Why is Responsive Design Important?

If you've been following our blog, then most likely you have seen us use the term "responsive
design" a number of times - and for good reason. In 2016, it's a primary design strategy when creating or redesigning a website. If you’re unclear as to why responsive design is important, then here is a quick primer.

How Does it Work?

Responsive design, also known as a mobile-friendly website, ensures your website visitors experience a pleasant browsing experience, regardless of the web-enabled device they use to visit your website. Mobile phones, tablets, and desktops all come in different shapes and sizes, and a website with responsive design responds to the device you're using and automatically adjusts the site to best display in the device.

Why is Responsive Design so Important?

Do you have a smartphone? Do you use it often? I'm not a mind reader, but I'm willing to bet your answers to both questions are yes. We’ve all visited a website that was NOT Responsively Designed from our smartphone. There was a lot of scrolling, pinching, and resizing to view the entire website. Annoying, right?

The size of the smartphone market, which is estimated at 68% of Americans, makes it more crucial than ever to ensure you’re providing the best user experience. And as we’ve mentioned in prior posts, the better the user experience, the better your search engine optimization will be. This is one reason why Google gives search rank priority to any business with a mobile-friendly design.

How to Know if Your Site is Responsive?
There’s an online tool provided by Google, and you can use it to run a free test of your site. If your results come back with anything other than “Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly,” then you’ll want to take the necessary steps required to get your website in line with today’s technology. Our team at CC Communications specializes in designing functional, visually appealing responsive design websites and we'd love the opportunity to speak with you about how our team can transform your business' online presence.

Connect with our team at www.CCCom.com/ContactUs for a no obligation analysis of your current web design. Ensuring you have a responsively designed website will be an investment into your future, put your business ahead of your competitors, and most of all will provide your website visitors and customers a pleasurable experience on your website.

Native App vs Web App: Which is Better for Your Business?

Apps are now assimilated as an integral facet of our daily life - Whether that is fulfilling our quest to conquer the world in Clash of Clans, checking out the latest sports and news from around the world from the SportsCenter or USA Today app, or running our lives via Evernote.

In all reality, what would we do without smartphones and apps to help keep our lives organized and at the top of our game? Knowing the ease it brings to your daily life, it's only normal you may be considering the development of an app for your business to provide your customers the utmost in resources and access. But what type of app is best for your business?

Not all apps are the same. The two apps that you may be considering are a Native App or a Web App. A Native App is installed directly on your mobile device and is uniquely created to operate on your phone, whether you have an iPhone, Android, iPad, etc.

On the other end of the spectrum, a Web App is solely accessed through a device's web browser. There is no installation that needs to take place to access a Web App. Consider thinking of a Web App as a cross between a mobile-friendly website and a Native App.

So, we come back to the question, what's best for your business? The following pros and cons to each option will hopefully provide you clarity in your quest to make the right moves for your business.

The Pros of a Native App

• Faster processing time as compared to a Web App.
• Offers the ability to use an app offline.
• Integration with smartphone features, such as the camera, GPS, and push notifications.
• Prime placement in app stores and marketplaces, like iTunes and Google Play.
• Since apps need to be approved by an app store or marketplace, users enjoy peace of mind and security in their downloads.

The Cons of a Native App

• Native Apps are typically quite expensive to develop, as compared to a Web App.
• Developers need to create a Native App for each OS (operating system), such as for iPhone, Android, etc.
• Users have to manually update a Native App if automatic updates are not selected by the user.
• Native Apps need to be approved by an app store or marketplace before they can be downloaded or purchased

The Pros of a Web App

• Does not require users to install new software to their phone or gain approvals from an app store or marketplace.
• Updates are available immediately and do not require users to make updates to receive the benefits of an update.
• No internal space is required to use a Web App on your phone.
• Only one universal version needs to be developed for users, regardless of their phone's OS.
• Generally, Web App's is less costly to implement as compared to a Native App.

The Cons of a Web App

• No ability to search through app store or marketplace to find a Web App, though, there is some ability to do so in iTunes.
• There is difficulty to find a Web App, unless a user is deliberately searching.
• Web Apps are not able to be used offline.
• It can be costly to provide updates to a Web App to ensure that users of any mobile device can access a Web App as it's meant to be accessed.

Our opinion? Combine the two for maximum exposure. Many tools available to CC Communications will blend the best functions of both a Web App and Native App into one management system. Otherwise, if you have a strong current customer base and are looking to boost their engagement or offer enhanced features, a stand-alone Native App may be your best option to pursue.

If you're still in flux, please reach out to us! We'd be more than happy to help you help you conclude the  best option for your business. Once your decision is made, please remember that CC Communications can be the source to help you develop a Native App or Web App. To contact the CC Communications team, please visit www.CCCom.com/ContactUs or call 704.761.4676.

Domain Theft: A Cautionary Tale, Courtesy of the Trump Campaign

It's no secret that politics, especially during an election year, can get ugly. If a candidate isn't on top of their game a rival can quickly get the better of them, which was the case in a recent takeover of the domain, JebBush.com. Apparently Jeb's team forgot to renew his domain name, which was quickly snapped up by either the Trump campaign or a supporter. Suddenly all web traffic was redirected to donaldjtrump.com, the official website for his presidential bid. Oh snap!

Since Jeb has dropped out of the race, viewers are now pointed to a page of sponsored links, a form of cybersquatting that we'll discuss in a future post. Stay tuned!

Don't Let This Happen to You
Politicians are not the only ones susceptible to this type of hostile domain takeover. Businesses and brands also need to be aware of the same pitfalls when managing online assets. If someone takes ownership of your domain you could be facing a lengthy legal battle and/or a large expense to get it back.

Understand the Process
When your domain is coming up for renewal, you'll begin to receive email notifications. Typically you'll receive three warning emails over a ninety day period leading up to the termination date. If you miss them, then your domain becomes an open target for your competition. Here are some ways you can help prevent your domain registration from lapsing.

• Keep your domain registration date on file and set up a calendar reminder.
• Be sure you know which email address will receive the notifications. 
• Use an email address that won't become dormant. Your IT manager may some day leave the company meaning their inbox could go unchecked.
• Allow your web development agency to manage the process for you. Here at CC Communications, we provide this extra level of security as part of our ongoing web hosting services.
• Remember your registrar. Since your specific domain name renewal date and contact information are typically viewable by anyone online, you may receive fraudulent email messages from other parties claiming your domain name registration is about to expire and offering to renew the license on your behalf.  Before responding, make sure that the organization sending you the message is in fact your designated registrar or service agent.  Take care to avoid sending your domain name license registration login ID and password information to anyone via email. Your legitimate registrar or service agent should already have a record of this information. Also take care to avoid providing any credit card or other online payment authorization information to via email, which is not normally secure. Always make sure that the representative offering to assist with your renewal is in fact your actual registrar or service agent, and not someone who is attempting to steal your domain name license or credit card information.

The Beginner's Guide to SEO - Part 2

Are you new to search engine optimization? We're detailing some of the key strategies you'll want to consider when auditing your website for Search Engine Optimization performance. This is part two of a series. If you haven't read it already, be sure to start with the Beginner's Guide to SEO - Part 1.

Why should you concentrate on SEO? Because when consumers are searching for a specific product, business, or service, they don't venture past the first page of Google. If your website isn't appearing on the top page, then your competitors are edging you out, which means you need to take proper measures to regain that lost traffic. So, what can you do to boost your SEO health? Take note of the following tips and contact the CC Communications team. We've been tailoring successful SEO campaigns for clients for over 22 years, and can provide an in-depth assessment to help get your site back on track.

Internal Links
Most SEOs and businesses focus on link building to websites outside of their own, but it's often forgotten that it's also important to link between pages on your own website, too! Internal link building provides an information trail through your website for users to easily navigate, and creates a hierarchy of information. Creating links from your more popular website pages to your sub-pages also gives you the opportunity to share your SEO 'juice' and increase the visibility of linked pages on your website.

Page Titles and Descriptions
One of the bigger errors you can make is generically titling your pages. For example, titling your homepage 'Home' does absolutely nothing for your SEO health. What does 'Home' tell the search engines? Consider page titles that speak to who you are and what you offer. Take for example, the CC Communications page title for our homepage: Charlotte Web Design & Development | CC Communications. It outlines our location, targeted keyword terms & main service offerings, and the company name. Be mindful to keep all of your page titles to 70 characters or under.

Your page description allows you to go more into detail about what one will find on a selected page of your website. Do not simply copy and paste a generic message onto all pages of your website. Duplication will not serve, but hinder, your On-Page SEO campaign. Write descriptions that are no more than 155 characters and uniquely speak to the content of the given page.

Become Social
Social Media has become increasingly important to SEO. Not only does social media activity show the search engines that your website hosts authority and is valuable, it also increases your opportunity to become indexed more quickly. The more fans, followers, likes, and friends you have on your social networks that interact with your business, the more authority you create, meaning you have a strong possibility of showing in their social media news feeds and personalized settings in the major search engines. Social Media is viral and the more 'shareworthy' content you provide, the better chances you'll have of having the word of your business spread like wildfire.

Ensure Your Website Has a Site Map
Though it seems minor, implementing a site map hosts bold benefits, such as easier website navigation and better visibility on the major search engines. Each time you make changes to your website, or add pages, your site map alerts the search engines of these updates for proper indexing.

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CC Communications has been helping our clients thrive online for 22 years... How can we serve your business?

Project Spotlight: Stone Truck Parts

CC Communications recently launched a redesigned website for Stone Truck Parts, a provider of parts and service to commercial vehicles across North Carolina. The new website incorporates the latest in responsive design technology and was built using DotNetNuke (DNN), a powerful Content Management System platform we recommend for it's ease of use and enhanced security features.

In addition to creating this new website, CC Communications also provided an in-depth SEO (search engine optimization) analysis, added an interactive calendar to promote events like Stone Truck Parts' "Tech Nights" series, and expanded the online job application to streamline the recruitment process.

CC Communications also added an employee intranet to the website to service the needs of Stone Truck Parts' growing workforce across the Carolinas. The intranet is a special feature of the DNN platform, making it an easy platform to manage internally.

Is your website starting to show it's age? Contact CC Communications for a free site review and analysis.

Is Email Marketing Worth It?

Are you on the fence about using email marketing for your business? You're not alone. Many companies have so many moving pieces to their marketing mix, that they're unsure of adding anything else to their to-do list. Many believe that blogging and social media are better alternatives to an email marketing strategy. However, we know full-well how challenging the Facebook algorithms can be, and we know the sheer volume of tweets that are sent on Twitter each minute (over 100,000), which can quickly hide your messages. While social media is a crucial piece to the marketing pie, email marketing should not be shunned.

In fact, e-mail marketing should be viewed in the same vein as social media. They are all tools in the inbound marketing arsenal. You should house all content on your blog or news section of your website, and then push that content out through as many channels as possible - Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and yes email. Your goal is to pull these readers back into your website or blog where they'll find all of the content you've worked so hard to create and ultimately learn more about your business.

The key to email marketing is to be realistic. Having open rates of over 80% are not normal. In fact, the average open rate for an email campaign is close to 20%. Why are the statistics so low? Well, think about how your inbox operates. How often do you delete messages to get to the core messages that need your attention? Have you ever looked at your spam folder? How often have you abandoned email accounts? Have you ever blocked an email from contacting you? The list goes on.
Once you dial into your evangelist base of email subscribers, and provide them the content and information they yearn for, you can expect to see the interactions and hopeful deep ROI of your investment.

RELATED ARTICLE: IS YOUR EMAIL CONSIDERED SPAM?

Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you evaluate email marketing for your business...

Keep the content engaging
Don't just send out an email campaign to 'touch' your email subscribers. Consumers are well conditioned and can tell when content is forced. Care for your email subscribers as you would your sales contacts and take the time to create lists within your subscriber base, so you can best 'speak' to your segmented audiences. Also, remember that nearly 75% of the over 140 billion emails that are sent each and every day are viewed as spam. Craft email campaigns that do not mislead your subscribers, but rather ask for their engagement, whether that is a sales touch point or the like. Make the email subjects catchy or clear and save the email fluff. Most people skim through their emails and asking a subscriber to invest their time into a detailed email is not feasible. Instead, invite a user to click to learn more or engage further in a trackable way.

Watch how often you send emails campaigns
In some business industries, it is acceptable to send an email campaign 3 or more times per week (news outlets and subscription based platforms), whereas for a B2B businesses, bi-monthly email campaigns are quite sufficient. There is a fine line between not 'touching' your email contacts enough and doing so too much.

'Earn' your email subscribers
Though it can tempting to buy a list to boost your subscribers or trade lists with another company, it's not an ethical practice. Please, please, please consider not doing so. As a business, I'd rather have 250 email subscribers who truly engage with my email campaigns than have an email list of 5,000 who barely eek a 10% open rate.

Email Marketing meets Social Media Marketing
Many of the top email platforms, like MailChimp, offer the ability to share your email campaigns as they're sent to your social media platforms. You may notice some users unsubscribe from your email list because they follow you on social media, but do not let this alarm you. Consider sharing your emails to your social media accounts as another touch point. HOWEVER, make sure that when your emails are auto-shared to your social media accounts, that they're translating well and include copy that speaks to your connections about what they'll expect in your email communication.

Track, track, track
What's great about many email platforms is that they offer extensive tracking and avenues to truly dial into and diagnose your email lists. Take the time to weekly, or however often you send emails, dig into your email tracking to see what your consumers click on in your email campaigns, and what gets ignored. You can learn a lot by email subscriber and consumer email traffic patterns. Let their behavior guide your content marketing strategy. If certain topics resonate well with your audience, then produce similar content for future emails.

Comment below and tell us what your thoughts and experiences are with email marketing? Have you enjoyed great successes or found that email marketing does not bode well into your business? As always, feel free to contact us here at CC Communications if you need help with setting up or managing your enewsletter strategy.

The Beginner's Guide to SEO - Part 1

5 Tips to Aid Your On-Page SEO Campaign. 

By now, most people have a basic understanding of what SEO is or at least know how crucial it is to implement a strong SEO campaign to expand and maintain your online presence. If you're a new kid in town or need a refresher, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is essentially the strategy and techniques that are used help a website achieve high rankings in the search engines, like Google and Bing. The better your website ranks for relevant keyword terms that one would use to find your business online, the better optimized your website has become or is becoming. You can reasonably assume you'll have more website traffic and more potential clients exploring your products or services.

Truly, if your website is not ranking well in the search engines, your competitors websites are...

Website Content 
While engaging in an SEO campaign or correctly conveying your services to your website visitors, content is king...Hands down. What content you have on your website truly is of utmost consideration for your SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Be mindful; just because you have a lot of content on your website, it doesn't mean it is always helpful. Make sure to infuse keywords or keyword terms (common terms that one would use to describe and find your website) into your content as you're able. For example, it's no secret that 'Charlotte web design' is obviously a keyword term that we'd like to rank well for and through our content, we take the consideration to implement that term as we're able.

Also consider hyper-linking specific keywords to internal (hosted on your website) and external (outside of your website) destinations, which is of huge benefit, too. Make sure that the keywords that you link to are relevant to what one would find on the linked page. Avoid using phrases like "click here" as you're missing out on an opportunity to fully optimize the phrase. An example of this practice would be adding a link here for our webpage on SEO services.

Side Note: Save the flowery writing, or what I call 'puppies and kittens' writing for somewhere else. I'm an admitted 'puppies and kittens' writer, but when it comes to SEO and keyword driven content, there is no room for that. Make your content as focused and meaty as possible.

Blog 
Blogging has multiple benefits for your business. When you create relevant, keyword-rich, original content, not only does your website benefit, your business savvy spreads by positioning yourself top-of-mind to your audience. If you create posts that are useful, interesting, and original, you add value and take the steps to earn your spot as an industry expert. I must caution that haphazardly posting a few blog entries will not cut the mustard; you need to be consistent with blogging and keep posts coming at a steady pace.

Name Your Website Images
When you save a document or image to your desktop or server, how are you labeling the image? Search engines do not read images as we do; they read images by the title. Take this for example. Your business is in the food & beverage industry, specializing in creating sweet treats. You're adding a new image to your website via your CMS and you title it Pic1948459.jpg. How does that benefit your SEO? It definitely doesn't. Take the extra few seconds to correctly title the image:  Charlotte-MiniCupcakes-CCBakingCompany.jpg. Not only does your image include your region, what the picture entails, it also includes your business. Much less, fully and correctly labeling your images will go a long way to ensuring that you're able to stay organized, without flipping through hundreds of pictures.

Leave Out the Meta Keywords 
In the past several years, Google has publicly noted that they do not take keyword meta tags into consideration for an SEO campaign. Check out what Matt Cutts of Google had to say about this fact. In the past, search engines 'read' the keywords that were embedded websites.  However, some websites began an unethical approach called 'keyword stuffing', where they would input dozens of keywords into their website meta data that they wished to rank for, whether it was relative to their to their business or not.  Put your focus into filling out your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions instead, which are of great consideration to your On-Page SEO.

Don't Forget the ALT Tags 
Similar to labeling images copiously, ensure that you also fill in the ALT tag associated with your images. An ALT tag is the text that is associated or alternative to viewing your image. You don't need to write a novel about your image; instead, just a few words that describe what a picture entails. For example, if you have a puppy training business and you're looking to create an ALT tag for a picture of puppy training, consider having the ALT tag read, 'German Shepard Puppy Training Charlotte NC.

There are obviously more than five things that need to be done for a strong SEO campaign, so please consider this blog post one in a series. Take a second to follow the CC Communications blog to ensure that you don't miss a beat!

Can we help you in the meantime? If you're interested in the comprehensive SEO and Internet Marketing services that CC Communications offers, or would like more information, please contact Marketing@CCCom.com or call us at 704-543-1171.