Based in Rome, Italy, Apparel Network, S.r.l. provides end-to-end services to companies seeking to off-shore their manufacturing operations, particularly to China. Within the country they’ve had considerable success working with some big name fashion brands, especially in the “street wear” sector. Due to an increasingly difficult Italian market brought on by years of economic crisis, the company was seeking to expand their operations to the United States.
It’s been a month since Google announced that it’ll be using HTTPS as a ranking factor to encourage site owners to keep their readers safe on the web by adding a layer of security to their websites. Although the boost delivered by the HTTPS ranking factor is lightweight compared to other ranking signals (such as providing your audience with high-quality content), many website owners are worried that they might get pushed down the Google search results if they don’t make the switch.
If you are considering moving your site to the HTTPS protocol, make sure that you do your research well and understand what it means. If you are not very familiar with HTTPS, here are some things you need to know: [Read more…]
Whenever we take on a new client for a website project, one of the very first issues we tackle is the question of design. Many clients use the terms “web designer” and “web developer” interchangeably, not really understanding that there is a big difference in skills associated with each of these jobs.
Whenever we talk to a new client about building or upgrading their website, the first thing we need to tackle is selecting the right WordPress theme. (A “theme” is the WordPress term for the set of page templates and style sheets that define the look and feel of your site.) Using a predesigned theme can save thousands on designer fees, and with the range of themes available (either free or premium paid themes) it’s almost a no-brainer for a small company on a limited budget to use one. A good WordPress theme will not only look great but can also be valuable for SEO, as the design and structure of your website will impact its performance in search results. [Read more…]
Last year, it was homepage “sliders” (even we are guilty of using those). This year, the must-have design feature for the small business website is “parallax scrolling.” Parallax scrolling is a technique that causes the background image to scroll at a different rate from the rest of the page, creating an illusion of depth. This idea originated in the gaming industry, where this visual effect has endless applications in online storytelling.
Panoptic’s Melissa Cahill joined up with her colleague Andy Christian of the Tadpole Collective for four fun-filled days on the Mississippi Gulf Coast last week, offering WordPress Workshops to attendees of the Society of American Travel Writers 2013 Conference.
The Conference brought together travel writers, resort property managers, regional travel promoters — all sorts of folks — many of whom run their own websites and blogs, who were interested in learning how to leverage the power of WordPress. From the feedback we received, workshop participants left feeling more empowered and enthusiastic about ramping up their online marketing activities!
While the half-day sessions were limited strictly to WordPress, the full-day course included a section on SEO, specifically around how to use the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin to make those tasks easier — and to learn to become a better SEO writer.
There’s no denying that your clients are all going mobile.
For many businesses, having a mobile-friendly site has become a priority but choosing whether to build a separate mobile website or adapting their current website to use a responsive design is challenging for most. What is the difference and how do you determine which is right for your business?
According to Google research, “By 2013, more people will use their mobile phones than PCs to get online.” Furthermore, if you haven’t been paying attention to what your site looks like on a mobile device, chances are you are sending your potential clients elsewhere.
What does a bad mobile experience can do to your business? Here are some numbers from a recent survey:
Three times in the last two months I’ve taken on small business clients who find themselves in an identical situations: they’ve spent good money for a high-design website, have generally been delighted with the results (ooh, ah — pretty!) and are perplexed when, a couple of months after launch, they see very low visitor traffic, or poor showings in search results, or both. Even the least internet savvy business owners know that they need to show up in search results — and most have an intuitive understanding that the Top 10 sites returned in a Google search get the lion’s share of the visitors.
So why does it happen?
Because web designers are not search marketers, and very few of them are familiar with sound SEO practices.
In two of the three cases I mention here, the designers chose WordPress as their platform. When we were conducting our preliminary research and competitive analysis for these clients, we saw their WordPress-based websites and thought, “Yippie — onsite optimization will be a snap!”
W
ordPress is great for SEO out of the box; using one of the popular SEO plugins, like Yoast’s WordPress SEO, makes it even easier and more robust. The plugin provides guidance for optimizing meta tags and on-page content, has options for applying basic indexation rules, generates and maintains Google XML sitemaps for you — all the behind the scenes stuff the designer doesn’t know or care anything about. (Why should she? She’s a designer!)
We always advocate using WordPress for websites, and the ability to create a mobile version of you site is one of the main reasons. It’s as easy as installing and activating one of the many plugins available for this purpose. And Panoptic’s developers have been moving more and more to what they call “responsive themes” — that is, themes that work across a variety of mobile platforms without having to use plugins.
But tomorrow night we’re going to be checking out CBS Local, who is going a totally different route. What’s it all about? We’ll know soon, thanks to the good people in our WP NYC Community MeetUp Group! Stay tuned…
Check out WP NYC, and New York’s best Meet Up!
Creating and sharing visual content has been a marketing trend for several years now and it’s not about to fade anytime soon. In fact, it has now become a MUST for any businesses that wants to be noticed on the internet. These statistics testify to … Continue reading →
