Interactive Division

These days, most businesses understand how important it is to have a website. Basic Web Development can now be done quickly, easily, and affordably. But this is not the end of the job; it’s really just the beginning.

Your website must be relevant and useful to your audience or the time and effort you spent was wasted. Here are some website basics:

1. Good Design – Your website needs a good design. This means your customers will find the website pleasing, easy to get around, and have the tools they need to interact with you – such as easy to use forms, shopping carts and good navigation, for example. Good Web Development anticipates your customers’ needs and designs for them. 
2. Useful Content – Content is the meat and potatoes of your website. There should be enough of it to provide your customers with everything they’re looking for – so they don’t go elsewhere to find it. This content needs to be updated with fresh information and news regularly. What “regularly” means to your customers will depend on your business; it might mean daily or weekly. But it never means a few times a year.
3. Website Promotion – If no one can find your website, no matter how great the design or content, it will not help your business. The internet is a quickly changing tide of technology and trends. Whatever you did to promote your website last year, may not help it show up where your customers are looking today.

Great web development requires a lot of time and effort to constantly keep up with what customers want TODAY. If you’d like to keep your valuable time spent working with your customers, consider finding someone who specializes in making your website easy to find, easy to navigate and up to date. Contact us and we can help!

Do you know about Google Panda and how it effects your Web site. This is a interesting article I found in Search Engine Land that explains the Google Panda Update in a infographic.

The WSJ has some good articles on semantic Web search and it is something to think about when designing or making upgrades to your Web site.

If your design firm or agency does not not how to code the site they might do something like <font size="12"><b>This is the page head</b></font> but the correct way would be <h1>This is a heading</h1>. This is a very basic example and there is much more involved planning and thinking.

There is no tool that can check for semantic code it is a matter of looking at the code.  A good place to start is by asking your Web designer if he or she codes semantically. If they look at you blankly or start stalling, you can be sure they don’t. Contact us and we can help you evaluate your Web site.

There is already a lot of questions from my clients about the changes to their Facebook Page. They have a new thing called the cover graphic for promoting your business or pushing a promotion. Take a look at the current rules from Facebook regarding these images before formatting your space.

The following was taken directly from the Facebook Help Center:

How should I choose a cover photo for my Page?

Use a unique image that represents your Page. This might be a photo of a popular menu item, album artwork or a picture of people using your product. Be creative and experiment with images your audience responds well to.

Cover images must be at least 399 pixels wide and may not contain:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
• Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
• References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

All cover images are public, which means anyone visiting your Page will be able to see the image you choose. Covers must not be false, deceptive or misleading, and must not infringe on third parties’ intellectual property. You may not encourage or incentivize people to upload your cover image to their personal timelines.

So – as it stands right now – you can not use your cover image to promote your business in a blatant way, but you can show images of your location, your products, your people, etc. (Also to note – you cannot do that on your personal profile either — and as an added reminder, make sure you aren’t using your personal profile for business as that has been against Facebook’s terms of use for quite some time now – if you are – setup a Facebook Page instead).

Contact us and we can help you rethink your Facebook page.

It is the fastest selling consumer electronics device in history three million iPads were sold in the first 80 days of its availability – more than 37,000 per day. How is your business adapting to this new technology? Start with you Web presence and consider the following:

1.) How does your Web site look on a iPad, Tablet, iPhone or Android devise? Don’t have one contact us and we will send you some screen captures so you can see.

2.) Are you using Flash in your Web site? If so STOP or if you need your Flash take steps to make it mobile friendly, Adobe is discontinuing Flash for mobile devices.

3.) How does your navigation look and work? Can the user easily click on the navigation buttons? Do you have a lot of fly out menus?

Mobile devices are not going away and at the moment Google’s Android and Apple iOS are the most widely used mobile smart phone operating systems. Apply currently has the lead with mobile tablet devices with no slowing down. In fact, nearly 7 percent of all online purchases were made using iPads, just 18 months after the tablet computers were released by Apple Inc., said John Squire, chief strategy officer for IBM’s Smarter Commerce unit.