Features of a Lightrail website
Every Lightrail website benefits from the numerous features we provide, ensuring a positive customer experience.
- Your website at your own domain
Having your website live at your own domain may seem like a given, but we've seen some insurance agency websites that don't. For instance, let's assume your agency is called Smith Insurance. Compare the following two URLs.
Lightrail (common) website URL
http://www.smithins.comOther website URL
http://smithins.insurance.hostingprovider.comWhile most respectable hosting providers at least offer the capability of having your website at its own domain (rather than as a subdomain of their own site, as in the "other" example above), some agencies don't take advantage of this, and the result is a URL that is difficult to remember and too lengthy to type quickly.
Please also note that we do not take control of your domain. Even when your domain is pointed at our servers (much like your phone number is "pointed at" your office building), you retain full ownership and control. You can think of this as phone number portability.
- Meaningful, friendly URLs
Friendly URLs (or "pretty" URLs) are easy for your customers to remember. You're more likely to remember a short, simple, meaningful URL than one that's long and doesn't mean anything to you.
Compare the following URLs, both of which represent a page for auto insurance:
Lightrail website URL
www.site.com/autoOther website URL
www.site.com/web/index.php?type=page&fmt=12&page-id=142Which of the above URLs would you like to put in marketing materials or read to a customer over the phone? Surprisingly, the second URL above is quite common among our competitors.
Friendly URLs are also important for SEO, which affects how easy your site is to find on search engines like Google.
- Marketing URLs
A marketing URL is a great way to track the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. For example, let's say you're about to mail out letters to a list of potential new customers. Rather than asking them to come to yoursite.com, you'll ask them to come to yoursite.com/special.
Since the only people who will know the "special" URL are those to whom you sent the letter, you'll know that anyone entering the site at that URL is doing so as a result of that letter.
- Conversion URLs (moving an existing site to Lightrail)
If you have an existing site, we'll map the URL of each page to the URL of the corresponding page on the new site.
For example, if your current business insurance page is at www.site.com/cms/index.php/Business-Insurance, we'll make sure customers trying to visit that page are automatically redirected to www.site.com/business.
This will ensure that links pointing to your site will still work after your new website is launched.
- Custom "Page Not Found" page
This is another feature that should be much more common than it actually is. Sadly, it's fairly standard to see a plain, black-and-white "Page Not Found" page when browsing around online. This is not helpful to users who have inadvertently requested a non-existent page, usually by no fault of their own.
All Lightrail sites come with a custom "Page Not Found" page (also called a 404 page). When visitors request a non-existent page, they will be greeted with a friendly page that matches the design of your site, along with a helpful message explaining what happened and some links to get them back on the right track.
- SSL protection
Accepting sensitive, personal information via non-secure methods is not acceptable. Unfortunately this practice is all too common, because many website operators do not understand the risks.
By having an SSL certificate, people can submit information to your website without having to worry about hackers stealing that information while in transit. This is the same method that is used by banks and online stores.
- Site-wide alert messages
If you have a message you want all your visitors to see for a certain amount of time, placing it in a prominent spot on every page is a good way of handling that. This can be helpful in a variety of situations.
For example, if there is a severe storm during the weekend, you can give simple property damage and claims instructions to your customers. Or, imagine your phones go down at your office — placing a message on your website quickly tells your customers that you're aware of the problem and advises on alternate ways of contacting you.
- Dynamic vCard for each agent
vCard is a standard file format for representing business cards electronically. The vCard format is recognized by various software applications, including Microsoft Outlook and Apple's Address Book, making it easy to import contact information.
Built in to every Lightrail website is the ability to have dynamically generated vCards for each person in your agency. Since these are generated on-the-fly, there's no need to manually create a new vCard when you hire a new employee or when an employee's information changes.
- Printable page designs
It's common knowledge that websites look a lot different when printed than they do on a computer screen. Background images are missing, colors are different, and all kinds of information is printed that isn't necessary (such as the site's navigation links, which are useless on paper).
So why not give your customers a nice surprise when they print a page from your website? We'll take the time to apply special print-only formatting to your website so that it contains all the relevant content and excludes everything that doesn't need to be printed. This is another professional touch we provide, which you're not likely to find elsewhere.
- E-mail address protection
Unfortunately, spam has become a fact of life. Once your e-mail address falls into the hands of spammers, there's no taking it back. One way in which spammers find new e-mail addresses "harvesting" them from websites. This is an automated process by which simple software crawls the web looking for e-mail addresses.
We've taken steps to protect the e-mail addresses on our websites, and we believe they've been very effective. There are some clever ways to hide e-mail addresses from these harvesters, but most of them use JavaScript (which most harvesters can't read) to convert a long string of characters (unreadable to humans) into an e-mail address. These solutions aren't up to our standards, however, since there are people (many with disabilities) that can't use JavaScript. We feel that it is unacceptable to exclude these users.
As such, we developed a custom solution that renders a human-readable address that is meaningless to the harvesters. And for users who have JavaScript available, our solution converts these to clickable e-mail links automatically. This solution provides the best of both worlds – e-mail addresses are hidden from harvesters but appear normally to users.
- Spam protection
Spam doesn't just come by e-mail anymore. For a while now, spammers have been using software to submit messages via website forms. To protect our clients and their valuable time from such spam posts, we've added protection into our form post processor software. And as the spammers continue to evolve, so will our software.
- Placeholder page during construction
During the time your website is being constructed, it's possible that people will attempt to access your website. If you don't already have a website, these people will usually be presented with a generic "Website coming soon" message, or as is becoming more common, a page full of ads. To avoid this, we can construct a simple, one-page website with your agency's name, logo, address, hours, and phone and fax numbers.
Having such a placeholder page has many positive effects. First, it leaves a more professional impression on your early visitors. Second, it allows you to include your website address on printed materials sooner without fears of people visiting the site too soon. And third, it allows you to use e-mail addresses at your domain (such as john@myagency.com) without worrying that people will attempt to visit your website at that domain (such as www.myagency.com).
- Fully accessible for users with disabilities
There are reasons the U.S. government has laws that require publicly accessible spaces to be accessible to all persons, including those with disabilities. We feel very strongly that websites should provide the same level of universal accessibility, which is why we construct websites in such a way that they are usable by everyone.
We do not use Flash (a common barrier to access for some disabled users), and we only use JavaScript to enhance the functionality of a website rather than as its foundation. We take many other steps to ensure that users with disabilities are fully able to browse our websites.
- Custom images
To bring a website design to life, we create custom imagery based on your agency's logo and colors. This gives the website a more integrated and professional look. Without this level of customization, a website design risks looking like it is a generic template.
We can also add your agency's slogan atop stock photography, giving the site an even more professional touch, and we always take care to use the same font (or a couple fonts that go well together) throughout the site.
- Our name does not appear on your website
Would you want your printer to put its own name at the bottom of your business cards or your letterhead?
Many web design firms place their own name at the bottom of every page of the websites they create. This is a good way for them to bring in new business and to build up their own reputation with search engines, but we feel that this takes something away from the agencies. We believe part of the reason agencies want a professional website is to convey to current and potential customers that the agency is able to afford to not have a website company's name on its own website.
For these reasons, our name does not appear on your website in any way.
- Cross-browser compatibility
Simply making a website function and look good in a single browser doesn't mean it will function or look good in the rest of the browsers. That would be like designing a car for dry roads and never testing it in the rain, just because "it doesn't rain very often." As silly as that sounds, it's happening.
We still see other website developers write sites for Internet Explorer while ignoring other browsers that are all gaining in popularity. With only 65% of people using Internet Explorer, ignoring other browsers can prevent 35% of your potential customers from using your website.
We test our websites in multiple versions of all the popular browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer. This allows us to ensure that your website delivers a consistent experience regardless of what browsers your visitors are using.
- Private pages
Some of our clients have private pages that are only used by agency staff. A common example is a "start" page for agents, with links to commonly used websites such as the agency management software, agent logins to insurance company sites, and more.
Your Lightrail website can be as many private pages as you like, each with its own, memorable URL, such as www.smithins.com/internal (assuming your website lives at www.smithins.com). Having a memorable URL is useful for accessing these private pages while away from the office (such as from your laptop while traveling).
Technical features
We've paid special attention to how quickly our websites load, and we think it shows. The faster a website loads, the more professional and polished it appears.
If you have a website already, or if you're shopping around and comparing providers, we invite you to ask whether the following features are standard or are even offered.
- Heavy use of page caching
A cache is a temporary storage mechanism for previously compiled data. A page cache, then, is a temporary storage for website pages. Using a page cache can speed up a website immensely by taking load off the servers and by removing duplicate processing.
As an example, assume you need to call three painters to get an estimate from each, and that you're going to look up their numbers in the phone book. Think of the piece of paper where you'll write the phone numbers as a "phone number cache." After looking up each number and writing it down, you refer back to it quickly and often without the relatively time-consuming task of finding it again in the phone book.
- Asset minification
This is the process of compacting assets such as JavaScript and CSS files by removing unnecessary content. This can reduce the file size, and thus the download time, by a noticable amount.
Here is an example of an original snippet of JavaScript code, followed by a functionally equivallent, minified version:
Original JavaScript
// show an alert box to greet the user
function sayHello(name) {
alert('Hello, ' + name);
}Minified JavaScript
function sayHello(n){alert('Hello, '+n)}In this simple example, the first original snippet is 95 characters, while the minified version is only 40 characters, meaning it will download more than twice as fast as the original.
- Asset packaging
This is the process of packing multiple asset files, such as JavaScript and CSS, into a single file for faster and more efficient downloads. Because a round-trip request from a browser to a server is relatively time consuming, packaging multiple files into one request speeds things up.
This is exactly the same reason that when ordering multiple items from an online store, they all arrive in a single box when shipped to your house. It's simply cheaper and faster to do it this way.
When combined with asset minification (above), asset packing drastically speeds up a website's load time.
- Image packaging
This is similar to asset packing but is specific to images. Most websites with a lot of polish and attention to detail utilize images fairly heavily. Similar to asset packaging (above), this is a method of reducing the number of requests a browser must send to the server, which can greatly reduce load time.
To demonstrate, see this image, which contains most of the images used on this site. If each of those packaged images had to be downloaded individually, this site would load much more slowly.
- Content compacting
Similar to asset minification (above), this is an optional feature we can enable to further reduce page size and load time. When using this feature, unnecessary characters are removed from individual pages of the website. See the example below, containing a snippet of HTML and a functionally equivalent, compacted version.
Original HTML
<div>
<p>
This is some sample content
for demonstration
</p>
</div>Compacted HTML
<div><p>This is some sample content for demonstration</p></div> - Content compression
In addition to all the minification and compacting strategies we use, we also utilize standard data compression that web browsers understand. This compression can squeeze content further, making load time even faster.
Understanding how data compression works isn't important, but what may be important is knowing that it is non-desctructive. When decompressed by the browser, the content is exactly what it was before being compressed by the server.
- Image compression
Images can be compressed different from standard data compression, and we take care to find the right balance between image quality and file size, striving for an optimal user experience on both fronts. This technique shouldn't be worth mentioning, but we've seen plenty of providers that don't take the time to properly compress images, and the user experience suffers as a result.
Another thing we do that some providers don't bother with is to size images properly based on how they will appear in the website. Requiring users to download a high-resolution image when it's only going to be displayed at a couple inches in size is counterproductive and slows the site down quite a bit. You've probably seen this before even if you didn't know what was causing it. If you notice a small image taking a long time to download (and you can see it download one "line" at a time), it's likely that the image is far too big and is being scaled down by the browser in order to fit in that spot.