Greenery is nature’s neutral. The more submerged people are in modern life, the greater their innate craving to immerse themselves in the physical beauty and inherent unity of the natural world. This shift is reflected by the proliferation of all things expressive of Greenery in daily lives through urban planning, architecture, lifestyle and design choices globally. A constant on the periphery, Greenery is now being pulled to the forefront – it is an omnipresent hue around the world.

A life-affirming shade, Greenery is also emblematic of the pursuit of personal passions and vitality.

What is the PANTONE Color of the Year?
A symbolic color selection; a color snapshot of what we see taking place in our global culture that serves as an expression of a mood and an attitude.

AWS Cloud Front
Pros: Customer’s loved AWS content delivery speed, pricing, and the integrated suite of website hosting products. Cons: The unique AWS architecture leaves limited flexibility and control over your content delivery. Verdict: The fastest and rated overall best in our survey but experienced webmasters will have a steep learning curve while trying to become familiar with Amazon’s proprietary architecture. 

Host Gator
Pros: Host Gator is a great choice for small business websites and personal hosting because of their overall ease of use and user-friendly web management tools. Cons: Though they do have some prominent clients their service is not really geared toward large scale web publishers. Verdict: If you need to get your website launched quickly or your looking for a painless migration Host Gator is your best option. 

Rackspace
Pros: Rackspace is now and has always had the best customer support in the website hosting business. They are truly dedicated to solving their customers hosting issues and developing unique instances for custom deployments. Cons:Compared to the competition Rackspace is a bit pricey and their cloud service does not scale as well as say Amazon’s. Verdict: The best choice for those looking for managed Dedicated Hosting. 

Peer1 Hosting
Pros: Peer1 was viewed as the most flexible web hosting company in our survey, with a fully integrated suite of content delivery products and a tech team that will help you build and maintain your custom hosting environment. Cons: Not a good option for small businesses as Peer1 is better geared toward handling larger websites. Verdict: Best for large scale websites that require flexibility and great customer support.

Softlayer
Pros: Softlayer has fantastic backend technology and had the best uptime and security of any of the other hosts in our survey. Cons: The major negative of working with Softlayer is price. In fact, every respondent familiar with their service mentioned their high service costs as a major drawback. Verdict: Very good for large scale operations that can afford best of breed technology and have the in-house tech no how to manage it. 

Blue Host
Pros: Blue Host is considered to be one of the best options for small publishers as they offer easy setup, excellent customer support, and low and easy to understand pricing. Cons: Just like with Hostgator, Bluehosts is not really setup to handle larger scale publishing operations, so it might not be the best choice if you’re expecting huge growth. Verdict: One of the best web hosting companies for small business without question.

LeaseWeb
Pros: If you need a fully customizable web hosting environment, no one is better at helping you build it then Leaseweb, famous for hosting Wikimedia’s European operation. Cons: They have often been criticized for their confusing billing practices and survey respondents felt they might not be a good fit for smaller businesses. Verdict: Great hosts for experienced operations wanting to build and manage a custom environment.

GoDaddy
Pros: Many might be surprised to see Godaddy on this list, but they are still considered an excellent choice for smaller publishers. Their price, easy-of-use, and wide range of hosting products are the reason they enter our 2015 list. Cons:GoDaddy is exclusively focused on helping small business owners and therefore offers very few tools for larger enterprise customers. Verdict: Great place for smaller companies to get started.

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.

A normal bounce rate for websites is around 60-70%. This means that over half of the people who visit websites leave after just viewing the page they land on. By implementing the following six tactics you can engage visitors and lower your bounce rate.

1. Create A Simple and Eye-Catching Web Design

These two ideas may seem conflicting, but often the most eye-catching designs are the simplest. Take Apple, for example. Their designs are sleek, clean, and simple, yet everyone’s eyes gravitate towards them. When web design is clean and simple it can give the user a sense of time and space and if the design is aesthetically pleasing the user is naturally going to be more inclined to stay on the website.

2. Make Your Brand Personality Shine

Just because your actual website design is simple it doesn’t mean it has to be cold and boring. Inject your brand and team’s personality into your website. Choose the perfect blend of colors that represent the business and transmit a message to the audience. Create wording for each page that is in line with your brand personality. Is your business easy going and laid back or fast-paced and current? Reflect that in your website copy.

3. Be Empathetic

Even if it sounds counter-intuitive, try to talk about yourself and your business as little as possible. Instead, you should be empathetic. Talk to about the website user and tell them how your business can help make their lives easier with your product or service. This should be apparent in the headlines, subtitles, and images as well as the actual website copy.

4. Content Should Match the Users Objective

Not only should you be empathetic, but each page needs to accurately describe and match the reason the person has arrived at the page. Content from one page to another should not be similar, but each page should offer highly focused and exclusive content to the visitor. You should also offer valuable free information to the visitor, either in the form of a resource page, a blog, or free media such as white papers and eBooks.

5. Headings, Bullet Points, Photos and Videos

A huge block of text on a web page is very unappealing. You need to break the page up into bite size pieces. Headings and sub headings are essential. Ideally each piece of content on the page should be able to be read and make sense in isolation form the rest of the content on the page – this accommodates the user’s process of scanning for appropriate content.

By adding relevant images and video to a page you break up the content but also create attractive features for the eye to be drawn to. They can also contribute to making the overall page aesthetically pleasing ans attractive.

6. Showcase Convenience

Make your navigation simple and intuitive so users can find exactly what they are looking for in less than three seconds. Foe example, put contact information in an easy to find location, with its own tab in the navigation and at the top right corner of the page. You should also always put a second copy of your contact information in the page footer as well.

By reshaping your website so it is visually attractive, providing valuable and highly appropriate content, presenting the content in easily digestible amounts, and having a logical and intuitive navigation, the user will be more engaged and more likely to convert into inquiries or sales.