If you’ve visited more than one website on your iPhone or other various smartphone, you can probably tell the difference between a responsive website and one that is not. How? Well, for starters if the site is easy to read on your smartphone, you are probably viewing a website built with a responsive design.

So, what is responsive design? As little as few years ago this term was, to say the least, on the design backburner. However, with the rise in popularity of smartphones and tablets alike in recent years, it’s a household word in the design community, so to speak.  Internet users accessing the web rose from 800 million in 2009 to roughly 1200 million in 2012 according to a recent ComScore Survey.  Statistics expect mobile internet usage to outnumber desktop internet usage by 2015.  The numbers don’t lie- if you don’t have a responsive website yet, you may want to think of changing soon.

7-Eleven is using the presidential election as a way to build hype around a new Slurpee flavor that ultimately builds the company’s SMS database and drives in-store traffic.

Blogging is not easy, especially for B2B companies.  Blogging provides a way to market new ideas, products, services, etc. The blog on your site is merely a container for the full articles that you provide links to in your email marketing.  

If you think writting your blog is hard, getting subscribers is even harder.  Here are 3 tips to help increase the number of people that sign-up for your email that contains links to your full blog articles.

We can now target ads through iOS and Android smartphones when consumers come within 300 feet of brick and mortar locations.

We can reach tens of millions of customers across more than seven billion impressions per month.  Hyper-Local’s targeting techniques are more precise than ZIP code and designated market area (DMA) features that we offer now.

1. Localize

National brands with local physical locations typically spend more time and effort on national marketing, limiting or eliminating the local message. However, that can be a mistake. Local efforts are instrumental in driving increased local business. 

One of the first things consumers look for when considering a purchase is a review of the product or service. They look to their peers for input and advice and trust those voices far more than your brand's, especially if they've had little to no interaction with the brand.

How do you get those first few reviews to help curb the concerns of new purchasers?

1. Why should you encourage online reviews?
2. How do you encourage online reviews?
3. How do you respond to negative reviews?

Mobile devices are inherently local tools.  People use their smartphones for all sorts of things that they might also do on a wired computer at home or at work.  However, we are seeing data that enforces the intuitive idea that people use their smartphones when they are “out and about”, “on the go” interacting with the world around them.

Over the last 15 years, this “online/ offline” “bricks and clicks” “web meets world” nirvana for marketers has been more myth than reality.  But, good things often take time and this one is coming around.   The intersection of local and mobile will be one of the real “sweet spots” in digital marketing over the next 5 years.

Local relevance and timing are key when converting mobile browsers to buyers, though specific consumer needs and verticals influence the way mobile devices are used for purchases. A new study investigates not only mobile consumer behavior, but preferences as well.

It’s important to understand how mobile users engage with your brand.  It’s even important to think of how their engagement may differ from a mobile phone to a mobile tablet device.

Here are four tips from the study:

Websites are going through some dramatic changes today.  It used to be that a company would redesign a website every year or more.  A lot of that had to do with how the website was used back then.  At that time the website was mainly a duplication of the sales materials.  Today, we have multiple devices that people are using (some that support Flash others that break when you use Flash).  The website visitor today isn’t interested in contacting the sales department right away.  They will do a tremendous amount of research online before they ever make a phone call.  Our Free white paper can help.  Click this LINK do start the download.

You probably don't need convincing that a company mobile strategy is necessary.  However, many companies are reluctant to start until the number of devices, market and approaches settle down.  The unfortunate part is I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.  There are ways to maximize your investment by selecting the players with the largest market share (iOS and Andriod).  Mobile plays an important role of providing people with information personally, immediately as well as in a location specific way.

How frustrating is it when you get a visitor to click on an ad, follow the conversion path through the site, and just when it's time to sign up they bail on you while filling out the form. Put yourself in their shoes, would you fill out all the fields in your form and go through the entire process?  You should constantly look at ways to reduce information that’s not required, make the process user-friendly, etc.

The latest information shows a change in what users like when it comes to filling out information.  The old way was to minimize the number of clicks required by placing all the fields together on a single page.

There are several steps to a website redesign but here are four very practical and important steps that you don’t want to forget.  If your website design company doesn’t talk about these four steps you need to find a new company.  Please contact us for a PDF of our full website design and development process.

Here are the four important steps that every website redesign should go through:

Earlier this year Forrester published a report after a 12-year study of 1500 websites regarding their user experience design.  Only 3% of the 1500 sites received a passing score.  That’s just 45 sites out of 1500 over 12 years.

The author of the report said websites are falling into the same old trap that they did ten years ago.  They just aren’t thinking about usability.  Things like making the fonts easy to read, customer task flow problems and thinking more about the creative design than the customer using the site. 

By themselves these problems may seem insignificant.  However, if a site is done right

We help our clients bring their national strategy into a local context.  It’s great when we hear from clients that want to start a local marketing program.  It’s a new channel that’s not easily understood unless you’re like us and you do this as your job.  We see several opportunities for new clients that want to start a local marketing program.

All programming languages have their benefits and have their place in the development community.  When it comes to Internet based website, landing pages, etc. it’s hard to argue with the benefits of PHP.  You can build websites in .NET, Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, PHP, CGI, Perl, etc.  You can get to the same end point; you just take a different path.

Here is a list of some of the most important benefits when looking at using PHP for your website: