As of October 2017, Chrome will show the “Not Secure” warning for sites that do not have an SSL certificate installed and that have any type of form or search field on the site. Other web browsers are increasing their warnings to website visitors for non-SSL or HTTP sites as well. What is an SSL Certificate? Let’s start with some simple definitions. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is a protocol that enables browsers to establish a secure connection between a website or web server. When you see a website address beginning with HTTPS, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, this means all the data being transferred is encrypted and it is more secure. And an SSL certificate is what makes the standard HTTP more secure. Anytime you see HTTPS, you know that the website is secure and has an SSL certificate. Does… Read More.
Frog Blog
You Don’t Want to Work There
When discussing the different types of visitors that come to a website (potential customers, referral partners, etc.), there’s one category of visitors that is often forgotten – future employees. Even if you aren’t actively recruiting, great talent may be visiting your website and you could be telling them, “Go work somewhere else.” Here are 7 tips to improve your website to engage the best talent: 1. Add a Career page or career information to an About page. When a potential employee visits your site, they’ll first look for a career page that has information relevant to them. Another option is to add a career section to an About page, including whether you are accepting applications or whom to contact for employment opportunities. 2. Show off your team. Having photos of your current team is a great way to build a positive emotional connection with future… Read More.
Websites for IT Businesses
Hi, my name is Lilly Ghahremani and I’m a web strategist for Tiny Frog Technologies. And today I’m going to talk about the unique needs of websites for IT businesses. And the reason I want to talk about this today is that these are really fun and challenging sites. And the reason for that is that what IT businesses do is so complex and these days, the trends on websites are towards simplifying. So how do you strike that balance as an IT business looking to have a great website? So the first recommendation that I have is – talk to your users in their language. Some IT businesses service other technology companies. In which case, you might have a little bit of wiggle room to use industry language and lingo. But generally, IT businesses set up the IT networks and systems for traditional, basic… Read More.
Website Analytics: Is Your Site Helping You?
Hello, this is Brian Lewis and I’m here today to talk about how your web analytics can be used for you to assess whether your website is doing a good job for you from a marketing perspective. You know, the first thing is before you dive into your analytics (and hopefully you are using analytics) is that you want to make sure that they’re actually properly set up and configured correctly. Out-of-the-box Google Analytics is pretty good about making sure that things are going to be set up for you all right, but there are some nuances involved with that. It’s probably a pretty good idea if you’re not sure about that to reach out to someone – actually we can help you with that too. Because if your analytics isn’t set up correctly then you may be measuring the wrong things. So you’ll obviously… Read More.
Why Choose WooCommerce for Your Online Store
Hi, this is David with Tiny Frog here to talk to you about the advantages of using WooCommerce, and why to choose WooCommerce as your e-commerce system. So all the websites we make are built on WordPress, the most popular website platform in the world and mostly all of the e-commerce websites use a system called WooCommerce. And we love WooCommerce over here because it is almost as popular as WordPress, which means it has very good support. That’s the number one benefit of using WooCommerce. Your store is very important for your business if you have anything that breaks, or anything that goes wrong it can hurt your sales right away and so using a system that has the support of a full development team and the community is important because you know that things are going to be updated quickly when the internet… Read More.
Common Mistakes in Restaurant Website Designs
Hi, my name is Lilly Ghahremani, and I am a web strategist for Tiny Frog Technologies. I wanted to talk today about the top mistakes that restaurants make with websites. You know when we’re hungry, or we’re planning a night out it’s a common practice to check a restaurant website and actually, it’s kind of a joke in the industry that restaurant website designs just do not do those restaurants service. Bad restaurant websites are everywhere and you’ve probably encountered them yourself. So today, I want to talk about really how to avoid these pitfalls and how to make your restaurant website extremely strong. On your restaurant website, people are looking for two things: first, they’re looking for information to determine if they want to eat there. Secondly, they may be looking for information because they’ve already decided they’re going to eat there and they… Read More.
How to Audit Your Website
Hello, this is Mikel Bruce with Tiny Frog Technologies. It’s very important if you have a website, to do a full audit of your website – all the pages – on a monthly basis or so. What that would mean is you go from page to page, open up the page, read the pages, and click on the links. We’ve noticed when we’re taking on a new website project and we do that for our clients, we notice there’s a lot of broken links and 404 errors. If you have a WordPress site and there’s a plug-in installed, there’s a very good chance that the plug-in has been broken, which could compromise an area of the site. You want to test your forms to make sure your forms are working. If there’s any interactive components to your website like a slide show or a photo… Read More.
The Best Designs Are Stolen
One of the biggest advantages of creating a custom website design is that you can pull inspiration from anywhere. At the start of a web project or anytime you are considering design improvements, it’s helpful to gather inspiration sites. Then your web strategist and web designer can guide you on how to incorporate these ideas and pair them with the latest design trends and best practices. Whether you are considering a redesign or looking for creative ways to improve your website, here are some tips on how to find inspiration: Check out the competition. Start with your competitors’ websites. Sometimes your competitors may be ahead of the game or their sites are examples of what NOT to do. Take note of any trends that you see on multiple competitors’ sites. Go outside your industry. Unlike a template design where you are limited, a custom… Read More.
How to Improve Website Speed
Hi, this is David with Tiny Frog. I’m a web developer here to talk to you today about factors impacting the speed of your website. Speed is very important. You want your website to pop up so fast when people go to it. Nowadays Google puts search engine factors in related to the speed of your website and they have a great tool to test the speed. So speed is very important and as software developers, we have a lot to pay attention to when it comes to delivering your website at lightning-fast speed to your visitors. The number one thing we can do is write our code very efficiently to improve website speed. So if we write code we want to only have to read it through it once, we want to make it very easy for your server and your internet browser to… Read More.
Avoid Slide Shows on Your Website
Hello, everyone, my name is Nathalie and today I’ll be talking a little bit about slide shows and how they can have a negative effect on the user experience. Now, why is that? The user likes to have control over the interface. So when there’s a slide show, they really might miss out on the message that sits over that slideshow because before they’re able to read it, it scrolls to the next one. This is one reason to avoid slide shows. As we talked about earlier, the statistics are very low on how many people actually sit in front of the slide show to be able to read all the different messages. We just don’t have the attention span nowadays. And last but not least when you’re thinking about doing a slide show, please take into consideration that you know we are designing for… Read More.
