I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again – EVERYONE is on their mobile. Over the past 2 years smartphone adoption has grown from 36% - 61%. Of those users, mobile apps dominate over three-quarters of phonetime. Sure, many kids are goofing with games but businesses have much to gain by entering the mobile app market. Seattle-based jewelry giant Blue Nile realized the importance of mobile commerce the first time the site made a $40,000 diamond sale via mobile device. “This is the future of shopping,” pointed out then CEO Diane Irvine. Many things will move the needle for your business. Today one of the most important is the mobile app – and here’s why.   More Sales Opportunities People are addicted to their phones. Standing in line, sitting on the bus, or waiting for change from the teller – these are all small pockets of time your customers are on their phones. While they could be checking former colleagues’ LinkedIn profiles, they should be checking out that shopping cart they put together on your app and place that order with you already. They could be browsing the newest and greatest you have to offer - but you need to make it easy for them with an app.   Simplicity Given the small screen necessity of big buttons and clean design, you can focus your audience on exactly what you want them to see. Not only that, but providing your clients with on demand access to your service is not only imperative, but gives them the easiest way to reach you better. Think of an app as a bookmark taking stable residence on a user’s phone screen. It’s familiar, always there, and easily accessible as a part of your customer’s everyday phone life. Now THAT’S simple.   Geo-targeting Knowing where your customers are can sound a little creepy. Even worse, knowing that your competition is already utilizing your customer’s location and sending them offers...while you sit idly by. Think of geo-targeting as helping your customer right where they are. A young couple is strolling by a movie theater and the fair lady receives a 10% off push notification to a movie showing starting in 30 minutes. They happen to be a 5 minute walk from the theater and decide to head on in. Thank you mobile app! Geo-targeted advertising is not only helpful for your customer, but can be profitable for you. Use the information everyone else already has - and capitalize on it.   Reward Your Customers Who doesn’t love earning rewards? Or getting free stuff? Providing a rewards program for your customers is easy via mobile app, and a fine way to encourage user engagement. Rewards programs can efficiently be tracked and redeemed via mobile app, while the instant gratification of this method makes for a fun and satisfying game your customers. Then you can be the fun company with a loyalty program that engages your customers and encourages them to interact with your brand.   Boost Team Productivity You want to be the boss who gives your team the right tools to do their jobs well. Mobile apps are a great way to simplify complicated programs to get your team the data they need quickly.  For example CRM mobile apps are a great way to assist sales teams while they are on the road closing deals. What could be more important to a sales professional than the ability to quickly find the information they need, without the complications some of the most robust CRM software programs can provide? Additionally sales tracking apps are a great way to manage deals while running around meeting clients. Mobile apps are a great way to make every trade show, convention, and off site meeting simple and well documented.   Brand Building Much of traditional marketing has died with oversized 90’s desktops, but the importance of boosting brand recognition will never change. The mobile app is a great place to do it. I wasn’t kidding about phone addiction - the average consumer spends 127 minutes a day on mobile apps. Now remember how your app could be a bookmark on their everyday mobile home screen? Yeah, that’s cementing your logo right into their everyday life - making your brand memorable, friendly and familiar. The added joy? It’s fun to get creative with your branding. For example, Volkswagon’s SmileDrive Android app allows users to share fun moments with their friends via virtual travelogue. They connect via Bluetooth (safety first fellas) and record their adventure whilst traversing the road. They can earn badges and points for passing other SmileDrive users, and at the end of the trip can share experiences with friends and family. All the while, Volkswagon gets the attention - and business.   Mobile apps are one of the best new ways to grow your business - hands down. Don’t know where to start? Just ask us here.  

We often hear this question from our clients as we're building their website and guiding them through the web development process: "What should my company and domain name be?"  While there are no hard and fast rules, we always offer the following suggestions: 1. Search Engine Optimization will be an important method of building traffic for most, but not all, business models.  If SEO will be a traffic generating strategy, focusing your domain name on the services and/or products you provide will provide a keyword-rich jumping off point for getting high rankings with the search engines. 2. If you're having a hard time finding those keywords for your products and/or services, choose some themes that relate to your business, like web development for Barefoot Solutions. Get creative and come up with a list of words that describe this theme.  Don't forget to include plural and singular versions of the same word in this list. 3. Once you've generated a list of potential words for your company name and URL, edit the list down to a selection of 15-20 phrases.  Keep your client base in mind when selecting the finalists -- what phrases would make it easiest for them to find your website? 4. Avoid phrases for your URL that would cause a repeat letter, like barefootssolutions.com. These represent some of the most common typos. 5. Don't use hyphens, spaces, underscores, cute spellings, or any kind of strange punctuation marks that would make it difficult or confusing for a potential client to find your website, like www.dog.treatz.com. 6. Test the company name out in a few major languages to make sure that the potential names won't offend someone in another language. 7. Once you've narrowed these results even more based on the criteria above, check the final company name and URL contenders for availability at register.com. 8. Most sites should try to obtain a .com address. Particularly if you are selling a product or a service, .com is the de facto standard. With that being said, new startups are meeting success with .net, .org, and .tv. 9. Avoid buying an existing domain. Unless it's absolutely crucial to the business, it's generally a waste of your company's time and money.  You should be able to come up with some alternate options that will work just as well without the price tag. -- Stephanie

According to an article from the New York Times, some venture capitalists have started making large investments into new cell phone technology that would make it easier to shop and buy online from your iPhone, Blackberry, or Pre Palm. They've invested more than $100 million already into this type of technology. If their investments are successful and these applications become mainstream for all 3G phones, they have the potential to change the way you run and design your e-commerce site. The aim of this new technology is to turn your cell phone into a virtual credit card. One of the companies that has started building this new technology, Boku, has laid out plans that you would actually use your cell phone number instead of your credit card number to make mobile purchases.  The theory behind this is that you are far more likely to know your own cell phone number over a credit card number and so will be more likely to make that purchase instead of wading through the frustration of pulling out a credit card and inputting all that information into your iPhone. The system then sends a text message asking you to authorize the transaction with a texted response. Your cell phone account would then sort of become a paypal account - any online purchases would show up on your monthly cell phone bill.  The pitfall to this scenario is that cell phone carriers currently charge a large fee for this paypal-like service, which makes it cost prohibitive for an e-commerce site to sell products on a mobile device. As of now, carriers can take up to about 50 percent of the purchase cost. This is one of the reasons this technology has failed in the past.  But venture capitalists who have made this investment see hope in the growing popularity of 3G phones.  They believe that if enough 3G buyers subscribe to this mobile service, cell phone carriers will significantly cut the cost per transaction fee for each mobile purchase. This technology has the potential to create another large revenue stream for your e-commerce site since it would make online shopping so portable.  The implications are that, when testing your website's functionality, it will become more important to design your e-commerce site to display properly on any number of 3G devices with a number of different carriers.  User interface applications, especially your shopping cart, will also have to be developed to format properly with cell phone service providers.