Monthly Archives: February 2012

Optimize your website for mobile devices

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Smart phones and other mobile devices are rapidly becoming an integral part of our everyday lives. If you have a website, it’s important for it to be optimized for mobile viewing so that you don’t lose out on potential viewers and customers.

When designing your mobile site, there are some important factors to keep in mind—a mobile device is much smaller than a computer screen, and your site should be streamlined, simplified, and downsized to make mobile viewing easy and convenient.  Remember, people viewing your site on the go are probably looking for some specific details or information. Design your site using your most important information and leave out long mission statements, employee bios, and large images that can slow down loading times.

Most people don’t want to wait more than 5 seconds for a site to load, so hold off on the large graphics and special effects that can bog down your site. Keep in mind that Apple products do not support Flash, and many other devices don’t support Java—avoiding those effects will ensure that you don’t lose out on viewers, and it will also keep loading times down. Keep the essentials of your branding, like a logo, on your site, because you want cohesion between your mobile and regular site, but don’t go too fancy.

Vertical menus work best, and your mobile site should have fewer pages than your regular one—most viewers don’t want to click through page after page of information when they’re on the go. Use white space to your advantage and make your links easy to click. It’s easy to get frustrated trying to click a small link when it’s surrounded by other small links.

Follow these tips, keeping your mobile user in mind at all times, and your mobile site will be successful.

Search Engine Optimization

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How Important Is Search Engine Optimization For Your Website?

What is SEO? It is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. What exactly does SEO do? It is the method of analyzing and constructing individual web pages, as well as entire sites, so they can be discovered, analyzed, and then indexed by various search engines.

SEO can make the content of your web pages more relevant, more attractive, and more readable for search engines and their crawling and indexing software.

Why would this be of great importance to you? Would it be important to you if customers were unable to find your telephone number or find the address of your business? I don’t think many businesses could survive for very long in this situation.

This situation can easily apply to a web site. Can potential customers locate your current web site easily? Traffic to your web site could be extremely low. Potential customers might not even know that your site exists.

“Wait a minute!” you say. “We have a beautiful web site, and we include the web site address in all advertising campaigns. Why would people be unable to find our site?”

Of course, your current customers and people already acquainted with your business would be likely to find your web site without difficulty.

But are you absolutely sure that your advertising has reached enough potential customers? Did you consider that some people simply do not read the newspapers? How about people who didn’t get the issue of the magazine where you placed an expensive ad? Did these people hear the WABC radio broadcast when your commercial aired? Were they watching channel 44 during the news hour? Were they on the direct mail list for which you paid thousands of dollars?

So how about those search engines that everyone uses? Potential customers will type a word or two into the box, hit ’Enter’, and immediately find a listing for your company’s web site. One more click and you have another visitor. Search engines sure are great, aren’t they?

Yes, they certainly are great, and the ’type-and-click’ scenario above does happen. More often than not, however, it doesn’t happen without a little work. Search Engine Optimization is that work.

We’re settling into our new office space in Worcester!

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JRA Design has finally made the move to a larger location at 51 Union Street, Suite 324 in Worcester and it’s a much needed new space! It’s taking a little getting used to, but we’re really enjoying it. We’ll be keeping the Shrewsbury office as well because I can already see the need for more space in the near future. We’ll see what happens there, but for now back to Worcester–we’re in a refurbished factory building built in the early 1900’s. The owner has kept the character intact, providing an inspirational, unique workspace. We’re in the process of creating a site for the buildings’ leasing and will keep you posted on that. If you’re in the area stop by and check us out.

Thanks – Joe Albano

JRA Website Design
508 735 3671
www.jradesign.net
51 Union Street, Suite 324
Worcester, MA 01608

21 Lakewood Drive
Shrewsbury MA 01545

JRA Website Design Receives 2011 Best of Shrewsbury Award

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JRA Website Design Offices Worcester MA
Our offices here at JRA Website Design

JRA Design Receives 2011 Best of Shrewsbury Award

Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

JRA Design Receives 2011 Best of Shrewsbury Award

U.S. Commerce Association’s Award Plaque Honors the Achievement

NEW YORK, NY, December 5, 2011 – JRA Design has been selected for the 2011 Best of Shrewsbury Award in the Internet Virtual & Web Hosting Providers category by the U.S. Commerce Association (USCA).

The USCA “Best of Local Business” Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USCA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2011 USCA Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USCA and data provided by third parties.

About U.S. Commerce Association (USCA)

U.S. Commerce Association (USCA) is a New York City based organization funded by local businesses operating in towns, large and small, across America. The purpose of USCA is to promote local business through public relations, marketing and advertising.

The USCA was established to recognize the best of local businesses in their community. Our organization works exclusively with local business owners, trade groups, professional associations, chambers of commerce and other business advertising and marketing groups. Our mission is to be an advocate for small and medium size businesses and business entrepreneurs across America.

SOURCE: U.S. Commerce Association

Top 10 benefits of website redesigning

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JRA Website Design Offices Worcester MA

Our offices here at JRA Website Design

Website redesign is as important as designing a website itself. The world is always changing and therefore with the passage of time, the concept and look of your website is bound to become obsolete when compared to other competitive websites.

Remember you have only seven seconds (as shown by various researches on web habits of visitors) to hook a visitor’s attention to your site. If your website does not appear appealing, they are going to waste no time in switching to your competitive websites. Once you lose a visitor, you are never going to get him back. And loss of visitor is directly proportional to loss of sale, right?
All these problems, however, can easily be taken care of with one important ingenious decision- hiring the service of a professional website redesign service.
Following are listed the top ten benefits of website redesign;

• Easily navigable

If navigation menus and links are not properly arranged on your existing website, it is going to irritate a visitor who will immediately move to your competitor website. Contrary to it, the ease of locating links will provide the visitor with the required information he/she seeks. Website redesign will help you arrange menu and links in a systematic order on your site and thus ensure the visitor remains glued to it.

• Making it look eye catching and aesthetic
Layout and design catch a visitor’s eyes first while visiting a site. If your site is not appealing to a user’s eye, he/she will immediately move to your competitive website. Website redesign can make your website pleasing to the eyes of visitors by using attractive and cutting edge graphics, images, fonts and colors.

• Enhanced search engine visibility
Website redesign not only adds to the aesthetic appeal of your website, it also helps in improving your site’s search engine visibility.
A professional web designer will put SEO tags in all your pages so that it can be indexed properly by search engines for keywords that potential customers use to find a business like yours (on the internet).

• Superior design + more eyes = More sales

With your website getting a killer look and increased visibility, it is bound to attract more and more visitors to your site. Website redesign will thus lead to an increase in the sale conversion and making your business a profitable venture.

• Superb compatibility with modern day browsers
Many new modern browsers have flooded the market. If you your website is not equipped with the latest technology supporting them, it is not going to be accessible to a number of online users. Having your website redesigned will ensure that your website is viewable on all major browsers and thus keeping your professional appearance up in front of everyone viewing your site.

• Highly competitive

The market is continuously changing. Your website, even if it is 1 – 2 years old, can no longer compete with technologically advanced websites in the present time.
Website redesigning will help in bringing latest technology and innovation to your site and thus ensuring that it remains competitive and in sync with the demands of the market.

• Reducing your maintenance time and cost greatly
By hiring a professional website design service, the time and cost you otherwise have to spend cleaning things up and ensuring everything is up-to-date drops considerably. This helps you to focus more on the things that matter most – traffic, sales and increased visibility.

• Equipped with state of the art technology

Technology is fast changing. Having a website which is unable to keep pace with latest technological demands is not going to serve any purpose.
Website redesigning will ensure your website is equipped with all the latest state of the art technologies.

• Creating a professional image
Out dated graphics and look of the website can turn away your visitors to your competitor’s website. Hiring a professional website redesigning service will help you give a neat and clean look to your site. The clean look of a site gives a professional image to your business which ultimately results in more leads and more sales.

• Fast uploading and conducive to all screen resolutions

Website redesigning will ensure your site can be fast loaded. This will also help in making your website accessible to all kinds of screen resolutions.

Conclusion

Website redesign is thus highly profitable if you want to enhance your chances of improved business and expectant sales. Redesigning the website helps in improving the overall aesthetic appeal of your website. Further, it also helps in increasing the search engine visibility which leads to an improved sale conversion rate.