In business, your reputation affects your sales.  According to Dimensional Research, 86 percent of consumers said buying decisions were influenced by negative online reviews. We all know that a satisfied customer tells 1 person and a dissatisfied customer tells 10, that’s powerful! Build trust and grow your business with current and prospective customers by protecting…

More and more people are relying on cell phones or other mobile devices for their everyday needs. Consumers are moving away from the traditional computer for their personal web browsing. A reported 77% of mobile searches are done in a location where a computer is readily available. Furthermore, by the end of 2015 there will…

  Small Business Saturday is a designated shopping day started by American Express, it helps to encourage shoppers to buy from local merchants in their community. Squeezed between Black Friday and Cyber Monday on November 30th, Small Business Saturday is on the biggest shopping weekend of the year in the U.S. The popularity of this…

There’s more to e-commerce than setting up a website and letting people purchase your products. A good setup includes plenty of options for e-commerce reporting. How many sales do you make in a given time? More importantly, who is buying? Conversion rates, demographics, payment options, purchase methods; all of this information is available to savvy…

Branding is a powerful service that businesses put into use to grow awareness of who they are and what they do. Advertising, marketing and sales are all part of branding, but there’s more to it than just direct advertisement. Branding is about having a recognizable logo and website design. Branding is about recognizing your audience; who…

If you’re a new business without a website, or if you have a website but want to upgrade, you need to invest in professional web development. There are many reasons to make this decision. First, no business owner has the time to invest in creating a website in-house. It requires a heavy investment in staff…

Content marketing is the heart of modern SEO and website optimization. It’s essential for any modern business to compete online. What is content marketing? Every piece of content that your site creates is a part of an ongoing content marketing plan. Each piece targets a specific subject, a specific keyword, with the goal of ranking…

  If you own a business and use the internet for marketing, you probably know that being on the first page, preferably the first few hits, of the search results is important if you want people to notice you. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of putting web sites at the top of search…

Every site selling something over the Internet needs to have an e-commerce system in place. Some sites attempt to make their own via comment submission forms and Paypal integration. This may work for a small-scale shop, but on a larger scale, such an e-commerce system will quickly be overrun with spam. It’s also not very…

Websites change over the years. Tiny tweaks are made to fix small bugs that only occur rarely. Minor performance hacks are thrown in to help stabilize a site for Black Friday. Content gets posted in different ways on the same site. All of these little tweaks add up to small hits in performance or optimization.…

Often, a lot of thought goes into the web design of a given site. Everything has to be considered. Where is the logo displayed, and what size is it? Does it link to an about page or the home page? Where is the navigation, and is it drop-down boxes or can everything fit in one…

Introducing new items into a marketplace is risky even if the initial results are successful. There must be people in the company who control the marketing research and finances. Even with this hard work, your products are not guaranteed to last after certain periods of time. After a time of failure, reintroduce your old ideas…

No business has a 100 percent conversion rate. There will always be a group of customers that, when they visit your site, decide they don’t want to buy what you’re selling. Some of them leave because it’s not the right time to buy. Others leave because nothing you sell appeals to them. Others simply visited…

In the world of online marketing, SEO — or Search Engine Optimization — is essential to success. SEO, at its most basic, is making tweaks to your website and your content in order to make it more visible to search engines. Specifically, you are taking steps to make your site look better to Google, by…

A content management systems (CMS) are software program to make it easy to publish, edit, and change content from a single platform. A CMS makes it easy for many users to collaborate in developing content. A CMS is often used by marketing businesses and corporations for websites and blogs, and one reason for the popularity…

Drupal is known as a content management system (CMS) and was written using the PHP scripting language. It represents the platform used to develop around a quarter of all government websites in the United States. It is not restricted to government use, however, and is one of the most popular web development software packages in…

WordPress is a web design platform that allows webmasters and laypeople alike to produce websites and blogs quickly. The platform can be installed to a domain along with a user interface that automates most of the creation process. It produces high quality web pages that use current Web 2.0 standards of usability and organization. It…

Joomla is a free, open-sourced, content management system that is designed to make creating and maintaining Web sites easy and inexpensive. Joomla provides the Web site owner with the power to alter text, photos, and other online content with minimal technological knowledge. Its ease of installation and use ensure that it remains one of the…