Find more customers and generate more revenue with your website.
Thanks to everyone that attended our first LinkedIn for Business class last Wednesday. We had a great time and learned how to get our LinkedIn profiles completed and “customer facing”. We are planning to meet for two more sessions after the first of the year to learn more about building our LinkedIn network.
More information on dates and times coming soon.
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If you needed just one more reason to get your web site updated to a responsive design, now you have one. Google is changing their search ranking algorithm to give priority to those sites that are mobile-friendly. You can read a great article about that at WP Tavern.
![By Flickr.com user "tanakawho" [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACleaning_brushes.jpg)
As you break out of your winter routine and begin to make household and yard cleaning lists, it’s a good time to take a look at your website and decide what needs cleaning there as well. We always clean our houses best when we are expecting guests. You are expecting guests to visit your website, right? Use the checklist below to help you think about what you can be doing better with your company or organization’s website.
No aspect of your website is as important as the content that you display there. After all, your site visitors come to your website to learn something about you, your organization, or the particular subject matter they are looking for. You want them to find value when they come to your site and not the same information they saw there two or three years ago. Content is important for your sites search ranking as well. Gone are the days of stacking your site with keywords. Google’s new search algorithms actually penalize sites for doing that now. Your visitors want great content and so does Google. That should be enough reason to get cleaning.
Last year the number of mobile internet users surpassed desktop users (Tech Crunch Article) and the numbers continue to get further apart. There is a very good chance your website visitors are viewing your site on their mobile device. Have you taken a look at your site on an iPhone / iPad or Android phone / tablet? Is your text legible? Pictures cut off? If your site is not showing up well on mobile devices, you need to find out how to make your website responsive.
You should think of your website as you organization’s basecamp on the internet. That is where you share your best content and have your “call to action” clearly visible (Your call to action is what you want your visitor to act on while visiting your site – join email list, request your free material, fill out a contact form to ask for a quote, etc.). Your social connections (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) are your outposts. As you engage with users on your preferred social platforms, the goal should always be to get them to return to basecamp with you. It’s a good time to determine if you need to spend more time on one social platform than another. Can you determine where you are being most effective? Set some goals for what you want to accomplish there.
Are you using Google Analytics to track your website traffic? Did you know that an analytics package can tell you how many users visited your site during a specific period, whether they are new or returning users, what browser they used, whether they used a desktop or mobile device, did they arrive via search term or a link, and how long did they spend on the site. All of this information is important when you want to determine how to make your site better.
You should be changing the look of your website every couple of years or so. Design trends change and in order to remain visually appealing, your site should change as well.
We will plan to expand on some of these points in subsequent posts, but these should get you thinking for now. As always, if you have questions or would like help, please let us know on the Contact Us page.
This is a bit of a departure from web design, but I feel it could be helpful for some of our customers. I’ve had my Macbook Pro for over five years now, and to say it’s performance has been getting a little slow would be an understatement. Slow boot times and waiting seemingly forever for basic programs to start was slowing my business productivity and becoming increasingly frustrating. When I shared with a family member that I was in the process of searching for my next Mac, he told me that he had recently upgraded his hard drive to a SSD and doubled his memory, and that his old MacBook Pro was like a whole different computer. I followed his advice and gained such an extraordinary improvement myself that I felt I needed to share it. My goal in writing this article is not to give a complete “how-to” tutorial, but to let you know the possibilities for getting a little more life from your Macbook.
There are several web sites that will help you determine the correct memory and hard drive to purchase for your particular Mac. I used Crucial.com for my memory purchase and Macsales.com (Other World Computing) for the SSD hard drive. Crucial just happened to be having a good sale that saved me $20 on my purchase or I would have used OWC for both. You will need to know the model of your Mac or Macbook in order to use their hardware selection wizard. Clicking the Apple icon at the top left hand corner of your screen and selecting About this Mac will give you the model info. Mine is a MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009) for instance.
The keys to this upgrade are maximizing the memory and purchasing the largest SSD hard drive you can justify. The maximum memory my machine will take is 8GB of RAM so that is what I purchased (double what came with my machine). SSD drives, in case you aren’t familiar, use the same type of flash memory that your thumb drive uses. Therefore, there are no moving parts and access times are FAST. These drives have come down in price recently so now you can get a decent sized drive for not too much cash. The sweet spot for me was 120GB. I keep most of my larger files on an external drive and stream most of my music, so space isn’t that big of a problem for me. I’m interested in getting the most performance for the fewest dollars.
The installation is simple to do and there are videos online that step you through everything. I recommend doing a clean install of the operating system using a USB drive with the OSX software installer. It is important to get your data backed up so that you can transfer all of your files to your new hard drive following installation. Most of your programs will be easily downloaded from the Apple Store or other online resource.
My old, 2009 model Macbook Pro now boots in about 30 seconds as opposed to minutes and opens programs almost instantaneously. For less than $200 in parts, I know I have added another couple of years to the useful life of my daily work computer.
I would be happy to help you with more specific directions if you would like. Just use the Contact form to connect and get more information.
This seemed to be a common question for many following the New Bern Now Social Media Summit last September, and, in my opinion, the answer is a definite “Yes.” That answer usually brings the next questions which are “Do I have to be on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.” and then “who has time for all that???”. No, I don’t think you need to be on every network. I feel that you should investigate each of the more popular social media networks and determine one or two that works for you. As for time, I recommend that new social media users schedule time to interact online whether it be daily, weekly, or whatever you decide. This will help you be consistent with interactions, but also help you avoid the inevitable time suck that can come from getting lost in your community’s conversations.
Your business or non-profit usually revolves around a particular product or community that will more than likely be better associated with one or two of the bigger social networks. Searching for conversations that include your product or non-profit area can help you narrow down a network as well. Google+ and LinkedIn even have individual communities within the network for common groups like “IT Professionals” or “Cavalier King Charles Spaniels” for example.
When you select a social media network to become involved in, it’s good to remember that you are still communicating with people. Those are real fingers attached to a real person typing at that keyboard or phone keypad on the other end of your conversation. This is a real community and you should be interacting genuinely with others as you would do in person. Just as you wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) enter a room of strangers and shout that you have the best widgets in town and that you are selling them for $XX.00, you shouldn’t do that online either.
I believe the most important rule for social media interaction is this – be HELPFUL in your community. I like the formula that Chris Brogan of OwnerMag.com shared in a recent email – “Be helpful + meet helpful people + connect really helpful people = potential for future amazingness.” I think that is a good strategy for online and off, and it reminds us to put other’s needs before our own.