Quick W.I.T.S.

Those of you who have followed me on social media for awhile now may recognize the name Denise Alison. She's the owner of Stratigro Business Consulting, and just like me she helps small and medium sized businesses improve their online presence to increase their success. Over the past year, I've shared a few of her articles on my own page, and we've traded comments back and forth on each others' content quite a bit. Denise recently reached out to me about a new online course she's offering, on using live video content to grow your business. This is a subject I'm very interested in - I've been thinking a lot about different ways to expand a company's social media presence. Video content is proven to get a lot more traction than written articles alone, due to its ease of access, and the personal rapport you can develop with your audience by appearing on camera. I've always been a little reticent to pull the trigger on video content myself (I'...

Did you know that there are over 2 billion smartphone users in the world? That number grows every year, while the number of people using traditional computers continues to slowly shrink. It's more important than ever to reach these users where they live, so your website needs to look great on mobile platforms if you want those users to find and use your business. A lot of web developers talk about "responsive" design. This is the term used to describe websites that resize images, text, and layouts based on the size of the screen or window they're being viewed on. Many platforms do this automatically, but just changing sizes isn't automatically good enough. The interface still needs to look good and work well on a mobile platform, and be easy and intuitive to use. Responsive code doesn't do this automatically - you need to build the site with mobile in mind from the outset. There are a few questions you should ask yourself when you or your web designer ar...

Guess what? Building a website for your business doesn't have to cost a fortune. I know I've said this before, but lately I've been hearing some horror stories that make me feel like it's worth mentioning again. There are companies out there, including right here in Pictou County, who want you to believe it costs several thousand dollars to have a site built, or that it's perfectly reasonable to pay hundreds of dollars a month to host the site once it's online. It's certainly true that it CAN cost thousands of dollars to build a website, under certain circumstances. A huge corporate website with hundreds of pages and lots of customized features, coded from scratch, can easily take a web designer hundreds of hours to design, and cost thousands of dollars to build. But the fact of the matter is, most businesses don't need anything nearly that complicated (or expensive). As someone with over 20 years of IT experience, I know that people tend t...

With all the reports of ransomware and cyber attacks in the news lately, it's getting scary out there (check out http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/canadian-firm-pays-425000-to-recover-from-ransomware-attack/394844 if you're a business owner and never want to sleep again). Now more than ever, it's important for even small companies to protect their data, and make sure their computer systems are patched and up to date. The real scary thing about ransomware is not the big dollar amounts you see in the news, but the fact that these hackers can cast a very wide net for almost no effort, as any business that gets caught up in their trap is in serious trouble if they're not properly protected. Arguably, a successful ransomware attack would be much more damaging to a small company operating on a small budget than to a large company. A big company having to pay money to retrieve their own data will suffer a bad quarter, but likely continue operating. A small company, o...