Blog | Web Design | Graphic Design | Minneapolis, Minnesota

Feb 16 2016

WordPress: Create Your User-Friendly Website

WordPress has become a very popular website tool for organizations and individuals due to its user-friendly features, cost (it’s FREE!) and ease of implementation including SEO. It has become a benefit to small, large or new organizations as they get their feet wet on the Internet. Here are few reasons why WordPress is better than all of its rivals:

Reason #1 – Availability and Price

WordPress is FREE. You can download WordPress directly from www.wordpress.org or hosting companies that use a control panel type system will allow for a one-click install of the software at no additional charge. Finding a hosting company that is WordPress friendly is easy and affordable (starting at as little as $3/month in our quick research). You don’t pay extra to use the software on your site once installed.

A few other platforms require users to pay on month to month basis such as Squarespace. Starting at $8.00/month for Individuals (if paid annually), Squarespace out of the box seems like an affordable solution but it has limits in regards to customization and added features. Wix is another month to month option starting at $4.00/month but it displays Wix ads and other content on the site. Premium features and apps may also have an additional cost.

Reason #2 – Do It Yourself

Technical experience is not necessary with WordPress; it’s intuitive and easy to get a simple site set up quickly. It’s easy to paste text from a document such as Microsoft Word into your site allowing for customization of font size and colors, text alignment and more just as if you were using the Microsoft Word editor. Add pages, blog posts and pictures with the click of a few keys and a couple buttons.

There are a huge number of free and paid WordPress plugins which you can use on your site to include new elements. Going from straightforward social sharing plugins to robust membership site plugins, you can make any sort of website you can envision. WordPress also has many great free and paid themes available to use on your website.

Reason #3 – Works with ANY type of Website Industry

In addition to serving the requirements of a blogger or a business professional, WordPress is also a perfect solution for any industry including travel and hospitality, reviews, information, photo gallery websites and so on. Since WordPress is extremely customizeable, there really is no limit to what type of website one can build using it. With hundreds of free templates and themes, as well as hundreds of free plugins, it’s never been easier to build a custom website using WordPress.

WordPress developers build websites with W3C acceptable structure, spamming assurance, Search Engine Optimization with unequaled user experience. They surpass expectations in dealing with WordPress necessities such as blog creation, custom module/plugin, theme customization, and, etc. Moreover, it is a simple one click installation through the web hosting providers without any difficulty.

One can highlight business through advertisement and publicity, track the navigation rates through Social networking plugin and other similar features. Website owners do not need to rely on web designers to upgrade or edit content of the site. WordPress’s dashboard is simpler and intuitive for a non-tech individual to include/alter or delete a page.

Reason #4 – Responsive and Mobile-Friendly

Responsive devices such as smartphones and tablets have taken the place of desktops and laptops. Individuals on the go need to use mobile devices for their essential demands. Thus, it is necessary for any blog or a website to be responsive for mobile devices. Upon installation, a WordPress website’s default theme is responsive making it mobile-friendly. Additionally, free themes and paid themes are almost exclusively designed to be HTML5 ready for responsiveness.

Not Yet Convinced?

WordPress is surrounded by a large community of developers and users willing and able to help when necessary. It has grabbed the status as the go-to publishing software on the web attributed to its flexibility and scalability with plugins, widgets, responsive themes and more.

WordPress is a robust platform with a lot of choices. It can be used by a beginner level users as well as advanced level users. It can be used to build a personal blog or a highly professional website. Today, WordPress web development has gained in global acceptance among developers and users alike. Though WordPress has a recent history, it has remarkable and surprising statistics with ample usage across the globe for all the industries.

If you are interested in taking WordPress for a test drive or would like more information about Flying Orange’s custom designed WordPress themes, please contact us for more information.

Feb 11 2016

Why Your Business Should Be Using Instagram

From a survey taken on Social Media Examiner in 2015, about 3,000 internet marketers mention that they love social media marketing. It has helped to boost the operation of visual marketing more than ever before. In 2015, 92% of online marketers indicated that social media remains an amazing tool to boost their sales.

The growing trend of visual content has made marketing through social media platforms worth investing in. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram have helped businesses to market their product and service at a more affordable cost than traditional methods. Internet marketers are now looking to design original, unique videos and visuals to engage audiences. However, there is no question that internet marketers need to think about shifting their content in this direction.

Are you pondering on Instagram importance for social media marketing? Reading through the rest of this article will help you discover Instagram importance for social media marketing.

Building Personality And Trust

Using Instagram for products and services usually help to build personality and trust. With branded content, marketers can easily generate engagement. One of the primary advantages of Instagram is to build trust for your products and services. To create the emotional connection with your audience, Instagram remain a powerful social media marketing platform to use. With Instagram, you can be able to share daily experiences of your establishment in a casual and informal way.

Increased Engagement

With respect to the quality of the product or service, branded updates on Twitter and Facebook are sometimes underrated by the user. In the case of Instagram, the scenario is different. When you have an active account on Instagram carrying informative and useful content, it can bring you amazing levels of engagement with your prospective audience. Instagram provides 120 times more engagement than Twitter and 58 times more than Facebook.

With the recent update that users can now switch between multiple accounts easily, engagement will increase significantly over the coming months with the ease of use.

Increase In Traffic

While it may not be possible to add clickable links to every Instagram update, the truth is that Instagram remains a powerful source to gain traffic through previously un-traditional methods. Since it can help generate increased engagement over Twitter and Facebook, you are sure to maintain and create a strong profile on Instagram. If you want your business to grow rapidly with little advertising effort, Instagram is the right social media platform to use.

Jan 28 2016

NEW Lower Rates for Monthly Website Maintenance Packages

Our clients have requested and we have listened! Effective, January 28, 2016 we have new lower rates for monthly website maintenance packages. Save 30-45% off our standard hourly rates by signing up for a monthly maintenance package.

Do you have an existing website that needs changes or maintenance? Don’t have time to keep up with updates to your website? Need general editing and maintenance on your website on a monthly basis? We provide website maintenance for ALL websites including those designed by Flying Orange, other designers or someone else!

Basic Plan

^$99/month

2 Hours Website Maintenance
No Monthly Backup of website files or database(s)
3 Business Day Turnaround Time

Intermediate Plan

^$229/month

5 Hours Website Maintenance
Monthly (one time) backup of all website files and database(s)
2 Business Day Turnaround Time

Pro Plan

^$399/month

10 Hours Website Maintenance
Bi-Monthly (two time) backup of all website files and database(s)
1 Business Day Turnaround Time

For more information about website maintenance including common requests and terms of service, please visit our Website Maintenance page for details.

Jan 19 2016

Content Marketing is Transforming Business Interaction with Customers

Content marketing is not just about advertising, it’s also about letting customers know who you are rather than merely telling them. Content marketing has completely transformed the interaction of businesses with their customers. With the recent rise of social media, all brands must communicate more with their clients if they want their trust and loyalty in return.

Simple broadcasting of advertising messages is not the only available strategy and it is not advisable for brands whose customers have made the effort of including them in their “social” circles. Today – it’s important to give clients engaging stories, information or advice that has genuine interest or use.

Many companies are still adjusting to the ideas and effort needed to create content. It isn’t always easy to quantify their return on investment (ROI) through this process. By examining the benefits, businesses can better understand the need for good content marketing to engage their customers.

Here are the top benefits of content marketing:

It builds customer loyalty.

Providing customers with good information builds a tightly connected community of clients that have loyalty to your brand. By giving them valued content for which they can follow you, they will have a good reason to invest their time in the brand. Moreover, if you publish content regularly, followers can effectively check in with your brand.

You are able to get to know your clients.

Content when delivered through the different social media channels allows for feedback. This means you will be able to gauge their attitude while also getting to know their demographics and needs better. Content can inspire allegiance, discussion, provoke thought and get people talking.

Content generation improves SEO.

For SEO, quality content is nothing but gold. Once you decide to create a blog that has quality content and then connect it to your brand there will be positive repercussions. The days of writing poor quality keyword loaded copy on blogs and websites are long gone. Contextual, meaningful and genuinely good, relevant writing is easily picked up by customers reading through the information. Search engines also will “read” content and use it to increase your search engine ranking.

Content adds value.

There’s a new business rule – for whatever business you are in, you must also become a publisher to be competitive. Customers expect that business websites and their brand ambassadors (whether they are staff, managers, hired freelancers or just customers) to entertain or deliver insight. People will want to go back to your social media page or website because the experience gives them something worthwhile. Posting amusing pictures, using videos for short films, delivering helpful and handy guides makes your website worthwhile and better engages customers.

Driving Traffic.

Providing quality content 0n your website drives more traffic to it. Consumers love educating themselves before talking to a salesperson. Good content whether in the form of blogs, eBooks or videos will help lead them there.

Generate Leads.

A Hubspot report has shown that companies which blog generate 67% more leads each month compared to those who don’t blog. By executing effective content marketing strategies that hone in on your clients’ pain points, more qualified leads find and use the website’s content. By establishing your website and hence, your brand as a resource that can be trusted, you will build an authentic relationship so that when the customers decide to make calls, they will have your brand at the top of their minds.

Promote Integrated Marketing.

Content marketing works well with SEO and plays hand in hand with social media – most content marketers use social media when distributing their content, according to a recent Content Marketing Institute Report. Social media is a great platform for promotion of content and followers who benefit a lot from content that is specifically catered to them.

Content marketing is safe, inexpensively available and beneficial in numerous different areas. The sooner a brand starts investing in it, the sooner they start to see the results, and the better results they will eventually see. Whether you are in it for increased traffic, higher conversion rates, or just a better relationship with your customers, there is no reason why you should not have content marketing included in your marketing arsenal.

Jan 05 2016

Choosing the Right E-Commerce Platform for SEO

Most retail businesses want to create as large of a customer base as possible to strengthen and continue growth of their business. For online retailers, one of the first steps involves creating an e-commerce website to sell their products/services online. Once their website is built and online, the next critical step involves working on a strategy to attract online visitors to the website. One of the common channels used by companies today is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a cost effective way of producing targeted traffic to an e-commerce website.

Benefits of SEO to an E-Commerce website

Typically, when people want information on a product or service, they will type it on their browsers and look it up from the search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. E-commerce websites on the other hand, strive to match the queries being searched to ensure that customers get the best information about the product or service and persuade people to buy from them versus a competitor. With good SEO, e-commerce websites are also able to experience better marketing capabilities which is relatively cheaper as compared to other options such as Pay Per Click (PPC). The success of this, however, depends on factors such as proper on-page and off-page optimization of the website in accordance with the algorithm of a search engine. This means that once a site is up on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for certain business keywords, the free traffic is all it needs for successful business.

How to Choose an SEO Friendly E-Commerce Platform

Assuming the e-commerce website now has the traffic that SEO targeted in the first place, the next thing is ensuring that the site has the relevant features that will help convert the traffic to create revenue from the products or services being offered here. There are various factors to consider in optimizing the experience of the website’s targeted users. These factors include:

Good e-commerce website design – The use of appealing and easily navigable website templates and efficient plugins. A well designed website provides a pleasant experience to users and may be a factor in enhancing increased return businesses.
Reliable Website Hosting – Choosing the hosting services of a fast and reliable provider will ensure your website runs smoothly, stays online during heavier traffic situations and handles the demands of your visitors and customers.
Good e-commerce software – The most important feature of any e-commerce website, it provides a convenient way for consumers to purchase products from a site. There are numerous e-commerce software programs on the market today.

Factor in the following considerations before making a decision on which one to settle on:

Flexibility in design and customization including mobile responsiveness
Provides secure payment processing through SSL and is PCI compliant
Search engine optimization (SEO) for custom URLs, dynamic meta tags, titles and more
Social and mobile commerce solutions for added customer engagement
24/7 and 365 Day support when you need assistance
Order management, processing and reporting
Product management, inventory tracking and reports
MOST importantly….. Ease of use

Why You Should Choose 3dcart for E-Commerce

As mentioned earlier, there are various options for e-commerce software available, some which offer these services and other inherent benefits. Our preference and recommendation for one of the most advanced e-commerce solutions used in the market today is 3dcart. 3dcart has been used by more 17,000 customers (23,000 online stores) since its inception in 2001, and is currently ranked among the fastest growing companies in America.No transaction fees – No setup costs – Advanced marketing features – Unlimited image storage – Offering a 15% discount on yearly prepayments and up to $225 in advertising credits. 3dcart offers plans to fit any store scale starting at $19.99/month.

3dcart Features Include:

Gift Registry – allows the customers to use website’s store for weddings, parties and shower gifts.
Loyalty program – customers are able to receive and accumulate points for every purchase they make on the site. The points can be used to make future purchases.
Drag n’ Drop editor – The software has one of the easiest design editors which enable users to customize their store in real time.
Integrated blog – all plans of 3dcart software come with an integrated blogging platform. This is especially helpful in search engine rankings providing SEO friendly links, alt tags, XML sitemaps, RSS feeds and page titles among others. Store owners are able to manipulate most of the optimization settings for their homepage and for individual products.
Hosting and securing store – the software guarantees an uptime of 99.9% with daily backups, intrusion and firewall protection, PCI compliant servers and IP blocking features are also offered.
Templates – 3dcart software offers tons of free and premium templates with most of them easily customizeable using HTML, CSS or using their popular Drag n’ Drop editor.

With the variety of features being offered by 3dcart, it is easy to recommend their e-commerce software to anyone who needs a reliable shopping cart solution. Any individual can test its suitability through their 15 day free trial before committing to their services. Take it for a test drive now!