Writings from Force 5 Basecamp

07/24/17

Our agency has been welcoming our furry counterparts into the office since, well… ever. We really love our dogs. But our dog-friendly atmosphere has more benefits than just being able to spend all day with our best friends. About 20% of U.S. businesses allow pets in the workplace, and have been reaping the benefits just like us. Having pets around

02/23/16

A webcam was recently installed at the Notre Dame Linked Experimental Ecosystem Facility (ND-LEEF) at St. Patrick’s County Park after two bald eagles took over an existing red-tailed hawk nest.  This is clearly an attempt by the eagles to break into the avian reality tv market and compete with South Bend’s Peregrine Falcons.   For your convenience, I have included the feeds

02/20/16

Force 5’s arsenal of tools that we use to plan, build and measure websites expands daily. It’s the nature of the industry – growing and adapting to the industry as needed. One such tool is growing to be an essential part of our web offering; the CMS or Content Management System. We have implemented numerous CMS sites on the web

02/12/16

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

02/12/16

What is a Favicon?  It is a 16×16 pixel image that is shown next to your web page’s title on the tab in browser address bar. Favicons are usually overlooked, but I think they are a nice touch on a website.  I thought that maybe it was just a quirk of mine, but then I read the article “What’s The

02/11/16

Latest Polling Numbers: REPUBLICAN PRIMARY Overall Average Candidate 404 Page 160-Character Stump Speech Favicon 18.7% Cruz 19.0% 17.4% 19.8% 18.3% Bush 22.2% 12.8% 19.8% 16.1% Rubio 17.5% 18.6% 12.3% 16.0% Kasich 14.3% 14.0% 19.8% 12.8% Trump 9.5% 14.0% 14.8% 12.0% Carson 9.5% 12.8% 13.6% 6.1% Gilmore 7.9% 10.5% 0.0% DEMOCRAT PRIMARY Overall Average Candidate 404 Page 160-Character Stump Speech Favicon

02/11/16

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. TITLE TAG – Title tags / Page Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result

02/10/16

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

02/05/16

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

01/26/16

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

01/14/16

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. In fact, looking at search analytics data for

01/04/16

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).  Mobile Friendly Not Mobile