Digital Marketing News in the Tampa Bay Area and Vestal New York.

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Why Your Business Needs to Evaluate its Website Performance

How’s your website performing? And why do you need to know?

Regularly evaluating the performance of your website is critical to the success of online businesses. Online businesses spend large amounts of time and money designing a website that attracts their audience, building functional online stores, creating marketing materials, and writing savvy content to draw in visitors. All of this work is meant to boost engagement and encourage quality traffic that turns leads into sales. Yet they aren’t receiving the conversion rates they expected, even if they have high traffic.

Without measurement and evaluations, determining what’s hindering your website’s success becomes a guessing game. Businesses won’t know how well or how badly their website is performing, but most importantly, they won’t know how to fix it. By running analytics on your website, it becomes much easier to determine which areas of your website are performing better than others.

Often, the root of poor website performance lies in an inefficient server, which dramatically affects page loading speeds and response times. Numerous studies have shown that even a few tenths of a second start decreasing a visitor’s desire to use a website. Despite quality web design, graphics, or content, slow load speeds can immediately alter a visitor’s perception of the website’s quality and their decision to use its services. In addition, page load speeds also determine where a website will rank in search engine results, majorly affecting a business’s SEO.

Page speed is often neglected in many businesses website planning processes. Overly enlarged images, unoptimized images, many different plugins or customizations, and inefficient coding can all bloat and slow down a website. However, a website’s hosting services and its server also have a major impact on speed and response times. Depending on a business’s hosting services, a crowded shared server could dramatically slow a website’s speed since it forces users to compete for resources. As a result, another website’s high traffic could slow down and even crash other websites on the same server. Though shared servers are cost efficient for many businesses, its instability can lead to lost sales.

Depending on the business’s size and budget, switching to a more powerful server may be the answer. But running regular evaluations and analytics on a website’s performance shows owners where they can optimize their current server and make the changes needed to improve its overall performance. Fast response and loading times have been proven to increase positive performance results and conversion rates, leading to higher quality traffic, increased sales, and higher search engine rankings.

Find Out Where Your Website Stands

Regularly evaluating your website will keep your business on track to meeting your objectives. Sun Sign Designs offers a free audit of your website’s loading performance and provides solutions to further improve it. Discover how your website is performing and learn ways to optimize it now.

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VPS, VMS, and Dedicated Hosting: What’s the Difference?

The type of hosting your website uses plays a critical role in how your online content is viewed and distributed. If a business chooses a hosting service that doesn’t fit its needs, the business’s ability to effectively reach its audience is impacted.

Just like local businesses will contemplate location, size, and ease-of-access when leasing physical spaces for its in-person store, online businesses need to evaluate their own pros and cons when “leasing” virtual space for people to visit their website and online shop. Web hosting essentially gives people the server space for websites to become visible on the Internet. In our digital age, virtual storefronts are becoming just as plentiful as physical ones.

When looking to build a website for their business, people need to make sure their website and ecommerce solutions can effectively perform business operations without downtime or interruptions. In order to do so, people will need to consider and definitively know their business’s needs before choosing a hosting server that will best serve them. Let’s explore the main differences between VPS, VMS, and dedicated hosting servers.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a physical server that is divided into several smaller virtual servers, in which multiple users share an operating system. A VPS is often likened to a large apartment complex in which each person has their own apartment. Everyone has their own space they can customize and control, but they are housed in the same building and share some basic resources. VPS is essentially a hybrid of shared hosting and dedicated hosting. It gives users the minimum amount of resources they need without overwhelming them with resources their business has not yet grown into.

VPS offers users a private operating system, storage, and bandwidth that is allocated and shared between users on the server. VPS also offers a high degree of control and customization, allowing users to easily change server settings, add software, add users, and turn the server on and off as needed. In addition, VPS hosting is incredibly cost-effective compared to a dedicated server and is an affordable option for small-to-medium sized businesses.

However, with many partitions and users on one operating system, it has the potential to cause increased strain on the server. As a result, VPS users may suffer from reduced uptime and increased disruptions. For example, if a VPS receives high, unexpected levels of traffic, it will use the entirety of the server’s CPU, or operating abilities. Consequently, one user’s traffic on a VPS could affect the performance of another user’s website.

VPS hosting is suitable for small-to-medium sized businesses, personal pages, or bloggers who do not receive high levels of traffic but still want basic security and reliability on a budget. For businesses that have outgrown shared hosting but cannot afford dedicated hosting, VPS is an affordable in-between.

Virtual Machine Server (VMS)

Similar to a VPS, a Virtual Machine Server (VMS) splits the physical server into many individual, virtual servers. However, instead of sharing the resources across all the servers, each partitioned server receives its own dedicated resources. VMS hosting is specifically designed to host numerous users so performance doesn’t become an issue. In comparison to a VPS, a VMS offers improved security and performance. In terms of storage, disk space, memory, and bandwidth, a VMS caters to small-to-medium sized businesses with an increased hosting budget for better performance and security. However, if a business needs low-cost hosting, VPS might be preferred.

Dedicated Hosting

A dedicated server means a user will get the entire physical server for their website along with increased storage, memory, disk space, and speed. As a result, a user’s website is physically isolated from other accounts, not just virtually isolated, which means increased security and reliability. The main advantage to dedicated servers in addition to increased space is that users have full control over their resources—no one else’s website will affect their own. However, dedicated servers are far more expensive and more complex to manage; essentially, they are not user-friendly. Dedicated services are suitable for high-traffic sites that have very specific hosting needs. For most people, VPS or VMS hosting are more affordable and flexible options.

 

Which hosting solution best fits your business? It’s important to keep in mind that the hosting solution you select could potentially be a long-term solution, one that will affect your business way into the future. Take your time and make an educated decision when choosing between a VPS, VMS, or dedicated server.

Got more hosting questions? Drop a comment below!

How Custom Photography Can Benefit Your Business

Every business, regardless of the industry, can benefit from custom photography. With only mere seconds to capture your audience’s attention, specialized images allow your business to truly shine and stand out. First impressions are critical and investing in originality pays off. Let’s look at 5 ways custom photography can add value to any business:

Establish Brand Credibility and Professionalism

Professionally-produced photos with creative design automatically establish a perceived sense of credibility and expertise for a business. The carefully curated imagery demonstrates that the business is professionally-driven and focuses on quality. Customers then extend this confidence and trust to the business’s products and services. Quality photography creates the foundation for strong brand reputations, which are essential for growing businesses to sell their products and services. Oftentimes, low-quality, DIY photos reflect poorly on a business’s products or services. Even if those products or services are excellent, potential customers will be reluctant to give them a try if they appear amateurish. First impressions are important!

Accurately Depict Your Brand

Your media represents your brand and tells your story. However, stock images can only do so much to effectively convey this. Custom photography, on the other hand, successfully captures the essence of your brand and message. Custom photography allows customers to get a close-up look and accurate depiction of a business, which boosts brand authenticity. In addition, when customers or clients are able to view team members and put a face to a name, they are able to form personal connections they can trust. Stock images can feel impersonal when customers are interested in getting to genuinely know your business.

Differentiate Your Brand from Competition

Custom photography is one of a kind while stock imagery is nonexclusive. Chances are, a business could find their competitor using the same stock images. In order to stand out from the competition and gain an advantage, businesses must invest in their visual brand presence. Brand recognition is an incredibly valuable asset to build trust and credibility. Custom photography allows businesses to build rapport with customers with unique images. Ideally, customers will then automatically associate these images with the brand. This brand awareness is often the first step to driving your performance in leads and sales.

Employ Powerful Visual Storytelling

Custom photography empowers your business to tell a story without saying a word. Website visitors are likely to scroll past huge chunks of copy while a creative, custom image will hook and anchor them. The visuals will convey enough necessary information about your business to get them interested in reading some copy and further exploring your site. Custom photography will enhance any business’s website, breaking up the copy and making it an overall engaging experience. Plus, in our age of scrolling, it is critical for businesses to hook their audience’s attention immediately, something generic stock imagery frequently cannot achieve.

Enjoy Ownership and Increased Versatility

One of the biggest game changers with custom photography is that your business owns the images and can use them as you see fit. Stock images, on the other hand, limit businesses with licenses and rights. With custom photo shoots, businesses can garner enough unique, on-brand images to reuse them across social media channels and to enhance other content.

If your business has an upcoming product or service launch, are thinking about a brand or website redesign, or want to take your social media and marketing to the next level, your business is ready to benefit from custom photography!

@sunsigndesigns https://www.sunsigndesigns.com

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No Horsing Around

Did a photo shoot on Tuesday at RVR #horserescue in Tampa Fl. What an amazing experience working with these majestic animals. Check back often as we will be launching their website in the next two weeks. @acadiapowell ⁣
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#horseshow #equestrianlife #horses#horseriding #horsesofinsta #equine#love #horsephoto #horselovers#horsesofig #horseofinsta#horsesofinstagram #horselife#horseofinstagram #horserider#horselover #horsejumping #dressage#equestrian #horsebackriding#horseaddict #instahorse #horselove#horsestagram #pony#horsephotographer #horseoftheday#pferd #nature @sunsigndesigns

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Sun Sign Designs Grows Tampa Succulents’ Website

Tampa Succulents is a succulent greenhouse and shop based in the Seminole Heights neighborhood of Tampa, Florida. Owner Lisa Kimball’s love for succulents and gardening bloomed at a young age. She was continually fascinated by plant propagation and creating new succulents from fallen scraps. She now helps others discover the joys of planting succulents and cultivating greater community connection!

With Tampa Succulents, she has the pleasure of sharing and teaching the art of gardening and succulent therapy! Through fun virtual DIY events, pop-up markets, and collaborations with local businesses, Tampa Succulents shares the process of potting, arranging, and growing your own succulent planters or living wreaths. Tampa Succulents also ships their DIY succulent kits nationwide, so anyone can build and design the perfect planters for their home or garden.

Tampa Succulents knows growth is key, so they turned to Sun Sign Designs to help their website thrive! Tampa Succulents switched to Sun Sign Designs’ reliable hosting services, which boast high loading speeds, minimal downtime, and secure encryption. Sun Sign Designs ensures that all their clients’ websites are fast and user-friendly for their customers in order to quickly convert leads into sales.

Sun Sign Designs enhanced Tampa Succulents online platform and marketplace with new website design and copy. With the endless varieties of shapes, sizes, colors, and textures of succulents, Sun Sign Designs made sure Tampa Succulents’ website was bursting with the same color and greenery to engage site visitors. Similarly, Sun Sign Designs revitalized Tampa Succulents’ online shop, so customers can easily sort through DIY kits, succulent favors, living wreaths, and more. Finally, Sun Sign Designs is boosting Tampa Succulents’ SEO and creating new points of entry to their website by writing engaging blog content. Websites that are regularly updated with fresh content stay relevant in search engines and climb higher in search results, bringing more business to the website.

We think strong website design and digital marketing strategies are essential for businesses to grow and thrive for the long-term.

Check out Tampa Succulents at https://tampasucculents.com/

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Sun Sign Designs Launches PEAQ Procurement’s Website

PEAQ Procurement is a strategic advisory firm focused on helping mid-sized companies grow and perform by delivering value through procurement. Through its name, PEAQ promises Procurement Excellence Achieved Quickly and bringing their clients to the pinnacle, or “peak,” of success through strategic procurement.

PEAQ is action-oriented and focused on accelerated savings and results for their clients. They intimately understand what mid-sized companies need at each stage of the procurement process having walked in their clients’ shoes and faced the same challenges. With PEAQ’s down-to-earth, action-oriented approach to procurement, Sun Sign Designs designed their website to visually convey this message and approach.

PEAQ’s homepage opens with a paneled slideshow that immediately engages and hooks visitors of the website. The images feature breathtaking, rugged views of mountains, deep valleys, forests, and rivers—but these are not uninhabited, empty stills. They present adventurers hiking trails, climbing uphill, and scaling craggy rocks. By showcasing individuals who are physically ascending rough terrains, Sun Sign Designs infuses PEAQ’s website aesthetic with advancement and achievement in the face of adversity—or in the face of an intimidating procurement process.

Sun Sign Designs visually helps push PEAQ’s action-based mission to keep their clients moving forward and reach their procurement goals with the carefully-selected storyboard of images. Sun Sign Designs makes the majestic imagery approachable by inhabiting it with successful, hardworking individuals. As a result, Sun Sign Designs makes PEAQ’s procurement process appear more accessible and approachable for the mid-sized companies PEAQ works for.

With several images of individuals standing at great heights, or peaks, looking down below, Sun Sign Designs emphasizes PEAQ’s promise to guide their clients through difficult obstacles to reach the summit of their procurement goals.

At Sun Sign Designs, we believe strategic visual communication and quality website design are essential for speaking directly to your target audience and strengthening your business’s brand and core mission.

Check out PEAQ Procurement’s new website at https://peaqprocurement.com.

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Blue Rooster Web | Domain Name

Once a business has decided to build a website, it has an important decision to make before even thinking of the design process: choosing a name.

In our digital age, domain names have become online property. It is the virtual storefront where owners conduct business and where potential customers will browse and shop.

Domain names provide identifiable addresses for Internet users to easily locate a business’s website rather than using a string of numbers, or the IP address. No two domain names are ever the same, so staking your business’s claim can be a daunting process and, inevitably, many questions arise:

“Do I have to buy the same domain name as my registered business name?”

“Which domain extension would be best for me?”

“Will the choice of my domain name affect SEO?”

Blue Rooster Web answers all of these questions and streamlines that process for businesses through creative consultations to problem-solve, create, and secure a business’s unique, brand-driven domain name with Search Engine Optimization in the forefront.

Already included in Blue Rooster Web’s comprehensive and affordable web design and marketing subscription, businesses don’t have to worry about annual fees for domain name upkeep.

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Blue Rooster Web | Secure Website Hosting and SSL Certification

In order for a business to have an accessible website, it first requires a website hosting service. Website hosting is a service that allocates organizations, businesses, and individuals the virtual space to post a website to the Internet. The web host, or the web hosting provider, offers the technologies needed for the website to be viewed on the Internet and show up in searches. The files that comprise the website are subsequently stored on the host’s server, which Internet users will then access by typing in the domain name.

For a business’s strong online presence, reliable and secure website hosting is key.

Blue Rooster Web affordably bundles its professional, high-speed website hosting service with its comprehensive web design and marketing subscription, so businesses have a website that is always running smoothly and never littered with pop-up ads. It ensures that business owners never waste their own time trouble-shooting or worrying about losing online visitors. At no additional cost, Blue Rooster Web offers its customers unlimited data on its VMS software system because the last thing anyone should worry about is running out of storage.

Blue Rooster Web also installs the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate onto the business’s web server to establish a secure connection between browsers and ensure all web traffic is protected. SSL Certificates shields users’ sensitive information, such as credit card information, usernames, and passwords and keeps data secure between servers.  SSL Certification also increases customer trust, improves rankings on search engines, and ensures the business passes payment card industry (PCI) requirements in order to continue selling online.

Check out Blue Rooster Web today!

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Sun Sign Designs Revamps Snyder Law’s Website and Business Model

Snyder Business Law is a boutique law firm based in Radnor, Pennsylvania. They proudly represent small businesses, start-ups, family-owned businesses, and their leaders, presidents, and CEOs. Snyder Law knows firsthand that small-to-medium-sized businesses traditionally serviced by large city-based firms are often disappointed by the lack of attention they receive as well as the soaring rates they are forced to pay. Snyder Business Law never lets their clients become afterthoughts and provides the same quality services for a much more affordable price—and they needed a website to effectively convey this to potential clients.

Snyder Law turned to Sun Sign Designs to host and create a sleek, professional website that visually communicated quality and affordability while providing ease of use at the same time. With these design goals in mind, Sun Sign Designs created a high-end aesthetic with cityscape backgrounds and professional figures and then balanced this design by adding images of people smiling and working together. As a result, Sun Sign Designs conveyed that Snyder Business Law offers the same quality services that large city-based firms do while being much more approachable and accessible. In addition, the website is easily navigable, so potential clients can seamlessly find the information they need to continue.

In addition to marketing savvy website design and SEO enhancements, Sun Sign Designs also helped Snyder Law pivot their business model to solve this common problem within the legal world: business owners needed to be able to contact their attorneys with time-sensitive questions about business decisions, potential risks, and potential opportunities on an affordable basis. Though Snyder Law knew this need was apparent, they didn’t quite know how to create a sustainable business model and website to fill this need.

Sun Sign Designs helped Snyder Law create a recurring revenue model that satisfied this need and streamlined it through their new website. Sun Sign Designs assisted Snyder Law in crafting its monthly subscription plan as well as scaling its operations and automating its processes to thrive in an online environment. As a result, Snyder Law’s Scribe subscription service satisfied the consumer demand for legal advice—available via phone, email, text, and Zoom—while also creating a stable revenue stream for Snyder Law that could grow without restraint.

Through the three different Scribe “Law on Call” subscription levels, Snyder Law has helped clients start their businesses, manage agreements and employment contracts, set their businesses up for sale or succession, and grow them with trademarks, licensing, and franchising. For low monthly costs, business owners can schedule a monthly virtual conference with an attorney to answer all their business questions and concerns. This opportunity to affordably problem-solve with a legal expert and receive ongoing communication is truly priceless for any business owner, and Snyder Law, with the help of Sun Sign Designs, was able to effectively create a profitable solution for both parties.

The affordability of the subscription-based model combined with the value and low-risk for potential clients to try out the service immediately attracted and retained more long-term clients in a cost-effective manner. Consequently, both the clients and Snyder Law saved money. Additionally, Snyder Law was able to diversify their monthly revenue streams and have a revenue stream that could increase without restriction. The recurring revenue model through a subscription service gave Snyder Law the opportunity to build strong relationships with their clients on an ongoing basis, creating stability and long-term sustainability for its boutique law firm.

Check them out at https://Snyderbusinesslaw.com