, it’s hard to know what to do! Here’s a short but useful list of 8 things you can do to improve online security for your business.

Finally… we lost our 15-year-old dog 2 days after Christmas. I saw this quote yesterday and it made me smile and think of her:

the best thing about dogs is you can act like something really good just happened and they’ll instantly start celebrating too and they have no idea what the context is they’re just always ready to party no matter what