A social presence of your company will allow you to connect with your customers in new and dynamic ways. Use selected social media platforms to share information about your business, people, career opportunities etc., and get feedback to help you grow your business.

The main objective is to understand that what you have to say must be valuable to your social media audience. After all, you want to encourage your audience to talk about your products or services, and to ultimately take some sort of action!  That said, you don’t sell, let alone hard-sell,
on social media. Social media is social. So to get people talking, it’s critical to build relationships with your audience based on confidence and trust.

Social media, while a great resource that is very cost effective for businesses, must be part of an overall marketing campaign. It is not intended to replace your other marketing activities, but to enhance them. As with any successful marketing strategy, you must have a purpose and a goal, and social media is no different. Developing social media as an effective and useful tool will take time, patience and commitment, but can be a fun and enlightening journey!

Give us a call to discuss how to reach or stay connected with your customers through one or more social media sites.

Check back next month for more detail about each social media platform…

One of our most respected experts on writing for the web is Canadian Nick Usborne.

“Nick’s passion is web marketing and helping freelancers and small companies grow their businesses. He devotes much of his time to helping people improve their own web content writing skills.”

Nick recently wrote an article on writing a website home page. In his article he includes the following 4 tips:

• Use your principal home page headline to communicate your site’s underlying
  value proposition.

• Use some short introductory text to clarify and expand on your headline.

• Help visitors find what they are looking for.

• Make your first-time visitors feel comfortable and confident.

If writing for the web is an area you struggle with, click here to read the long version of each of the points above. It may just kick-start your writing in a whole new direction and with new-found enthusiasm…

Thanks Nick!

While WordPress comes ready to embrace the search engines, we can never forget that it’s the content on a website that is critical to its success.

As far as SEO goes, WordPress features and functions guide a search engine through the pages, posts and categories to help the search engine crawl your site from page to page and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.

Good navigational links to the various pages on your site will invite a search engine to move gracefully from one page to another, following the connecting links and visiting most of your site.

While moving through your site a search engine gathers content and information by evaluating the words, giving credit to certain words and combinations of words. Words found within your pages are compared to words found within your links and titles.

The words, the content, the material in your site that explains, shares, informs and educates your site visitors is the content search engines digest.

So remember…content is still king when it comes to search engines, but it’s real people who are reading the content!

Read the article below for further assurance ; )

www.searchmarketingstandard.com/good-seo-requires-good-content

Simply Effective will soon be offering a series of free WordPress instructional videos. These videos will outline the basic how-to’s and management of WordPress, as well as, plugin/widget installation and much more. Each tutorial can be used for reference and viewed as often as needed. With a little practice you’ll be updating your own site content in no time!

Please check back again…our videos are currently in production…

We hope that 2012 will be an exciting, joyous, healthy, prosperous, and successful year for you. Whatever your web needs, let us know how we can be of service…we look forward to exceeding your expectations!

To all our existing clients…

We know you have many choices in doing business so thank you for choosing us. We look forward to working with you again soon!

Many of our clients have requested their website graphics, navigation menus and page content simply be transferred to the WordPress CMS system. The CMS system provides a modern design appearance with advanced functionality.

Due to all these requests, we’ve put together a value-packed package offering a layout option that retains the flavour of your existing site, but with the opportunity to refresh/update your site content. It is a tailor-made site over which you have full control. Armed with training via an instructional tutorial, you add all new content, then maintain it and make any necessary changes and updates whenever needed. No more waiting for your “web person” to fit you into their queue!!

Not only that, every installation of WordPress comes with a file editor you can use to edit your pages right in your browser without having to worry about downloading and uploading the files in order to edit them. With just a click your new pages and/or changes are published to the net!

When you do your own site maintenance, the only continuing expense is for hosting service and domain name registration.

Website transfers/set-up for up to 10 pages » $1,200 + GST

For a brief overview about WordPress click here. If you still need additional information about how to get your website transfer under way, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d be happy to answer all your questions!

Once you make the decision to convert to WordPress, with minimal instruction you’ll be updating your site content in no time!

How is it that some folks can do such underhanded things leaving a stain on the industry?

We were recently approached to create a website for a company who has experienced some very bad luck with some “shady” individual(s) in our industry. After going through the time consuming process of relationship building and discussing strategy and direction for their website development, our client was certain he had selected the “web design company” who could get the job done. After all, they had promised they could make their new client’s vision come to life!

Sadly, after this company (or more likely, one individual) had secured the required deposit to begin the web project, they were never heard from again. Our client was left in the dust with nothing but a registered domain name! Who does this?

We have worked with clients all across North America and some. Mostly anonymously, online via email and phone calls. Isn’t this the way of the world? An understanding that a contract is a contract, despite the fact that we may never meet face to face. What ever happened to the “gentleman’s handshake”? Honouring “your word”?

These individuals leave such a dark mark on our industry. How does one put faith and trust in the next company they seek to do the job? Fortunately, after a decade in the web design business, this situation isn’t pervasive, but sporadic. I guess no different really, than how this behaviour applies across the board in all business/walks of life.

Shame on whoever adopts this immoral work ethic however. Unfortunately for them, karma does not discriminate…actions bring upon ourselves inevitable results. It’s just the good ol’ law of the Universe that what you put out there eventually returns to you. Honestly, why not make it something great?

Our most recent facelift involved revamping our client’s website to coordinate with their modified product packaging.

Real Rides becomes Cycle 180! The client’s goal in revamp­ing the over­all web­site look and the redesign of their prod­uct pack­ag­ing was sim­ply to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the actual prod­uct mix being offered. That said, it never hurts to freshen up a site that’s been around for awhile! The key is to ensure that the core message being communicated, especially if successful, remains in tact.

At Simply Effective our goal, as always, was to keep the site simple and clean — good design, functionality, easy to navigate, and easy to understand. The strategy provided a new, bold, fresh look.

Check it out:

We just completed a website revision for a previous client, Metropolis Developments. The request was to replace their outdated html site with an updated presence in WordPress, so that they are free to manage their own website content as time and inclination permits.

Click the thumbnail to view the live site. You’ll see that, even though WordPress began as a blogging platform, these days any website can be developed with static pages to look just like a site vs. a blog. WordPress websites work well for businesses of all types.

If you have an old site that you’d like to transform give us a call. We’d love to put our expertise to work for you and bring any vision you might have to life!