Jerod Bast, the General Sales Manager at WSBT AM/FM and WHFB in South Bend, stopped by the Force 5 office for a meeting yesterday. After talking business, we hit the vintage Coke machine in the lobby and played a game of pinball. Afterward, Jerod wrote a post on Linkedin about the lessons one can learn from a pinball machine, I thought it was good, so I wanted to share it on our blog...
Latest Polling Numbers:
On a search engine results page (SERP), the listing of results returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query generally show two bits of information from your webpage, the title tag and the meta description. Properly worded and formatted meta tags can have an impact on a website’s search engine rankings and click-through rates, so great care should be used in crafting these snippets because you only have 50-60 characters in the title tag and about 160 characters in the meta description to sell yourself.
According to Google, a 404 page is what a user sees when they try to reach a non-existent page on your site (because they've clicked on a broken link, the page has been deleted, or they've mistyped a URL). A 404 page is called that because in response to a request for a missing page, webservers send back a HTTP status code of 404 to indicate that a page is not found.
Today I had to run out to Elkhart to run an errand. That gave me the opportunity to meet up for lunch with my friend Chris who works out there, and try a new restaurant that opened last fall. I had read about Hotdogeddy’s on the Flavor 574 website, and although I am not generally a huge fan of hot dogs, my friend is.
An effective customer-centric website design requires the designer to put himself in the customer's place to build a site that is user-friendly, while providing all the information that the visitor needs. If you find it hard to put yourself in your customer’s shoes, there are services out there that will critique the usability of your website for you. Some, like theuserismymom.com and theuserisdrunk.com take it a step further...
A recent poll by the Domain Name Association shows that when people are looking to go to a specific company’s website, 43% of them will type the company’s name or relevant term into a search engine while only 31% of people will type the domain name (www.domainname.com) into the browser address bar.
One sign that you might need a new website is that it doesn't look good on mobile devices. According to a recent study, mobile device usage is significantly higher than desktop usage, with people viewing 51% of the content on mobile versus only 42% on desktop/laptop. (Five years ago, it was 12.5% mobile vs. 75% desktop/laptop).
The team at Force 5 shares their thoughts on signs that your business might need a new website.
A Halloween post with downloadable pumpkin stencils of the Force 5 team.
According to a recent study by HubShout, 94% of people use a mobile phone to search for local businesses. So what information are they looking for when they get to your website?
