By: Robert Wang So you just started this whole blogging business on the side, and now streams of visitors show up at your virtual doorstep every day, demanding flash media and video content. You're feeling ready to embrace a larger audience and maybe redesign your homepage, but aren't really sure what direction to go. We've got what you need. Barefoot Solutions has picked through dozens of articles to deliver the cream of the crop for your consumption. BY FAR the MOST IMPORTANT component of a high caliber blog. You can't become a rockstar without fans. Make friends with other bloggers and win over some of their traffic: •    Link to other blogs •    Comment on their posts •    Feature guest writers Most serious bloggers check Google Analytics religiously, so they’ll know, with startling immediacy, when you interact with them in the slightest way. The nice ones will pay you a visit or ideally even link you back. From there, your glowing prose and dazzling personality will hook new traffic and grant you the worshipful readership you’ve always dreamed of. Want the nitty gritty of link building? Vandelay Design offers 9 ways to make sure you’re linking where it counts. This is how it's done: VentureBeat.com - Think your page already has enough links? VentureBeat has 944,506 incoming links from other webpages. Well, 944,507 now. The staff's amazing networking ability has no doubt played a major role in launching this page into the top 100 Technorati Blogs. The simplest explanations are usually best. Keep it a quick and fresh. If you can’t say it in a few paragraphs, save it for another article or trim the fat. Keep in mind: bullets, top 10 lists, and short blocks of text are your friends. I'm confused. Examples? DaringFireball.net - Extreme minimalist design. This page only has 2 images...and one of them is a search button. The result is amazingly clean, professional, and easy on the eyes. The more time you take to manufacturing an appealing (read: glowing, abstract, and AHDH-friendly) interface, the more likely you are to be well received. TIP I: If you use a lot of colors it will tend to make your site look cluttered. Take a little time, pick a 2-3 color theme with good contrast, and stick to it. TIP II: The best looking websites will take an idea and apply it to every last detail and aspect of their design. Always think about how adding or subtracting from your blog will impact your theme. A study conducted by Dr. Gitte Lindgaard found that it takes users 0.05 seconds to decide if they enjoy looking at your site. Not sure where your page falls on the spectrum of attractiveness? Check out WebSiteOptimization.com for examples. Emulate me: OurWorld - Winner of the Best Blog Design Weblog Award 2008. This page tactfully combines beautiful high resolution banner images with an understated low color saturation theme, sleek fonts, and hot javascript action for an amazing webpage that just sucks you in, eyes first. According to Giancarlo Gallegos from BlogCatalog, we click because we believe we have something to gain from it—whether it is knowledge, pleasure, or LOLCATS, clicking requires a clear motive. Give people a reason to click through to your blog by creating a unique spin on overblogged topics. To quote Dawn Foster: “You can talk about a news story that other people are blogging about, but spend some time writing about your experiences and ideas that offer a different perspective than the rest of the crowd. Use research in new ways, interview interesting people, and talk about your experiences. By offering something new, people are much more likely to read your blog post and link to it, which is where the real SEO magic is found.” Brush off that storyteller’s cap. Y’all got some yarn spinnin’ to do. Now this is writing: RoughType - While the layout isn't much to look at, Nicholas Carr's blog is the perfect example of a content driven blog. The homepage has a mindblowing PageRank of 7.0 - this one man has accumulated the same net authority as the COMMUNITIES of Yelp and Metacafe. Be amazed. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster are amazing for visitor tracking, sculpting page rank, and otherwise refining your blog in ways you would have never thought possible. Once you’ve mastered the skills, you’ll be able to pinpoint the “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, and probable “why” of every last click and page-view on your blog. Did we mention you can run customized analytics and test multiple versions of your blog simultaneously? No? It’s awesome. If you’re looking for a nice springboard into the world of analytics, Google has graciously provided a quick tutorial to get you started. Hop to it! Serious Skills: SethGodin's Blog - So what's so special about Seth Godin? His blog ranks #12 on google's search for "blog". While normally ranking on page 2 is sort of unimpressive, this page trumps roughly 2.3 BILLION other search results: including the official Whitehouse and Facebook blogs as well as BLOGS.COM. HE OUTRANKED A PAGE WITH BLOG in the URL. SEO. Learn to love it.

So, your website is up and running, people come to your site and get value from it... but are you really maximizing the opportunities you have? A wise person once said, “Excellence is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never ends.” And while this quote was in relation to someone's personal life why can’t it also pertain to your company’s web presence? Taking this philosophy and applying it to your company is what will put it in the top tier.  Just because you have a functioning website does not mean that it’s the best possible website you could be giving to your visitors. Re-design will allow you to improve the way you present your information and change how visitors use and engage with your site. Below we have detailed  a few of the reasons it might be time for you to redesign your website. You aren’t getting the results you want. If you’re not getting the results you want it may be time to improve your website. A new design can allow you to create new calls to action that will allow you to better optimize your site for lead generation. Because at the end of the day that’s the end goal, right? So it's definitely beneficial to do what you can to improve your conversion rates. A few important things to take into consideration is the copy of your website:  is it too text heavy or does it not give enough details? Does it match your company's voice? What about the look- does it go with a general theme or just seem sporadic? While these all might seem like minescule factors about your website it's important to remember that all combined together they are your company's voice and online impression. Make it count. Your website doesn’t work across all platforms. If you’re anything like me you like to do majority of things from your phone and then later will check it again from your computer. We expect things to be easy across all channels and to be able to seamlessly  transition between any platform. Providing a smooth experience for your visitors is a key factor. By having a responsive design it allows your website to be easily adaptable from any screen on any device. Another key thing to take notice of is the functionality of your website. How easy is your site to use? Are your call to actions visible and easy to access? These are highly important factors that can make or break your website! The purpose of your site has changed. It's important to stay on top of your website's purpose; if it has changed then your website should reflect this change. Perhaps your marketing strategy has changed or you have decided to feature different aspects of the company altogether. Perhaps you want people to read your blog more or use your request a quote box more often. Whichever it is- keeping up to date with your site’s purpose is highly important. Another instance to be mindful of is if your company has added new services or features. If so, then your website should reflect this change otherwise your visitors will take their business elsewhere! Your third-party tools are outdated. A very important factor to pay attention is to how your third party tools are functioning. Ask yourself the questions: are these tools up to date ? Are they functioning at the highest level they could? If you answered no to either of these questions then perhaps it's time for an upgrade. Making the moves to more modern third party tools will not only appeal to your visitors but also turn them into leads. By ensuring that you are up to date with current technology you will not have to worry about your website lacking in loading times or meeting your guests with error pages! Your Sites Loading Time is …. Slow! As we’ve entered 2018 its important to note that loading speed is now a MAJOR factor. Even if we don't like to admit it, we’re impatient people who have grown accustomed to pages loading instantaneously. “People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth of a second)” (Ny Times, 2018). Website speed and mobile speed should be  a top priority. If your website is loading slowly then it's definitely time for an upgrade.  Some of the Features or Content Don’t Display Properly Ensuring that your content displays properly is another major factor to be mindful of. As I said previously it's important to have seamless transitions between your web and mobile and the same goes for the way the content displays. You should also be mindful of the many different mobile devices your visitors may be using- there are lots of options out there! Whether they are looking from an iPhone or an Android Tablet the navigation and display should be easy to use and look the same across all channels. Compare to Competitors Another important reason to consider redesigning your website is seeing how it stacks up against the competition. By keeping up with the competition you are able to set your prices competitively, create marketing strategies, and accurately respond to rival marketing campaigns. If your top competitor is having far more success generating traffic to their site  then perhaps it's time to take a look at their site and see what they are doing differently. Now you don’t need to redesign your website every time you see your competitors making changes but staying relevant and up to date will be beneficial in the long run. I hope that you’ve found the above reasons as useful insight on whether or not to redesign your website. It’s easy to remain content with a website that’s working but as we said above: are you maximizing on the opportunities you have? If you’re not, or you felt like any of the above reasons directly related to your website, it's time to redesign! This will be an exciting time because you will be able to take a close look at your website, analyze the strategies that have worked, and improve! Remember “excellence is a continuous journey, not a destination.” Now, we are aware that redesigning your website can seem like a daunting or overwhelming task, but that's where we come in! Barefoot Solutions is more than happy to work with you to help redesign your website. Use the contact button located below and let's get redesigning!  

by: Robert Wang By now you've inevitably heard of it. Every here and again, you hear mention of its function, little blips on the radar of the collective consciousness that is the Internet. And yet, despite the articles and buzz, people are don't seem to be able to pick out Google Wave from a hole in the wall. At first glance Google Wave is every marketing executive’s wildest fantasy come true. The service is exclusive, offered by media darling Google, and the description is so laden with buzzwords that it seems like a sure-fire win. Unfortunately in the process of self promotion, Google has overwhelmingly succeeded in making themselves a product that borders on impossible to describe and to some extent, comprehend. To give some sense of just how brain wrenching the project is, consider the following: Google published a tutorial video in an attempt to explain its brain child. At just a shade over an hour and 20 minutes, the video is roughly the length of your average romantic comedy. Regrettably, by the end, most viewers would still be hard pressed to summarize the service in a sentence or less. Google Wave was released under the same invite program that helped build up hype for Gmail. Currently there are roughly 100,000 users testing the service, however, new users can only register through invitations they receive from current users or Google itself. Consistent with Google’s previous policy, Wave is an open source project—meaning it will be increasingly more customizable and polished over time. So far it looks like their invitation for development has been well received. Open-sourcers are already looking to jump on the bandwagon, going so far as to bid on invitations to the service so they have a head start over their competitors. As you read, prices for Wave invites on eBay have begun to climb. The highest offering already hangs at a steep $200 per account. So why all the hype? Why are people paying hundreds of dollars for a service that’s still in its testing stage? Just what in the heck is this thing? In summation, users can invite other users to their “wave” which is a bit like a chat room in the sense that users can use it to communicate live. Users can submit, edit, and comment on content in the form of text, pictures, videos, Google maps windows, or even games. Everything is updated on a near realtime basis, thereby making collaboration and social interaction the real core function of this service. However, Wave is still much more than that. The fact that the service is open source means that its potential applications are really limitless. Provided someone takes the time to program an extension for it, Wave will allow for users to incorporate ANYTHING, and we do mean ANYTHING—even other websites, in your wave. In many ways, Google Wave is a project with such myriad functions, that it’s very difficult to pin down and categorize. This sort of thing has never been done before and because of that, it defies explanation. Whereas most services will focus on performing one function extremely well, Wave seems to do everything communication-related at once and the end result is understandably tough put into words. It is email, it is AIM, it is the wealth of information and entertainment that makes up the internet integrated into a single platform. It is everything and simultaneously nothing more than a blank canvas. Wave was developed by a group of engineers who were essentially left to their own devices for months of development time and it shows in the resulting product. There’s no clear product, only amorphous potential. Google has a real challenge ahead in marketing their new toy—and until they can figure out how to describe it in less than an hour and twenty minutes, the public will likely stay confused on the subject. Fortunately, WhirledInteractive has taken a step in the right direction, and released their own explanation of Wave. They aren't the only ones. LifeHacker recently sent out a call for the best real life applications of Wave and hundreds responded with some of the most innovative things we've seen. The Google team needs to take a page out of this book and present a marketing campaign that's as creative as their product.