October is one month of the year where promoting certain products becomes more important than at any other time of the year. There are special sales days and of course the winter holiday season. If you have followed our series “Promoting your business online” you may have found some useful tips and tricks. If you may have misses an article let us provide you with an overview. In our series we have published the following article:
In the following weeks we would like to follow up our series with additional posts starting with “Social Media Management” followed by “Social Media Management Tools”
If you are located in Vancouver and like to learn more about promoting your business online, we offer our Online Advertisement Seminar again and would be happy to welcome you in our consultation location. More information about our seminars can be found via the event list link or simply by clicking here https://teccrab.wordpress.com/event-list/
But unfortunately the upcoming holiday season also attracts those how like to find ways to trick you into providing your money to them. Those who will try to steal your identity and credit card information. Just like last year we have also for this year planed to host some events regarding Internet Security. We offered last year two different seminars with overlapping topics and combined the two into one seminar we like to call Internet Safety Seminar. You can find the seminar details at our event list or by clicking this link: https://teccrab.wordpress.com/event-list/
To learn more about us please feel free to follow the links below.
In our series Promoting your business online, we have talked about building a website and website structure. We as well posted a general article about online marketing and hope each of those articles were helpful. Today we want to inform you about a very important change from Google. We are sure you are well aware that Google is the most used search engine today. It is therefore important to get your website listed via Google and to make sure you are building your site based on the latest Google standards. To help users to get the best possible search experience Google had changed their search engine over the years many times. Certain standards are required to secure that your website is in good standing with Google and it is advisable to check them out if you are going to build a website.
One of the latest and very important changes is related to the increasing use of mobile devices. In the last couple years users have changed their behaviour when searching for information. Many are suing their mobile phones instead of their desktop computer to look up information. With this in mind Google has announced to change their algorithm in a way that would benefit those website that are mobile friendly compare to those that aren’t.
What does that mean for you?
Based on the information we have, mobile friendly websites will benefit from this change, if users are searching via mobile devices. Apparently the desktop search is not effected. However we have noticed a significant traffic increase to one of our websites in the last couple weeks. It is of course possible that this increase is due to the fact that Google is testing their system. We also would like to mention that we have not noticed the same change on other websites we maintain.
How to check if your site is mobile friendly?
It is very easy to check if your website is mobile friendly. Google is providing a tool to check your site for free. If you want to try it just follow this link:
What to do to get a mobile friendly website?
If you are working with a professional website developer we are confident you will be in good hands. Especially if your website was build in the last couple months, we are sure your developer team has taken care of it. If your site is a little older you may want to talk to your developer. It is possible that simple changes can improve your site and if they are easy to implement it is very likely you will get them for an affordable price. In case you have build your website yourself and don’t know how to get it mobile friendly, we can offer you to take a look and to give you an estimate. If you are planing on building a new website we would be happy to take care of your project.
How much does a mobile friendly website cost?
The cost for a website depends on so many factors. We have build a tool to calculate the cost for a website which you can find here:
It is important to mention that the calculator was designed to help you to get an idea how much a website can cost. To get a real estimate you will have to talk to a developer about your project. A good developer will not only take the information and put them online, but will also advice you which elements are necessary and what you can add later.
We offer free consultations and work with many creative developer together. If you want to talk to us about your project we are happy to assist you. Hopefully this article was useful and if you like please feel free to share it. If you would like to learn more about us check out the links below.
We hope you enjoyed our first two articles Promoting your business online: Website and Promoting your business online: Online Marketing. In this article we would like to go a little deeper into the structure of a website. Certain pages are needed in order to have a successful site. Also pages need to be structured in a certain way to make it easier for search engines to scan the content of your page. We will try to be not to technical in our post and to give you an overview what to look out for.
About Us Page
An About Page will help visitors to learn more about your business. If you are a small business you may want to have the people listed who are working in your company. A mission statement and a little history about your company will give visitors an idea what your business is about.
Contact Page
Beside the About Page the Contact Page is in our opinion essential. You want that visitors become clients and therefore give them options to contact you. The address, phone number and a general Email address is enough, but if you have the opportunity to add an info form we encourage you to add this too. If you are running a home business and don’t want to have your address on your website we recommend getting a PO Box. Another option is to use a office sharing service where you can also get a separate phone number.
Product / Service Page(s)
Since you want visitors to know what you have to offer you of course also need pages to showcase your products and or services. Depending on the nature of your business this can be one page or multiple pages. If you want to build an online store you also need a checkout system.
Privacy Policy and Disclaimer
Some countries have strict rules when it comes to do business online. Some may even charge you a hefty fee if you don’t have such a page on your website. The content of the site has some main elements such as Copyright and Privacy Statement, how you handle Personal Information and Security.
Sitemap
This will help search engines to scan pages on your site. It might not be the first thing on the list of pages you consider adding to your site, but should be on your to do list regardless. It is also not necessary to have a link in your navigation to this page.
The pages mentioned above are in our opinion the essential pages you should have when developing a website. Keep in mind that you might be able to create a one page site that includes all the details mentioned above, but we encourage you to consider building a website with many pages at some point. Beside the content of a page we also would like to mention some more technical things to think about.
Content
You may think that this is obvious and not worse mentioning, but we saw websites were simply a flyer was scanned and uploaded. Some other mistakes are poor descriptions, not using keywords or having to many of them. We suggest writing articles for your audience and to keep in mind that even if Google and other search engines need to be able to find certain keywords in order to list your website you shouldn’t consider them your main audience.
Images
Even if writing is very important, pictures can help visitors to put an images to the text. Try to optimize your images to reduce loading time. Make sure that your images have an so called Alt Text so search engines know what this images is about.
General Structure
Some SEO experts will tell you that Meta Keywords aren’t important, some will say they are. We think as long as you have just a few and not an endless list of Keywords you will be fine. The so called Meta Description is in our opinion much more important. The Meta Description is a short description what your business is about. Try to keep it under 160 characters because some search engines will cut your description short if you have more. You also need to secure your site with so called <H1> to <H6> tags to define HTML headings. The <H1> tag is for the most important heading and <H2> to <H6> for the lesser important. Depending on what kind of website you are building you may have to consider familiarizing yourself with the so called “.htaccess” and how to configure your so called “robots.txt”. Some platforms such as Joomla will have standard files already included. Also some of the “ready to use” website builder are taking care of this for you, but you may want or need to make some modifications.
We hope this article was informative and that you enjoy our series. Some of our upcoming topics are Online Advertisement, Social Media, Blogging and Videos. As always if you like to talk to one of our experts, we offer free consultations to help you making the right decisions for your business. Visit http://teccrab.com to learn more about us.
In our opinion the first step to promote your business online should be a website. A website is like your store, but in the World Wide Web. You can showcase your products and services, can have contact details available and depending on the nature of your business maybe even a shopping cart system in place. There are a few questions you should ask yourself before getting started.
1st Question: Your Budget
The first question you should asked yourself is how much money you have available for your website project. Your available budget will help you answering the next questions.
2nd Question: Platform, Host, Domain Name
Depending on the product or service you have to offer you may want to go with a WordPress Blog, a Joomla website or maybe an online store build with Magento. There are many other platforms to choose from and some are more suited for your business than others. If you are not sure which one to choose you can contact us for a free consultation. Some platforms require to be setup proper so you should check which website host is offering them. Last but not least you will have to get a domain name preferable something that is also the name of your company. Depending on the Host and the kind of domain name the cost can vary and the cheapest you can get is under $10 per month.
3rd Question: Developer
You may feel comfortable to build your first site by yourself but maybe you need professional help. Picking the right developer is an important step. Consider how much money it will cost to build the site by yourself and compare that with the costs of a professional developer. We have created a tool to give you an idea how much a website can cost. The calculator is designed to give you a general idea, prizes can vary a lot and also depend very much on the project. But we hope it will give you at least an idea. So please feel free to follow this link. We suggest to “shop around” a bit to see if you can find a developer that fits your needs, budget and can earn your trust. Trust is a very important factor when picking a developer. We suggest not to go with the fist guy, check out other options and find the one that is the right fit for your project.
After you have asked yourself those 3 questions you can go to the next step which is building the website. You may have seen many one page websites and those are often a great way to get started. But keep in mind a good website is changing, a successful website is growing and you should always try to add new content. Think of your website like a real store where you change the decoration depending on the season or add new products to your shelfs. With the right platform you will be able to create new content easily and if you have the right developer on your site it won’t be a problem to keep your website fresh and interesting for your visitors.
You also want to consider Online Marketing options such as Online Advertisement and Social Media to increase the traffic to your site. We can help you with every single step and even if you decide to go ahead and try it on your own first, it might be a good idea to have the knowledge that a professional have pointed you into the right direction.
Today we would like to give you our first impression of an application called MyPoi. This application is at the moment in an early stage but still something we think you should check out. What you can do with MyPoi is saving your special places, your points of interest by pinpointing them to a map and adding tag(s) to it. You can share this place with your friends, family and colleagues or of course use MyPoi to find this special spot yourself again.
You can download MyPoi for free and creating an account is also free. When you start the application it will show you a list of your Poi’s sorted by the date you added them. Via the Plus button you can easily add another point of interest. The available fields at the moment are a Title and a Note Box. The Note Box can be used for tagging. Below them you will find a switch to either save your point of interest public or not. MyPoi is designed to work offline too, so you can add your Poi anywhere.
Below the fields where you can enter information about your new point of interest you will find a map and below that a little icon to add pictures.
To check your points of interest you can use the list icon in the top left corner. There you will have also the option to search for other Poi’s. Just enter a keyword or #hashtag and then click search. Your hits will be shown in a list form and selecting a location will provide you more information.
If you prefer to see your Poi on a bigger screen you can also go to the website and check out your story page. Ours is for example http://www.mypoiapp.com/story/teccrab and shows the points of interest we have saved so far. Another feature is the Tag map where you can find Poi’s around you based on a tag check http://www.mypoiapp.com/map/viewpoint as an example.
As mentioned earlier, the application is still in the development stage but shows already promising features. We had the chance to meet Clint Liang, the developer of MyPoi, and to talk to him about his application. He is very excited about the feedback he got so far and is working on implementing a web based interface for users to create POI’s online. He mentioned that it would be great to get even more users involved, because the feedback from them will help to develop an application they like. If you are interested to learn more about MyPoi please follow the links below:
If you have thought about building your own online community for your business or hobby, then Anahita might be the platform you were looking for. Anahita is a minimalist, customizable, and extendable social networking platform. Features can be enabled based on the community you would like to create. You can even build and integrate your own applications and the best is, it is open source, which means you can download it for free.
Joining the Anahita tribe gives you the chance to exchange ideas and experience with other developers. If you want to learn more about Anahita please follow this link: http://www.getanahita.com
This post will be a bit longer because it is a question that is not easy to answer. I once saw a very clever post from a website developer who explained creating a website with buying a car. He explained in his example that you can get a cheap car or a luxurious car with a lot of extras and depending on what car you need or want you will pay for it either a little or a lot. I think that this example was very true and to the point. In my post today I would like to help you to get a better understanding for website development, how much you can expect your project will cost and will try to mention some prices so that you can do your own calculation.
The first question you will need to ask yourself is what kind of website do you need? The second is how much can you do yourself?
If you have a business where most of your costumers will visit your real store and not buy your products online, you most likely will go with a very simple website and use one of those “Do it Yourself” tools, to have at least something like an online business card.
But as soon as your business is growing you will see the need to present yourself a bit more professional and this will be the moment where you will start looking into the available options more closely. You will also see the need to look into someone with SEO knowledge and experience with social media tools as well as someone who can help you with internet marketing solutions.
You as successful business owner will have your experience with the fact that finding a good partner can be a challenge and you will know how important it is to have good partners on your site. Knowing that your online presents is an ongoing project and not just a tool you buy and use until it is broken is also a very important fact, because this will make you aware of securing the right partner on your site. To get back to the car example, you most likely will go to the same mechanic every time your car is broken, if you like and can trust this person. The same rule applies for sure for a doctor or dentist. If you do not feel comfortable with your doctor or dentist, you most likely won’t get back to that person. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the greatest compliments you can get is when a client appreciate your services so much that they even post about it on their own Blog. INTERNeX just did this today in a very nice way. Please find here what they had to say about us:
Our Summer Party in 2012
Last summer we enjoyed and incredible Summer Party! But that was just possible to all our sponsors! One of them was teccrab. It just launched its new website. It’s quite impressive so you should check it out!
What does teccrab have to offer?
If you want to start selling your products or have your own presence online, teccrab can help you to develop your website.
If you are looking to improve your presence on the World Wide Web, teccrab can design online marketing strategies for your potential new customers.
If you are planning to have an event teccrab have their own Public Relations departments so don’t doubt on contact them.
R. Simon Kaebe, founder of teccrab
R. Simon Kaebe, founder of teccrab
If you need a promo video for your event, I specially recommend you to contact them… their job is just amazing!
And last but not least…maybe you are interested in knowing a little bit more about all the the World Wide Web world, in that case you should contact them because teccrab offers IT Classes as well!
When you work doing your passion, do you know what happen? Brilliant results! So if you really want to have or to improve your online presence, just give them a call!
Thanks again teccrab for your help!
Cheers,
Irene
INTERNeX International Exchange
Suite 200 – 211 Columbia Street
Vancouver BC -V6A 2R5-
Web: http://www.internexcanada.com
Phone: +1 (604) 662 8149
Email: pr@internexcanada.com
Thank you INTERNeX for the compliments and we are looking forward to provide more services to you hopefully in the near future.
I am very happy to announce that we recently launched our new website and I would like to invite you to check it out. With the new design we also introduce some services we didn’t had online with the previous version. We went with the latest Joomla version, Joomla 3.0, to realize this project. The latest version of Joomla is great for those who would like to have a fantastic looking and functional website not just on a computer, but also on a tablet or smart phone. We checked our new website on an iPad and iPhone and were very pleased with the result.
Beside changing the website we as well redesigned our Logo a little bit. We will still have the crab as our symbol, but created now alos a text version, which you can find now on our Blog, Facebook Page, LinkedIn Page, Google Page as well as our website of course. For our social media platforms we added the icons of the services we offer and we think the new look is clean and fits our overall design.
Because we will celebrate in February 2013 our first anniversary we plan to have some special deals for new customers. We encourage therefore everyone to check out our Blog frequently to see what we will have for you. We already started the new year with one of our new packages, called the Google AdWords KeyWord-Broker Start. This package is especially for small business owner designed and in our opinion a great and very risk free way to check us out and start using our services.
Beside the Google AdWords KeyWord-Broker Starter Package we plan to offer IT Training. This is based on a few conversation we had during the holidays were we talked with various people about the IT Training landscape in general. Most people were not pleased with the available IT Training options, told me about their experience were the training was either very expensive or not practical. I had my share with so called IT Training Provider as well. I had the experience that classrooms were often way to big or that the teacher couldn’t reach the student because they were “hiding” behind a screen.
Our classes will be 10 students max and our first training will be very basic, but hopefully useful, practical, a little bit entertaining and not very expensive.
We are very excited to see how well this new service will perform and can not wait to welcome the first class.
I hope this short update made you interested in our services and please visit our website http://teccrab.com to see what we have to offer. Don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know how you like the new site.
There is exactly one month left to “MarioFit Fighting for Kids in Need” event. I can’t tell you how excited I am for this event. This is crunch time at teccrab! As a major sponsor, we have been doing all the online marketing to make this event as successful as possible. This includes developing the event website, which if I may say so, is looking pretty awesome.
If you haven’t heard, teccrab is currently working on this project to promote Mario Schiopu’s fight at the 2012 BC Karate Championship Tournament. Simon was at the Zone 5 Qualification round this past Sunday to cheer on Mario for officially qualifying to the main event on November 17th and 18th. A huge congratulation to Mario and we are very proud of him!
Mario is a former Romanian Karate Champion and is a certified 3 Dan Black Belt instructor by the World Karate Federation (WKF). After turning 50 years old, he wants to prove that with his knowledge in fitness and living healthy, he is more than competent to compete and win against much younger athletes. We have just launched the blog where Mario will be updating his training and progress daily!
Mario has a big heart and I can tell especially after meeting his family and his two gorgeous little girls. He wants to use this attention he has gained from all his sponsors and supporters for a good cause: helping children in need. Mario has picked two charities very dear to his heart: Children’s Hunger Fund and BC Children’s Hospital.
Living in Vancouver, it is easy to ignore all the people in the world that don’t have as much as we do. We really hope that this event will be able to provide awareness and much needed resources to children who are desperately in need of food or medical treatment.
As for you faithful teccrab blog readers, here is a little sneak peak for what’s to come. We filmed a questions and answer video with Mario yesterday which took about two hours to do, but will be edited down to about 10 minutes. Stay tune as it will be ready in a short couple of days!
October is one month of the year where promoting certain products becomes more important than at any other time of the year. There are special sales days and of course the winter holiday season. If you have followed our series “Promoting your business online” you may have found some useful tips and tricks. If you may have misses an article let us provide you with an overview. In our series we have published the following article:
In our series Promoting your business online, we have talked about building a website and website structure. We as well posted a general article about online marketing and hope each of those articles were helpful. Today we want to inform you about a very important change from Google. We are sure you are well aware that Google is the most used search engine today. It is therefore important to get your website listed via Google and to make sure you are building your site based on the latest Google standards. To help users to get the best possible search experience Google had changed their search engine over the years many times. Certain standards are required to secure that your website is in good standing with Google and it is advisable to check them out if you are going to build a website.
We hope you enjoyed our first two articles Promoting your business online: Website and Promoting your business online: Online Marketing. In this article we would like to go a little deeper into the structure of a website. Certain pages are needed in order to have a successful site. Also pages need to be structured in a certain way to make it easier for search engines to scan the content of your page. We will try to be not to technical in our post and to give you an overview what to look out for.
In our opinion the first step to promote your business online should be a website. A website is like your store, but in the World Wide Web. You can showcase your products and services, can have contact details available and depending on the nature of your business maybe even a shopping cart system in place. There are a few questions you should ask yourself before getting started.
Today we would like to give you our first impression of an application called MyPoi. This application is at the moment in an early stage but still something we think you should check out. What you can do with MyPoi is saving your special places, your points of interest by pinpointing them to a map and adding tag(s) to it. You can share this place with your friends, family and colleagues or of course use MyPoi to find this special spot yourself again.
You can download MyPoi for free and creating an account is also free. When you start the application it will show you a list of your Poi’s sorted by the date you added them. Via the Plus button you can easily add another point of interest. The available fields at the moment are a Title and a Note Box. The Note Box can be used for tagging. Below them you will find a switch to either save your point of interest public or not. MyPoi is designed to work offline too, so you can add your Poi anywhere.
If you have thought about building your own online community for your business or hobby, then Anahita might be the platform you were looking for. Anahita is a minimalist, customizable, and extendable social networking platform. Features can be enabled based on the community you would like to create. You can even build and integrate your own applications and the best is, it is open source, which means you can download it for free.
This post will be a bit longer because it is a question that is not easy to answer. I once saw a very clever post from a website developer who explained creating a website with buying a car. He explained in his example that you can get a cheap car or a luxurious car with a lot of extras and depending on what car you need or want you will pay for it either a little or a lot. I think that this example was very true and to the point. In my post today I would like to help you to get a better understanding for website development, how much you can expect your project will cost and will try to mention some prices so that you can do your own calculation.
I am very happy to announce that we recently launched our new website and I would like to invite you to check it out. With the new design we also introduce some services we didn’t had online with the previous version. We went with the latest Joomla version, Joomla 3.0, to realize this project. The latest version of Joomla is great for those who would like to have a fantastic looking and functional website not just on a computer, but also on a tablet or smart phone. We checked our new website on an iPad and iPhone and were very pleased with the result.
There is exactly one month left to “MarioFit Fighting for Kids in Need” event. I can’t tell you how excited I am for this event. This is crunch time at teccrab! As a major sponsor, we have been doing all the online marketing to make this event as successful as possible. This includes developing the event website, which if I may say so, is looking pretty awesome.
Mario has a big heart and I can tell especially after meeting his family and his two gorgeous little girls. He wants to use this attention he has gained from all his sponsors and supporters for a good cause: helping children in need. Mario has picked two charities very dear to his heart: Children’s Hunger Fund and BC Children’s Hospital.
teccrab inc. | Blog 