PROJECT DETAILS
LWCS wanted to enhance their online presence by improving the design of their website and creating a place where school news and information could be easily distributed. We redesigned the site with this in mind and used the homepage as an aggregate for their various information sharing needs.

TECHNOLOGY USED
- WordPress
- HTML/CSS
- PHP
- Jquery

VISIT WEBSITE

PROJECT DETAILS
BTI wanted to dispel the notion that accountants were boring and impersonal, but also maintain their their professionalism. We decided to use crisp, inviting photography accented by charcoal and gold hues to create just the aesthetic they were looking for.

TECHNOLOGY USED
- WordPress
- HTML/CSS
- PHP
- Jquery

VISIT WEBSITE

There are a slew of things you can do to improve your search engine rankings. Here are a few easy, important tweaks that are essential and do a lot for the amount of effort required.

1. The page titles of your website
This is the part of your site that is shown at the top of the browser window. It is usually the name of the site or the page you’re currently viewing. Change this to contain your business name and your main key words.

2. Content
Content is king! Remember, people are searching for information when they use Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. If your site contains information that is relevant to the searched topic, then you’ll do well. Make sure to use keywords in your content that people may be searching for, but don’t overuse them. Just be aware of them as you write.

3. Incoming Links
Ask others who have websites to add a link to your website. A bonus would be for that link to contain keywords you’re targeting.

4. Keep It Fresh
Search engines like fresh content. Update your site regularly with new articles and/or other information.

I often get asked to describe what makes a website “good.” While this term is commonly used, it is quite vague and lacks true meaning. When discussing what makes a certain thing – such as a website – good, perhaps we should substitute the word “effective.”

As many of my friends know, I’m a simple man and like to be lo-tech where possible. I think it’s good to take some of the tech-mystery out of web design. So here’s a simple question: What makes a knife effective? And now a simple answer, it cuts! Now, there are many other factors that go into what makes one knife better – or preferred – to another. Does it cut easily? Does it have a good handle so you don’t cut what’s not supposed to be cut? Is this the best type of knife for what I want to cut? These concepts can be applied directly to websites.

Your website’s grand purpose in life is to tell the story of your organization and encourage some sort of action from the its visitors. How well it does this truly determines how good, or rather, effective it is.

Effective websites are designed for a specific audience. It is vastly important to know who your website’s audience is or who you’d like it to be. This one piece of information will influence every piece of the site. A professional web design company will want to know this before engaging any other part of your web design process.

Effective websites have high quality visual design. Good design generally leads to pleasant aesthetics and a better user experience. Visual design basically takes a website – a huge piece of technology – and makes it something that humans want, and possibly even like to use. This is a mammoth subject and warrants a follow-up so check out “What the Heck Is Good Visual Design?”

Effective websites utilize excellent information architecture. This is the practice of determining for users what information is most important and then guiding them to other areas that contain supporting information or detail reading. This keeps your website from having huge blocks of text that end up making it feel like a book. It also helps to keep visitors engaged because it is LESS BORING and is more communicative than throwing all sorts of content up and hoping readers enjoy hundreds of lines of 10pt digital copy.

Effective websites have a conversion goal. Conversion is simply what you’d like someone to ultimately do after visiting your site. For some organizations this is a phone call, for others it is joining their Facebook page. Deciding this will help focus the design process of your website so that your conversion goal is reached as effectively as possible.

If you’d like to discuss these or other issues regarding your website, please feel free to contact us. We’d be happy to talk it through with you!

All the best!

Joe Bennett
Sites That Pop

I started out in digital advertising during my time in NYC five years ago. At that time Facebook wasn’t used by any of the major advertisers we worked with and it wasn’t even a sparkle in the advertising eye for small businesses. Now, 50% of all Americans have a Facebook account. With that kind of penetration you get traffic and where’s there’s traffic, there’s advertisers.

Usually digital advertising can be too expensive and ineffective for small businesses because they’re paying for national exposure while desiring to focus on a local market. True, online advertising is one of the cheapest ways to promote nationally, but who cares about that when you just want to get the word out to the community you do business in. For this reason there’s been a big barrier to entry for many startups and small/medium size businesses to advertising online…until now! You can get started advertising on Facebook here.

The beautiful thing about Facebook is that it is a great venue for small businesses to get into digital advertising because it is affordable, easy to use, and is highly targetable – most notably – geographically.

Here are some quick tips for getting the most out of a Facebook ad.

Use a headline that communicates a benefit. Your headline must quickly and simply communicate the value you are offering to potential customers. Don’t make the mistake of putting your business name as the headline.

If branding, use your logo as the image and if advertising, use an image that communicates a benefit. A decision needs to be made between branding and advertising. Branding is concerned with increasing the awareness of your company, its logo, mission, etc. Advertising is focused on communicating a specific benefit, service, feeling, etc. Make sure you determine which one your ad is for and then choose the image appropriately (see examples below). And definitely make sure to size your image to the correct pixel dimensions! They are 110 pixels wide by 80 pixels tall.

Use the detail text to further explain the headline and give a call to action. Digital ads work best when a “call to action” is used. This can simply be something like, “click here to get started” or “act now.”

Make good use of Facebook’s targeting. One of the most important things in advertising is targeting! As you target your ads you’ll see Facebook calculate the number of people in that audience on the right side of the page. The smaller this number is, the more efficiently your money will be used.

Pay by click, not by impressions. I’ve seen the best results using the “pay by click” choice. If you notice that you happen to be getting a ton of clicks then try switching it up…so far I’ve been much better off by not using the “pay by impressions” option.

For your reference, here are two of our ads. You’ll notice one is for branding and one is for our web design service.

I seem to have inherited a rogue social media gene. For the most part, the social media phenomenon (of awesomeness) eludes my parents and pretty much everyone else in my bloodline, who believe that Facebook is only for people who say things like OMG, LOL, and FTW.

For me however, there are a huge number of reasons that a person would utilize Facebook on a daily basis – wall posts being just one part of the Facebook experience.

We at Sites That Pop wanted to know why the people in our social network utilize Facebook and other social networks, so we did a Facebook poll (of which there are a number of formats available!). The top five responses to this question were:

1. To keep up with friends and family. Facebook has almost entirely replaced email correspondence, sending picture attachments and updates to friends and family for Facebookers.

2. To participate in Facebook groups, forums, etc. One may participate in discussions with people in various groups dedicated to specific topics – i.e. parenting, healthy living, sports, art, music, what have you. There is a Facebook group or page for just about any and every topic or interest you can imagine. (And if there is not a page or group for something you are passionate about, you can quickly and easily create one!)

3. As a resource to find out about events, deals, etc. Various retail stores, businesses, blogs, etc. have member/fan-only events, coupons, etc. which are made available only to Facebook followers who “like” their official Facebook page.

4. To participate in online social gaming. Farmville, Texas HoldEm Poker, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, CafeWorld, Bejeweled Blitz, Pet Society, SIMS, and Words With Friends are currently some of the most popular Facebook games being played.

5. As a social calendar. Facebook events can now be imported into almost any virtual calendar

In addition to these five, there is so much more that Facebook can do!

Hopefully, these five reasons help to explain why and how the general populace utilizes Facebook. I will be highlighting more specifically how Facebook can boost business revenue and different ways that businesses are using Facebook in my next blog post.

Stay tuned!

Elizabeth Repass Hollida
Sites That Pop
Social Media/Digital Marketing

Flash mobs are a recent social media phenomenon which are becoming more popular and have begun to take root (for both good and bad) over the last few months and years. A flash mob is essentially a group of people who assemble in a public place seemingly suddenly in order to carry out a specific task.

Thanks social media networks like Twitter and Facebook in combination with the accessibility of the internet via Smartphone technology, large numbers of people are able to communicate with one another instantaneously, enabling the coordination of a mass event to take place almost seamlessly.

The lighter side of flash mobs includes group art projects/experiments (i.e. – The “flash mob” of pregnant women [& one man] who gathered at the amusement park, King’s Island in an apparently random [to onlookers] choreographed dance in order to raise awareness and funds for the March of Dimes).

The recent Arab Spring in the Middle East has been attributed to so-called flash mobs as well as the recent London riots.

If you’d like to discuss this or other questions about social media, please go to our facebook page and post a comment.

Liz Hollida
Sites That Pop