The top website and online marketing links of the week. Are you a stickler for great imagery on your website to show off your products or services to the max? Or is it just one of those things that doesn’t get a lot of attention – you either have little imagery or use photos you took on your phone? Whichever camp you’re in, the quality of your site images says a lot about your business. Learn why having great images is so important to giving a professional impression to your customers and how high-quality photos improve your credibility. To follow… Continue Reading
The “Minding Your Business” Blog
Weekly Links Roundup – Top CRMs, Polling Plugins, Nonprofit Content Strategy, Local SEO
The top website and online marketing links of the week. Do you currently use CRM (customer relationship management) software for your small business that you like? Tell us about it in the comments below! But if you don’t, and you’re looking for one, here’s a review of 9 top CRM software tools for businesses. CRMs help you track notes, leads, contact info and much more for each of your customers. I use Freshworks for my helpdesk so am looking into Freshsales by the same company. Would you like to collect visitor feedback or run surveys on your site? Of course… Continue Reading
New WordPress Performance Project
My long-time WP Minder client BedTimes Magazine came to me with a quandary – their newly-redesigned website was very slowly. Could I help? Of course I could. Looking for the low-hanging fruit, I made some performance tweaks designed to get the best load time reduction with the least input per my client’s request. While there were many third-party scripts in play on the site, which we couldn’t do anything about, there were definitely areas I could improve fairly easily. We wound up with a load time reduction of about 58% – it’s not the fastest site, but the goal of… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Banner Ads, Blogging Ideas, VPN, Favicons
The top website and online marketing links of the week. Don’t know if you noticed, but if you logged in to your WordPress site in the last day or two and are using Yoast SEO, you would have seen a great big irritating animated banner advertising Yoast’s black Friday sale. There were so many complaints and so much pushback, they actually apologized and released a new version of Yoast SEO minus the ad. (WP Minder users, you’ll get this update on Monday!). Please think about the impact banners and popups have on your users, this one is a good example… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress History, Domain Names, Tracking Clicks, Product Photos
The top website and online marketing links of the week. I know it’s been a long time (about 6 weeks!) since the last post. Today’s post I hope brings an end to that unplanned break. It’s been a crazy summer that included a death in the family, a broken elbow and hand, a sad lack of paddle boarding, and a badly-needed vacation. But now that things have settled down, I plan to get back to weekly blogging (or thereabouts). Just for fun – here is the history of WordPress in 4 minutes. If you’re a long-time WordPress user, you’ll get… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Email Marketing Images, Heatmaps, Map Plugins, PDF Plugins
The top website and online marketing links of the week. Ever really think about using images in your email newsletter? And what kind of an impact those images might have? If not, take a look at this post about images in email marketing, you might learn a thing or two about selecting and using them more effectively. Here’s a nifty new addon tool from Google Analytics – read this guide to using the Page Analytics Chrome plugin to see heatmaps of any website. A heat map can show you where users linger on your website – where they tend to… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Website Maintenance, WordPress Admins, Email Marketing, Why WordPress?
The top website and online marketing links of the week. When you own a WordPress website, are you aware that updates and maintenance are all on you? If you don’t do it, you’re increasing the risk to your site from hacking, malware, and loss of functionality due to old plugins, themes, or server software. Websites under your control require attention – they’re not set-it-and-forget-it, no matter what you may have been told. Maintenance has to be done either by you/your staff or another provider. It’s just a part of having a business website – like doing routine maintenance is part… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Content First, Free Plugins, FAQ Plugins, Gallery Comparison
The top website and online marketing links of the week. One thing that often surprises my design clients is the immediately request for their content when their website project starts. Often, especially for a first website, they have no clue what content they’re going to have. This makes my job as a designer much, much harder. Having all the different types of content that will be on the site up front (at least the types, if not the actual content) is absolutely necessary, as the content drives the design. A site that is all about news articles on the home… Continue Reading