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How Can You Turn Website Speed into a Competitive Advantage?

You wouldn’t think something as small as page loading speeds would impact something as big as the success of driving forward your business’s mission—but it does.

When a user first decides to visit your website, the first thing they notice isn’t your colorful web design, clean layout, savvy content, interesting  products or services—it’s your page loading speed. And for better or for worse, the way they perceive the rest of your website and business will depend on this first impression.

Research has shown that the modern user expects websites to load in three seconds or less. In fact, some users will even leave before the three second mark. These studies show that, when forced to wait longer than three seconds, the users will leave the website and look elsewhere. As a result, slow page loading speeds are directly correlated to lower traffic and conversion rates.

Imagine this: someone visited your website with the intention of reading your content or purchasing purchase a product or service—but you lost them, not because your website was unappealing, but because it simply didn’t load fast enough. It’s a shame that slow page speeds are what prevent users from enjoying the creative web designs and content businesses work so hard to create for their customers.

Consequently, business owners do not have a second to lose. Here’s how fast page loading speeds can immediately secure a competitive advantage for your website and business:

Capture and Maintain Consumer Interest

As we noted above, it isn’t enough to simply spark consumer curiosity—you have to also maintain it! Creative web design and strategic marketing will do the heavy lifting to get the traffic to your website, but fast page loading speeds will be the secret edge that maintains and boosts it.

When pages load quickly on your website, users are not distracted by inconvenience and don’t become frustrated. Fast loading times lock in visitors to your website. They won’t have time to think about leaving when you have a website design and layout that makes users explore. As a result, they won’t leave your website and can form their opinion based on all the hard work that went into the website’s design, layout, copy, and offerings.

Create a Positive User Experience

Even if your web design and content are more engaging than your competition, it won’t matter if visitors won’t stay long enough to interact with it. Every visitor is a potential customer. When page loading speeds and general performance are slow and clunky, it is an immediate turn off to the modern internet user.

You can put all your time, money, and energy into creating the perfect, most seamless user experience. However, it will all be for naught if you have slow page loading speeds. First impressions are incredibly lasting. Also, with so many options on the market, there isn’t a big reason for visitors to return and try a slow website again. Ensure your visitors’ experiences with your website are positive and lasting for the right reasons.

Build Loyalty and Trust

People expect lightning-fast loading speeds and an entirely frictionless experience. When they receive this in a website, they immediately feel taken care of and appreciated. They will see a website and a business that prioritizes their experience and appreciates their support. Customers will perceive the website as a quality business they can trust and that they can return to.

Even though design, content, and product and service offerings will certainly have sway in their overall opinion, fast loading times will tip the scales in the right direction. It is far more cost-effective for businesses to get loyal repeat customers to make another purchase than it is for businesses to obtain new customers. Consequently, fast websites will instill trust and build loyal customers.

Boost Conversion Rates

Slow page loading speeds could be killing your conversion rates. According to one study, improving your page loading speeds by 1 second can lower bounce rates and increase conversions up to 27 percent. Unhindered by slow speeds, more users can complete the business’s desired action, whether it be reading a blog post, filling out a survey, providing an email address for a newsletter, or purchasing a product. Page loading speeds clearly have an impact on businesses’ online revenue potential.

Ensuring your website has fast page loading speeds is a critical first step to growing your business and maintaining a competitive advantage over your competition. What are you doing to boost your website speed?

How Fast Are Your Pages Loading? Find Out Where Your Website Stands Today

What’s slowing your website down? Let’s find out and fix it together!

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 the solutions needed to further improve it. Discover how your website is performing and learn ways to optimize it now.

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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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American-Made is Best

In a time when so many American goods, services, and technologies are outsourced abroad, Sun Sign Design wants to reiterate its belief in purely American-made web design, marketing, and advertising. Sun Sign Designs never outsources its products, services, or technologies abroad. All of its unique web design, brand-building graphics, e-commerce solutions, social media and content marketing, its advanced Search Engine Optimization software, and website security technologies are exclusive to the U.S.A.

Sun Sign Designs knows that when you buy and support American workers, you also keep local businesses strong and support domestic job growth. Sun Sign Designs is proud to be a part of the American workforce that strives for excellence and superiority in its services. It is also proud to never risk its clients’ satisfaction by outsourcing work abroad. Businesses that rely on outside services inevitably risk the reduction in quality as important project details are lost in translation. In addition, outsourcing work abroad calls security into question since different countries may not have the same laws protecting intellectual property or private data.

By keeping its services and technologies domestic, Sun Sign Designs is able to personally collaborate with every single one of its clients to understand their business and their goals, becoming incredibly familiar with the unique characteristics and needs of every project. Staying American allows Sun Sign Designs to closely monitor all projects and always turn out quality website design to its clients. Most importantly, Sun Sign Designs’ clients rest easy knowing their intellectual property and private data will never be compromised by a foreign entity.

Staying American-made means keeping American consumers’ trust. That’s why Sun Sign Designs has created a new “Made in the USA” graphic to place on its clients’ websites. The phrase “Made in the USA” speaks of quality, excellent craftsmanship, and a superior product, and these connotations are immediately transferred to the website. The graphic will not only show viewers of the website that the business supports American jobs, but it will also instill a sense of trust in them knowing that it has not been created abroad and that it will have superior products and services than those that are not American-made.

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Sun Sign Designs Enters the World of CBD Advertising

When I met Fawn Organics I immediately fell in love the with products they were selling. THC-Free CBD products that had a major health benefit. I also was up for the challenge of marketing CBD products. Cathi was awesome and shared many documents about CBD advertising and I was amazed. Not at the lack of knowledge we had, but how the rules of marketing this type of product aligned with how we do marketing.

Brilliantly phycological marketing that did not mention CBD at all. Yeah CBD is a dirty word. We had to do marketing that appealed to the senses in the subtle way. Anyone who has works with us has heard me talk about how the website is the center of the wagon wheel and the digital marketing are the spokes of that wheel. The website can use whatever vernacular clearly defines the products, however, it cannot mention that CBD products provide health benefits. We know they do and so does the FDA 😉  The external advertising cannot mention CBD at all. Facebook who plays both sides of the aisle on this one, states they will ban the use of the word CDB. However, I have noted in my visual research that they “allowed” bigger players to use the word CBD in their context. Other social media channels, email marketing, and some SEO will not allow the word CBD to be used. We did a keyword check on Google for paid advertising for the keyword CBD… non existent. Bottom line is that you can not be bold and literal with this type of product line.

Phycological marketing is our favorite. So game on.

We like to introduce our newest website to our portfolio of work, Fawn Organics. Please shop local while we all #flattenthecurve and give Fawn Organics the opportunity to exceed your expectations. https://fawnorganics.com . As always, drop us a line, comment on our website and feel free to ask us any questions.

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Dirty Words

How Everyday Business Terminology Can Get Flagged by SPAM Filters

I recently had a conversation with a client about how the use of his business name in the subject line of his email was getting picked up by SPAM filters when he sends out his monthly newsletter. Why had the word “financial” become a dirty word? If you are like me you get 50 calls a day about expansion capital. Not only do I get calls, I also receive unwarranted texts and emails with regards to this same topic. If you get enough people complaining and marking these emails as SPAM, then certain words get targeted going forward.

So where is the line between legitimate businesses and SPAM? In many cases that line has disappeared.

Lets add another variable to this equation. Content. A lot of companies use their newsletter as archives on their website to help broaden their website’s footprint and help improve their rank on the search engines. You’ve probably heard a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how using certain keywords can raise your website’s visibility. But what you may not have heard is that the word choice in your content not only has the power to allow more people to see you, but when it comes to emails, it can influence whether you can be seen at all.

While certain keywords can help to improve your online ranking, certain words can also trigger the SPAM filter. You may have stellar content that properly represents your brand and gets your messaging across in an easily understood manner, but if your email includes certain words, it won’t matter how great your content is – it simply won’t be seen. But why is that? It may just end up in your SPAM filter.

Trigger Words

There are actually hundreds of common words and phrases that most SPAM filters will pick up on. These are known as “trigger” words. Though this list of words and phrases is continuously changing, here are just a few examples – you may be surprised.

• #1
• 100%
• Affordable
• Cancel
• Buy
• Click Here
• Credit Card
• Deal

It is not easy to predict all of the words that will trigger SPAM filters, however there are many online resources that you can use to check to see if a word has been listed as a common SPAM word.

Here are a few best practices that can be used to avoid the dreaded SPAM filter:

• Use more than one word in subject lines
• Double check spelling
• DON’T USE ALL CAPS
• Do not include exclamation points!

Sun Sign Designs Can Help!

If you want to learn more about trigger words, email marketing, SEO, and other methods for improving company visibility, Sun Sign Designs, Inc can help. To learn more about Sun Sign Designs and the services that we offer, visit us online or email [email protected] today!

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LIVE AUTHENTICALLY, BRAVELY, AND WITH GUMPTION

Maria Ricciardi may possibly be one of the most amazing and interesting people I have ever met in my life. Introduced by an old college friend and now her husband, I met Maria for the first time in Chicago on a cold and blistery day in late January. Maria has been the reason for the season ever since that moment, through her travel photography, I have experienced so many amazing things. The stories she can tell with just a picture let alone the words that can go along are captivating in its self. The relationships she builds in-person, with people, and with her photography bring life to the human condition and pose a different perceptive on the world.

Maria IS her website. She does live authentically, bravely and with lots of gumption. This portal into her travels and life, I could never do it justice, however, I can let her speak for herself.

“I am Maria Ricciardi and I am a traveler, writer, and photographer.  I started adding my journal entries to the photos I take to share my adventures and experiences one photo at a time.  At the end of the day, you will be able to walk the same path I did through my visual storytelling. I love to travel and experience new things, meet new people and photograph the world.  Supporting local economies, conservation of wildlife and environmental sustainability are incredibly important to me, and what I am conscious of as I explore. I hope to enhance your experience of travel through the trials and errors of mine, and take you on a journey of visual wanderlust.  My goal is to live authentically, bravely and with gumption…with my camera in hand.  Would you like to join me on one of my photographic adventures?” -Maria Ricciardi

Please check out Maria’s website at https://mariaseestheworld.com/ Drop her a line and tell her what you think. Also, come back often to her site and checkout her photo updates and awesome new worldwide adventures.

 

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Home is where the heart is, the launch of Calculating Destiny, a reimagined brand.

When she came to me with the original idea, I thought she was crazy. Financial services paired with the idea of home. Calculating Destiny is a professional  services and accounting company, dedicated to the tag line (which we created for them); “Strategic solutions that revolve around numbers allow you to exactly calculate your growth model through creative marketing, compliance, and metrics. Our partnership with you is designed to help direct your books, to turn ideas into profits.” How could this be about home?

Home is where the heart is. It is where we begin our day and end our day. In between, we think about home; our partner, our children, our pets and the spaces that surround them. In between the love of home, is the right to protect, nourish and grow it. This is where the financial part comes in. The numbers are what help build these memories, the structures, and the family. As business owners/leaders, our drive to create comes from our businesses, and what our business produces. Although it was crazy, the marriage of these two idea’s is genius.

Lets remove the sterile environment of company, corporate, partnership of firms, and lets come home.

Sun Sign Designs Inc, and Blue Rooster Web proudly announce the launch of Calculating Destiny’s new website. https://calculatingdestiny.com

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Blue Rooster Web Launches JK Executive Services

Located in Rochester New York, JK Executive services provides professional services in recruiting, staffing, and executive search. The site functions as a job search engine for the local Rochester, Buffalo and the state of New York. The state of New York has approximately 450,000 business with 100 or less employees and the city of Rochester has approximately 70,000 in total employment.

JK Executive Services connects leaders, strengthen culture and deliver results. Their initiatives are founded upon custom solutions, a conscientious approach and confidentiality at all times.

Please check out their site and our work at jkexec.com.

Affordable Website Design

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Blue Rooster Web Gets A New Logo

Affordable Website Design

Blue Rooster Web just got a logo refresh. Blue Rooster Web is an affordable website design, hosting and digital marketing package that allows any business of any size to have a custom website designed and programmed for the fraction of the cost of traditional digital services. ($97.99 per month) Take a look at our packages at www.blueroosterweb.com and/or share with a friend.

Want to make some extra cash? We also offer affiliate programs for reselling BRW. Contact Us today!