1. Ease of Use

WordPress is very easy to use and has an intuitive interface.  Adding new pages, blog posts, images, etc. on a regular basis is a breeze and can be done quickly.  Because the technology is so simple, time spent on formatting is greatly reduced.

2. Manage Your Website from Any Computer

WordPress is browser-based. You can login from any Internet connected computer and manage your site.

3. No HTML Editing or FTP Software Required

WordPress is a self-contained system and does not require HTML editing software (such as Adobe Contribute or Dreamweaver). You can create a new page or blog post, format text, upload images (and edit them), upload documents, video files, image galleries, etc. all without the need for additional HTML or FTP software.

4. Search Engines Love WordPress Sites

The code behind WordPress is very clean and simple, making it easy for search engines to read and index a site’s content. In addition, each page, post, and image can have its own meta tag keywords, description, and title, and be optimized for specific keywords, allowing for very precise search engine optimization.  You can also use tags to further enhance your search engine optimization efforts.

5. You Have Control of Your Site

No more waiting for your web designer to make simple updates to your site. With WordPress, you have control of nearly every aspect of your site and can easily make those simple updates yourself.

6. The Design of Your Website is 100% Customizable

WordPress acts as the engine for your website. The look and feel of the site can be 100% customized so your brand can shine through on your site and provide a unique experience to your visitors.

7. A Blog is Built-in and Ready to Go

Since WordPress was originally created as a blogging platform, blogging capabilities are built-in and are easy to integrate, if desired. Setting up RSS / email subscriptions to your blog, commenting capabilities, and automatically adding the most recent blog posts to other pages of the site (your home page, for example) are also very simple to set-up, and help to extend your company’s reach and make your site more dynamic and interactive.

8. Extend the Functionality of Your Site with Plugins

Want to add an event calendar, video gallery, Twitter Feed, Facebook Fan Box, and more to your site? WordPress makes this possible with plugins, most of which are free or very reasonably priced.

9. Your Site Can Grow as Your Business Grows

WordPress sites are very scalable. You can have hundreds of thousands of pages or blog posts on your site and the performance of the site will not be compromised in the least.

10. Have Multiple Users

As an administrator of a WordPress site, you can set-up multiple users for the website and assign access levels and capabilities to each user.

If you’ve read anything online, undoubtedly there have been headlines about exploits, vulnerabilities, identities stolen and other compromises.

Are you one of the 9.3% using Internet Explorer 10 (IE10)? Hopefully, you keep your software updated, as Microsoft did squeak in a patch last Tuesday. However, if you haven’t, please stop reading this and update it and all other Microsoft patches immediately.

FireEye recently found a combination of watering-hole attack and drive-by download that utilizes the exploit in IE10.

You don’t know what a watering-hole attack is?

Let’s say the hackers find an exploit in a particular browser and they want to use that to infect the computers of people most likely to use that browser. They will find one or more websites that focus on that particular group of people. The hackers will then try to infect those websites with some drive-by download code. This means that anyone visiting those websites will be subject to the download which will infect their computer.

After the websites have been infected with the drive-by download code, hackers will blast out a series of SPAM emails that include a link to one of their infectious sites. The SPAM will be targeted to people in the targeted industry. This is called a watering-hole attack.

Just so you don’t think I’m focusing on Microsoft, these same types of attacks happen on FireFox, Chrome and yes, even on Macs.

Your best defense against these and other attacks is to keep your software updated – constantly. This doesn’t mean just your browser, but all Adobe products, your operating system and all other software programs installed on your computer.

April of 2014 will see the end of support for Windows XP and Office 2003. If you haven’t upgraded these yet, you should make plans. Without support from Microsoft, you will no longer get updates to that software. Hackers know there will be many people refusing to upgrade so not upgrading will make you the “low hanging fruit” for hackers.

In addition to keeping your software updated, please let everyone you know to use strong passwords. This cannot be emphasized enough. About 30% of the websites we clean are the result of compromised passwords. Make it at least 9 characters long and DO NOT use common, related words.

A recent informal survey we conducted shows that many passwords end with either the year, 123 or the exclamation mark (!). If this sounds familiar, please change your passwords immediately.

One other key point that we’ve been “pushing” for some time now is to schedule daily full system scans with your anti-virus software.

Here’s why.

If the anti-virus company finds a new virus “in the wild” on Monday, they will analyze it and create a rule to detect that virus. Then on Tuesday, you update your anti-virus software – either automatically or manually, this means your computer is protected from getting infected by that virus from Tuesday moving forward. However, if your computer was infected by that virus on Monday, your anti-virus program won’t remove it until you run a full system scan.

That’s why it’s critical that you run full system scans – EVERY DAY!

Let’s be careful out there, huh?

Thank you for reading.

Although not many expected the Internet Explorer name to be retained for Windows 10, its death has now been confirmed. The old web browser will not be immediately going away in Windows 10 but will not be the primary way of browsing the Internet.

Microsoft marketing chief Chris Capossela explained that IE will still be included for use in some enterprise situations, saying:

“We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan, which is codenamed Project Spartan. We have to name the thing.”

Codenamed Project Spartan, Microsoft’s new web browser is currently under very active development for Windows 10. Although not available yet to Windows Insiders, it is expected to be included in the next released builds for both desktop and phone.

Spartan includes a number of new features designed to make browsing easier and more enjoyable. It sports an all-new, more modern interface that looks good regardless of screen size and has thrown away much of the legacy Internet Explorer code so that it is faster and more responsive. In some leaked benchmarks, Javascript performance in Spartan has been the best of any browser available today.

Integration with Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant will also be a prominent feature of the new browser. A new reading mode will be offered to make it easier to interpret lengthy articles online and it will be possible to annotate websites with notes and drawings for later sharing with others.

Microsoft has tried for years to shake off the negative image of Internet Explorer acquired when the company let the brand stagnate and become mired in its own original success. It quickly fell behind competitive rivals such as Google Chrome when little improvement was made from IE6 right up to the release of IE9 with Windows 7.
The company is likely to include “Microsoft” in the final name of “Project Spartan” as market research on Google Chrome users — a browser which also has its maker’s name in its title — revealed that including the Microsoft brand significantly increased appeal.

We are unlikely to know the name of the new browser for some time. Work has now begun on the difficult decision but an all new brand must be created to bring Microsoft’s web browser forward and keep it popular in the years to come.

And yet, in its nine years since launch, Twitter has never released an official plug-in to make WordPress and Twitter play friendly. Until today.

I figure anyone reading this article knows what the words “WordPress” and “Twitter” mean, so I won’t be awful and explain what those two things are.

Here’s what the new Twitter WordPress plug-in does out of the box:

• Lets you add a one-click sharing button so visitors can tweet out your stuff
• Lets you more easily embed tweets, and customize the color scheme of embedded tweets to match your site’s look. You can change the link color, border color, and pick from a “light” or “dark” look
• Automatically builds Twitter Cards when you share stuff to Twitter
• Helps you add a follow button to your layout
• Tracks ad conversions if you’re running a Twitter Ad campaign for your WordPress blog

If you’re already happy with your third-party Twitter plug-in or custom-built Twitter solutions, this new plug-in … might not do very much in terms of new stuff for you. Hell, your current plug-in may even do more.

One thing it’s lacking, at least at first glance: the ability to embed your Twitter feed, or at least your last few tweets, in your WordPress layout. It’ll do individual tweets, but there’s no mention of feed embedding — and that’s a pretty popular use case for third-party Twitter plug-ins.

But this plug-in wraps up a lot of the basics in an easy-to-deploy package and makes it a bit less necessary to hunt through the forest of unofficial plug-ins just to find one that both currently works and is probably going to keep working in the future.

What is a call to action?
A call to action is simply the thing you want your users to do once their on your website. If you have a brick and mortar business your first thought might be “I don’t want them on my website, I want them in my store.” But even in that case, you need something for them to do from your website. Do you want them to call you and make a reservation or appointment? Do you want them to sign up for your newsletter to get more information? Do you want them to give you their email so you can contact them later?

Why have a call to action?
A clear, specific call to action not only helps you gain customers, it helps you focus your website, and evaluate your own success. If your call to action is asking people to sign up for your newsletter, then you’ll easily be able to see how successful the call is by comparing the number of new website visitors to the number of newsletter sign ups.

How to create a call to action?
This is one of those cases where the “how” is completely dependent on the “what” and “why.” Once you know what you want people to do and why, you can create a call to action. Keep the call simple and clear, both in terms of language and visuals. Keep the options limited. The call to action is simply the first step in building your relationship with your customer, you can get in to more complicated information later.

Here are 5 reasons that show the importance of business blogging:

1. Foundation of All Social Media Activities

A blog allows you to create a place where all of your work is stored. A blog also allows you to build a stronger picture of who you are. It is true that most people will meet you through other places; Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for example, but if they like what they read on these platforms, they will most likely follow you back to your blog and find out more about who you are.

2. Build Your Brand as an Expert

Bloggers don’t focus on themselves. They turn their focus towards publishing educated articles that put their true talents and knowledge on display. Being an expert does not translate into talking about yourself. If this occurs, your efforts will most likely backfire on you. It is well known, that in blogging as in real life, the more you talk about yourself the less people want to follow you.

3. Build Trust

People are becoming more skeptical each day. They are especially skeptical about marketing messages found on the Internet. A blog with consistent, truthful and helpful content will allow you to build strong trust among your followers. Be patient and persevere because the time you put into your blog will outlast the ones who don’t.

4. Exercise Your Creativity

Some might wonder why creativity is so important in the business world, but the answer is quite simple: in virtually any field, the most creative will enjoy the most success. Ultimately, blogging will lead to growth as you begin to learn more about yourself, your audience and the world around you. This will then help lead to further creativity and profitability for your company.

5.  Proven Marketing Strategy

Blogging has been proven to be a successful marketing tool for businesses. It is quite amazing to see that some people would ignore what has worked for so long and instead run off to the latest social media fads. A combination of social media and blogging will be the best option for any type of business.

We hope these five points have helped highlight why blogging can be a very effective marketing strategy for virtually any business. Keep an eye out for two more articles coming on this topic.

Because mobile Internet usage is increasing steadily, it’s extremely important that your website is mobile friendly. Usually this isn’t a major concern. You have a website designed for desktop users and another site specifically developed for mobile users. But, is it possible to have a site that is equally favorable for both desktop and mobile users?

There actually is a design that can handle both types of users. And it’s called responsive web design.

What is responsive design?

A responsive design simply means a website that has been constructed so that all of the content, images and structure of the site remains the same on any device. For example, when a user accesses a site on their desktop, they are getting the full view of the site. But when that same user goes to visit the site from their smartphone or tablet, the site will retract to fit on the smaller screen.

In other words, with a responsive website design, you don’t have to have worry about having different websites for various devices or making sure that your site runs properly on a mobile device.

But there are some other really important reasons why you should make the switch to responsive design for your website.

Mobile Usage is Increasing.

Take a step into the outside world and you’ll definitely notice a lot of people on their mobile phones. In fact, it seems that just about everyone is attached at the hip with their smartphone. For some reason, however, there are many businesses who have not yet picked up on this trend. Maybe they could use the following stats to convince them how much mobile usage has skyrocketed.

• More than 20 percent of Google searches are now being performed on some sort of mobile device.
• In 2012 over half of all local searches were done on a mobile device.
• 25 percent of Internet users only access the internet via a mobile device in the United States.
• 25.85 percent of all emails are opened on mobile phones, with another 10.16 percent being opened on tablets.
• In 2014 mobile Internet usage is expected to overtake desktop usage.
• Out of the 4 billion mobile phones in the world, 1.08 billion are smartphones and 3.05 are SMS enabled.

Recommended By Google

We all know that Google is a really big deal. In fact, the Big G claimed 67 percent search market share in 2013, making it the most popular search engine in the world. So, if Google claims that it prefers responsive web design as the recommended mobile configuration, you better take that as a hint — which was confirmed by Google’s Pierre Farr in June 2012.

But why does Google prefer responsive design? For starters, it’s more efficient for Google to bot crawl the site and then index and organize all the content that is online. The reason for this is that with responsive design, all sites have just one URL and the same HTML across all devices. When a business has both a mobile site and desktop site, there will be a different URL and different HTML for each. This forces Google to crawl and index multiple versions of the same exact site.

Also, when there is just one website and URL, it’s much easier for users to share, engage and interact with the content on that site as compared to a site that has different pages for mobile and desktop users. Google is a fan of that as well. Why? Because what if someone shared a mobile site on a social media outlet and one of their connections viewed that mobile site on their desktop? That viewer would then be viewing a less than optimal site because it was intended for mobile. This makes the user unhappy.

And Google realizes that unhappy people will go elsewhere, meaning that bounce rates increase and the site will not rank on mobile searches. This creates a whole big headache involving Google’s external link algorithm and on-page errors. Which in turn, also harms your SEO.
In other words, it’s just bad for business for both Google and all of the websites that aren’t taking advantage of the benefits of responsive design.

Can Increase Conversion Rates

Besides all of the search benefits, as well as making users happy, responsive design has the ability to increase those coveted conversion rates from all of the mobile users in the world. Why? Well, if a website is not working on mobile or tablet device, users will obviously be unable to convert. And how many people are doing online shopping from a mobile device? There has been research that found 69% of tablet users shopped on their device within the last 30 days.

So, when a user has to do more work than needed to complete a conversion, do you think that they will still convert? It’s less likely they will convert. However, there’s a little more to it than that. For example, since a responsive website design can adjust to any screen, developers have control on how all of those conversion elements will display on mobile and tablet.

Finally, responsive design allows you to do some important high-end heatmapping and A/B testing, which can be done through software like Clicktale or Optimizely. This means that you can segment users by mobile and gain a better picture of how those users are interacting on your site. When you do this, you can discover what sales tactics and marketing strategies are effective, as well as, those that are not. When you have this information, you can increase conversion rates.
Social Media Has Gone Mobile

We’re guessing that you’re involved with inbound marketing. But even if you’re not, you still realize how important blogging and social media are in the 21st Century. In fact, if you have not implemented some sort of social media strategy in your marketing campaign, you’re missing out on a lot of leads. But, social media has also now gone mobile, which you may have noticed. How important is mobile for social media users? According to a study from ComScore, 55% of social media consumption happens on a mobile device.

This is a really vital stat because what’s the point of sharing content on social media if it’s not compatible with mobile devices? Again, if a website isn’t functioning on a mobile device, users get frustrated and leave. High bounce rates = low conversion rates. And, that puts everyone in a foul mood.

Better User Experience

We’ve briefly touched on this before, but responsive design gives users a better experience. For example, users don’t have to fool around with zooming and shrinking the text or images on screen. Instead, all of the content automatically adjusts to the screen of the device. This makes it easier and more convenient for users to read and navigate on your site.

And, there are stats to further illustrate why the experience of users is so important. According to Google’s Think Insights on Mobile, whenever someone arrives on your mobile website and is frustrated, or doesn’t see the content that they are searching for immediately, there’s a 61 percent chance they will leave and head to another website. However, whenever a user has had a positive experience with your mobile website, that individual will be 67 percent more likely to buy a product or use a service. Furthermore, 48 percent of users stated to Google that when a site doesn’t function on their mobile device it makes them feel that the company does not care for their business.

A better user experience also makes it easier to be reached and complain. If people are able to contact you and find a way to complaint you have a much lower probability of them going online through social media and complaining.

Easier to Manage

Going back to SEO for moment, if you have separate desktop and mobile sites, you’re going to have to run separate SEO campaigns for each. Wouldn’t it just be easier to manage only one SEO campaign and one website? That would make not just your customers happy, but also your team including everyone from developers to content marketing managers. More importantly because you only have one site, responsive design is more cost effective as well

Stay Ahead of Competition

In the business world, you have to stay ahead of the competition. So, if more and more users are using their mobile devices to search and make purchases online, you have to cater to that audience by having a mobile-friendly site. In fact, 85 percent of adults believe that a mobile site must be as good, if not better than, a desktop site.

Chances are that you competitors aren’t making use of responsive designs, which means that they are losing out on potential customers. And, that is where you can stay ahead and take those customers away.

Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites.

How Are Search & Social Media Marketing Related?

Why would a search marketer — or a site about search engines — care about social media? The two are very closely related.

Social media often feeds into the discovery of new content such as news stories, and “discovery” is a search activity. Social media can also help build links that in turn support into SEO efforts. Many people also perform searches at social media sites to find social media content. Social connections may also impact the relevancy of some search results, either within a social media network or at a ‘mainstream’ search engine.

Social Media Marketing At Idea Web Development

Idea Web Development covers all facets of internet marketing, including these popular topics within social media marketing:

Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
Pinterest
Google+
Linkedin
YouTube

Technology is becoming more and more ubiquitous in today’s consumer market. Browsing and shopping occurs on computer, tablets, and smart phones. With over 2 billion mobile-broadband subscriptions, responsive design that works well across multiple devices is crucial to help consumers become customers.

When developing a responsive site, grids of information must adapt to different screen sizes, images must be flexible to fit into the appropriate space for each device, and CSS rules must apply suitably to varying browser displays. These set the foundation for a functional and attractive site.