October 2015

  • Halloween Posts on Your Company Blog

    Halloween Posts on Your Company Blog

    Should you be posting about Halloween on your company blog? Not if your target demographic would be offended or your brand wouldn’t benefit from the frivolous nature of such a post. We’re doing seasonal posts for about half the sites we blog for. Here are some ways to make it work. Write a normal post…

  • Trying Out Hotspots Analytics

    Trying Out Hotspots Analytics

    Hotspots Analytics is a free WordPress plugin that provides data about website usage that used to be costly to obtain. It offers heatmaps and custom event tracking. Your website and your browser have to be HTML5 compliant to use the heatmap features. The makers of the plugin warn that it shouldn’t be used “where performance…

  • Trained Customers

    Trained Customers

    Gideon and I still use paper planners, and this is the time of year that I order them. I went online over the weekend and placed the order, and I typed in my code to get 20% off for the reorder. I clicked on “Apply the promotion.” Up popped the message, “Trained Customer Discount Applied.”…

  • Is SEO Too Effective?

    Is SEO Too Effective?

    Everyone is connected these days. Well, everyone might be a bit of an exaggeration. It’s estimated that about 45% of the entire world population uses the Internet, though almost 90% of North Americans are in that group. That’s a pool of about 3.2 billion people who are online. People have computers in their pockets, and…

  • What’s Your Website Waiting For?

    What’s Your Website Waiting For?

    It would be nice if website builds always went smoothly. In real life, they sometimes get hung up while waiting for a picture, a bio, or some other piece of content. What can you do when you’re stuck in this way? Launch anyway, and change it later. This is often the easiest and best option.…

  • Need States and Websites

    Need States and Websites

    I’ve been reading The Dorito Effect, a fascinating book about the food industry in America. At one point, there’s a discussion about how some food companies are no longer thinking of their customers as an Asian-American housewife or a Hispanic Millennial guy, but are thinking instead about need states. The housewife might need to fix…