I am often met with fear and trepidation when I ask clients to give me some content for their website.  "I can't write!" I hear very commonly.  The good news is you don't have to - we can do it for you!  So, what, we're experts on every subject?  Hardly!  But we do know some good questions to ask, and this allows us to write great articles about any subject that you give us the information on.  Here's a brief idea on the sort of things we can ask to jog you into giving us facts we can then weave into content.

• When did you start your business and why?
• What's your USP (Unique Selling Point)?
• What are your <insert number> major products/services?
• Who are your staff?  Tell us about their background (better still have them write it).
• What concerns do customers in your industry have?  How does <insert company name> help them overcome those worries?

When writing articles, be they ordinary website articles or blogs, think of the potential reader, and then think WIIFM - what's in it for me?  Let's face it, we all WANT!  And, generally, we want new, improved, more depth, etc.  We don't want yesterday's

What are your marketing strategies?  Are they staying up to today’s trends?  Here are some marketing strategies that we use here at CitrusKiwi Web Solutions to help drive traffic to our site and our customers' sites, establish credibility as a company and turn that traffic into sales.

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

People select from the first or second page of search results.  CitrusKiwi provides ongoing SEO services as part of their Web Solution packages as we see this part almost as critical as the actual website itself.  A fantastic, "all-the-bells-and-whistles" website is useless if it appears on even page 4.

Keyword Research

Discover the words and phrases people are searching for online.  We are addressing this issue even as we are designing the site.  Why wait till after the site's designed and content written?  As the site develops and evolves, we help you continually refine these words and phrases within your site to ensure we are targetting the right keywords and keyphrases.

Social Media

Create buzz around a product, brand or business.  We can get you started or help you identify options.  The savvy businesses are utilizing the major social media players such as Twitter and Facebook.  In our

Website content is the collective information that appears your web pages.  This can be images, text, tables or files.  Typically, at the time of the website's design, the web content is fresh and valuable (assuming it is well researched and written!).  But, as things in your business change, your website becomes out of date or incomplete, and your web content can become stale and boring.  Not only do visitors to your site appreciate up-to-date, fresh information and website content, but so do search engines!

No static pages

In the past, old web sites utilized “static” pages and were somewhat cumbersome for clients to add or edit web content.  Site owners generally needed to rely on their web master or web designer to implement changes to their site and to the website content, which, of course, meant time and money.

CMS puts the power in your hands

The breakthrough came with Content Management Systems (CMS), a new way to construct websites and deal with website content. With a CMS, tiers of authority can be given to individuals throughout the company to add or edit web content in real-time, on-screen with little to no chance of them breaking anything.  So, as soon

Feelings & Emotions

Color for website design and for branding definitely matters.  Color is a non-verbal (or non-written) communication.  Colors convey feelings and emotions, often without the viewer being aware of it.  These feelings can be inbuilt (for example, red has been shown to raise blood pressure), cultural (for example in the western world we associate white with weddings) or trendy (many people associate avocado with the 60's & 70's).

When thinking about a color for a website, care must be taken to understand who the intended audience is.  Male?  Female?  Old?  Young?  Western? Asian?  Global?  Yes, white is associated with weddings, but that's very much a western idea.  In the Asian continent, white is associated with death and funerals.  An Asian wedding site in white is not going to go down too well!

Color for your company's website

Obviously the colors in use in your company are going to dictate to some degree the color for your website.  You may think that's going to be a problem if your logo is mainly turquoise (one of a man's least favorite colors) and you're trying to pitch to men.  But that's not the case.  Color matches can be adjacent, complementary or

Blogging for business

We often have new clients asking us about blogging for their business website.  "Do I need to do a blog?"  "Are blogs important for a business website?"  "How often do I need to do it?"  "How much time will it take?"  "What do I write about?"  "Can someone else do it for me?"  "I'll be away for 3 weeks and won't have time to blog - what do I do?"

Do I need a blog?

The answer is no.  But you don't need to SEO your website either - or have a website at all.  The truth is, blogging on a business website is an integral part of SEO and promotion.  Search engines have complicated algorithms to determine the relevancy of a site to the search phrase entered.  Google's algorithm purportedly looks at over 200 factors.  One of these is fresh content.  Blogging for your business is an awesome way to add fresh content, keep existing customers informed, and generate traffic.  Do you need to blog?  No, but you'd be silly to ignore it.  Blogs are important to the health and life of your business's website.

How often should you blog?

This is a "How long is

This is a joke I use from time to time, and it usually gets a smile or two.  Unfortunately it applies to a number of websites I see every day - I'm not sure what to call them, I just hope their owners are getting breakfast!

I said in a post a while back that, in the old days - back when I first began writing websites, pretty much anything would pass for a good website.  We didn't have the technology either to design or be found.  It was the age of the online brochure.  But visitors demand more than just a brochure now.  They need action, movement, help, usefulness.

Sadly, many site owners just don't get it.  The good news for them, is their sites are so badly optimized that most searchers aren't going to ever find them!  What a waste of effort and money.  Whilst hosting is cheap now, having a site designed is usually a costly business.  Not being found is a waste of this money and effort.

Here are some easily fixable mistakes, ones that cost you big time in rankings.

Poor title tags. How often do I see "Home - Mozilla Firefox/Internet Explorer".  This is

It's been a quiet start to the year with our attention in other places for much of it.  However, we've been quietly working away at a number of designs, some of which have been totally rewritten with the advent of the latest Joomla version- 1.6 - which has a whole different architecture to the previous version.

Our latest creation just went live yesterday and you can check out one of Sacramento's only dedicated real estate attornies in Rita Lingwood by following the Sacramento real estate attorney link.  All of us here at CitrusKiwi wish Rita all the best with the new site!

Hey, don't worry, this is not how we treat our clients!  In fact, our whole marketing strategy is built around our giving our client the best service we can.  That's how we can keep them,and still charg elow monthly fees for the great service we offer.

But the purpose of today's post is not to tell you how great we are - after all, what we tell you will be treated with caution anyway - but to introduce you to our latest live site, and our new client Hurt by Love.  Cindy and Doug have a great ministry reaching out to, mostly, abused women in our world, giving them good, solid, practical advice, a listening ear, and a safe haven to find hope.  Cindy is an abuse survivor herself, so doesn't speak out of someone else's experience or from a dry textbook.  Her experience came at a high price.  Doug, her husband, has 23 years, and counting, working behind the walls of a state prison and brings the experience of dealing with abusers and manipulators of all types. His experience is invaluable.

If you are the victim of emotion or verbal abuse, or you know someone who is, this

I don't doubt that all these are repeated elsewhere, in 1000's of pages.  That's the good, and bad thing, of the Internet.  There's a bunch of information.  Unfortunately, especially when it comes to IT, much of it is out of date (or not updated), totally wrong, or written by armchair amateurs.  You know, some of the same ones that clog up the Internet with horrible web pages that start with "Welcome to my page" or similar.

So let's get started......(in no particular order)

1. Bloated files/pages.
This could really be 2 categories.  Firstly bloated pages.  These are the ones stuffed with gigantic pics that allow you to cook dinner, wash the car AND do you shopping while the page loads.  Second are bloated files.  PDF's are great used properly, but they can be big.  I like to offer my visitors the option of saving/opening a PDF, or viewing as a plain HTML page.  Yes it takes more work on the part of the designer, but it's much more user friendly.

2. Visited links that don't change color.
When users have visited somewhere, they like to know it.  Not coding links to change color when they've been clicked is insulting to

1. Their portfolio has nothing that makes you think, “Yeah, they can handle my website!”
Many people look for experience and that can be good too, but, if your designer has years of experience, and their portfolio is lackluster, then that’s what you’ll likely get.  Lackluster.  Look for someone who has a portfolio, but one that makes you go “Wow!” and don’t worry about size.

2. Going for the cheapest price.
How often do we hear that it’s not necessarily the best option getting the cheapest, but so many people still do.  If you’re doing that, you’re only thinking with your checkbook, and not your head.  Not that paying high prices guarantees quality either, but neither does a low price guarantee a good deal.  As Benjamin Franklin used to say, "The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten."

3. You rush them or they rush you.
I’m often asked, “How long will this take?”   The truth is, on the average site, 2-3 weeks is sufficient, but that time frame is dependent on you getting all your copy and photos together in a timely fashion. Anyone can quote you a week, or 2 weeks,