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
Plugins
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 – 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
Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress Resources for Beginners
The top website and online marketing links of the week. Are you brand new to WordPress? Or considering moving to WordPress but not sure if you’ll be able to get the hang of using it? Don’t worry! Today’s post is all about resources for WordPress newbies. First is the user manual – WordPress doesn’t come with one, but there’s a great alternative in Easy WP Guide. It’s free, it gets updated frequently (unlike a real book) and is easy to read and use. Just don’t print it – it’s big and it updates too often to make that worth your… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Lazy Loading, Tracking Downloads, Page Speed, Email Marketing for Bloggers
The top website and online marketing links of the week. Here’s an easy performance win – implement lazy loading on your site. Lazy loading means not loading images that are off-screen; they eventually load when the user scrolls down to them. Learn more about lazy loading and here’s the plugin I like for this task in WordPress sites. If you offer white papers or other kinds of downloads on your site, did you know that you can use Google Analytics, which you’re most likely already using, to track downloads? Though GA doesn’t natively track this kind of interaction, you can… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Store Locator Plugins, Plugin Roundup, Social Media, Screenshots Tool
The top website and online marketing links of the week. If you have multiple brick-and-mortar locations, a really useful feature you can add to your WordPress site is a store locator – a map showing pins for each of your locations. Clicking on a pin opens up address and other info about that location. Here’s a small roundup of 5 top store locator plugins. I’ve used Store Locator on a few sites, pretty easy to use, but these other plugins also look promising. And speaking of WordPress plugins, here’s a big review of the single best plugin across many categories…. Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress Login Pages, Social Media Icons, Starting a Blog, Instagram Marketing
The top website and online marketing links of the week. Done with that boring default WordPress login page? I make a custom one for client projects, and you too can improve both the appearance and security of your site’s login page. Check out this roundup of 16 WordPress login page plugins. Do you use social media? And do you help your website users find you on social media by putting social icons on your site to link to your social media pages? If you don’t, you should do it. But where should they go? In the header? The footer? The… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Better Signup Forms, SEO Plugins, 2019 Holidays, Logo Trends
The top website and online marketing links of the week. First post of 2019! Let’s begin with something that affects most business websites – signup forms. Read about 12 tips for creating better signup forms for your site, including: How many fields to include; Whether to offer some kind of incentive for signing up; How to prevent spam without using a traditional, hard-to-read Captcha. Next… As a new-ish user of the Genesis Framework, I was interested to see this smackdown between Genesis SEO and Yoast SEO, two of the top SEO solutions for WordPress. I must admit I’m a Yoast… Continue Reading