Research: One in four teens are “cell-mostly” internet users

Recent research from Pew Internet reports that 25% of teens are “cell-mostly” internet users – that is, they primarily access the internet through their cell phone. Older teen girls are especially likely to be cell-mostly internet users – 34% compared to 24% of boys the same age. Currently 78% of teens now have cell phones, and almost half of them own smartphones. That translates to 37% of all teens who now have smartphones. According to the study, youth in lower-income and lower-education households are somewhat less likely to use the internet at all, but are just as...

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WordPress Security Update

Keeping your website secure is an ongoing battle. Fortunately, most major CMS systems like WordPress have lots of eyes watching for threats and issuing quick fixes. If you keep your WordPress version current, you are protected from a great number of the potential threats. Chris Jean at iThemes (and a former Main Street employee) has written a great blog post talking about some of the current threats in the WordPress world and some fairly simple security steps you can take to reduce the risk of hackers getting into your site. Check it out:...

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Happy 10th Birthday WordPress (almost)

WordPress will be 10 years old in May. Yeah, this is a little bit early, but we really love WordPress and don’t mind starting the party early. If you’ve been around the internet for very long, you know that 10 years in the internet is like a billion years in the real world. In the last 10 years WordPress has gone from nothing to running 65% of the top million websites on the internet. Builtwith.com has some fascinating statistics on WordPress and the other major content management systems used today. Besides having the largest installed base, WordPress also is on the receiving...

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Does your website target your best customers?

Everyone want their websites to rank highly on Google. There is a whole sub-industry of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that works to optimize websites to get the best ranking. When we start studying search engine optimization, it’s easy to get sidetracked by the minutia of optimizing techniques – optimizing image tags, managing percentage of copy of a page, and cramming keywords in meta tags. These are all marginally effective, but it’s amazing how many organizations don’t even have their primary keywords on the site. Examples: – A local service business...

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Social Media Graphics Checklist

Are you frustrated by all the different image sizes and banner sizes required by the various social media sites? Every time you find a good masthead image for Facebook, you realize it won’t work well anywhere else. We got tired of trying to remember or look up all the image sizes so we created this cheat sheet with the sizes and rules for all the major social media platforms. Of course, this checklist is only good until somebody changes their format, so get it fast and get all your graphics in sync! Social Media Graphis...

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The economical one page website

The rise of social media has changed how websites are used. As more discussion, promotion and photos move to social media, the traditional website becomes either smaller, or a redundant copy of data that also exists on social media. Many individuals and small groups start with a Facebook page or Twitter feed and then look toward a traditional website to gain search engine placement. But, with all their content already on social media sites, they dread the extra work of maintaining another copy of it on a website. Enter the one page website. The one page website goes back to the old strategy...

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