As the creative director for a website design and development company, I pay attention to marketing materials. I was thumbing through a pretty technical car magazine yesterday and ran across an ad that had a highly stylized illustration of a car. The ad was in color and took up a full page. This page probably… Read More
Slick agency syndrome is a lot like Stockholm syndrome, wherein a business is held hostage by a slick website design & development company and eventually succumbs to and starts believing all the B.S. Eventually, the client breaks the spell, but not before the slick website design & development firm has wasted a lot of money… Read More
Small and even medium sized businesses have long relied on their relatives, friends and other semi tech savvy people to be their “website design agency.” And it worked just find for a number of years. But, as website design & development becomes ever more sophisticated and it has increasingly become hard to rank in the… Read More
There’s a glaring problem with modern website design and development. First, it’s not very modern. Far too many web shops are comprised of one or two people. They are expected to know all the software, coding, SEO techniques, content creation, social media, digital marketing and a whole host of other capabilities. All of the above… Read More
“Never do anything in your life that you wouldn’t want to see in the paper the next day.” This wise advice came from a wise journalist I knew many years ago. Of course, this same advice applies to the Internet, perhaps even more so. After all, after a bad story appears in the newspaper it… Read More
There’s a real conundrum for website design and development agencies and their clients. Clients (and presumably the users of their websites) absolutely love clean, simple, beautifully designed home pages. Unfortunately, Google hates them. Well, they don’t really hate them, per se, but they do ignore them, largely because there is no text. Google search algorithms… Read More
There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t get a call from a frantic customer that involves their website and loss of control of that site. It always amazes us at Kirk that companies entrust their customer face to an a person who has little vested interest in the success of the company. … Read More
As an NH SEO company, we often get asked what is the best way to optimize for the local level? First, companies know who their customers are. Where are they located? Are they primarily located in their state or are more located nationally? Who do they want to sell to now and in the future?… Read More
About 20% of our web projects are failed projects that were started with another Website Design and Development company. They will find us through search or through other trusted partners as a company that can help rebuild their failed project. Most Website Design and Development companies come from a back ground of web development, not… Read More
In the old days you could hire a website design and development person who knew a couple of coding languages, throw up a site and you were in business. As the web grew more sophisticated you hired a web design agency to update or redesign your site. But hire a typical website design and development… Read More
After an extensive two-year investigation, the Federal Trade Commission has determined that the way Google arranges search results is not a violation of antitrust or anti-competition laws. “While not everything Google did was beneficial, on balance we did not believe that the evidence supported an FTC challenge to this aspect of Google’s business under American… Read More
As a website design and development company it’s our job to stay at the leading edge of all things web. When it comes to e commerce, we’re helping our clients move ecommerce to mobile and tablet technologies. Given that there are about 80 million smart phones out there it doesn’t take a website design and… Read More
As a website design and development company, we’re doing more and more work for traditional ad agencies, marketing firms and PR firms. There are several reasons for this: First, the aforementioned know that, while they can create the one-off website, they can’t do all of the highly integrated work that a good website design &… Read More
It costs about $500,000 to open a Planet Fitness and you need $1.5 million in assets. Too expensive? A Dunkin Donuts will set you back around $400,000 and that doesn’t count the real estate. If these costs are way out of line but you still want to invest in a franchise, investing in an SEO… Read More
On most days, we love what we do. We help companies improve their online image and rank higher on search engines. In general, higher rank means higher inquiries and more sales. It all seems so easy that any one can do it. Unfortunately, SEO is becoming increasingly hard. SEO is not unlike many other industries… Read More