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How can content strategy help your users and your search engine optimization efforts? How should you go about developing great content? More...

“Let’s make good better.”

One of my favorite journalism professors had a way of working with students that was respectful and positive while still instructional. During our weekly reporting assignment, he encouraged each of his students to bring a draft of their article to him during office hours. This session was invaluable. He would offer feedback on the story and guidance on how to improve it.

These meetings were the most useful when the story had already been given a lot of attention but needed a little extra polish to truly shine. In those situations, my teacher would compliment the story and discuss its merits. Then he’d say, “Now let’s make good better.” More...

Super Bowl XLVI offered more than dueling quarterbacks and an excitement-packed last minute of gameplay. In addition to wings, dips, and beer, an extra helping of insight into user behavior was made possible by the big game. More...

Web content is more important than ever. Users want relevant content that is up-to-date and easy to process. They want to find information as quickly as possible, and they want to share what they find. More...

1. People are talking about you online. Not all of them are saying nice things.
2. Nobody can "just call Google" and have them remove negative mentions of you or your company on other websites.
3. Facebook and Twitter might be free, but building an audience takes time, energy and persistence.
4. You don’t need to squat 279 website domain names. It’s expensive and confusing.
5. Don’t be afraid to put your client list on your website. Your competition already knows who’s on it. Be confident you are servicing them better than the competition ever could.
6. Don’t be afraid to put your management/employee list on your website. Your competition already knows who’s on it. Be confident you are treating them better than the competition ever could.
7. No CMS magically makes you a designer. It’s still HTML, and you can still screw it up.
8. Websites typically don’t just “stop working”. If your junior IT guy was in there monkeying around and broke something, we aren’t going to be mad, but we do need to know or we can’t fix it.
9. It’s like a house; the price changes based on how big and how nice.
10. It’s like a house; once it’s built, a change means more time (and likely money) is needed to do something different.
11. It’s like a house; if the deadline is January 1st you can’t wait until December 31st to approve the blueprints and expect to finish on time.
12. Don’t require users to fill out a form to access your content. Your users don’t want it that bad and your competitors are just going to enter fake data.
13. You can’t keep me from stealing your images. Turn the right click back on.
14. You can’t tell somebody everything at once, so stop trying. Slow down and focus on what really matters.
15. You can’t force people to stay on your site. If you want them to stay, give them a good reason to. No, opening external links in new windows is not a reason.
16. Your site has to have content.
17. Your site has to have good content before other people will link to it.
18. You can’t steal that content from other people.
19. Good content is hard work. Hire a content strategist and copywriter.
20. Use straightforward, meaningful, real words in your content. Nobody knows what it means to “synergize core competencies through proactive dialogue” (nor are they searching for that).
21. It’s okay for a page to scroll. Honestly, if Target.com isn’t worried about it, neither should you be.
22. Make the logo smaller. Big logos don’t mean people will remember you. It means you have a logo that’s too big.
23. I don’t care what your print designer is telling you…If you don’t make the link look like a link; people won’t know they can click it.
24. Don’t ever tell a designer to “make it pop”. It’s not helpful feedback and they’ll be secretly wishing that you stub all of your toes later.

Aztek is a Cleveland, Ohio based web design firm who sincerely hopes you appreciate that we are only using humor as a vehicle to illustrate our points. But seriously, don't make the logo bigger.

As a business, you want to protect your intellectual property on the Web, especially on your own website. Oftentimes, that involves with the use of a trademark symbol on a product name or logo. But many businesses are not sure which symbol to use, when to use the symbol, or how many times to repeat it. To assist you in understanding the proper use, our good friends at the Law Firm of Brouse McDowell have shared some pointers on trademark use.

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People like easy. Easy to make 10 minute dinners, easy self checkout lines at the grocery store, easy cheese in a can (ok, nobody likes that) but you get my point. This desire for simplicity permeates our lives and the Internet is no exception. People expect ease of use and speed on the websites that they visit. This is espcially true for ecommerce websites. More...

Everyone (well at least those of us in the SEO world) knows how valuable a strong, high quality inbound link can be for your website's link profile. Inbound links help drive traffic to your website, influence your search engine rankings, and help search engine spiders find and index your site's pages (among other benefits). What some people may not know is that all links are not created equal. Links from popular blogs with a strong community following not only offer the same benefits as any other link but also provide increased brand awareness and can help build industry awareness. However, due to the format of most blogs, the power of these links can begin to decrease as time goes on, even within a few days. As new blog posts are written, older posts undoubtedly move deeper into the site. More...

You may have thought that Aztek was only a Cleveland web design firm. However, you would be wrong. Aztek is also a provider of a wide range of web marketing services including SEO (search engine optimization), online marketing, social media integration, email marketing and more. Not only do we offer these services, we are experts in online marketing. Aztek has been an Adwords Certified Partner for over a year now. Just this week, our web marketing team successfully renewed our partnership with Google by passing an updated advanced Search Advertising exam. More...

1. Content is a cookie, and once they're done eating it, they should want more.
2. Tell a story.
3. Tell your story one snippet at a time. Being too broad makes you boring.
4. The hook comes first. More...