Press Release: BVCS (Daily Local News)

Press Release: BVCS (Daily Local News)

by | Sep 10, 2018

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Chris Dima

Founder and CEO

Sep 10, 2018

Content, Entrepreneurship, Incubator, Innovation, Press Releases, Startups, Website Development

Brandywine Valley College Specialists was featured in the Daily Local News this week for the recent launch of their online program which makes college admissions a breeze.   Founded by two experts in the field of admissions, we were approached in the Summer of 2017 to help transform their previously face-to-face consultative approach into a digital experience for increased accessibility.  Fast forward to Summer 2018 and we launched a fully produced platform experience with video and downloadable supplemental materials!

If you have someone in High School who is planning to go to college check out BVCS: https://bvcollegespecialists.com/

Press Release:  https://www.dailylocal.com/business/new–part-video-on-demand-course-is-designed-to/article_6a83c580-f49d-589b-a0d6-f130e420294a.html

SeO What? Good Content vs. Good SEO Content

SeO What? Good Content vs. Good SEO Content

by | Sep 1, 2017

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Chris Dima

Founder and CEO

Sep 1, 2017

Content, SEO, Startups, Website Development

SeO What? There’s Great Content, and There’s Great Content for SEO.

 

It’s time to face the facts..Content without an SEO strategy just doesn’t keep up in the 2017 digital marketplace. Imagine new rims and tires without a motor, SEO without content gets attention that goes nowhere. Unfortunately, search engines are not handing out checklists for “high-quality content,” and they probably never will. For this to work, you need to think Early & Often when it comes to SEO.

 

Speak Their Language: Start with User Intent Research

Once you know what queries your audience is using, and what kind of content they are looking for, you can design a content strategy that answers their specific questions and helps move them through the funnel.

 

 

 

SEO Foundation: What Makes Good Content

Aside from building around information that users actually looking for, make sure it has a single focus. Readers need to feel like they’ve completed one specific task. To further the engagement include additional content they want or an opportunity to purchase if its adjacent to their journey.

 

 

 

 

 

Top Technical SEO Issues Worth Noting:

LOAD TIMES: Resize your images and media to ensure faster load times. People don’t like to wait more than three seconds.
MOBILE: Content looks good on mobile devices. Most sites use responsive design but it’s always important to make sure images are center-aligned, forms and CTAs are tappable in the content, and so on.
SHORT URLs: Top URLs average <60 characters. Also, it’s best if you can have one URL for both web and mobile.

Facebook Insights Is One Of The Most Powerful Tools

Facebook Insights Is One Of The Most Powerful Tools

by | Aug 25, 2017

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Chris Dima

Founder and CEO

Aug 25, 2017

Analytics, Social, Startups

Facebook Insights Is One Of The Most Powerful Analytics Tools Available

 

In Facebook there are so many data-points available to measure — Likes, Engagement, Reach, Demographic, Etc — Insights helps you to understand how your audience is connecting with your content, how you’re growing and provides you with an overview of how your overall Facebook strategy is performing.

 

Half the battle of making sense of data is clearly defining what you want to accomplish. Next, is knowing where you can find measurable data to track your progress, hone your tactics, and ultimately achieve your goal . Here are just a few of the key highlights of what you’ll know from FB Insights:

1. Where your Page Likes came from,

2. What’s your reach and what factors affect it.

3. What people did on your Page; Who liked, saw, or engaged with your Page.

4. In Messenger, understanding your Response times and analytics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Local Tab: Local Businesses. Minds Blown.

In this tab, you have information about the foot traffic in your area, demographic information about people near your place, and percentage of people nearby who saw your Facebook ads.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Action Tab: Know Your Audience

The Actions on Page tab allows you to understand what people do when they are on your Page. A few actions that Facebook considered are clicking on “Get Directions”, clicking on your phone number, clicking on your website, and clicking on your action button.

5 Reasons to Run your Site on WordPress

5 Reasons to Run your Site on WordPress

by | Mar 22, 2017

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Chris Dima

Founder and CEO

Mar 22, 2017

Startups, Website Development, WordPress

1. The search engines love WordPress

Matt Cutts, software engineer for Google says, “WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues.” The WordPress platform is structured in a way that is search-engine friendly and there are many third-party plugins available that let site owners fine tune their message to be even more crawlable by Google.

  • Images – Google can’t “see” a picture or photo. WordPress allows text describing the image (tags) to be optimized so Google can find the images and know what they are about
  • Page load speed. Google knows that people will leave a website if they have to wait for pages to load. Out of the box, WordPress is a fast loading framework. The site owner still needs to make sure they are not overloading pages with tons of large images and bloated-code, but as long as best practices are followed the page will load quickly.
  • Social media – Google wants to know that a website has fresh content and regular visitors. Having social media accounts with frequent posts and many visitors sends traffic to the website is an important indicator for Google. WordPress has many options to integrate social media accounts with the website.

2. WordPress is free and open source.

When you build your website on WordPress, you are not locked in with a developer or third party. It is your choice where you host your website and you can use the platform however you choose. Because of this flexibility, WordPress is a very popular platform. 1 out of 4 websites on the internet is built on WordPress. This makes for a very large community of developers, site owners, and users. There are many opportunities to get answers to questions, share ideas, and even collaborate on projects. Also, there is no shortage of options to hire someone to help with site design, content writing, or even have a website completed from beginning to end.

Wordpress is open source and easy to use

3. WordPress has plugins. Many plugins.

A plugin is a piece of software that can be added to your WordPress site to add functionality. As of this writing, there are 49,285 plugins available in the WordPress directory. Many of these plugins are completely free, some are paid (either one-time fee or subscription model), and some follow the freemium model. A freemium plugin usually has a scaled-down free version that still offers much of the functionality you are looking for. You can test out the plugin and decide if you want to upgrade to the premium version. This may unlock additional features, automate functions, remove watermarks or plugin branding, and provide additional value. Here are some examples of the features that plugins can provide

  • Social Media – Integration with social networks, allowing users to share your content
  • Forms – Allow users to contact you, sign up for newsletters, make payments, and more.
  • Security – Provide higher levels of security for the website, users’ data, and assets.
  • SEO – Allow for fine tuning of content so that Google and other search engines find your site.
  • Advanced Functionality – Everything from membership sites to downloading ebooks to interactive calendars. If there is a need for it, there is most likely a plugin for it.

4. Themes

One of the key features of using WordPress is how it uses themes. WordPress installs “out of the box” with a default theme. A theme allows the website owner to make changes to the appearance of the site–colors, fonts, layout–without changing the core functionality of the site or needing to dive into the code. When the WordPress framework needs to be updated, it won’t write over the changes made to the theme. Think of it this way: if the WordPress system is a car, think of the theme as the paint job. While this is a simplistic analogy, it is a good example of how themes work. A more thorough explanation would also include how a framework can be installed onto wordpress, and why we would use parent and child themes. But we’ll leave that discussion for the next post.

5. Built for the mobile web

More than 50% of all searches are conducted on mobile devices. We’ve all gone to websites on our phone that were too small to read, hard to use, and loaded so slowly that we ended up leaving and going somewhere else. If your website doesn’t look good or work correctly on a mobile device, your visitors are going to leave. A responsive website means that the text, photos, and layout will automatically resize to look good on a desktop, tablet, or phone. And with so many responsive themes available for WordPress, it is easy for a website owner to build a website that looks and works great.

Wordpress is built for mobile

WordPress is the most popular content management system on the web. Its ease of use, countless options, and versatile design make it a compelling choice for any business owner. If you would like to discuss running your website on WordPress, give us a shout at (610) 541-2026 or send us an email.

5 Reasons Shopify is the Super-est platform for Ecommerce

5 Reasons Shopify is the Super-est platform for Ecommerce

by | Mar 16, 2017

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Chris Dima

Founder and CEO

Mar 16, 2017

Ecommerce, Startups

Whether you are just starting out or looking to grow your business, Shopify is great platform to run your ecommerce business. With beautiful themes that look and work great whether viewing on a computer or mobile device, Shopify can help you connect with customers and drive sales. With over 300,000 Shopify stores currently on the web today, you’ll get the support you need to be successful.

 

1. Ease of Use

When running an ecommerce store, you want it to work for you, not against you. Shopify allows you to easily edit inventory, make changes to themes and menus, and add pages and posts. Using Shopify Smart Collections, store owners can separate the catalog of products into categories and make it easier for customers to browse. The experience of using Shopify is both simple for the store owner, and for the customer. From browsing products, to adding items to the cart, to completing the purchase, the experience is seamless.

Shopify is easy to use on any device

2. The Apps

Since Shopify runs on a standard platform, you are able to try out different apps to see which ones are a great fit for you and your ecommerce store. Because these apps are built to run on Shopify, you don’t need to worry about “breaking” your site. There are apps for loyalty programs, cross-sell and upsell aps, shipping apps, apps to integrate with your accounting software. You can make your ecommerce site run just how you want with well over 1,000 apps to choose from.

 

3. Security

Defending against threats are always a high priority for any ecommerce site. Keeping your customer data and business information securely maintained and safe from hackers is of the utmost importance. Shopify is certified Level 1 PCI DSS Compliant–meaning you can accept credit cards with the peace of mind that the data is being handled securely.

 

4. Tracking Orders and Sales

You can manage your orders and track sales right from your mobile phone. You are only one click away from all the info you need to run your ecommerce store. The mobile dashboard lets you see your business at a glance and track trending items. You can lookup customers and contact them by email or phone right from the app. And your data is always synced with your online store so that you can make decisions with real-time data.

Track your Shopify orders and sales

5. Outstanding Customer Service

You want to spend your time running your business, not playing tech support. The help center is full of FAQ’s, user guides, and tutorials. It is clearly organized with the ability to easily search for a quick “how-to”. But you always have access to live support.
The Shopify support team is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can reach them by email, live chat, or phone.

 

To learn more about how you can get started with Shopify (or how to migrate your current ecommerce store over to Shopify) drop us a line. You can call us at (610) 541-2026 or send us an email.