These posts are published in our quarterly newsletter.

Should I ride 50 or 100 miles at the Best Buddies Challenge?

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bestbuddiesI am pleased to be riding the Best Buddies Challenge bike ride to the Cape Cod over Memorial Day weekend. Help us support this great cause with your donation.

Vote the distance with your donation!

  • $0-$99  is a vote for 50 miles
  • $100+  is a vote a vote for 100 miles –  1 vote for each $100.

 

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About Best Buddies

Best Buddies is a global volunteer movement that creates opportunities for one-to-one friendships, integrated employment and leadership development for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).

 

 

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WordPress Security and WPEngine

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What do Playstation, U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM), Target, Home Depot, Apple iCloud, Snapsave, and Evernote all have in common?

They each have been hacked within the past year resulting in a treasure trove of sensitive information being released.

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Society now lives in two worlds; the physical world and a digital one.  The information we put online has given hackers the ability to cultivate information over time, chip-away at your digital-self, and execute an attack that spans into both.  New viruses combined with new technologies have changed how we must protect our businesses and online investments.  DDoS attacks, otherwise known as Distributed Denial of Service attacks, Trojan Horses, BadUSB, as well as malicious codes like SoakSoak and ShellShock (Bash), all effect WordPress websites.

“74,652,825 sites out there are depending on good ol’ WordPress. That’s one site per person in Turkey. Around 50% of this figure (close to 37 million) is hosted on the free WordPress.com. In the realm of self-hosted sites, WordPress accounts for 18.9% of all websites,” as of last year according to an article by ManageWP.

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Top 5 User Experience (UX) Myths BUSTED!

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A “build it and they will come” approach to web design is an uniformed approach. Still, some people ignore UX completely or forge ahead with limited knowledge only to find out later that users are bouncing off their brand new web pages like ping pong balls.

Then there’s mobile UX concerns to think about. With mobile devices proliferating and their users becoming more adept at using them, expectations are high. Not only are you expected to have a responsive mobile design, but the overall experience you deliver must be fast and easy for users.   

Even if you understand that UX is an essential part of web design and internet marketing, you may still be operating under some misconceptions. Are you really following UX best practices? See if you’ve subscribed to any of these UX myths:

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5 Reasons Why CRM Is Essential in Growing Your Business

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It’s all about the customer.  Cultivating and managing your customer relationships is essential for effective marketing campaigns, sales, and repeat business.  But when your contact list becomes unwieldy or you find that several people within your company are reaching out to the same contact, you know you need to get organized.  Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs enable you to respond to your customer base with timely communication, targeted marketing campaigns and strategic follow up.

3-Tips-to-Using-Email-Thread-for-Smooth-CommunicationMy Pet Peeve: Email Threads

How often have you needed to check a customer detail that was in an email thread you received days or weeks ago? You’re hustling to get to a meeting and just can’t find that all important message.

CRMs centralize, store and organize detailed customer data and history logs for easy reference. Help your salespeople improve their effectiveness by sharing information with your team or designating members to manage a particular lead or customer.

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Blog Post Checklist

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Before you publish a blog post, ensure the content, and context meet your company’s standards and the post is optimized and ready.  Too often, authors get off topic or write overly complicated information without proper context resulting in a less than positive response and engagement.  When we publish a post or work with clients on publishing a post, we use a checklist to remind ourselves to address a range of important factors.  Below is a Blog Post Checklist that includes questions you can ask before pressing the ‘publish’ button.

Download and save for later use!

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What’s Makes a Good User Experience?

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John Stone from Revenue Architects asked me this question over lunch. The answer I gave him got me thinking about a conversation I had at a conference a few years back.

I was approached by a business executive who asked me what is the difference between usability and user experience. My answer: Here’s the big difference, user experience is all about ROI (Return on Investment).

Integrated Digital Strategy

Source: RevenuePerform.com

The start of any good user experience begins with a clear business goal. Whether it is a mobile app, website, or even a physical product a good user experience fulfills that need. Start by asking yourselves the hard questions – What do I want my users to do? What do I want them to accomplish? What is the call to action? Given that end goal, a good user experience optimizes the path and flow that they will need to take.

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