Directive Blogs

Virtually any type of business needs a website. Whether you are a local restaurant, a one-person CPA, or a busy manufacturer, your website is the proof that your business has a pulse. Like it or not, this will be one of the main conduits your prospective customers and clients will use to find you.

Even if your website is an afterthought, you should consider auditing it and refreshing it at least every couple years. That might not mean a full redesign from the ground up, but it definitely needs to reflect your business and provide your visitors with enough information to take the next steps.

No business owner wants to deal with potential lawsuits, but over the last few years several companies have been constructed for the sole purpose of crawling the web and finding businesses to send copyright claims to. While copyright laws are important, these businesses aren’t looking to defend the sanctity of intellectual property, they are predators trying to squeeze a little money out of small businesses like yours.

Having a good web presence is important for any organization, but what makes a good website has evolved over the last several years. Let’s discuss a handful of major mistakes we often see local businesses make when it comes to their online presence.

A few months ago, the Department of Justice (finally) updated their guidelines for web accessibility. In this blog, we’re going to walk through how to keep your website compliant as you make changes to it and add new content. This particular guide will cover WordPress and Joomla websites.

If you're like most businesses who managed to remain open during these trying times, you have had to make a wide range of changes. The question is, are your customers aware of them? Do they know your new business hours or your COVID-19 precautions? Is your only communication tool a piece of paper taped to your door? Now is the time to take advantage of one of the most potent business communication tools available: Google My Business.

Marketing your business may seem like a huge endeavor, or that you need to be a marketing mastermind to actually effectively market your business, but that is not true. If done right, marketing can be done without any stress or hassle. Where do you start? With a plan of course!

So, you have a brand new website that offers some pretty outstanding products/services, and now you have the expectation that it is going to sell, sell, sell. Great products, after all, are the best marketing you can have. Let me tell you first so you don’t have to hear it from someone else…that is not enough.

Question: What is the purpose of a landing page? The answer: a landing page is designed to achieve a specific marketing goal--usually something along the lines of collecting contact information, driving traffic, or pushing for a purchase. However, before you just throw some text and a form on a page and call it a day, you should know that there is a process to creating an optimized, more effective landing page.

It stands to reason that, in order for a user to visit, review, and retain information from your website, your site will have to look good. Of course, as with anything that has to do with what looks “good,” web design decisions should be dictated by what’s currently in fashion. In order to keep up with the trends of 2017, we’ve compiled a list of design elements that will be crucial for your website.

In the past 10 years, the number of people who use the internet in their daily life has skyrocketed. As a result, many jobs now include adding or writing content that is ultimately posted online. Your business depends on your ability to create cohesive, complete information presented in an aesthetically pleasing, and memorable way.  How can we know if the content we are writing is presented in the appropriate fashion? There are a few best practices to keep in mind that will keep users coming back to your site, time after time.

Here at Directive, we love Joomla, the open source content management system that makes it easy to edit your website. Here's an intermediate Joomla trick that will let you load a module inside an article (instead of in one of your template's pre-defined positions). There can be numerous occasions where you might want to drop a module inside one of your Joomla articles. Maybe you want some tabbed content inside your article or an image rotator that shows off your latest photos, or embed a JoomConnect form. This can all be done very easily with Joomla's loadposition tag. Hit the jump to find out how this is done.

With all the fancy content management systems out there making it easy for users to manage and update their website, suddenly creating new content and pages on your site becomes a snap, and anyone can do it. While CMS's like Joomla empower those outside the professional web design field to completely turn their website into a living, breathing dynamic canvas, there are still a few simple best practices that one might not know without a little experience. One of the big ones that often get missed are images.  In this article, we'll show you how to work with images for the web so you get the best results possible when putting pictures on your website.  This will apply to blogs, social media, and just about any other method of publishing on the web.

Everyone has heard of Google.  The word itself is synonymous with searching the web.  If you don’t know something, what do you do?  You Google it.  It’s become part of the internet vernacular.  You rarely hear folks say they are going to Yahoo that when they get home, or come across a solution by Binging it.

Like it or not, Google has become a part of our lives, but it certainly hasn’t done so without deserving it.  It is the leading search engine, and has earned it by being reliable.  When you search for something on Google, you find what you want.  It’s not easy to manipulate the system, and that’s why people trust Google so much.