Blog

Five reasons why your business should make a Facebook Page

Since Facebook introduced “Facebook Pages” in 2007, a wide array of organizations, businesses, celebrities, and brands have been using them to broadcast information to those “followers” or “fans” who choose to connect with them. Having a Facebook Page has garnered considerable buzz in the marketing world, but it does require some effort to have a successful Page. One of the cornerstones of our online marketing philosophy is that your reputation is built through all interactions you have with customers and potential clients.…

Around the Office: Google’s comment crawling, the business of themes, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Roberto found Sawyer Hollenshead’s tips on building WordPress themes as a business to be a great resource for developers who are considering getting into designing themes around the WordPress content management system and blogging platform. Among the important takeaways was to build a solid user base by prompting whoever downloaded his…

The 13 Real Rules of Social Media Engagement

This guest post by our friends at Toronto social media marketing company Spark Boutik lays down the rules to follow in order to truly engage your audience through social media. One of the biggest reasons brands struggle with social media is because they do not understand the need for engagement. Engagement means going beyond output and actually stimulating conversation. So, instead of blasting twenty tweets a day, you should be reaching out to your followers. Instead of asking for Facebook ‘Likes’,…

Around the Office: Facebook/WordPress integration, real-life e-commerce, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Brent likes the idea of bringing e-commerce into the real world. It’s not science fiction! The Korean division of Tesco supermarkets made it possible to go shopping on a subway platform using a mobile phone. They put full-scale images of their aisles and cellphone scan-able QR codes in the subway, letting…

Don’t lose your domain: Tips to keep your domain safe

Losing your domain is a big deal for any site owner. A client of ours recently had their domain expire because they didn’t renew their domain, leaving them without email or a working website. As anyone can imagine, this can have a devastating effect on your business and productivity. Usually, someone will notice that their website is down and figure out that they have to renew their domain name contract, and after it expires there’s usually a period when you can…

Around the Office: WordPress SEO tips, Googling images, Chrome’s arcade, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. We’re very happy with the current WordPress plugin Formidable Forms, but to make it even better, we suggested that the developers, Strategy 11, add a query parameter after the form has been submitted. This would help us collect data for analytics purposes. Strategy 11 helpfully obliged, telling us this feature will be added in a…

Around the Office: virtual worlds, online privacy, the two sides of versatility, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Brent came across a Toronto artist this week who creates original pin-up art and accessories she sells on Etsy under the name Bombshell Artillery. It’s good to see that working in technology doesn’t dull one’s taste for classic design.Wayne has been checking out Chrome Experiments, a collection of applications to inspire…

Carousels: Rotating your featured webpages to help turn heads

You cannot count on website visitors to scroll to find your content, so why not scroll your content for them? You can do this using what are known as “sliders” or “carousels”. Like their fairground counterparts, website carousels rotate — but rather than moving model horses and unicorns — they move images and links. Bell Canada is one of many major businesses that uses changing images to draw attention to its various initiatives. A carousel is actually a standard application…