Directive Blogs

In today’s business, the demand for software often outpaces the supply of available coders. For businesses that find the need for new applications to drive their business initiatives, there are now “no code” tools available that can help them create the software they need without having to lean on software developers. This week, we take a look at no code tools and how they can work for your business. 

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.

Your website is the primary marketing tool for your business, and as such, it must look and operate as expected. It has become a pretty standard practice for smaller businesses to use prebuilt WordPress or Joomla templates as opposed to paying a designer to build a custom website from scratch. It saves money, and it gets you, essentially, the same end result. However, not all templates are created equal. An inferior template or theme will end up costing you in the end.

The pandemic changed how businesses interact with their customers, particularly regarding communication. As customers have grown used to and have come to expect to find solutions to their problems online, the question is, does your website help or hinder your customers? Here are some steps you can take to ensure your customers have a great user experience.

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.

Browser cookies might not sound delicious, but they are a particularly important part of your browser’s technology. Do you actually know what they do, though? Today’s tech term will explain just what these cookies are, as well as the purpose they serve for your organization.

You may have heard technology professionals use the word “cache,” pronounced cash, in their day-to-day duties, but do you really know what it means? Generally, the context of this word is that users should “clear the cache,” but unless you know what that process entails, you won’t really understand what the cache does or why it’s used in this way. This week’s tech term is cache, so let’s see what hidden treasures this word yields.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a critical consideration when building a website. After all, higher search rankings bring in traffic, which is exactly what you want your website to receive - otherwise, what's the point? There are, of course, different tactics one may implement to improve their position in rankings, with varying degrees of moral standing. These practices are divided into two subsets, white hat and black hat tactics.

The Internet has made quite a few common processes easier, including buying and selling goods and even services. However, while e-commerce is experiencing extreme growth, it may not be the right fit for every business. There are a variety of considerations to balance out to determine if e-commerce is something that you should be leveraging.

Today, just about everyone has a digital camera in their pockets, which has led to an unprecedented amount of picture taking compared to the days when photos had to be developed. Having more cameras has turned us into a more visual society, but not every amateur photographer understands how to best manage all of their photos, which causes problems.

You've just started your own small business, and your head is swimming with ideas that you want to share with the entire world. You create a blog and publish a few articles, but only get a few hits. You sigh, write another entry, and then shut down your computer for the night. This happens for a few days, which turn into weeks, and months, and something doesn't feel right to you. Why aren't you getting any viewers?