This is a week of exciting announcements here on our open adoption blog. On Tuesday, I told you about the launch of a new interview series aimed at showcasing hopeful adoptive parents from our “Find A Family” section. Today, I’m thrilled to announce yet another networking tool we’re offering that may be of interest to you: our adoption profile website service.
If you’re hoping to adopt and are looking for a great way to stand out and introduce yourself to prospective birthparents, I think you’ll find there’s a lot to like about our newest open adoption outreach service.
For one thing, it’s different than others. Most customized adoption profile services will design you a personal website and, well, stop there. What you may not know is that if you want prospective birthparents to actually see your website, there’s a lot more to the process than that.
What’s different about our adoption profile website service
First, you need to register a domain name or web address where prospective birthparents can find you (e.g. BillandSusanAdopt.com). Then you need to find a service to host your site so that prospective birthparents can get access to you online. After all, if they can’t find you, your website might just as well not exist in the first place.
Most website services will charge you an extra fee for registering a domain name and/or hosting your site. Getting a web address isn’t particularly difficult or expensive, although it is an extra step. Finding a service provider to host your site, however, is a little trickier and can set you back about $100, or more, a year.
With our service, everything is included — the design, the registration and the hosting. In other words, we take care of all the pesky technical stuff so you don’t have to. All you need to do is send us a copy of your parent profile letter and your photos and wait for your site to go live!
But that’s not the only thing that separates us from other web services. As you can see from this adoption parent website we recently created for Tracy and Micah from our “Find A Family” section, our websites have a different look and feel to them. You won’t fancy fonts, busy backgrounds or extraneous images. Instead, look for a clean and simple design that keeps the focus on what matters most: you and your photos.
Gives prospective birthparents a more complete portrait
Using the latest state-of-art technology, we’ll help you tell your story through 5-7 easy-to-navigate pages. In addition to creating large web-ready photos, we offer interactive slideshows that give prospective birthparents the ability to view larger versions of your photos instantly and easily with a click of the mouse. And there’s virtually no limit to the number of photos you can include on a page. After all, if you want to make a strong first impression, what better way to do it than through your photos.
Each photo is optimized. That means we’ll not only crop and color correct it, we’ll re-size it so that your page loads quickly and cleanly. Having an eye-catching website is great, but it isn’t enough. If your website takes a long time to appear on screen, prospective birthparents won’t wait around to view it. But that’s not the only reason why you want your website to load quickly. Having a fast-loading site is a proven way to help a website rise to the top of the rankings on search engines like Google and Bing.
To give prospective birthparents a more complete portrait of you, you also have the option of keeping a blog. It’s simple to use and another terrific way to give prospective birth families a window into your life. If you already have a blog, we’ll integrate it into your site.
Not interested in a blog? That’s okay, too. If you’ve got a Facebook or Twitter account, we’ll add a link to them so that you can keep prospective birthparents engaged and informed directly through your updates.
Takes your adoption search to the next level
Because our websites use the latest state-of-the-art technology, you’ll also have a better chance to maximize your presence on the web through search engine optimization. More about that in future posts. For the time,just know as part of our service we’ll optimize your site for search engines. And if you’re interested, we’ll even set you up with an analytics account so that you can keep track of the number of hits and visits your site receives and from what cities or states.
Our website service is designed to take your adoption search to the next level. But don’t take my word for it. Do a comparison with other adoption website services. See how our features stack up against theirs. Compare what they offer and what they don’t offer, and how much extra it costs. And check out the overall look of their sites, the navigational tools, the quantity and quality of their photos, and how quickly they load.
There’s lots more to tell you about, but this should give you an idea about what our new adoption profile website service has to offer. We hope you’ll check it out. We’re fired up about it, and we think that once you have a chance to view all the neat stuff it contains, you will be, too. If you’re interested in signing up for our service and increasing your chances of finding a match with prospective birthparents or just want to know more about it, feel free to email me any time.