by Bill Rambo | May 18, 2020 | Case Study, General, Local News, Website Design
ITD Interactive built and launched a new website for Beacon Financial Credit Union in May 2020.
Beacon Financial, formerly Mountain States Credit Union, is a credit union based in Johnson City, Tennessee.
The credit union serves customers all across the Tri-Cities with three branches and a number of ATMs.
ITD Interactive built the website to match the new branding guidelines supplied by the credit union.
The site has general information about banking services and loans. It also features a number of loan calculators, document downloads, and much more information for existing and prospective credit union members.
Contact ITD Interactive today for your bank or credit union website needs.
by Bill Rambo | May 17, 2020 | Consumer Trends, eCommerce, Email Campaigns, General, Local News, Website Maintenance
The coronavirus pandemic is a troubling time for local small businesses. Use your website to keep your operation running smoothly.
While the spring and summer of 2020 haven’t gone the way any of us in the business community might have planned, many businesses large and small are finding ways to adapt to an economy that seems to change daily. Practicing social distancing can be difficult while also trying to keep a business running. Use the tools you have available to make things easy and safe for your staff and customers.
Update crucial information on your website
Have your hours or availability changed to help prevent the spread of COVID-19? Have you closed your lobby or started offering curbside pickup? Be sure to update your website to reflect these changes. Update this information on your Contact Us and About Us pages. Add banners and other notes on your front page to be an eye-catching way to present the new information.
Remember that your customers aren’t just looking for this information directly on your website! Update this information on your Facebook, Instagram, and other social media. If you manage your Google Business listing update your hours and availability there. If you don’t mange your Google Business listing, now is the perfect time to get started on learning how to use this important tool.
Keep your customers informed with a pop-up
Pop-ups don’t have to be the same annoyance they were in the 1990’s and 2000’s. A well-designed and unobtrusive pop-up can be an easy way to communicate important information about COVID-19 policy changes to your customers. Plugins make it simple to make a pop-up box that blends in well with your website and won’t be in the way.
A well-placed pop-up combined with updated information throughout the site will make sure that anyone checking your site will know if you’re offering additional services during this complicated time.
Local businesses are offering curbside pickup to serve customers with less close contact.
Revitalize your business model with online ordering
During the pandemic many restaurants and businesses have switched to pickup and curbside service. You can streamline this process for your small business by setting up online ordering on your website. You can use forms to do anything from requesting pickup for an item, filling out an entire restaurant order, or even collecting payment online. Adapt your model to an online system to keep your employees and customers safe while keeping your doors open.
Use your mailing list to send updates
Have you been building a database of loyal customers in a mass emailer? Now is the perfect time to send messages to your users to let them know about changes in your hours and business practices. Restaurants offering specials and modified menus can use these email lists to get the word out. Combine mass emails with website changes and social media updates for an effective strategy.
Coming together as a community
If there’s any silver lining to the coronavirus pandemic for a business owner, it’s that many are turning to local businesses for support and normalcy during this time of uncertainty. A business that learns to adapt will emerge stronger and with a better grasp of how to use their website.
Contact ITD Interactive today if you want more information on how to update your website to keep your customers informed. Now is a great time to set up an online ordering system!
by Bill Rambo | Dec 3, 2019 | General, Security, Website Design, Website Maintenance, Websites
When you sign up with ITD Interactive for managed website hosting, you get more than just a place to put your files. You get security for your private information. You get a website that your customers can easily and quickly load. Most importantly, you get a guarantee that your website will keep working!
Our Servers Are Safe And Secure
We partner with WPEngine for our website hosting service. They only do WordPress hosting, which means they do one thing and they do it really well. They protect their servers with lots of methods such as (tech talk warning) intrusion detection, disk write protection and limitations, vulnerability scanning, and much more. WPEngine even lets us know when there are widespread security issues that we should look into. They’re serious about security and so are we.
Your Site Loads Quickly And Is Optimized For Mobile
One of the best things about WPEngine hosting for WordPress is the requirements they put on new sites. While it might take a little extra work to keep everything in line, it ensures your site loads quickly and efficiently every time. The servers are structured in a way that balances the data to lighten the impact on your site’s load time even during peak hours.
We Give You A Free SSL Certificate, Just Because
We offer a completely free and auto-renewing security certificate as part of our basic hosting package. This will keep your site secure and let your customers know your site is legitimate and professionally made. It also gets rid of that annoying popup in Chrome that could scare some potential customers away from your website!
If you’re running an eCommerce site you’ll want to consider a paid SSL certificate like those offered by GoDaddy and Network Solutions. These come with guarantees that will keep your site safe and offer compensation in the event of a security breach.
We Make Sure Your Website Keeps Working
It’s crucial as a website owner is that your site stays up and running all the time. What happens when a potential customer tries to open your website and nothing loads? They’re going to go somewhere else!
The most common reason for a site to stop working is related to automatic updates of the WordPress core or plugins. As a managed hosting customer you’ll always be protected from these issues. If you try to load your site and it’s not working, just drop us a note about it and we’ll check it out. If it’s because of an automatic update or something else that’s out of your control, we’ll get it fixed and make sure your site is up and running as expected with no extra charge.
It’s important to note that these fixes are only covered if it’s related to an issue that was out of the site owner’s control. If your site breaks because of something you were working on (editing core files, installing new plugins, etc.) we’ll still fix your site for you, but there may be a charge for the labor depending on what we have to do.
Your Site Gets Daily Backups (Just In Case)
We get it! Sometimes things just happen. In a worst-case scenario when a small change to your site breaks the whole thing with no easy way to fix it. With daily backups you’ll always be able to roll back your site to a previous backup of the site. Then we’ll be able to keep your site running while we investigate what caused the problem in an isolated environment.
If you’re ready to stop stressing about keeping your website up and running, get in touch with us! We’d love to talk to you about how managed hosting can make your life easier.
by Bill Rambo | Sep 22, 2019 | eCommerce, General, Inbound Marketing, Local SEO, SEO, SEO for Small Business, Web Marketing, Websites
SEO for Nashville, Knoxville, Johnson City, Memphis, and Everything In Between
The business community in Tennessee is thriving. New businesses are popping up all over the state: new restaurants, new microbreweries, new and expanding manufacturing, and so much more. A strong economy and increased access to high-speed internet services has created a boom in new businesses that need websites and successful SEO strategies to get them noticed.
If you’re one of the many new Tennessee business owners (or one that’s been around for a while) and you’re looking for a way to give your website a boost in search engine results in a clean and organic way, we’re Tennessee-based SEO experts and we’re here to help!
SEO in Johnson City, TN
Photo by mrgriffter / Wikimedia Commons
At ITD Interactive we’re partial to Johnson City because that’s where we’re based! Our local economy has taken off in the past several years with a big focus on the downtown area. Dozens of formerly vacant buildings have been developed into restaurants, breweries, local retailers, and more. The downtown area and beyond have turned into a hotspot of activity with tons of foot traffic that should be appealing to anyone with a dream to open their own business. A good SEO strategy for a developing area like Johnson City is to leverage the “shop local” movement as customers transition from shopping at the chains and big box stores that have been here for decades to focusing more on new locally owned and family businesses.
SEO in Knoxville, TN
Photo by Nathan C. Fortner / Wikimedia Commons
Knoxville is a unique city when it comes to the local business community. It’s a large city of over 185,000 and home to the University of Tennessee. Knoxville has a thriving and eclectic downtown area full of local retailers, breweries and restaurants. The greater Knoxville area is home to many corporate offices, industries, retailers, and much more. To stand out in search results against other Knoxville businesses you’ll need to use a strategy that competes against those with a long history in the area. A strategy that utilizes landing pages to target specific services or products you offer will help you funnel potential customers from a search engine directly into your inbox.
SEO in Nashville, TN
Photo by dconvertini / Wikimedia Commons
The heart of Nashville is naturally the music industry, but Tennessee’s capital is also known for its honky tonks, restaurants, breweries, and other industries that cater to tourism. Professional sports help bring in millions of tourists annually with the Tennessee Titans football team, Nashville Predators hockey team, and a pro soccer team coming soon. Higher education and related industries are important to the city economy as well – Nashville boasts many universities and colleges including Vanderbilt, Belmont, Tennessee State University along with several other schools in the city and in the general area. Any new business in Nashville catering to these industries absolutely needs to leverage those areas of activity when considering SEO services. It can be difficult to rank highly in an area saturated with so many existing businesses but the right SEO strategy using long tail keywords can help you find interested customers in a crowded market.
SEO in the Rest of Tennessee
Tennessee is a big state and every part of it is different when it comes to business. The right SEO strategy for your Tennessee business website needs to be customized for you and where you’re based, not a one-size-fits-all solution. If you’re ready to get your website noticed, contact us today and see how ITD Interactive can create the right SEO strategy for you.
by Bill Rambo | Aug 20, 2019 | General, Mobile, Website Design, Website Maintenance, Website Maintenance Services, Websites
Website Maintenance That Won’t Crash Your Site!
Here at ITD Interactive we’ve had 20 years in the business of web development, website maintenance services, and website hosting for local clients and beyond. In that time we’ve also taken over some old websites that needed to be redone and spruced up. It’s in that work that we’ve come across many web design no-no’s that you should never do yourself.
Part of our standard web design package includes staff training so that our clients will always be able to update their own sites. While we’re happy to continue working on sites if needed, we don’t believe in forcing clients to use us exclusively for their maintenance and updates.
For those of you want to be adventurous and update your own sites, take a look through this list of what NOT to do first.
DON’T: Self-host a video for a website background
Using a video as a hero background is a great way to add motion and personality to your site. But be careful when setting it up – uploading your video directly to your media folder could bring your whole site down.
Look at it this way: on average a looped video file that’s been processed for use on the web is still going to be about 5 megabytes. If one or two people open your website and download that file, it’s no big deal. But if for some reason you get a rush of 200 people looking at your site all at once, suddenly 200 people are trying to download that 5mb file at the same time and using up a gigabyte of bandwidth. For many lower-end hosting plans that can be a huge chunk of your monthly allotted bandwidth, and using that much at once can even entirely crash your site so that nobody will be able to look at it without a time-consuming and expensive support call.
Do this instead: Plan ahead for these traffic rushes by using a third party site to host your video. Many slider plugins will let you easily paste in the URL of the video and display it perfectly on your slider without using any of your bandwidth. This should go for any video, not just backgrounds! There are plenty of great options available for video hosting like Vimeo or even YouTube.
DON’T: Upload full-size images
Just like self-hosted video files, it would only take a few huge images on your website for a traffic rush to bring your server to a crashing halt. Raw files that come straight off a phone or camera can be 10mb in size or greater, so uploading lots of these will burn through your allotted bandwidth and disk space more quickly that you can imagine. It’ll also drive your users crazy if they have to wait for huge files to download before the entire site can be seen, especially if they’re using a mobile phone on wireless data to view your site.
Do this instead: Process your images first before uploading by resizing and optimizing them in a program like Photoshop. If you don’t have access to Photoshop there are free alternatives online like Pixlr. For most uses your image shouldn’t need to be larger than 1920px on the longest side at 72 PPI, compared to the huge 2500px+/300 PPI files from your smartphone or camera. You can save your images in JPG format for most situations – you should only need a bulkier PNG or a GIF in special circumstances that require higher definition or a transparent background.
DON’T: Forget about the mobile version of your site
More than half of the visitors to your site will view it on a mobile device. Not only that, but Google now actively penalizes sites that aren’t optimized for use on mobile. It’s absolutely crucial to work on the mobile view of your site alongside the desktop view! Ignoring this step when adding or changing content will result in frustrated mobile users leaving your site and Google knocking it down in search engine ranking.
Do this instead: Always test your site in a mobile view when adding new content. Use a phone or tablet to open your site, or if you don’t have one available you can resize your browser window into a vertical ratio to get a good idea of how your site will look on a mobile device. Make changes as needed to make sure all of your content can be viewed and navigated normally.
These are a just few of the major no-no’s to watch out for in website maintenance, but believe us when we say there will always plenty more lurking. Keeping a website up and running with fresh content is crucial to any business
If maintaining your own website is becoming too much of a burden, talk to us about our maintenance plans!
We’ve got a package to fit any size business with any size budget and will work with you to make sure your website is always updated and filled with fresh content tailor made to boost your presence. Contact us today to find out how to get started.
by Bill Rambo | Jul 15, 2019 | Consumer Trends, General, Local Search Optimization, Local SEO, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Checklist, SEO for Small Business, Website Design, Websites
Making your website ADA compliant is a tricky and complicated task that’s recently become a hotly debated issue, but we here at IT Decisions are ready to help you get started and up to code!
What exactly is ADA Compliance and why do websites need it?
In a nutshell, ADA (the Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance is working through a general checklist of tasks and guidelines to make sure your website can be easily and freely accessed by visitors who are differently-abled, such as blind users who use audio narration software to read websites to them or deaf users who need closed captions because they can’t hear the embedded audio in videos. The goal is to ensure that anyone who comes to your site won’t be blocked from accessing any of the content or information by means of good, thoughtful design or alternative methods of accessing the content.
Do all websites have to be ADA compliant?
While the ADA guidelines are vague when it comes to website accessibility it’s become a “better safe than sorry” situation that every site owner should consider, especially if your site is for a government organization or a public service. If a lawsuit is filed that your website is not accessible, you can be accused of discrimination and held liable to the tune of thousands of dollars in damages and legal fees.
Don’t let the threat of a lawsuit make you think accessibility isn’t important on its own! An open and accessible internet for everyone is something all site owners and developers should strive for. When we build a site we make sure that many of these items are cleared right out of the box, like making sure that all images have alt text and every page has a clear heading.
ADA Compliant design is good design!
One of the best things about making your site ADA compliant is that it also results in a clean, usable site for everyone. It can even help boost your SEO rankings! Many of the tasks required to make a site ADA compliant overlap with the ones to make a site user and SEO-friendly, like adding helpful alt text to every important image and using headings to make your site more readable. Getting your site compliant with ADA would work hand in hand with a larger SEO strategy designed to make your site more usable and visible to Google and other search engines.
ITD Interactive has the tools needed to make your site ADA compliant
If your site is a little older it wouldn’t hurt to have it scanned to see what needs to be improved to make your site ADA compliant. Many of the guidelines are common to newer sites, like including closed captions in videos, but if your site was built before video content was common then that’s just one thing that will likely need to be addressed.
ITD Interactive specializes in making websites ADA compliant and we can help make sure your site is both safe from litigation but more importantly accessible to anyone who wants to check out your content.
We’re a local business in Johnson City, Tennessee, but we can scan and improve sites anywhere around the country since these guidelines are so universal.
Contact ITD Interactive today if you’d like us to look at your site to see what it would take to make your website fully ADA compliant.
