St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Client News’ Category

Let's explore e-mail marketing delivery methods

When launching a large e-mail campaign it’s wise to ask “Should we use a company like MailChimp or Constant Contact, our own mail server or should we use a commercial e-mail server to send our mailings?”  Here’s your choices Mr. Executive:

• Your traditional E-Mail Delivery Methods
• A free e-mail account
• An E-Mail newsletter service provider
• Dedicated space on a private server

It’s good to ask this question and carefully consider the answers because there are advantages, disadvantages and risks to each choice.  We can’t give you a definitive answer that works for all businesses and all e-mail campaigns.  There is once choice that is more obvious than the others so we’ll start there. Continue reading “E-Mail Marketing – Service or Server” »

We’ve just created an mobile theme for this blog.  We hope you enjoy it.  We like it because it’s “responsive”  which means it automatically adjusts for any size screen.  It even has some server side programming to resize images!  It can be used as a full screen desktop theme as well but we like the full sized theme we have.

We’ve combined our new mobile theme, which we are tentatively calling Flxi, with a a “sniffer” script which detects the device being used.  If it’s a tablet or phone then it gives them the same content but with the Flxi theme. It also includes a link in the footer to bypass this script and view the mobile version.  Once in the mobile version, the link in the footer will switch you back to the desktop version.  We did this because our main theme looks great and is highly readable in all but the smallest of devices.

Here’s a link to bypass the preview it.  Remember, it will look different depending on the size of the device.  For instance if you are on a desktop PC or a laptop it will have three columns.  If it’s a much smaller device, then it will only have one column so please try it on a couple devices…

Mobile theme

It’s an important questions for web designers and web design managers. Especially when it come to the more specific question of Which version Of Internet Explorer (IE) are people using.
Nowadays with the advent of HTML 5 being released into the wild and CSS 3 being released into the wild, both before they are even finished by the way, it’s important to know which features you can use in your web designs because most of these new features don’t work in all browsers.

If you turn to Google for the answer to this question you’ll most likely be pointed to a one of the big tech websites like twocows.com or something and there you’ll see an old or a newer chart that shows how many people visited the web site and what browser they were using.  The problem is that they are a tech web site visited by Technical people.  Technical people on tech web sites are far more likely to use web browsers likely Firefox and Opera and less likely web browsers like IE and Chrome because of the security and social issues involved.  (IE is part of a scheme to monopolize the world computer and internet technology, while Chrome is too, it’s also actively defrauds advertisers by making all typed in addresses count as click on an advertisement when it wasn’t.)

So we checked our clients websites, We tried to get a wide sampling of “typical”web sites that have mostly U.S. Based web traffic; we are using fresh (last 30 days), combined data from several web sites and averaged it together and then rounded the results to the nearest whole percentage point:

Here’s what we found (to protect the clients, we are used percentages, not raw numbers):

Browsers:

• IE: 47%
  • The IE browsers by version as a percentage of IE users, not as a percentage of all users:
  • IE 9: 10%
  • IE 8: 65%
  • IE 7: 17%
  • IE 6: 3%
  • IE 5.5: 0%
• Firefox: 17% Continue reading “Which Browsers and Devices are Used the Most?” »

Our Basic Local Internet Marketing package, has just been trimmed down and deeply discounted for those small businesses who’d like to get listed in the local sections of the three big search engines.  It’s an inexpensive and simple way to be introduced to the benefits of local internet marketing.

Learn about our  Basic Local Internet Marketing Package new low price and what it entails.

If you’d like more we still do much much more so drop us a line and we’ll work out a custom marketing campaign just for you.

Create a Post in WordPress Video

WordPress, a web application that supports not just reverse chronological order articles, hierarchical pages, a WYSIWYG content editor with a working image/file uploader and embedder and tons of other features, sounds a little intimidating at first.  But the beauty of WordPress is that it’s easy to use.

Yes WordPress is powerful, secure, has tons of plug-ins and a huge user community.  But it also has it’s basics down.  If you are a basic level user it just doesn’t get much easier than this to work.  Other Content Management Systems (CMS) like Drupal, PhpNuke, Joomla will have even the fastest of learners pulling their hair out within a manner of days.  Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s them.  WordPress is so widely customizable that it can do just about any job that they can.  But without the heartache that the others cause.

We’re proud to launch our in house made client info and proofing system. Behind a password protected front end we’ve created a custom section for each client with client news just for them, a summary of their account status, proofs of their latest web designs, if any are available and a simple feed back form for approval and feedback on these proofs.
Like we said it’s pass word protected so if you are awaiting a proof we’ll be contacting you soon (if we haven’t already) with your user name and password to the client info center.