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Aug 22 2020 
How to Select Your Website’s Color Palette
Introduction
Why would you think this is an important topic? Does color really matter?
● Believe it or not, colors elicit subliminal feelings or moods.
● No matter what industry you are creating a website for, the feeling you want to create matters significantly for your brand.
● You need to familiarize yourself with the variety among different business categories and know where to look for further reference in selecting your website’s colors.
What is Color Palette, and Why Does it Matter?
A color palate is a grouping of colors that blend together and denote the primary, secondary, tertiary and accent colors in a website or brand style.
Below is an example of a color palette named Watermelon and Stripes found on Canva.com.
Canva.com/color-palettes
“62-90% of consumers’ initial impression is based on color choices alone… which means that finding the right color scheme for your site isn’t just an aesthetic decision – it’s a business one. 🎨✨” Matteo Duo @matteoduo
Clearly, color is a very important decision!
How to Choose Your Company’s Colors
There are many rules that govern the selection of the colors including the primary and secondary colors not having hues that are adjacent on the color wheel.
For Instance Red-Orange and Orange should not be primary and secondary colors while Red-Orange and Blue-Purple can be primary and secondary colors.
Like all good rules, they are made to be broken, bent or exploited for effect by bold designers.
Different companies choose different colors based on the type of company. Why would that be? Because they are communicating with their audience on an emotional, subconscious level. What emotion do you want your brand to elicit from your potential customers?
The color Blue has been used to represent Trustworthiness but also conveys Tranquility and peace! The tranquility of the ocean waves lapping against the shore on a bright sunny day. The trust one finds at a prominent bank or financial institution! The color Red conveys Attention and Passion. This primary color has been used effectively in the Real estate, Apparel and Automobile industries. Everyone loves a red car or that beautiful red dress!
The color Green conveys Natural Vitality and Well-Being. This primary color is common in Food & beverage, landscaping or wellness vertical. Green the color of mother earth and all that grows!
Black usually conveys Confidence and Sophistication. This color is common in High-end Apparel & Accessories, Travel and Hotels.
Once the primary colors have been selected the secondary colors can be selected based on the rules mentioned above about avoiding colors adjacent on the color wheel. Putting all the colors together for different industries will look similar to the sample below. Each slice of this wheel represents an emotional picture of a particular industry and its intended impression on potential customers.
In Closing
Website colors are not chosen randomly but rather to communicate with the viewer on a subliminal level regarding the brand’s value proposition. They are designed to convey a message to the audience on a subconscious level and should be chosen with great thought regarding the brand positioning.
For more tips like this on engaging and attracting your ideal clients online, subscribe to our blog posts here. https://cw2interactive.com/myblog/
Portions of the post are based on excerpts from blog post by Matteo Duo with Kinesta written 8/7/2020 -
Mar 16 2020 
Capitalize on Panic
The current Covid-19 Health Crisis reminds me of the frequently discussed topic in Business Success Training known as ‘Moving To the Opportunity’. Let me explain what I mean by that!
People are experiencing a lot of extra stress due to the unknown factors surrounding this new virus that no one has an immunity for. Now is Your Golden Window of opportunity to sell them a product or service that alleviates their stress!
The current Covid-19 Health Crisis reminds me of the frequently discussed topic in Business Success Training known as ‘Moving To the Opportunity’. Let me explain what I mean by that!
People are experiencing a lot of extra stress due to the unknown factors surrounding this new virus that no one has an immunity for. Now is You Golden Window of opportunity to sell them a product or service that alleviates their stress!
If your Product or Service already does this like the face mask manufacturers, Fantastic! If not, perhaps you can add a New Service or Product that complements your business while easing your clients jitters during this time. Then get on Social Media and publicize your Product or Service! You will be the hero and make money as well!
What else can we do to help your business today? -
Facebook Pixel
Marketers who are placing Facebook Ads for their business should take advantage of the remarketing capabilities of Facebook Pixel. Simply put, when a user places the Facebook Pixel on their website’s landing page, they can capture information about the users that clicked on their ad and didn’t buy! This information can help to further define your audience and improve future ads.Additionally, the price of the item you are selling can also be captured by the pixel to help determine the ROI of the advertisement. For more tips and tricks regarding social media advertising, subscribe to our newsletter.
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Nov 04 2017 
Measuring ROI of Social Media Campaigns
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion regarding how to Measure a Social Media Marketing Campaign. Your boss may even have asked you what the ROI was for the money spent. Unlike Google Adwords which are targeted to potential customers when they are ready to buy a product like you have to offer, Social Media Campaigns cannot be evaluated directly by immediate sells or leads. However, that does not mean that they fail to be a factor in gaining new clients and ultimately growing your business.In fact, social media has become a critical factor that Google uses to rank your website for Quality Score and User Experience which both affect your search results. Starting back in 2012 with the Penguin Algorithm updates, inbound links took less of a role in search ranking and was replaced by social media footprint. That really aligns with the intent of social media which is interacting with your audience by giving them useful information regarding their businesses. This information serves to promote the reputation of your company at the same time.
Better metrics for a Social Media Campaign might be Engagement, Number of Shares and Increased Followers of your Facebook Business Page. In today’s fast-paced instant messaging life, a potential client’s time is the best gift of all. So if you continuously provide content of value to a business owner and they begin to follow what you are saying, the conversation eventually pulls them into your leads funnel when they or someone they know have a need for one of the services you provide. That is truly how social media can work for your business to eventually drive traffic to your websites and increase your bottom-line!
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Nov 02 2017 
Google’s Quality Score
I had a client this week wanting assistance with a Google AdWords account. They had implemented a variable ad with different titles and keywords pertinent to their campaign. The ads were running continuously and charging for impressions. Analysing the Quality Score for each Variable, showed that only one variation had a score over 7. This means the ad was running continuously even during the night at a higher than normal price due to the lower quality scores.The solution we proposed was to develop separate landing pages for each keywords being targeted to more closely tie the Landing Page to the Ad. Additionally, the advertised times were narrowed to specific daytime slots that had shown interaction with an increased daily bid. The result was a vastly improved campaign performing as intended to get more tickets sold for the event.
Remember, when running an Ad Words Campaign, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and forget about the important stuff that matters to Google! Check your Quality Scores on all your Campaigns to maximize dollars and improve your results!
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Free Preliminary SEO Analysis
If you’re like most people, you probably don’t have a clue how well your website is performing when potential customers search for your services. In fact, the whole concept of website optimization is somewhat of a mystery. To find out for sure how your site is performing and what you need to do about it, sign up for our new SEO Analysis!
This service is absolutely FREE to you, so why wonder, Know! To sign-up, click on the button below!
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Sep 25 2017 
Using Social Flow to Measure Engagement
The diagram above illustrates one of the nice ways Google Analytics can be used to view the Value of traffic from a Social Media Campaign. This graphic shows the different Social Sources and the behavior of users when they visit your website. Each section shows the path a user took through your website when they left and how many pages they visited and in what order they visited them. This information can be used in a number of ways to improve your potential client’s user experience with your brand.
First of all, the traffic comparison of your different social media accounts will show you Which Platforms are feeding you the Most Traffic. This is useful for adjusting your campaigns to the areas where you have the largest audience. Secondly, it shows where the user exited your website. If several people exit on the same page, then you may need to look at rebuilding that page or doing an A/B comparison of a different version of that page to see if users stay on longer.
Additionally, the page path can tell you something about your user’s objective for coming to your website. Which information is most valuable to them will probably be viewed First or Second in the flow. The number of pages visited tells you something about customer engagement. The more pages, the more engaged the user is with your brand. A large number of exists after the first page tells you something about the Landing Page not matching the Advertisement. In this case, you should experiment with new Landing Pages to find one that will perform better.
Your Landing Page can also be the Conversion Page. If the objective of the Ad is to get the user to Make a Purchase or Ask for a Quote the instructions should be clear and easy! It’s also very important to search engines especially Google, that the Landing Page match the Advertisement. In fact, Google may refuse to post your ad if the Landing Page is drastically different than the Advertisement!
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Facebook Penalizing Low-Quality Website Links
Beginning on May 10th and continuing for the remainder of May, Facebook is modifying its algorithm to penalize a ‘poor customer experience’. They define a ‘Poor Customer Experience’ as websites or landing pages with little substantive content, large numbers of paid advertisements, and/or malicious ads. In order to determine whether your website is considered to have this definition, they are using Artificial Intelligence to understand whether new web pages shared with links have these characteristics. If they do, the post will show up lower in people’s news feeds and you may not even be able to place a Facebook ad at all!This initiative is stemming from the social media giant’s desire to provide a good user experience to its users. As the largest and most widely used Social Media Company, their impact on advertising results of small businesses is huge. Their message seems to be, if you are small, don’t act that way by posting spam like content and advertisements on your website or landing pages. Small businesses would do well to heed the warning!
Custom Websites to Go has been in business for 12yrs, helping address the digital marketing needs of small businesses! We are happy to visit with you about any concerns you have with regard to marketing and advertising your business!
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Shared Hosting Problems
The proliferation of WordPress as an easy to use platform has created a whole other layer of problems for the user. Because WordPress is easy to use, it is also easy to hack. If you haven’t had this happen to you yet, you definitely will at some point in the future. Shared hosting is like sharing an apartment where you share common space with your neighbors. It is one size and you cannot customize anything which means you can’t add software to assist in securing your site. It also lacks privacy which is where the problem comes in for WordPress sites. The single size with no customization and lack of privacy makes your website more prone to being hacked.WordPress sites need to be hardened to prevent attack, which means that best practices should be followed in maintaining the website and locking it down. As an open source platform, the main software that runs WordPress is always being updated when vulnerabilities are discovered. That means, the software needs to be updated to the latest versions. Plug-ins are additional software programs that add functionality to the main WordPress website. They also have frequent updates which are needed for security of the website. Updates are frequently missed in the shared hosting solution due to lack of diligence or knowledge of the user.
There are 2 potential solutions to this, VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Server) and Dedicated Hosting. VPS Hosting is advantageous to Shared Hosting, because you have control of the server and what resources will be provided. You can set the size of memory and use of resources for each account. Although the websites are still sharing the same server, they can be configured for security and best use. This is a great solution for businesses that are small to medium in size without heavy user traffic. A website with a great deal of traffic will require a Dedicated Server where the website has its own server and resources.
