Tips and Tricks

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • Carousels: Rotating your featured webpages to help turn heads

    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 […]

  • The Path to Accessibility: Six AODA Questions to Ask Your Web Developer

    With about 15 per cent of the world’s population living with some form of disability (pdf), accessibility is increasingly becoming an issue that cannot be ignored when, for instance, hosting an event or planning a building, yet it’s still often an afterthought for websites. (Updated January 2018) In an effort to simplify the process of […]

  • Online Friendly Fonts: Six Web Typography Services

    Online Friendly Fonts: Six Web Typography Services

    It used to be that Web designers were limited to a handful of “Web-safe” fonts, which made for predictable, if not boring, websites. Now, high-end typography is within reach of all website owners, making it possible to use nearly any font imaginable. Still, there are limits to how you can use fonts on your website. […]

  • Search Engine Optimized: the importance of meaningful internal links

    Search engines use various methods for creating titles and descriptions (or snippits), and determining if your page is relevant to each search. They crawl for content contained within a web page’s meta tags including the “title” and “description” tags, but also page content that seems most relevant or useful. This means that various page elements […]

  • Creating Website Content for Better User Experiences

    Creating Website Content for Better User Experiences

    Modeling and designing your website’s user experience means attempting to understand all aspects of the user’s online and offline interaction with your company, and how the site is perceived, learned, and used in order to make informed decisions that will improve your users’ experiences. Designing a great user experience or “UX” sounds like a tall […]

  • What email marketing can offer your business

    The idea of “email marketing” can seem intimidating, but it can be thought of as a form of direct marketing like traditional mail. Instead of using the postal service, however, it uses email to send your commercial or non-profit messages to an audience. Various marketing email types sent out include email newsletters, quick announcements (also […]

  • Are you stopping visitors from commenting?

    Are you stopping visitors from commenting?

    Blog comments are something that you should typically encourage because they give readers a chance to participate in the conversation. Comments give readers the opportunity to relate their experiences, offer their point of view, and provide related information. This interaction within the blog can help to expand the original blog post, sometimes giving it a […]

  • Does your website have an effective call to action?

    A “call to action”, as the name suggests, tells your visitors what they should do. In the case of a website, it’s basically a message that links to a desired action. A successful CTA will help persuade visitors to take your desired action, which you should be able to determine based on your business goals. […]

  • How to read your site’s statistics: 6 tips

    How to read your site’s statistics: 6 tips

    As we wrote in a previous post, statistics are necessary to determine if your website is meeting its goals. But it’s hard to know if you’re meeting your site’s goals if you don’t know how to read the multitude of numbers and graphs provided by a service like Google Analytics. In this post, we offer […]

  • Do you own your blog?: Owning your domain

    With the wide variety of free blogging platforms, blogging is essentially free. However, to get the impact you’re looking for, it may be worth it to blog using your own domain. In fact, it can be easy to setup and doesn’t have to be terribly expensive to get your blog on a URL that you […]