When it comes to running a website speed is absolutely everything. If your website does not load fast enough then you will find that your website visitors will leave in droves. In addition to this you will find that it is VERY difficult to get ranked highly in the search engines. Have no fear though. If you work with a decent Phoenix Web Development company then it is simple to boost the speed of your website. On this page I want to share with you five tips that you can use to boost the speed of your page. If you do not know how to implement any of these into your site then by all means ask a Phoenix Web Design Company. They should be able to help you out!
1. One of the main reasons as to why websites load slowly is because there is far too much media on a page. There are plenty of website owners who think that in order to have a decent website they need to pack it to the brim with videos, sound clips (awful idea by the way) and photos. You really don’t. In fact, in the world of web design, especially in this day and age ‘less is more’! It is therefore suggested that you cut back to only what is necessary. Do not include anything that is not contributing to the overall feel of the website.
2. There are plenty of websites out there which have poor coding behind the site. What you need to remember is that before a web site is displayed every piece of code needs to be loaded by the web browser or web server. Every line of code that is loaded will add a significant amount of time onto the load speed of the website. I suggest that if your site is loading slowly then you get in touch with an experienced web developer in Phoenix. They will be able to go through your code line by line and cut it back.
3. There are many websites out there which load slowly but for an indeterminate reason. Most of the time this is down to the web server that they are located on. If your site is loading slowly and you are on a very cheap hosting plan then it may be worth talking to a web designer to help you get moved to a new host. A lot of the time this can add a lot of speed to your site without adding too much in terms of running costs.
4. There are some file formats that are not suitable for the web. For example, if the images on your website are in .bmp format then they can easily run to a good couple of megabytes in size. This could take up to a minute to download. If you convert them to .jpg format or even .gif then you could cut them back to a few KB in size without losing too much quality (it will be unnoticeable on screens). This will take seconds to load instead. If you do not know how to change the file type of images then I suggest that you talk to a professional.
5. Look into trying to get your website cached in the browser of your website user. This will ensure that your website loads quickly in each subsequent visit. This may be something that is very difficult to incorporate into your website if you are not familiar with coding. However, this is one of the best ways to boost load speed.
|
1/30/2014 | Continue Reading...
Customer service on social media is a tricky business. You must think carefully about how you respond to messages, regardless of their content. Each organization will have its own idea of how to answer the questions of current and prospective customers.
Many people will simply have a question about your products or services. Others will mention your organization in passing during conversations with friends or family members. If you notice a message that contains an inquiry, you can offer to reach out and help. People will love this proactive approach – and it will provide a boost to your online reputation. Some organizations reply to all messages, while others don’t. What happens regularly is that organizations don’t react to Facebook status updates or Tweets that mention their names but not their Twitter handle.
How to Recognize Customer Feedback
If users choose to compliment your organization, it’s recommended that you thank them publicly or click “Favorite” on their message. If users instead choose to mock or insult your organization, don’t incite an argument by posting a reply. Ignore these messages and, if necessary, address them offline. People are free to divulge their opinion or critique your products or services, but don’t let the situation escalate further.
Businesses can understand and influence the conversation as never before, while listening to what their consumers are saying. Social media has affected the role of the public relations professional remarkably. The job has become more demanding as these front-line practitioners must think quickly on their feet.
How to Monitor Social-Media Conversations
Given the arrival of Facebook, Twitter and other up-to-the-minute social-media sites, businesses must respond quickly when a crisis occurs. It’s an intelligent tactic to monitor conversations focused on your industry competitors. In this action, you’ll learn what their strengths and weakness are – which gives you the opportunity to capitalize on their shortcomings. You can use all your newfound information to improve the experience of your own customers. Small business owners have the ability to communicate in an instant and establish a rapport with customers.
Keep tabs on the online mentions of your business and its products and services.
Social-media channels are available at all times. Most small businesses focus on peak usage times – but customers are accessing these networks at their convenience. It may be hard to devote time to this habit, but many small business owners are managing just fine. According to a recent MarketMeSuite infographic, 26 percent of small businesses devote an hour or more to these social-media channels each day. Although some of these small businesses are Web-only entities, these numbers indicate the importance of taking stock of your online reputation.
How to Turn Readers into Customers
One last note: You should not try to fabricate your positive reviews. The best strategy is to create articles, blogs, infographics, videos and other forms of content that will accentuate the best aspects of your business and assist your audience in some way. Google is getting smarter about understanding web content, and will display videos and images right alongside text content. Social-media fans and followers like to think of themselves as creative, so giving them the opportunity to share their artistic flair could result in a considerable amount of traffic. The more traffic that visits your site, the more sales that you’re likely to experience. You should also strive to interact with potential business partners and industry leaders who could prove to be major benefits for your business.
Small business owners are leaving sales on the table when they fail to their online presence. Don’t get left behind.
About the Author:
Blake Jonathan Boldt is a content strategist for Reputation Advocate. He provides writing, editing, social media and content strategy services for both domestic and international clients. His articles have been featured in numerous magazines, newspapers and digital media outlets.
|
1/22/2014 | Continue Reading...
Yes, you heard it right! You can also create your own custom web-browser for your computer and browse within it. There may be a question rise in your mind that how we can make a browser without knowing any coding, but don’t worry because there is a free online tool which let you make your own browser with some customized features without any coding to do. If you want to make yours and want to know how then you’ve to read this post because here we’re going to teach you briefly how to make your own browser for PC.
Customizations you can apply:
In the browser you are going to make, you can apply the following customizations, i.e
1. Your own logo
2. Custom Name
3. Custom bookmarks and homepage
4. Custom features – given below etc.
How to Make Your Own Browser Online:
Now here we’re going to teach you how you can make your own web-browser for your computer, having your own logo icon, bookmarks etc. Actually we’ll be make use of MakeMyBrowser which let you do it. The process of making a browser with this is very easy and straight forward, all you need to do is to follow the below instructions and do the steps carefully.
Step-1: First of all you need to do is go to MakeMyBrowser’s WEBSITE [www.makemybrowser.com] and then click on “Start Now” button.
Step-2: In the new page, you will need to give a name to your browser and set your own (or pre-made) icon to the new browser, So enter the name in the first box, and click on ‘Select or upload’ button, a new box appear where you have to select an icon or click on upload button if you want to upload your own.
Step-3: Now next step is to add your bookmarks, so click on select bookmarks button at the lower-right corner. After you click on this button, it asks you that do you want to import your bookmarks from google chrome browser ? Now it is upto you, click import if you want or click “Continue/Skip” button if you don’t want.
Step-4: Here you can add your own bookmarks to the browser, Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo and Amazon are already added if you want to add your own then you’ve to click on ‘Add A New Bookmark’ so you’ll be given two boxes first is to add the link and second is name. Also click on ‘Select Homepage’ if you want to select a homepage of your own choice. After setting that click on add features.
Step-5: Now here are some features you can add to your new browser you’re going to make i.e popup blocking, Unblock blocked sites, Translator, screen captures with annotations, etc. So select one by one in the list which you want to add to your newly browser and then click on Select Theme button.
Step-6: Now you’ll be given 8 themes from which you can select a theme you want. As you select a theme, your browser is ready to download, now click on finish and download button so an automatic download starts and you can see the new browser you created in your downloads folder. Now you can install this on your computer and enjoy your own customized browser.
Read: How To Make Free Online Phone Calls
So friends, above we shared a web-based application which can be used in order to make your own web-browser for your computer, I hope you liked this post.
About the Author:
Basheer Ahmad loves to surf online share useful tools regarding internet/tech etc, through his blog. He recommends to Convert/Download Youtube Videos Using Free Online Tools without any software.
|
1/20/2014 | Continue Reading...
Fewer and fewer of us are using our home phones, personally I don’t even own one and there are those who have had the copper wiring that used to provide their landline phone connection removed. Why? There are many reasons, some simply didn’t replace damaged wiring and had it removed for safety, feeling of course that damaged wiring that wouldn’t be used was something they were simply better off without. Some even had it removed to sell a few years ago when the resale value of scrap metal like copper rose considerably. However; they might come to regret it.
There are two reasons I am happy with the copper wiring remaining in my home, the first is that it provides an emergency internet connection. Using pay-as-you-go dialup internet services you can accomplish a connection at any time, day or night, for low cost and reliability. This is perfect if you have a wireless broadband connection which suffers unexplained and unpredictable signal drop frequently, reducing your internet service to nothing.
Instead of sitting there, restarting your modem, running diagnostics on your connection and wondering how many tries it will take to guess your neighbours password you can just plug in a cable, log in and pay for it with your phone bill at the end of the month. Simple. Don’t want to use it for longer than you have to? If you have a smartphone, tablet or wi-fi enabled mp4 player with app support you can download a radio streaming app and open it. Of course it won’t be able to stream the radio until it manages to accomplish a wi-fi connection, so when it starts playing music your internet is back on and you can switch back to broadband without wasting time waiting for it and not getting things done.
The second reason I like knowing I still have that connection available is because copper wire is actually very good at doing broadband. G.fast is a broadband option that uses copper telephone wire to achieve download speeds of up to 1GBps; it is reliable, and because the copper wire is already there and ready to go it’s cheap too. The standardisation of G.fast stated in 2011, it is expected that by April 2014 it will be a standard and easily attainable form of connectivity, which could mean faster, cheaper and more reliable internet packages for anyone who struggles with wireless broadband.
The fastest LTE-Advanced networks currently being tested use 40MHz of spectrum, but the G.fast would use 106MHz; which does give you a pretty good indication of the speeds you might expect from this new form of broadband. The only problems so far are that the G.fast won’t work over long distances; which makes it an unlikely solution for rural areas unless there is big demand for it; enough to warrant installing an exchange in the area. The second problem is that, as you would expect of a service that uses the landline copper connections; it will be affected by crosstalk interference. This isn’t to the extent of dialup – you will be able to use the phone and internet at the same time as there is vectoring to counter it, however there may need to be some physical modifications made to your wiring to ensure this works correctly. As not many people use their landlines any more however this is unlikely to cause much of an issue at all.
About the Author:
Kate Critchlow is a young writer with a quickly developing passion for technology, in particular software design.
|
12/18/2013 | Continue Reading...
Pinterest has quickly emerged as one of the web’s most valuable content-marketing tools. Its visual nature and layout makes it easy for people to discover and share new content.
From the perspective of businesses, Pinterest presents itself as a showroom for displaying products and advertising space for content marketing campaigns. This content-oriented platform serves as an avenue for companies to generate brand awareness and to cultivatean online community.
Third-Party Endorsements
Pinterest gives brands a unique opportunity to encourage third-party endorsement through the “pin” and “repin” buttons. Just as you would hear one of your friends discussing a new product and become interested, seeing that another user pinned an item evokes an equivocal level of interest.
If a piece of content is repined multiple times, its exposure multiplies exponentially. With the value of pins and repins established, the challenge for marketers becomes creating content worth sharing.
Pinterest Content
Pinterest’s platform offers companies a medium for communicating their brand’s personality while also sharing products. You can think of each Pinboard as a facet of your brand identity. This means it is in your best interest to create boards to represent your brand’s products, style and voice.
Make sure your images are high quality photos with aesthetically appealing overlaid text or a comment explaining why the pin is important to a pinner. Check out Havahart’s Pinterest page for great examples of what your Pinterest board should look like.
NBA
One example of an organization that has managed to bring the diverse facets of its brand to Pinterest is the National Basketball Association. The NBA’s Pinterest features pins for everything and anything NBA, including product, a board for NBA championship images and a board for famous NBA quotes. Also, there is a board for NBA’s “NBA Cares” program, which is the organization’s initiative for social responsibility.
When you view this Pinterest page you instantly know what the NBA is and what it stands for. Across a fairly small number of Pinboards, this organization was able to tell its story and convey its brand while interacting with their fans
Peugeot
While utilizing pinboards in a traditional fashion is a great start, Pinterest’s platform leaves ample room for creativity in your branding. One example of the creative freedom that Pinterest affords content marketers is Peugeot’s Panama Puzzle campaign. By capitalizing on Pinterest’s grid layout, this French car company developed an ingenious contest as a part of its digital marketing efforts.
In this contest, each individual pin on Peugeot’s page servedas a section of a larger, incomplete image that represented a puzzle. With the missing piece located on the Peugeot Facebook page, users could track down the missing image, pin it and claim their reward. This puzzle concept led Pinterest users on a wild goose chase through Peugeot’s digital assets with ample content exposure along the way.
Prior to this campaign, Peugeot was a French car company with limited brand awareness. Following the contest, Peugeot had announced its brand with a fun, creative connotation.In terms of thinking outside of the box on Pinterest, this campaign is just about as good as it gets and left creative directors wishing they’d thought of it first.
Community Development
Once you’ve developed your own strategy for spreading the word about your brand on Pinterest, the work doesn’t stop. Having achieved some level of brand identity, a company needs to seize the opportunity to engage with its Pinterest following. This means responding to comments, repinning relevant content from other users and interacting with pinners through contest or other sentimental activities. These are the activities that continue to drive traffic to your own boards and encourage third-party endorsements.
While the key to sparking brand recognition on Pinterest is content, it is community management that keeps the flame burning. If Peugeot were to simply let the hype from their campaign dwindle, it would have been ineffective in the long run. Rather than allowing this to happen, the company kept the conversation going with its users and came up with other creative campaigns.
Developing a brand on Pinterest means creating a content-marketing plan that communicates key components. By leveraging Pinterest’s format and content sharing tools, you can develop a strategy for spreading your brand’s unique identity.
|
12/18/2013 | Continue Reading...
Social media, in the present time is important! Important and life shaping relationships are build on these platforms and hence, for business brand, it has become more important now than ever before for the brands to optimize their social media efforts.
Although concentrating on the search engine optimization of your brand and perhaps investing in a fully scaled PPC services would offer remarkable returns to the business, but if your vision for your brand includes longevity, you would like to optimize your social media efforts as well, in order to maximize the chances of success.
Social media in its most basic form is the means for establishing a strong online community around your brand. And while there is a complete host of endeavors which a business house, entrepreneur or organization may undertake to optimize their social media presence, we shall here concentrate on the content. If you have always wondered the type of content that you should create or post on your social media profiles, we come with a few possible options readymade for you. With our expansive knowledge of the social media platform, we are hopeful that the following suggestions and principles of social media marketing would work for your brand too:
1. Create Content worth Sharing
Content is all about your distinctive playing with words and its related collaterals, and words have the power to either make or break someone. While churning up content for your social media, try and design a story – something which inspirers people, shared a chord with them, is something that they can relate to. Do not use social media platform as a monotonous robot, which only wishes to drive more traffic to their website or are there to share yet another discount scheme or special offer.
We are not asking you to turn overtly devotional, but the point is simple – while coming up with a piece of content, do ask yourself – is it worth for an online reader to share?
2. Concentrate on One Platform for Now
Optimize your endeavors for a particular platform, instead of creating a complex potpourri of different available networking sites. The point here is exclusivity. The reason why a particular customer or online user would subscribe to a particular channel of the online marketing mix is because of its exclusivity – the exclusive ounces of information shared via that particular platform.
Thus, understand your business and your customers well, and decide what works best for them – email marketing, Facebook or Twitter, or YouTube etc. and optimize your social media optimization for that particular platform. By the virtue of the viral nature of various social media platforms, the content will get shared everywhere else even before you could tell.
3. Everybody loves a good contest
The point is simple, allow users to showcase their talent on your social media platforms, or ask them to participate in any which way possible. If you are an ecommerce store, ask for your trusted online followers to post a picture of themselves posing with a product that they brought from there store – offer free goodies or gift vouchers to one that comes up with the most beautiful or maximum number of pictures. Or, run a photography contest; ask them to upload a picture on a particular theme suiting the niche of your business operations and offer handsome prizes to the winners. This is a good way to get the activity rolling on your social media pages.
4. Share Your Stories
If someone is following you on the social circles, and that too for a considerable amount of time, you can be rest assured that they are really interested to know more about your business, its various initiatives and its personality as a thriving entity. Hence, mingle! Share with them the stores, the struggle it took you to be where you are today, your experiences, what drives you, and get chatty! Ask them about their feedback, views, or in any way to supplement to the discussion. Share your pictures while you are headed to a conference in a foreign locale, or when you are partying on the occasion of your company having completed 2 years, etc.
Be more than a trade and commerce entity, express your personality, be a human that they can connect with, not just a good business deal or a trading opportunity.
5. Let Your Followers Shine on Your Page
Often we grow older but never grow over the fact that we would like an audience to our lives; and if not a full-fledged audience then at least someone to notice us in some way. You have the opportunity to provide your readers with that stage subtly lit up with the lime light, and allow them to actually shine. All you have to do is to acknowledge. Run a ‘Member of Month’ contest on your Facebook, wherein the one with the maximum and the most meaningful activity on your page would be acknowledged at the end of the month – with perhaps a public acknowledgment on your page and a special goodie bag for the same. You can also create ‘Hero of the Month’ wherein you would share about a customer or an employee or any contact whatsoever, who was your hero – and why?
Summary
Each brand has its own story, its own uniqueness. We hope that the above mentioned suggestions work for your business brand, and if you would be so kind enough, we would like to know your story. How you turned social media in your favor, and what kind of content would you usually share? Share with us your thoughts and opinions about the same in the comments section below.
About the Author:
Arbaz Khan heads Tech Plus Reviews and SEO service delhi company and has a special skill for providing the most competitive SMO Services Delhi. Get in touch with Arbaz to discuss any of your online marketing campaigns.
Posted by Ravi Kolhe |
12/16/2013 | Continue Reading...
People have been saying for generations that a picture is worth a thousand words. In this respect, your blog posts should be worth less. Even though it's hard to give a definitive answer to this question because there are many unknowns, as far as blogs go, bigger isn't always better. You need to understand this – you aren't writing a novel. You are publishing online content, and when they're online, people don't want to spend too much time reading something. Even if your content is interesting, very few will likely dedicate their time to reading a really long blog post.
In fact, in many cases the length of a post might put people off which means they won't even begin to read your blog post, let alone read the entire thing. That being said, there are certain topics you can afford to write a lot about. Highly specialized subjects like science can get away with long posts because then people are looking for a certain information and are willing to spend more time trying to find it. With this in mind, I have decided to group blog posts in three categories – short, medium and long. Like I said, there is no definitive answer, but there are certain rules and principles you have to follow if you want to be successful.
Short Blog Posts (500-1000 words)
Short blog posts are what you should generally aim for. When I write about something that doesn't require elaborate explanations or complicated qualifications, I usually try to keep it within the 500 words. I don't always manage, but I believe this is the optimum length for most blog posts.
You need to ask yourself, “Why am I writing this? What kind of message I want to convey?” Usually when you're writing a blog, you are presenting with your opinion on certain topics or you're writing about something new or hot. This is all well and good, but people on the Web get easily bored so if you spend 2000 words on something that could've easily been explained in 500, you are going to lose readers. Try to be as informative and brief as possible. Like I said, most blog posts should fall into this category.
Medium Blog Posts (1000-2000 words)
You are already using way too many words, but you can get away with it in certain cases. If your content is interesting, shocking and informative, people might forgive the length. If you insert a joke here and there (and no, knock-knock jokes don't count) and keep your audience entertained, 2000 words might not bore them that much. Still, here you need to tread carefully. This length is usually reserved for stories people can get involved in or lists people would like to read about in order to be entertained.
If a person starts to read your 2000 blog post on how you hate Mondays and you spend 500 words on how your colleague, Steve, really loves Monday morning and how strange you find that, you can be sure that many people won't get to the end. Preferably, here you want to talk about things people are interested in in your niche. As a bit of a nerd, for example, I like comic books, so I wouldn't mind reading a 2000 word blog post on why making a Batman/Superman movie at this point is a bad idea, or Top 10 most powerful beings in the DC Universe. But I don't care about your Monday, and neither do most people.
Long Blog Posts (2000+ words)
Unless you're writing about science or your content is highly entertaining (and I do mean highly, like, hilarious), or you're writing a really good story, steer clear of posts of such length. This will be an absolute disaster if you pour so much time and effort into writing something 5 pages long that no one would ever read. We don't care about your coworker's ugly neck tie, so don't bother telling us about it. If you don't have anything interesting to say, but since this is the Internet you want to say something anyway, keep it short.
About the Author:
Rose Finchley works as an technician for http://www.tidycleaning.co.uk/deep-cleaning-nw4-hendon/ and has a lot of experience to share with her readers.
|
12/06/2013 | Continue Reading...
As far as responsive web design is concerned, testing is one of the most crucial aspects of this truly complicated process. It's not just about writing the code and figuring out the layout and the design, but you also have to be adamant in your strive for perfection by constantly testing the product again and again and looking for flaws in what is otherwise a perfect symphony of mathematical precision.
Indeed, the process is difficult, but there are lots of tools to help you along the way in this inexorable march towards a flawless product. It is in the irrevocable nature of the responsive web design that you have to always be on your guard and not let your guard down even for a second, otherwise mistakes might be made that will put your whole project in jeopardy. Fear not, though, as I will present you with some of the most useful weapons to combat those dire eventualities and forever detriment the rise defects and imperfection in your work. If perfection is what you're after, then you will definitely need some of these tools.
Respondr
Invaluable companion to anyone who is searching for anomalies in one's design, Respondr is a pretty small and easy to use tool. It enables you to check the results of your work through the eyes of various devices without actually having to own those devices. Have you got the dimensions right? Are the pictures displayed properly? Is the site loading with a regular speed? Answer these questions and more with the help of this little gem. Just paste the URL of the site you want to test and then pick the setting of the device and viola – you're done! It's a truly amazing yet unimaginably simple tool, but you know what they say – everything genius is simple.
Viewport Resizer
In a pretty similar fashion like Repondr above, VR enables you to copy and paste the URL of the site you want to test and the settings you want to test it with. This little program has more variety in options, though, as it lets you go from a small smartphone to an HDTV and even though I doubt most people use their 49” plasma to browse the web, when you are after perfection, then you are not allowed to make any compromises, even if it's a huge improbability that anyone will ever see your site in this manner.
Responsivator
You already know the drill – enter URL, pick dimensions of testing. If you're already getting a sense of deja vu, you should – you've already seen it. But of course you, these tools are similar and have the same functions using the same methods – what did you expect? Still, there are small differences between all of them. In this case the difference comes from the fact that this tool lets you also use a custom resolution or screen size in order to test it, which is pretty neat if you're trying to pull something interesting and truly creative.
Screenfly
Guess what this tool does. If your answer is “creating a virtual fly on your screen just to annoy you or scare your girlfriend”, then you haven't been paying much attention to the article so far. It lets you enter a URL to test a site, choose the dimensions you want to test and also enables you to share a custom link with others to test the site, which is what makes it different from the other programs or applications in here.
Well, you can choose one or more of these to test your site and create something truly beautiful and unique. Good luck!
About the Author:
Rose works as a web designer at http://www.perfectcleaning.org.uk/end-of-tenancy-cleaning-stoke-newington-n16/ she has a lot of experience and loves to share it.
|
11/11/2013 | Continue Reading...
