Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Why does my business need a Mobile Website?

It’s a fact that over 90% of smartphone users keep their device within arm’s reach 24/7. Besides using them for communication, one of the main activities we use smartphones for is browsing the Internet. Whether we’re looking for a recipe for gluten-free brownies, shopping for a new pair of shoes or trying to figure out if that weird lump is serious, we spend a lot of time online with our phones.

My website shows up on my phone, so what’s the problem?

The good news is that if you have a website, you have a website that can be accessed by a smartphone. The bad news is that it might not look as good as it does on a desktop computer. That beautiful Flash animation might not work on some phones, and all those columns of text and graphics might require a lot of swiping and pinching to navigate. And worst of all, your site might take a long time to load ... so long that users might take their business – and their money – somewhere else.

What can I do?
Create a “responsive” website that will adjust itself depending on where it’s being viewed. It should be a streamlined version of your current website with “thumb-friendly” buttons, intuitive navigation and a clean, single column layout.

I’m still not sold, tell me more.
As technology advances, the Google search engine gets more and more particular about recognizing websites as legitimate. If a website isn’t mobile-friendly, Google might not display it in search results. Since your website is nothing if it can’t be found, it’s very important for your site to be recognized by Google and other search engines. (For more information see my previous post on Search Engine Optimization.)

Ready to get started?

We can help you create a responsive website experience for your customers. Contact us today at (860) 301-5384 or visit www.CentralStudioDesign.com

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Keeping up with Social Media


By now we all know the importance of keeping your business visible and current on Social Media. Americans spend over 100 billion minutes per month on Social Media sites, and 98% of 18-24 year olds are active on Social Media. There’s huge potential to keep in touch with your customers and keep your brand fresh in their mind. How many times have you seen the cupcake photo from the shop up the street and thought to yourself, “Hmmm, I could go for that Chocolate Sparkle Cookie Explosion today!” and grabbed one (or three) on your way home from work? We can all agree that Social Media works for business.

Sounds like a no-brainer … right?
With this incredible potential to reach hundreds – maybe thousands – of customers each day, why aren’t we all posting, tweeting, blogging and sharing on a regular basis? The simple answer is simple: There are just not enough hours in the day! That’s where we can help … let us work with you to create a Social Media Plan that keeps your product or service in front of your customers on a regular basis.


Whether it’s a series of Facebook posts, Tweets or E-mail Blasts promoting a new product or event, a blog post that tells a story about your business, or sharing your daily menu specials, we’ll create interesting text and eye-catching imagery, then share with your audience on a regular basis – so you can keep up!


Ready to get started?  
Contact Central Studio at (860) 301-5384 today to discuss how we can design your unique Social Media Plan.

Monday, February 16, 2015

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

As a website designer, one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “Why don’t I show up on Google??!!” There’s no easy answer, but there are lots of things we can do to bring your site up to the top of the list. Below, I’ll share everything I know about how to optimize your website for search engines.



What it a Search Engine?
A search engine is simply defined as "a program that searches documents (your website is a series of documents) for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found." A few common search engines are Google, Bing and Yahoo.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO is defined as “the process of editing and organizing the content on a web page or throughout a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines and importantly ensuring that external links to the site are correctly titled and in abundance. This is done with the aim of achieving a higher organic, unpaid search listing and thus increasing the volume of targeted traffic from search engines.”

What Does Central Studio Design & Communications do to ensure that our clients’ websites are Search Engine Optimized?
We do a variety of things to try to get the search engines to “find” your website. When I say “try,” it’s because with search engines, there are no guarantees that your site will come up high on the list unless you pay the search engine company (usually the first three items that pop up are paid advertisers).

  • We title all of the pages in your site with relevant keywords, including the name and location of your business.
  • We add alternate text (text that comes up if the image can’t display) to each image on your site, and we add keywords to each image as well. "Keywords" are words or phrases that a customer might type into a search engine to find your business. Back in the day, web designers would hide irrelevant keywords all over websites to try to trick search engines – for example, a popular phrase like “Pamela Anderson” in black letters over a black background, hundreds of times. Search engines have grown more sophisticated, and tend to pass on sites that use this type of tactic.
  • We put relevant keywords in the background of every page. We not only put the name and location of your business, but we research other terms that your customers might use to locate you on the Internet.
  • We make sure that your content contains as many keywords as possible, without making it sound like a crazy person wrote it.
  • Whenever possible, we use live text instead of pictures containing text. Live text is visible to search engines, but text embedded into images isn’t.
  • We submit your site to the major search engines in hopes they will come visit (or “crawl”) it, see all they keywords and rich content, and add it to their listings.
  • We share your site on across social media. Search engines love it when a website has lots of external links leading back to it, so we try to create as many as we can. Currently we’re using our own website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram ... and coming soon we’ll be featuring clients on our blog.

What Can You do to help?
There are a few things that you can do to help your site get moved up in the search engine rankings.

  • Post a link to your site anywhere you can. Create pages on all of the major social media sites and post a link to your website on each one.
  • Have other websites link your site to theirs. For example, if you own a clothing store, see if the designers you carry have a “Where to Buy” feature on their own websites.
  • List your website on all of your printed materials (ads, brochures, business cards, mailers, banners, signs, etc.) This will help drive traffic to your site, and search engines love a site that gets lots of traffic.
  • Keep your website content fresh – update photos and text frequently. Stale content makes search engines (and customers) bored.
  • Start a blog, and keep up with it! A blog is a great way to tell your customers about sales, new products or services, or just to share little personal stories. Blog posts can be tagged with keywords, and linked back to your website.
  • Submit your site to a free service like EntireWeb.com. Because these services collect your email address and may use it for marketing purposes, we don’t submit your site to them, but we do encourage you to look into them.
  • You can pay. Although no one wants to hear this, they best way to ensure that you come up at the top of a search is to pay the search engine to put you there.

Site Still Not Showing Up?
Even with all these techniques, it can still take several months for your site to show up in the search engine rankings. We’ve found that after about 6 months of going live, most of our sites come up on top or on the first page of a search engine listing when the company name and state or city is searched.

To sum it up, there is no guaranteed, quick (free) way to get your site to be listed first, but with a little effort, your site can be made search engine friendly and easy for your customers to find.