Just like cars, there are a variety of tests you can run to evaluate your site’s performance.  Although they may seem simple, they can provide a lot of useful information that may help you discover and fix problems with your website. Here are five crucial performance tests your website should pass. 1. Loading Speed Test High-speed internet connections and overall demand for faster connections make a fast loading speed a must.  If your website takes too long to load, visitors may abandon your site all together.  Don’t know your website’s loading time?  There are a variety of free web tools, such as pingdom.com, ...

Evaluating your website with a critical eye is one of the best things a small business owner can do. Your website is one of the most powerful assets you have so it’s important to make sure it’s working with you instead of against you. Take the time to look over your website, or better yet have an unbiased friend do so, and ask yourself these 10 questions. An honest answer will help evaluate your website and put you on the track to making it even better. 1. What do you see first? – The first impression is the most critical. Are you ...

As the digital age advances, it’s hard to believe that print media is still a worthwhile endeavor. Between PPC ads, corporate blogs and social media strategies, it may be easy to think that online marketing alone is sufficient to grow a business. As effective as online marketing campaigns can be, no business should dismiss print media as part of their overall marketing strategy. Print media is still an important piece of the marketing puzzle. Here is why: •Print is Portable – Even with laptops and smart phones, print media still retains the ultimate portability. It’s available everywhere and to everyone, ...

E-newsletters have long replaced traditional print newsletters. Cost, ease of use, tracking capabilities and convenience are just a few of the reasons why business owners have turned to e-newsletters. Although there are many pros to using e-newsletters to stay connected with your customers and followers, your e-newsletters still need to be worthy enough to read.   Use the tips below to create an effective e-newsletter.   Think of Your Readers This may seem like a no-brainer, but we sometimes get too involved in what we want to say that we forget about what our readers want to hear. Understanding your readers means that you know ...

Your website is an essential marketing tool. Your business depends largely on its success, especially if you are running an eCommerce website. Making sure your website is an effective marketing and sales tool is essential to increasing your bottom line.   If you’re just getting ready to launch your website or have had a website for some years now, it’s always a good idea to double check that you aren’t making obvious mistakes. Here are 9 common website mistakes that can be easily fixed.   1) Unprofessional Look and Feel For many, your website is the first impression of your business. An unprofessional website that you ...

Your website is a very important part of your marketing plan and as such, should be created and designed with users in mind. This will ensure a positive user experience and effectiveness in getting your message across. If you don’t yet have a website and are just starting to create your master plan or feel that you have an ineffective website, make sure you consider these tips for a more engaging and effective website. 1. Less is More With so many technologies and tools available, it’s possible to have your website filled with features that might cloud your message. While this may ...

Starbucks has made it possible for you to pay for your drinks directly from your iPhone or Blackberry. Would you consider transferring your Starbucks card information and only using your iPhone for payments?

With an estimated 5.2 billion mobile subscribers in 2011 and 1.7 billion mobile web users expected by 2013 (Infonetics Research), tapping the mobile platform is critical for businesses. While some technology innovations and gadgets are merely shortly lived fads, there are others that transcend time and effectively change the way we function and do business. Mobile technology has expertly turned smart phones into web surfing devices, sometimes surpassing or taking the place of traditional internet surfing on personal computers. As technology advances and connections become faster and more reliable, more and more users will take advantage of mobile web surfing. What does ...

Long gone are the days of static websites that simply provided information to visitors. Today’s savvy customers demand more from a website than simple contact information. Visitors are looking for positive interactions that provide them with exactly what they need, whether that’s an in-depth explanation, a demonstration or a question answered real-time. Creating positive interactions on your website depends largely on what you have to offer your visitors. If you’re looking for ways to increase the time visitors spend on your website, you need to provide them with various options of interacting with your website. Below are ...

The Direct Marketing Association is the leading global trade association of businesses and nonprofit organizations using and supporting multichannel direct marketing tools and techniques. They will be releasing their new website design that complete revitalizes their company. Their old homepage was extremely cluttered with links, a lot of flashing banners, and a moving ticker at the bottom. There is no clear direction in which the DMA wants their visitors to go. With so many options and links, it can be confusing for visitors to figure out where they will go and lead to a low click-through rate and high bounce rate. Their ...

According to the October 2010 U.S. Mobile Consumer Briefing, 59 percent of mobile consumers plan to use their mobile phone for holiday shopping and planning holiday celebrations, not including making phone calls. In 2009, the number was only 25 percent. The iniquitousness of smartphones means that more people will be using apps, mobile websites, geolocation services, and more to assist them this holiday season. If your business is not present in the mobile world, then you are missing out on a prime opportunity to target holiday shoppers. “Holiday shoppers are always in a time crunch, and in this economy, they’re in a budget ...

A lot of companies do not spend their time thinking about how to make their eCommerce websites search engine optimized. The website will contain navigational pages with little content and product pages with duplicate content. However making your eCommerce SEO friendly is an important step in increasing your awareness. You want to make sure that your website comes up first when people are searching for the products you have available on your eCommerce website. Follow these 4 steps to increase your search engine optimization and create keyword-targeted pages on your eCommerce website. Write Detailed Category Descriptions - Including a description for each of ...