It’s taken a while for the technology to stablize, but we now have a solution for developing mobile apps for Apple iPhones and Android phones that integrate with your existing WordPress website. You don’t have to maintain separate content on your app and website.
We will have more details soon. Contact us if you want a sneak preview.
We are rapidly coming to the end of 2015 and it’s important to verify your website and plugins are up-to-date. This has been a particularly vicious year for hackers exploiting old, outdated versions of WordPress and plugins to put malicious programs on unsuspecting websites.
Check your site, or contact us for do a free site audit:
WordPress: current version 4.4 released on 12/8/15.
Gravity Forms: current version 1.9.15 released on 12/1/15. We have seen old versions of this plugin exploited by hackers this year. It must be updated.
All-in-one SEO Pack: current version 2.2.7.2 released on 9/4/15.
These are just a few of the most common plugins. Contact Main Street if you need help with updates.
Responsive is the new buzzword in web design. All the new sites we build are responsive, many of our past customers are coming back to have their sites redesigned to be responsive.
So what’s the big deal?
The term responsive means the site template automatically responds to the size of the browser and reformats the website content. By shifting content elements and menus, the layout is automatically optimized to work on big screens, small screens, tablets, and cell phones.
Before responsive designs, web designers had to create separate design templates for mobile devices and tablets. This was always difficult because apparently no two mobile devices are the same size. If you developed a site to look good on an iPhone, it may look awkward on an Android device. Also, creating multiple templates cost more money and required more maintenance every time we needed to change the template.
As more users access the web via mobile devices, the challenges multiplied. Even within a single vendor, different models of the same device have different sized displays. Nobody is standardizing screen sizes — they are getting bigger and smaller at the same time.
Rather than continue to spend our client’s money creating a dozen different design templates (in hopes of hitting the major models), we are now developing single templates that can detect the browser size and automatically reformat the content to best display on that device. This will optimize not only for today’s devices, but also for whatever new sizes come out in the near future.
It really does matter
Now that a majority of web traffic is coming in through non-desktop computers, it is critical that your website display properly on alternate devices. A shocking number of younger adults use their smart phones as their primary internet access device. If your site still tries to display the whole desktop view of your site on their phone, they will skip it and move on to another vendor.
The volume of mobile web usage is so high that now Google even takes your mobile-friendliness into account when ranking search listing for mobile users.
Responsive design is the best solution available today for making your website usable across all of today’s devices. It will reduce your maintenance costs and even improve your Google rankings for mobile users. It’s time to update your site to a responsive design.
The secret to getting a good response on social media is understanding your followers. People don’t follow you on Facebook / Twitter / Instagram to see another copy of your standard advertising, they follow because they want to see behind the scenes and be treated as insiders. To get people’s attention on social media you need to post things they haven’t seen somewhere else.
Most people like being insiders, and are more likely to share your content when they think they have information their friends don’t have. A good series of insiders posts will build buzz, allow you many more touch points than traditional advertising, and will be more likely to be shared.
Here are 20 possible social media posts to promote your next big event:
1. Create a unique hashtag for your event and ask you followers to use it too.
2. Pictures of planning meetings for event.
3. Announce speaker or session details before they are public.
4. Pictures of last year’s event.
5, Pictures (or video) of venue before setup.
6. Pictures (or video) of tshirts and/or supplies as they come in from vendors.
7. Short video interviews from past attendees.
8. Pictures of staff preparing materials / kits / handouts.
9. Pictures of food prep.
10. Pictures of speakers with teasers from their sessions.
11. Pictures (or video) of event setup.
12. Pictures of hotels or lodgings.
13. Short videos with staff about upcoming event.
14. Pictures of entertainment.
15. Pictures of team packing everything up to go.
16. Pictures of rehearsals, sound check.
17. Pictures of volunteers during setup.
18. Green room interview videos with speakers.
19. Update on registration counts.
20. Pictures of attendees during the event (where they can tag themselves).
You can mix your standard marketing messages in with these items. When posting pictures of the venue, don’t be afraid to include “Only 10 days left to register at the earlybird price!”. Make it fun. Make it shareable. But most importantly, make it something special that they only get on social media.
One of the big trends in our business these last few years has been converting existing websites to “responsive” designs to make them more usable from mobile devices. These mobile-friendly websites are generating better results than traditional designs.
Here are three reasons why:
1. More people are using mobile devices to access the internet.
The original mobile internet users were teenagers who lived with their phone in their hands. Teens are still big mobile users, but now they are joined by millions of soccer Moms, contractors, and other business people who spend much of their life away from an office and desktop computer. These mobile workers are now accessing the internet though smart phones and tablets.
2. Google penalizes non-mobile-friendly websites on mobile search rankings.
Google realizes that almost half of their search traffic comes from mobile devices now, so they are adjusting results rankings to favor websites that are mobile-friendly on their results. Regardless of your previous ranking, if your site is not mobile-friendly, Google will now rank you lower on results sent to mobile users.
3. People are more comfortable doing business on mobile devices.
Mobile users are increasingly more comfortable doing transactions over mobile devices. They are willing to make appointments online, do simple transactions and registrations, and even make online purchases over smart phones and tablets. By offering these functions on a mobile site, businesses are capturing the transaction at the point of need, instead of requiring customers to “go back to the office” to place an order.
Mobile-friendly websites are an expected part of business now. Few organizations can afford to ignore the huge number of mobile web users, and the ones who have optimized their sites for mobile transactions are seeing results.
Five things you can check in five minutes…
It’s August. Summer is almost over, school will start soon, and many businesses are getting ready for their busy season.
It’s also a good time to review your website and social media. Many of your customers and new prospects will be seeing them in the next few months. Now is a good time to make sure they are up to date.
Frankly, many business websites are embarrassing and don’t give a professional first impression. Here are five things you can check in five minutes:
1) Check the information on your website and social media. Is it all correct? Did any phone numbers or contacts change since you last updated the site?
2) Check the news. Is your last news article or blog post several months old (or years)? Does your site look like you went out of business months ago and nobody remembered to turn off the website?
3) Check the mobile view. More and more people are using smartphones and tablets on a regular basis. Many are even using mobile devices for their primary internet access. How does your site look on a smartphone and tablet? Is is useable? Does it look professional?
4) Check the message. Does your site present the message you want today? Has your business focus changed? Do you have seasonal marketing messages that needs to be updated?
5) Check the style. Is your site design clean and simple — easy to view on mobile devices? Or does it look old-fashioned, like it was designed years ago when people thought you just couldn’t have too many graphics?
Now is the time to update your site. Your website will be the first impression for many of your new prospects this fall. Don’t let an embarrassing website make you look unprofessional and maybe even cost you business.
Main Street offers free website audits. Call or email today to schedule a no-obligation evaluation of your current website.
Principles of Effective Communications
For Churches and Non-Profits
Principle #1: Guests come first
One of the challenges in communications for churches and non-profits is that we do a tremendous number of recurring events, most of which are attended by the same people each time. Eventually our communications tend to evolve into a series of reminders instead of true promotions.
If a first-time visitor read one of your publications, would they be able to understand it? If someone tried to attend one of your events based only on the information published on your website, would it be enough?
Here are two simple ways to make your communications more guest-friendly:
Eliminate “insider-speak”
From a church bulletin: “MOPS meets in the MPR after flocks.”
This poorly worded announcement is trying to invite visitors to join the Mother’s of Preschools group (MOPS) that meets in the gym (multi-purpose room MPR) after Sunday morning classes (flocks). Your members will understand all the insider-speak, but visitors won’t have a clue.
A large suburban church promoted their student ministry as “Route 66”. They had an outstanding program with great facilities, but nowhere in the building or the website was there any explanation that Route 66 was the student ministry. There were announcements for “Route 66”, but no explanation of who that group was.
We love our acronyms and branding our people, places, and things, but this can make our communications impossible for an outside to understand. Define acronyms, explain branding terms, write for the outsider.
Provide the details
Bulletin announcement: “Missions Banquet at 6pm tonight in the family room.”
This reminder is fine for most of your members, but it doesn’t provide anywhere near enough information for a first-time guest. Is there a cost? Do I need to dress up for this? Do I bring my kids? Is childcare provided? Do I need to bring my checkbook (is this a fund raiser)?
First time guests need significantly more details than your membership. Even simple things like the street address need to be provided. Where is the event? What time? Is there a cost? Are children welcome, is childcare provided? How long does it last? What is the dress code? Where do I park?
You don’t need all the details on every announcement, but they should at least be included on the website (the announcements refer to the website for details). Please don’t require first-time visitors to call the office for the details.
Guests come first
It’s easy to forget this principle when you are cranking out promotions and news for a thousand events a year, but your guests will thank you if you take the time to write a little extra for them.
As the internet has matured and become a mainstream business tool, so have modern web design standards. Today’s websites are designed to be user-focused, and equally usable on any device – desktop, tablet, or cell phone. These objectives have made web design less focused on graphic design, and more on effective content delivery.
Here are a few design elements in modern, mobile-friendly websites:
Mobile-first design
With desktop and mobile devices having such different capabilities, there are times when it is impossible to optimize a design for both at the same time. Today designers are leaning toward “mobile-first” designs, sacrificing desktop optimization in favor of creating a better mobile experience.
Streamlined layouts
Modern designs have less complicated graphics, more white space, simpler layouts. Besides being cleaner looking (think Apple), they also load faster on bandwidth limited devices like cell phones.
Responsive layouts
Rather than building separate layouts for desktop and mobile views, modern sites use “responsive” designs that automatically resize and rearrange the content layout based on the size of the browser.
Large, responsive images
Since designs need to look good on tiny screens, many designers are moving toward fewer, but larger images. Full screen width images are becoming common, with the site automatically resizing the image to match the browser size.
Less text, bigger text
Again, as designers work to make sites usable on mobile devices, they push text sizes up and generally reduce the total volume of text on sites. Also, buttons are bigger and menus are tighter.
More meat, less fluff
Traditional desktop designs with three column layouts have lots of room for non-critical graphics, mission statements, and feel good photography. Mobile layouts are almost always one column with all content is stacked by priority. Feel-good stuff doesn’t make it in the design any more, every element is important.
The rapid growth of mobile internet usage has radically affected modern website design. Rather than being design fads that come and go, these new standard are functional, and important to making your website most usable to mobile users.
Elegant Themes has been a game changer in the industry for many years. Not only do they offer a very inexpensive entry point to access a wide variety of themes, they also have pushed the envelope in traditional theme options and content customization.
They started with short code integration which allowed users to easily do things like slideshows, tabbed content and columned layouts from inside the content editor of WordPress. This concept has now grown into their flagship theme, Divi. With the recent release of Divi 2.4, Elegant Themes has demonstrated how far they can control every aspect of a site’s design.
Divi 2.4 doesn’t look on the outside much different than the previous versions. The real change was in the back end editors and the control they are offering over every element in Divi. If you are not familiar with Divi, it is a clean, mobile-friendly, responsive design that utilizes a diverse library of content options using their built in content system. It includes default layouts that can be used to quickly populate a site with demo content that is featured in the Demo site.
One of the biggest benefits of Divi is this ability to make it look like the demo in just a matter of minutes using their “load” function for their page builder. For example, you can load a corporate home page that will feature a slider, 3 content blurbs, some quotes about your company, and a contact form at the bottom of the page. That is just one of the many default layout models they offer that can then be customized and modified.
I am obviously a little bit in love with Divi. It’s a fun system to use and really allows for some great content treatment and individualized pages. The question that comes up with a lot of clients is, “Is Divi right for my project?” To answer that, I’ll go through a few Pros and Cons to Divi:
I doubt that there will every be “one theme to rule them all”, pardon the Lord Of The Rings reference, but Divi does try to do that and continues to impress me with each release. I look forward to what Divi will do next and how designers, like me, will get the chance to push it’s limits of design and customization.
Adam White is the Creative Director of Main Street Enterprises, a web development and consulting firm that specializes in small businesses and non-profits. He can be reached at awhite@MainStreetOpen.com.
It’s been a busy couple of months in the web development and hosting business. Several new exploits have been discovered and hackers have been ravishing websites all over the world. WordPress has released several updates in the last few weeks as they rapidly respond to newly identified security issues in their software and their partner developers’ systems.
WordPress has just released version 4.2.2 which is a cumulative update including all security patches to date. We recommend you install this update immediately.
Normally, we advise our clients to let new versions run in the market for a few weeks before installing them on commercial sites. However these security updates are extremely important, and have much lower risk of causing issues with your site.
Main Street offers a very inexpensive automatic update service if you are not comfortable running updates to your site, or you don’t want the hassle of monitoring when new updates are available. Contact us for details.
Starting yesterday (4/21/15), Google will take your site’s “mobile-friendliness” into account when providing search results to mobile devices. This means your site may rank lower on Google searches from cell phones and tablets if they don’t deem it “mobile-friendly”.
According to Google, roughly 50% of online searches come from mobile devices. In an effort to show the best results to their clients, they are now factoring in the mobile quality of your site when they generate results. They are not banning sites that don’t display well on mobile devices, but when multiple results are available, they will give preference to those that can generate better results on a mobile device.
For example: If a user on a cell phone or tablet Googles “Lucky Dragon Chinese food Tulsa OK” they will most likely get Lucky Dragon’s site regardless of it’s mobile-friendliness. But if they search for “Chinese food Tulsa OK”, Lucky Dragon may get pushed lower in the rankings if Google finds other Chinese restaurants in Tulsa have more mobile-friendly sites.
Google has a free tool to let you check your site: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
If you have a new, responsive site, you should be in good shape. If your site is deemed “not mobile-friendly” by the Google Gods, then it’s probably time to update your website. Otherwise you can expect a drop in search traffic from the 50% of Google searches that originate from a mobile device.
Give Main Street a call or email if you want to discuss how to make your site more mobile-friendly.
Who can benefit from a one-page website?
In each case, a one-page website offers a quick, inexpensive, and effective solution.
A typical one-page website provides the same information as a one page brochure. They identify your product, your market, your competitive advantage, and details how to contact your company. All of this content is carefully loaded with keywords to give you the maximum search engine exposure.
With a simple design and limited content, these sites go up much quicker and less expensively than traditional websites. But even without the full price, they still can provide full exposure to search engines.
A one-page site allows you to create a new set of primary keywords for your business. If you are selling into multiple unrelated markets (ie. an insurance agent wanting to target doctors, lawyers and accountants) you can build multiple one-page sites. Each site specifically targets that one market – “insurance for doctors”, “insurance for lawyers”, and “insurance for accountants”. To search engines, each site has the impact of a completely dedicated site — at a fraction of the cost.
For products and markets that are new and evolving, one-page sites give you a quick and easy way to launch. As the marketing evolves, you can update and expand the site. It’s not unusual to see a one-page site grow into a full blown marketing site over time. In any case, it gives you flexibility in your online marketing.
Next time you want to expand your marketing, but aren’t ready to commit the big bucks, give a one-page website a try. You might be surprised how well it works.
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Terrell Sanders is president of Main Street Enterprises, a web development and consulting firm that specializes in small businesses and non-profits. He can be reached at tsanders@MainStreetOpen.com.
Your website is more than just another element in your online marketing mix. It should be considered the digital anchor that holds all the other pieces together. Even with the phenomenal rise of social media, your website is still the one online property that you fully control, and the only place you can present your message without competition.
As an anchor, your website serves two important functions: it provides a solid point for your social media and online ads to link to, and it provides dedicated outbound links to your other online marketing resources from the website. Both of these functions help strengthen your brand and improve your marketing.
Here are three simple rules for using your website as a digital anchor:
Rule 1: All online content links back to the website.
Your website is the one online property you fully control. When visitors find your content on social media you want to use that opportunity to pull them back to the website. The longer they stay on Facebook, or Instagram, or Google, the more chances they have to find a competitor’s product or another distraction. While you will have content specifically developed for social media, you want to always direct visitors to the website for more information. Once on your website, they won’t have distractions. All ads and social media properties include links back to the corporate website.
Rule 2: The website links to all other relevant online content.
While your website is the best venue for telling your story in a distraction-free environment, it’s not reasonable to expect people to come to your site every day looking for new content. Once they have visited your site, make sure they can easily follow you on their favorite social media. It is much easier to build a relationship with people on social media than with a string of advertising or direct mail campaigns. Let people find you where they usually hang out. Include links to your social media prominently on your website.
Rule 3: Details are on the website.
Many social media posts have opportunities to link back to your website. Don’t post details on social media. Instead link back to an article on your website containing the details. For example, if you are posting an article (like this one) to market your business, post the full article on your website. Then post teaser links on your social media that link back to the article on your site. The teasers will drive traffic to your site where they will hopefully find other valuable content. The magic words you want to use as often as possible are “details on the website”.
Social media and online advertising have created tremendous new opportunities for online marketing. But they are noisy channels, full of distractions. By using your website as a digital anchor you can benefit from the additional traffic social media generates, but still bring your visitors into an environment you control – your website.
Terrell Sanders is the founder of Main Street Enterprises, a web development and consulting organization specializing in churches and non-profits. Terrell can be reached tsanders@MainStreetOpen.com.
True story. Several years ago a pastor at a medium-sized suburban church called me. “We need help. If you Google “Baptist church” in our town, our church website doesn’t even come up at all. Several other churches show up on page one, some aren’t even in our town. Why aren’t we listed?”
Being the internet guru that I am, I immediately looked at his site to see if the words “Baptist church” and his town name actually occurred on his home page. They didn’t. He had a warm, inviting website that would easily appeal to a good Baptist family in his area, but the specific words “Baptist” and his town name weren’t on the site. That’s a pretty big hit on Google. They index you on what your site says, not what you meant.
Much of our work in search engine optimization is not rocket science. It’s trying to figure out what the visitor is searching for, and putting those words on the site – preferably on the home page and in page titles.
Another sneaky killer is using the wrong keywords. Your store may be the largest retailer of quality footwear in the world, but if your customer is looking for “running shoes” or “boots”, the keyword “footwear” isn’t going to put you on top of the search listing.
Google loves specialists. The more tightly tailored your pages are to your keywords, the better they will rank. The broader you go, the weaker the keywords rank. As business owners we want to market our products and services as broadly as possible — to reach as many potential customers as possible — but this has the unintended consequence of diluting our keywords. It’s a balancing act.
Take a look at your website. Do you have the right keywords on your site? Do you have the keywords that your clients are using? There are many nuances to search engine optimization that will make minor improvements to your listing, but start with the basics and you will be amazed how quickly you can improve your ranking.
What every business owner needs to know about web sites
2 hour lunch & learn format. Non-technical for business owners
Sponsored by: Noble Chamber of Commerce, Discover Church & Mid-America Technology Center
The rules for good web design have changed over the last ten years. Users have much clearer expectations of what they want from a website, mobile devices are changing the format of the display, and design standards have evolved.
Today’s most effective websites are designed with modern, no-nonsense, mobile users in mind. This two hour lunch-and-learn class will explain to business managers the best design principles for modern websites, and the most effective ways to organize your website to get results.
What you will learn:
This is a non-technical seminar designed for business owners and managers. Graphic design skills are not required, and we will not be teaching how to program websites in this session.
Designing Effective Websites
Date: Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Time: 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Location: Discover Church, 1002 Hamilton Dr, Noble OK 73068
Cost: $10 for Noble Chamber members, $15 for non-members (price includes lunch)
Register online: http://www.matech.edu/bis/sbm/noble/
Most of the security problems and site failures we see on WordPress sites are caused by old versions of WordPress or plugins. WordPress and the major plugin developers typically stay very current with known security issues, but the updates only work if they are installed.
Main Street offers automatic updates to WordPress and most major plugins. This inexpensive service starts at $5/mo for most sites.
Our automatic update service will check your site monthly, and install all available updates to WordPress and any supported plugins. If you have unsupported plugins which require updates, we will contact you with a recommendation and cost.
This is the easiest and most cost-effective way to keep your site current, and prevent unexpected downtime and expensive cleanup from a site hack.
Contact Main Street today for a quote on WordPress Automatic Updates.
Email marketing ceased being cool a few years ago. Spammers and overuse tarnished it’s reputation, but despite recent news reports, email marketing is not dead. It’s actually still very cost effective.
Social media marketing gives us access to fans and their friends, but Facebook continues to raise the bar on how often you have to “pay” to get this “free” advertising. Even with a million fans, if you aren’t paying to promote each post, you probably aren’t reaching the majority of them.
Email marketing can still be accomplished at an extremely low cost — often for free if you have less than a few thousand subscribers. Even with spam filters it has a better than average chance of getting to your customer’s eyes compared to social media or direct mail.
But email marketing still relies on collecting those important email addresses before it will work. Make sure you have a process to collect email addresses from new customers and prospects. Put a subscription form on your website allowing interested visitors to subscribe for more information. Even if you don’t produce an email newsletter today, you can still collect email addresses for the future.
Don’t write off email as old technology. Like anything else, it probably won’t stand as your exclusive marketing channel, but you will be amazed the results you can generate from a quarterly enews blast or occasional special offer. The cost is minimal once you have the list, and the results often come back the same day. You can’t say that about direct mail.
Start collected email addresses. Give us a shout if you need help.
Like a lot of things in life, websites need to be updated every few years even if they were fabulous when launched. We don’t think you need to update every year just because, but there are some factors that will help you decide when to go for a new look.
Here are two ways to know it’s time to update your website:
1. Your website doesn’t look good on a smart phone
Research from earlier this year showed 63% of adult cell phone users use their phone to go online. Over 30% use their phone as their primary internet access device. Especially if your web visitors are young, your site needs to be usable and look good on a mobile device.
2. Your website doesn’t integrate with your social media.
Over 74% of online adults use social media. Today your business probably needs a strong social media presence, especially if you market to consumers. Social media traffic compliments your website, but doesn’t replace it. You need to have foolproof ways to drive traffic from your website to your social media, and from your social media to your website.
Fortunately, updating websites is significantly easier and less expensive than building new websites. Usually most of the content can be reused, and the basic navigational structure stays the same. If the original website was well designed and had good content to begin with, then the revision is more of an update than a complete rebuild.
Take a look at your site. Then give us a call if you want another opinion on how to make it most effective in today’s market.
Research sources:
http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fact-sheet/
http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/
Last week we helped restore a WordPress site that had been hacked. The WordPress version was relatively current, but one of the plugins was old, and the hacker had used a weak spot in the plugin to vandalize the site.
Most plugins are simple and don’t cause security issues. But plugins that accept data or allow file uploads are especially vulnerable to security holes. It’s important to keep these plugins up-to-date. On your WordPress dashboard it will show you how many plugins have updates beside the Plugins menu option.
As always, perform a full backup of your site and your data before upgrading. Poorly supported plugins are notorious for generating output that can break your template and crash your site. These are usually easy to fix, but it’s still good to have a backup on hand.
WordPress released their version 4.0 last week. You can read the details of the new release here.
Usually when software vendors release a new version ending in dot zero, it signifies a major update. In this case it really should be called 3.10. The new version has some nice features that make editing and managing media easier, but no huge system-wide changes that will require you to retrain your staff.
Personally, I think this is good. As WordPress has evolved into a professional caliber business tool, stability becomes more important that chasing every new fad and feature.
This release looks solid. We recommend updating for our clients. As always, perform a full backup of your site and your data before upgrading. If you have automatic updates enabled, you may still need to trigger this update manually since it is technically a major release.
