Your collection of passwords has a lot in common with your keys, believe it or not. There are a few ultra-important ones, a few that open less important sites, and a few that are still hanging around, even though you’re not sure what they open. And just like your key chain, you’d never want to…
Sending and receiving email messages is a routine part of the workday for Calgary residents. It’s such a routine part of networking and online marketing, in fact, that you can almost do it without thinking. When you send a receive many emails each day, it becomes easy to overlook some of the finer points of…
Even the best businesses will lose customers from time to time, often for reasons that have little to do with the quality of the products and services they offer. Keeping your business healthy means replacing those lost customers with a steady supply of new faces. Growth is a priority for every successful business, and building…
Your digital content should be one of your most powerful marketing tools, but it only works if you know the basics of writing for an online audience. The first thing to realize is that Web readers aren’t looking for a literary masterpiece when they visit your site. In general, they’re looking for information first and…
Intranet portals have long been popular with large organizations, like universities and major corporations. The basic idea is simple. An intranet portal provides a centralized, easily accessible location where your employees can access applications, critical information, and any other digital tools they need to increase productivity, all in real-time. Portals are especially popular in industries like sales,…
The process of an effective website design shares many similarities with the process of building a physical structure. Building a home, for example, starts with a foundation, which supports the load-bearing walls. Beams and load-bearing walls on the first floor support the second floor, which supports the roof, and openings for doors allow the home’s…
Trends change quickly online, and crafting effective digital marketing means staying on the cutting edge. It’s equally important, however, to avoid neglecting “old” tactics that still deliver excellent results. Email is an old medium, at least in Internet years. It predates social media, Google, Amazon, and most of the other giants that shape today’s digital…
A picture might be worth a thousand words, but it takes more than a glossy photo to make your products pop online. When shopping online, customers don’t have the luxury of calling over a staff member to answer questions, or getting a hands-on trial of the product they’re considering. A well-written product description is the…
Social media has been a popular marketing tool from the start, but its performance hasn’t always matched its potential. That’s not to say it has performed poorly, or anything close. It’s just that marketers identified the massive potential of social so early, and so publicly, that it took a few years to see if the…
Creative thinking is invaluable in the business world, and is also frequently mythologized for understandable reasons. When you look at one of Van Gogh’s paintings or see one of Shakespeare’s plays staged, it feels like you’re witnessing a singular, inspired achievement. What you’re really seeing, however, is the result of countless hours of hard work and toil.…
Ever wonder what your favourite Beatles song would sound like if it was dubbed over the beat of the rap song you sing along loudest to? If so, you’re not alone. Music mashups have long been a part of Web culture, and there’s a good chance that a YouTube video already exists to satiate your curiosity. The mashup concept…
Naming things is one of the most challenging parts of writing. That’s true whether you’re working on a blog post, a novel, a presentation, or anything in between. Of course, the stakes are higher in marketing. Your blog post titles need to accurately describe the post and grab the reader’s attention, without slipping into hyperbole.…
Are you doing everything you can to protect your personal information online? Transacting business online has become second nature for most people. On a given day, you might use the Internet to shop, bank, pay bills and socialize. Maybe all at once! While it’s great to be able to accomplish so much from your computer,…
Trends change quickly online. At least most of them do. Some elements of the Web, however, become so familiar that we almost don’t even notice them after a while. For most people, hyperlinks fall into that category. Google, which got its start in 1996, stuck with the underlined blue text look for almost two decades,…
Your website is the digital face of your business. Potential customers form impressions of your business based on the quality of your website, just as they’d analyze your brick-and-mortar location when visiting it for the first time. If you want that impression to be positive, you need to update your site regularly. Broken links and…
Compelling content is an excellent marketing tool, but it can only reach its potential if your readers know where to find it. Newspaper readers will likely be familiar with the “above the fold” concept. If you look at a broadsheet-style newspaper on a store shelf, it will be folded in half. The portion of the…