On February 12, many of the world’s greatest musicians will gather to be honored for their craft. Many of those musicians aren’t just good at music though; they (and their marketing teams) have built websites that offer great examples of how to do web marketing well. To honor their skills at another type of craft, we at HostGator have decided to provide our own awards to Grammy nominees based on the marketing savvy on display on their websites.
Without further ado, here are 2017’s winners of the Snappys.
Best Landing Page
A
good landing page is focused on trying to get visitors to do one specific thing. That means the action you want your visitors to take should be clear, the case for doing so briefly made, and the page designed to minimize distractions.
People who navigate to Lukas Graham’s website are hit with a page that is a perfect case study in all the best practices of a good landing page.
First, you know right away what action this page wants you to take: Sign up. Then, they sum up in just a few words what you get when you do so: exclusive updates and special offers. Other than those words and the sign up box, the only other thing on the page is the small link in the top right to enter the main website. The page checks all the boxes for a high-converting, well-designed landing page.
Most Intuitive Web Design
You want anybody landing on your website to be able to find whatever they’re looking for easily and quickly. Drake’s website has a simple, clean design that puts all the navigation options front and center (well, to the left) where any visitor can find them.
All the information you could need is right there in the left-hand menu. Our only complaint about Drake’s website: he falls prey to one of our
top ten homepage mistakes by including an autoplay video.
Most Unique Web Layout
Part of the appeal of a pop star like Rihanna is that she’s always bringing something new and fresh to the scene. In her website, as in her songs and style, Rihanna doesn’t bother with the conventional. She does something entirely different.
While she keeps the left-hand menu for intuitive navigation, the rest of Rihanna’s home page provides a unique visual layout that looks great and allows users to navigate the site via images. When you scroll over each image, you get a little more information to help you decide whether or not to click.
In spite of being different than the design choices commonly used on websites, Rihanna’s layout is easy for visitors to figure out and it looks good.
Best Website Visuals
Sturgill Simpson’s website has a distinct illustration style that immediately gives the website character and provides a visual theme that ties back to the artist’s album
A Sailor’s Guide to Earth.
The whole website keeps up the visual style, making it thematically resonant and attractive throughout.
Best Website Photography
While Simpson does a great job with illustrations, Beyoncé is the queen of great photography. Her website’s design centers on beautiful photos of Queen Bey herself, her costumes, her performances and any other great visual mementos she chooses to share with her followers.
When you photograph like Beyoncé does, why
not make that the centerpiece of your website?
For bonus points, her website also has a whole section,
#Beygood, devoted to highlighting the singer’s philanthropic efforts and actions fans can take to do good.
Best Website Animation
Some basic animation turns a colorful, alluring image into something you can hardly take your eyes off of, in spite of its simplicity. For a cool touch, the animation on Anderson Paak’s home page is even slightly interactive.
On top of the neat effect the animation has, the page manages to clearly communicate the main thing it wants every visitor to know: where to buy the artist’s music.
Best Mobile Site
With nearly
60% of all searches now happening on mobile devices, no website can afford not to have a mobile friendly version. Adele’s website works great on mobile. It’s visual, the CTA buttons are all big enough to see clearly and click comfortably on a mobile device, and you can scroll down to see your different options.
Adele’s marketing team clearly gets how important mobile is and how crucial it is to provide an intuitive, easy experience to visitors on a mobile device. Her mobile website gets it right; many brand websites could learn a thing or two from it.
Best Website
Just as the Grammys do, we’ve left the most important category for last. With so many websites to choose from, all of which show different strengths, this isn’t an easy category to choose a winner in, but decisions must be made. For 2017, our choice for Best Website from a Grammy contender goes to….
Winner: Sturgill Simpson
The illustrations on the website look great, they tie into the album’s theme, and the website checks a lot of important marketing boxes.
The main page has clear CTAs:
The navigation options are clear and intuitive:
Every page has a CTA to sign up for email updates at the bottom:
And it’s optimized for mobile:
All in all, it does enough right to merit our biggest award of the year.
To some degree, musicians have different marketing goals and best practices than a lot of other brands, but every business can learn from looking at good website examples and analyzing why they work. Consider if there’s anything you can borrow from this year’s "Snappys" winners to make your own website stronger.
In honor of our fifteenth birthday, we present to you a timeline of our favorite milestones in HostGator and Snappy's history.
Now four years old, Snappy learns how to tie his shoes and discovers his favorite candies are blue M&Ms. He also adopts his first dog!
Five-year-old Snappy graduates from kindergarten, where he quickly became the class pro at playing leap frog (the big alligator tail helps).
In honor of Snappy's birthday sale, we are giving away free Snappy stuffed animals for a limited time!
Note: This giveaway is closed! Thanks to everyone who participated! 
Today we're proud to announce the winners of the 
Logan Miller[/caption]
In this rapidly evolving world of tech and social media, small businesses find themselves out of place. No longer are traditional forms of advertising such as TV and radio ads effective. Even a well-designed, money-intensive website proves to be lackluster when it comes to attracting new customers, especially younger generations. In today’s economy, word is spread via social media. Whether that is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, the world sees trends through these outlets. Rather than focusing on promoting links on Google or ceaselessly renovating their webpages, small businesses should turn to private partnership networking apps.
The value of private partnerships can be seen in many places. For example, in Tucson, Arizona, several downtown businesses collaborated after the Great Recession to revitalize the downtown area. In promoting and networking with each other, businesses such as the Rialto Theatre and Club Congress brought in new customers and helped spur economic recovery in a hurting economy.
Now, the first step in promoting these private partnerships, wherein small, local businesses promote each other, is to display these partnerships and the services or goods these businesses offer in a clear and concise way. This can be done simply through an app! Imagine you’re traveling to a new city, and you want to find a local bookstore. You go into your phone, download said app, enter the locality you’re visiting and voila! A listing of local businesses in the region pops up. What’s even better is that the stores themselves offer up suggestions for other businesses customers might enjoy or need.
One possible downfall for this plan is the cost of developing the app. Many small businesses are already strapped for the cash and manpower needed for a project such as this. However, there is a rather simple and innovative solution. Who is spearheading new development in tech while writing the rules of social media? The youth.
In partnering with local schools, small businesses would be able to capitalize on the technological prowess of the youth. Many schools already have Career and Technical Education programs in place to provide students with real world job experience. Auto repair and biotechnology are taught in schools, and since the technological sector is one of the fastest growing, most profitable industries in the world it would make perfect sense to provide students hands-on, real world experience in that job market.
The development of this networking app will serve several purposes. It will provide local businesses for an easily-accessible display for their businesses, attracting customers through the conveniency of their phones. Secondly, it will provide local students hands-on, readily applicable job experience while possibly opening them up to internships or job opportunities with the businesses they are working with. Furthermore, the app’s creation will spur connectivity between local businesses, helping them to organize together to prevent large-scale, national chains from out-competing them. Finally, by partnering with local schools, local businesses will help spread their names throughout the community in which they reside. Word of mouth is still important today, especially in the age of social media. By integrating themselves with the students designing the app, their parents, and the teachers, the businesses will greatly expand their customer base.
It seems as though local small businesses are being replaced by standardized chain businesses at a rapid rate. Even worse, finding an organic search on a search engine for small businesses can be difficult or next to impossible. This is worrisome for those small business owners looking to expand their clientele. Small businesses are important to our economy and they need to be a priority when considering new methods of advertising, especially with the current US consumers’ reliance on technology.
Small businesses have shown to be important for driving economic growth. According to 
The holidays are one of those unique times of year where we spend a lot of our time shopping for ourselves and those close to us, but we also donate our time volunteering to causes we care about and people we may never meet.
At HostGator, things are no different. Our team has been up to some pretty impressive volunteering work lately, if we do say so ourselves. Check it out...
The November food drive was just the beginning. We had caught the volunteering bug!
Last week, HostGator staff teamed up with some of our fellow colleagues at Endurance International Group to volunteer at Operation Blue Santa. We spent an afternoon packing toys and food donations for Austin families in need.
Next up, we're collecting donations for Toys for Tots and Front Steps, an organization which provides clothing to homeless living under the I-35 bridge in Austin.
To learn more about these non-profits and how you can help, please visit one of the links below:
