A lot of businesses worry about hiring an out-of-town web design agency. They wonder if the web design agency is out of state, they’ll also be out of touch. Out of sight, out of mind.

Businesses do not work with local agencies for a variety of reasons. Maybe the business’ location leaves options limited and the BEST agency is a state away. What should a business owner do with the options he has?

The web design process – whether updating the old site or starting from scratch – can be a long, overwhelming process. We have designed and developed hundreds of websites and want to share an outline of the web design process and define terms you will hear along the way.

A poorly written or poorly placed call-to-action (CTA) can be the kiss of death on an otherwise perfectly-planned marketing campaign. All the great copy you have written only goes so far if your CTA does not elicit a response. Not to mention a lot of users skim the page, looking specifically for the CTA to tell them what the page is about. Use the CTA to grab them!

We want you to be successful in your marketing efforts, so we are outlining the parts of a CTA you cannot overlook and how to use them strategically.

August 6th marks the anniversary of the very first website. Published in 1991, the world’s first public website began a total overhaul of the way we live our lives. Sir Tim Berners-Lee probably didn’t imagine how the World Wide Web would impact us socially, nor in business, politics, retailers, banking or healthcare. An entire industry – web design & web development – were born on August 6th, 1991.

The news is out – content is king. Everyone is writing, posting to social media and gating their content. Inbound marketers are using those outlets to find and woo their ideal buyer persona.

Sometimes, the content we are posting is great. Other times, it's the exact same thing someone else just posted or what we’ve written is bad. Typo bad. Run-on sentence bad. Tired and boring bad. Hard to read bad. Too casual and filled with slang bad.

We recently had an internal blogging contest, where we encouraged the members of our team to create a topic specific to their job role and to take a shot at writing it up. Even if they can’t write. And, here is an insight – they’ve been our best-performing blogs to date.

“Quality score is one of the single most important metrics in Adwords and also one of the most ignored. No other metric has the impact that a bad, or good, quality score can have on a campaign.”  – Brent Wildman, Search Marketing Manager

There has been an update to how we view and access Google’s Quality Rating and the relevance of keywords to your ads. Due to these visual changes to reporting, advertisers are now able to easily identify underperforming metrics and compare changes and updates to historical performance.

Back in the day, when kids wanted to make some pocket change for the summer, all they needed was a jug of lemonade, a Sharpie, a piece of cardboard, and their adorable little smiles. Talk about a slice of Americana. Unfortunately for little Billy, times have changed. If he’s looking to make enough for that new bike, he’d better be on top of his social media game. Where’s the Instagram account for Billy’s Lemonade Stand? Is he even paying attention to the Yelp reviews? What’s going on with his analytics? Does he have the slightest idea about SEO best practices?

When people talk about inbound marketing, they tend to focus on creating content and generating social media buzz. While blogging and social media engagement are both important building blocks that make up a good inbound campaign, they’re not the only components that should make up an inbound marketing strategy.

Social media and blogging are two aspects of digital marketing that used to be separate – even competing – processes. The logic was that the fast-paced nature of social media marketing was inconsistent with the thoughtful, long-term approach offered by content marketing.