MichiganOnlineLawyer.com
Suski Web Design was honored to develop the website for this dynamic start-up! With busy schedules, working with a Michigan licensed lawyer who uses an online delivery channel makes sense. I love that MichiganOnlineLawyer.com publishes the fees for their personal and business legal services. It’s the best place for Michigan legal forms.
Laura Griese, the founder, is a great client and I look forward to seeing her start-up really take off!
Create an Online Resume for Free
Recently helped out with mock interviews for Grand Blanc High School and discussed the benefits of online resumes. To get the students started, I wrote out directions on the web page I put together for the December 7 Grand Blanc High School Career Day.
Basically, anyone can get a free wordpress.com account and paste their existing resume in as a new page. For the cost of a GoDaddy
domain name, they can even have their own .com point to their resume. Gotta love tips and tricks!
Android App To Accept Credit Card Payments
Saw this at an Expo last weekend and want to share! If you use an Andoid smartphone and need to accept in-person credit card payments, this is just too easy and convenient. Go to SquareUP.com to learn more.
Only wish they had an affiliate program so I could make a few bucks for promoting them 
New Favorite Website!
Content is king on websites and I just launched a website that exemplifies this!
This Flint & Fenton OBGYN practice hand-selected their top picks for women’s health online resources. The result is a tremendous source of reliable information. How impressive that this OBGYN group cares enough about their patients to provide this service.
Here’s more about this project!
The objectives included:
- Generate interest in the practice by establishing itself as the foremost resource on women’s health issues by providing extensive obstetrics & gynecology patient education.
- Demonstrate that the practice uses the most advanced technology available by proving details and videos to increase visits from patients who are interested in minimally invasive surgery and 4-D Ultrasounds .
- Improve patient satisfaction and retention by making it easy for patients to research the OBGYN doctors, access forms, pay their bill online, find Flint area hospital & surgery center directions, and read about women’s health news from the Blog and Email Newsletter.
- Improve office efficiency by providing forms, bill pay, policies, and directions online.
- A link to pay bills, content management system; home page animation; email sign up; lightboxes to showcase videos; and a floating bar with the practice’s phone number, social media, and AddThis links.
- There is a separate page for each of the practice’s office locations, and one for each hospital and surgery center they use. When their patients need directions to Hurley Medical Center, for example, it’s right on their website. In fact, the directions appear on the same web page as the map – no clicking over to Google Maps and possibly viewing competitors ads.
- The blog and Facebook sites have the same look and feel as the website.
- The website content is keyword-rich. In addition, my contact for the OBGYN site was hands-on and used my DIY Guide to Search Marketing to submit quality listings to major search engines and online directories. (She saved the practice a bundle versus paying for a service to hand-submit to these sites.) She also set up LinkedIn accounts for each of the doctors and contributes content for the practice’s Facebook page and Blog. Lots of search engine food to increase traffic
Facebook & iFrames
Did you know you can frame in pages from your website right on your Facebook business page?
I just created two on the Suski Web Design Facebook page: a Digital Marketing Resources page to supplement a presentation I’m giving tonight at a Kettering University TechVenture class, and a Wearable Art for Sale page to generate some affiliate income.
Think about ways you can expand your business using Facebook Pages
SEO & Social Media Profiles
Just read a good article on optimizing your social media profiles for SEO. Check it out!
Domain Registry of America Direct Mail Scam
I’ll keep this short and sweet. If you get a letter from the Domain Registry of America, just throw it in the trash. Period.
Cheers,
Mary
Try this search engine: DuckDuckGo
Try this super fast, straightforward search engine. Results appear in a continuous list, no clicking from page to page.
DuckDuckGo has all kinds of tools, apps, add-ons for power searchers. It’s gaining a cult following, try it and you’ll see why!
Won Best of the Best Web Designer
Celebrating today for getting voted the Best of the Best Web Designer in the contest held by the Grand Blanc View newspaper.
Happy for all Grand Blanc businesses, and especially happy for clients who also won Best of the Best or were voted a Grand Blanc Favorite:
- Diamond in the Rough Jewelers
- Winegarden, Haley, Lindholm & Robertson PLC
- Royal Gardens Flowers
- Tomlinson Design – I work on her Women2Women Michigan website
- Computer Care & Repair (not a client, but they are the best place in Grand Blanc for computer repair)
Snake Oil & SEO Companies, alias We’re a ‘Google Partner’
One reason I went into the web design business in the 90′s was because when I opened an invoice from my current webmaster, I had that sinking feeling that I was being taken for a ride. I went back to college, took programming classes, and then enrolled in Penn State’s first-ever Webmaster Certificate program.
These days, the most prevalent examples of companies who take business owners for a ride are the SEO companies who make grandiose claims.
Sadly, many small businesses get a quick ‘n dirty site going and wonder why they don’t get any business from it. In swoops SEO companies. They say for a monthly fee ($99+) they can get you top rankings on Google and Google Places. They impress you with incredible stats, etc. My clients are educated enough to just hang up the phone, however if you’re tempted to listen to their spiel, do yourself a favor and download this free eBook: How to Spot Bad SEO Services.
The first sign is “Making promises that are too good to be true”. Google warns against making such promises in their Search Engine Guidelines, saying, “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
The bottom line is business owners can get the best results for their online marketing investment by working with a web designer who is experienced with the big picture from day one – think an online / digital presence, not just a website.
Want more info? Check out “The top 10 SEO myths”.
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