Category Archives: Editorial

3 Things Your Website Must Do

Posted on March 23rd, 2012 by Jason Bumblis:

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All websites are not created equal.  Somehow, in 2012, many people still do not understand the value of a website for a business.  A website is the only advertising that you do that works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 2-3 years.

If you don’t think that your business website is accomplishing anything, then you should ask yourself these 3 questions:

1. Does my site clearly and concisely describe what my business does or sells?
2. Can my website be found easily in Google and other search engines?
3. Does my website integrate my online marketing strategy to generate leads?

If you did not answer an emphatic “YES” to all 3 of the above questions then you are not using your website to its potential.  A properly designed and optimized website should be a powerful lead generation tool  for your business.

Once people visit your website you have between 5 and 8 seconds to convince them that you can help them.  If your message is not clear and concise, you will lose that visitor.  If you keep that visitor on your site, your lead gen strategy must go to work and capture their information.

These things are all easily remedied by professionals like us here at Pacer Design Studios.  We can sit down with you and review your current site at no charge.  We can then help formulate a plan that will help you get the most out of your most important marketing tool…your web presence.

Google Gets Personal With Your Data

Posted on January 11th, 2012 by Jason Bumblis:

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Google’s new “Search Plus Your World” rolls out today, marking the most radical change ever in how Google serves up your search results.  The new results now not only find content out there on public websites, they also display content that has been shared privately through Google+.

The new format went live today, and will start showing up for everyone over the next few days.  You can tell if you are seeing the new format because you will see an image like this:

HOW IT AFFECTS YOU
Google has been using personalized search results since 2005, with updates in 2007 and 2009, but this is a whole new level.  For instance, when you type in your friends name, their Google+ profile will appear right in your search results.  When you search for a photo of say, “Bermuda”, any photos your friends shared of Bermuda will come up first.  If your neighbor shared a photo of his dog named Bermuda, that would appear.

The personalized results will also creep into your search bar via the autocomplete predictions as well.

For instance, for most users, a search for “chikoo” would show links about and photos of an Indian fruit. But for friends of Google Fellow Mr. Amit Singhal, it would also show photos and posts about his dog, Chikoo. A search for a sports team would show, in addition to the usual links, conversations about the team among a user’s friends on Google Plus.

PERSONALIZED SEARCH RESULTS NOW INCLUDE:

• Listings from the web
• Listings from the web, boosted because of your personal behavior
• Listings from the web, boosted because of your social connections
• Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you
• Private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you

While it may freak some people out seeing personal information in their Google results, you must remember that these are not public results.  They are results personalized just for the person viewing them.  If private content has been shared with those people, that is visible.  If it has not been shared, it is not visible.

PUBLIC CONCERNS
This new system seems to have an appeal to certain people, but in the broader scope it seems to have generated more concern than anything.  Right off the bat the anti-trust comments are everywhere because now it seems that Google is giving search preference to its own social network.  Obviously Google and Facebook are not friends anyway (since Facebook partnered with Bing), but now Twitter and other social services are concerned that their information will automatically be pushed below Google’s own network results…which is a no-no.

“We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users,” the company (Twitter) said in a statement.

SHOULD YOU BE CONCERNED
As with nearly every social media, it is very easy for someone with access to private content to re-share it publicly, whether intentionally or not.  So if you share a photo of Grandma sleeping on the couch on Google+ and forget to mark it private, it could potentially show up for anyone searching Google.

DO I HAVE TO SIGN UP?
Unfortunately, Google chose to not go down the Opt-In route, but rather the Opt-Out option.  You can go into you search settings are on Google and choose to permanently opt-out.

“I think this is a much better experience, at the end of the day,” Singhal said, explaining why the default change was made.

CONCLUSION
Overall, I think that the marriage of public and private data is an obvious one, and everyone could see it coming.  I think there are some security concerns that will startle a few people, but for the most part people will adapt to it and learn to like it.

I think this will almost force Facebook and even Twitter to come to the bargaining table with Google and try to get their services included in the same fashion.

It is nice that Google allows you to turn this off, which will help some people avoid it, but long term I think this is the future of search.

The way Google+ is integrated into this gives it a distinct advantage and only further strengthens our stance here at Pacer Design Studios that search engine marketers cannot ignore Google+.

Do you want an APP…or just a mobile website

Posted on January 5th, 2012 by Jason Bumblis:

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I am constantly approached by customers who want us to write a custom APP for their business.  Are you someone who wants an APP?  Here are 5 questions that you need to ask yourself before you plop down the thousands of dollars needed to create your own custom app.

1. Will you give the app away for free or sell it? If you give it away it will get more downloads, but people are very quick to delete an app they got for free because…well, it was free.  Selling it costs you a cut if you put it into the APP store, plus it will get in less hands than if it was free.
2. Are you prepared for the cost? APP’s cost thousands of dollars to develop, are you ready to spend that?  Mobile websites can often be developed for a fraction of the cost based off your current website.
3. How will you update it? If the data that needs constant updating, then you need to plan for that.  One distinct advantage of a mobile website over an APP is that it pulls the data from the same place as your regular website, which means you do not have to spend extra time updating it.
4. How are you going to market it? An great APP is not going to download itself.  You will need to spend money promoting your APP.  A mobile website gets promoted every time you promote your website, so their is no additional cost.  Your mobile website will spider in the search engines too, your APP will not.
5. Is your APP the next big thing, or just something additional for your customers? If you have the next big thing on your hands then good for you.  Go for it, be committed, market the heck out of it and see where it leads you.  If you just want something else for your customers that is great as well.  It is important that you set your expectations and go from there.  If your APP is an add-on to a service you already provide, then don’t expect to get rich off of it.

Make sure you have looked at all the solutions first.  A mobile website can more times than not solve the same problems that an APP can at a fraction of the initial cost and with less up keep. If you eventually find that a mobile site is not enough, you can always add an APP, while still keeping the mobile site and all of its benefits.

APPs are great things.  It is funny how something we didn’t even know about 5-6 years ago is now so important in our lives now.  If you do your research and set reasonable expectations, then an APP can be a nice addition for you and your customers.

Contact us at Pacer Design Studios and we will set up a free consultation to help you plan out your mobile project…app or mobile site.

Steve Jobs…what a failure!

Posted on October 6th, 2011 by Jason Bumblis:

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Steve Jobs has been pronounced by many as the Thomas Edison of our generation.  Time will tell on that one, but I still use my light bulbs more than my iPad so I am giving the nod to Edison there.

Upon his recent passing, there are tribute articles everywhere listing his numerous accomplishments and praising him as a human being and visionary.  This is not one of those articles.

Yes…Steve Jobs was an amazing visionary.

Yes…Steve Jobs was a powerful leader.

Yes…Steve Jobs invented the mouse.

Yes…Steve Jobs was a huge failure

That’s right, you read it right.

What sets Steve Jobs apart from so many is not that he failed, but that he failed on a large scale, and came back stronger.  Steve Jobs went big, or he went home.

In today’s world were everyone coddles the youth, and tries to insulate everyone from failure and losing, Steve Jobs successes should serve as an eye opener to parents and leaders all over our once great country.

IT IS OK TO FAIL

Seek it out, embrace failure.  Failure is not what will define you, it is how you respond to that failure that will determine who you are and what you become.

Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College after one semester.

• He then slept on friends floors and snuck into classes that interested him.  Jobs later said, “If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, the company that he started.

• They came crawling back in 1996, sort of the same time Apple started to become relevant again

Steve Jobs pumped millions of dollars into NeXT, have you ever heard of NeXT?

• NeXT was a hardware company Jobs started to build computers for the higher education and business markets.  The cost of the machines never fit into budgets and the company only sold 50,000 units total.  Jobs swiftly switched the focus of the company to software development and pioneered technologies such as OPENSTEP and WebObjects.  He eventually sold the company to Apple for $429 million and 1.5 million shares of Apple Stock.

Steve Jobs and failure do belong in the same sentence.  It was from his failures that he learned to be great.  It was fear of those failures that drove him to be great.

Steve Jobs was a great visionary and innovator…his failures and the way he embraced them had as much to do with that as anything.