Sharp Innovations Blog
4 Ways To Get The Design You Want
February 14, 2018When you’re getting ready to make a new website, you can take some important steps to ensure that you’re happy with the design that your developer creates for you. Here at Sharp, our designers will always try to incorporate your vision as we see it while still implementing general rules of good practice in the world of the web so that you get a website that matches your vision and works efficiently for your customers.
Things like button placement, color palette, fonts, iconography, photos, and so much more are all important decisions that go into an initial website design. Merging these deliberate decisions with what you have in mind is a careful balance that can sometimes result in something unexpected without a lot of detail. Some people like to be surprised and allow our designers as much creative freedom as they want, but if you have a particular vision of how you want your new site to look, here are 4 ways to get the design you want.
1. Provide as much detail as possible. If you have a very specific vision, be sure to communicate it as clearly as you can. The more detail you give us, the closer we can get to your vision. To you, that vision can seem obvious, but we may have a very different picture in mind if you don’t provide us with copious descriptions of what you’re looking for. So tell us every little thing. For a web designer, there is no such thing as too much detail!
The Internet In 2018
January 31, 2018“The only constant is change.” That’s how web development is defined, and in 2018 nothing will be different.
Users are continuously expecting more from their online experiences. Content should be engaging, intuitive, and accessible everywhere in real-time, especially on mobile devices.
Here are some online trends to watch in 2018.
Browser extensions are key add-ons for the major browsers and have been for years. Extensions improve a browser’s user interface and make browsing easier for the user.
Here Are 3 Actionable Items to Improve Your SEO Results in 2018
December 21, 2017If you’re planning your marketing strategy for the New Year and haven’t thought about your digital presence, now is the time!
2017 saw a number of important changes as search engines such as Google and Bing have continued to evolve in an attempt to deliver the best results for web users. By keeping up with and adapting to these changes, you can help ensure that your website is making the biggest impact and delivering the best returns from search engines for your business.
Here are a few different ways to improve your SEO results in 2018:
- Fully Optimize Your Local Listings – For any business who sells their products or services at their location, at a minimum you should have a verified Google Maps and Bing Places business listing set up and maintained by you or on your behalf. This will let your local customers know where you are and when you’re open.
And there are proven ways to get even more out of these listings, especially as “near me” searches are as prevalent as ever. An interesting shift, however, is the exclusion of “near me” in the search query, but the expectation that local results are still delivered.
What’s Your Brand?
November 28, 2017Wooo!
With that expression and an outlandish personality, Ric Flair created a brand for himself that people around the world recognize and celebrate. Flair was a wrestler who branded himself The Nature Boy, and he used his brand to become famous and to distinguish himself from hundreds of other, less memorable wrestlers.
The main components of Flair’s brand, in addition to Wooo!, were his flashy hair and clothing, his habit of surrounding himself with beautiful women, his ability to give a great interview, and, finally, his willingness to put on a great show inside the squared circle every night. Put all of those factors together, and you have a memorable brand that put people in the seats and money in Flair’s pocket.
Ric Flair is unusual because he’s a one-man brand. Most other successful brands belong to companies with more than one employee. However, whether your business has 1 employee or 1000, you can certainly benefit from developing your brand. Conversely, you’ll suffer from not having a brand.
What Is This Web Coming To?
October 31, 2017Every day, almost all of us use the Internet in one way or another, and the crazy part is that we might not even realize we are using it for what we are doing. For instance, when you pick up your phone and check the weather, that app is accessing the Internet to get the information it needs to relay to you. When you go home at night and nothing good is on television and you put on Netflix, all of the choices you have to watch are on a database on the Internet, and all of that streaming takes place over the Internet.
And what about so many other things that we hear about and use, such as Amazon’s Alexa? Yes, even that is using the Internet. Security companies are using the Internet to allow you to see your cameras on your mobile device or even to control your lights using your mobile device. Using the Internet, your exact location can be pinpointed on a map. You can post how you feel on social media. What is this web coming to, though?
If we think about the many different innovations that are being made each and every day, we can see a greater need and a greater use for the Internet. One of the greatest inventions for the Internet was the use of accessing it over cellular towers. This has allowed for a lot of new innovation. For instance, self-driving cars. They have to navigate and be controlled remotely. This can all be done over the Internet in combination with a GPS system.
Get Those Business-Building Google Reviews!
October 6, 2017One of the simplest ways to improve your online marketing presence is establishing a business listing on Google and Bing. But just having a presence isn’t enough. To benefit fully, you must make your presence a hard-working member of your marketing team.
Too often we find that businesses fail to take the extra few moments to fully detail their profiles. By adding several set of photos (inside, outside, team, at work, etc), business hours, a 360-degree virtual tour, and other useful data, you are directly providing not only Google with additional information on your business, but potential customers as well, and photos add more of a human touch to your website. This additional information can help improve click-throughs on your business listing, your local pack ranking, and your localized organic ranking.
If you are not part of the minority of businesses currently taking advantage of these features, it’s likely that you’re missing out on another simple way to improve click-throughs, your local pack ranking, and your localized organic ranking – Customer Reviews.
It’s Time for Your SEO Audit
August 31, 2017Your website should be hard at work driving targeted traffic and leads to help complete all the goals that you had when you created the site. Whatever your goals may be, and even if you currently have or have had in the past signed up for search engine optimization (SEO) services with another internet marketing firm, it may be wise to perform an SEO audit.
But first, don’t let the word “audit” scare you. We’re not the IRS, and an SEO audit is actually a positive experience that can help to bring you more business.
In an SEO audit, the first step is a comprehensive diagnostic survey of your website, and this survey will gauge how your current website is performing and how you (or our internet marketing team) can ideally approach your site’s optimization.
An SEO audit can help in many ways, and here are just a few:
4 Reasons to Build a New Website for Your Business
August 22, 2017Nowadays, how many businesses don’t have some form of website? Even small businesses know the importance of having an online presence so people can find them. However, many of those websites are years behind the curve in how they were built and even in the information that they contain. While having any online presence is certainly better than having none, having a modern website that follows current industry standards will do significantly more for you and your business than will a website that’s a couple of years old.
Here are 4 very good reasons to build a new website for your business:
5 Reasons to Think Mobile-First
July 26, 2017It wasn’t too long ago that your website only required you to think about how it would display on desktop computers. In today’s world, if you aren’t thinking about mobile and tablet devices, as well, you are likely ignoring the majority of your visitors’ preferred method of interacting with your web content. That’s because as many as 60% of all internet searches now take place on mobile devices.
So, now is the time to start thinking about your website from a mobile-first view rather than the desktop-first mentality of yesterday. Simply put, thinking mobile-first means placing the emphasis on user experience on mobile devices, rather than having it be an afterthought to the desktop design.
Speed and Performance Focused Websites
July 17, 2017With the ever-growing rate of mobile sites, it has become increasingly important to also improve the usability of the site. One of the large factors in this is that of page loading speed being as quick as possible, to not slow users down as they use your website. Along with this, Google and other search engines have realized the importance of this, and as such, they emphasize and prioritize sites that are well optimized for this in their search results. This is because they recognize the reality of how users interact with your site, and the experience they have if it loads slowly. In fact, Google has found that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.