Digital accessibility means making a website, digital app, or online document accessible to people of all levels of ability. It is an essential part of good website design and user experience that is often overlooked. In some parts of the world like here in Canada, it is required by law.
Continue reading
It’s our 19th birthday this month (this week in fact) and in honour of this momentous achievement, we’re launching our brand new website.
Launching a new website is always thrilling and exhilarating, made even more exciting when it is the culmination of months of hard work (and even longer in rumination and brainstorming).
When customers are in the research phase of the sales cycle, how will they find you?
The research phase of the Buyer Journey is a stage that all customers will go through before making a purchase (we discuss this in greater detail in a previous blog post). It is a safe bet that many (if not all) of these customers are doing their research digitally.
Continue reading
Websites nowadays are making it even easier to connect directly with their customers using chatbot marketing. You’ve probably seen this on websites already. Some Chatbots are either a pop-up or appear as a small icon on the bottom right-hand corner of the page.
Continue reading
We have a new website launch for Salt Spring Sea Salt that we’re excited to share!
Owners Philippe Marill and Carolyn Kvajic, a husband and wife team, first introduced the gourmet finishing salt at the island’s popular Saturday market. In just a few years, online sales have grown exponentially. Salt Spring Sea Salt is now available in select retail shops in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, the Yukon, and the United States. Salt Spring Sea Salt is getting noticed for many reasons, from the purity of the product and process, to the exceptional taste.
Phillippe and Carolyn needed a website that suited the needs of their growing business. We created a custom web design with full ecommerce capabilities to draw customers in and reflect their west coast values. Sea salt is a niche market, so we wanted to create a site that conveys their natural approach to harvesting and the simplicity of island living. We started from scratch and figured out exactly what our clients needed, and worked our way out from there, creating a website with clean lines and beautiful images of Salt Spring Island.
It was the pairing of a French culinary tradition with a natural West Coast resource – along with a dash of ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit – that created Salt Spring Sea Salt. Established in 2014, the Canadian company is based on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia and is garnering international recognition for its pure, handcrafted fleur de sel.
Phillippe and Carolyn are passionate about producing a gourmet finishing salt that rivals the very best French sea salt, and providing their customers with exceptional service. This dedication to quality has garnered a lot of attention – from a Royal visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to being featured as a Pit Stop on The Amazing Race Canada.
We worked with Salt Spring Sea Salt to make sure that they didn’t just have a beautiful website, but a search engine optimized one as well. We wanted to make sure that they had all the tools in place to boost their fleur de sel to the top of their niche in Google searches. Providing SEO services on all of our websites ensures that our clients get a increase in online visibility and can generate more business.
We are proud to work with clients like Phillippe and Carolyn to help them achieve websites that are not only beautiful to visit, but are intuitive to navigate and deliver results.
Imagine if people trying to visit your website got an alert saying that your website is not secure. Do you think it would deter them? Hell, yes it would! That’s what’s going to start happening in July on websites that have HTTP when people visit using the latest version of Chrome browser (Chrome 68) visit.
Chrome is the most popular browser used worldwide with about 50% penetration. So if your site doesn’t have encryption with an SSL/TLS certificate and HTTPS set up this affects you.
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure and works as a layer of security between the client (visitor) and the site when a connection is established. Data that usually moves from the site to the client and vice versa in plain text is encrypted securely by the browser when a TLS certificate is in place. That means eavesdroppers won’t be able to read important information from your users, like passwords and credit card numbers, in plain text.
Up until now this alert only appeared on form pages (i.e. contact forms) but moving forward it’s going to show up on all pages that aren’t secured.
What to expect for non HTTPS sites? In July you can expect to see a drop in traffic to your site, conversions will likely fall too. You may also see a drop in your page rank – where you show up in Google search. Google started lowering the rank of non encrypted sites three years ago.
First check to make sure you don’t already have HTTPS set up.
Then decide on an SSL certificate. They vary in prices from free to the most expensive we’ve seen which was over one hundred dollars. There is a newer free way to get TLS certificates through an initiative called Let’s Encrypt. Certificates created this way expire every three months, but most hosts have an automated solution to renew the certificate before it expires, so you don’t have to do anything once it’s set up.
More expensive purchased certificates often come with additional insurance for online transactions, which might be desired if you are running an online store. Purchased certificates expire less frequently than free ones provided by Let’s Encrypt, lasting as long as 3 years.
Once you’ve made the switch, there’s still a little work to do if you use Google Analytics or AdWords. You can find out more about that on our previous post about website security.
WordPress websites also need to be updated to ensure your pages don’t show up with a “mixed content” warning, which means that some materials (often images) are being embedded on the page using an unencrypted connection (i.e. http:// instead of https://, note the s).
If you need us to do this for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
We are excited to announce the launch of the new Vital Plumbing + Heating website.
Vital Plumbing + Heating is a locally-based and family owned company that has a long history with their clients in the Lower Mainland. They handle projects of all sizes, whether their clients are in the initial phases of a construction project or repairing the heating systems in an apartment building, they have a team of dedicated professionals ready to provide expert knowledge and service.
We worked with Vital Plumbing + Heating to create their vision of a WordPress website with a streamlined user interface that draws potential clients in with a fresh feel and easy to navigate design. Because dealing with the internal plumbing of a home can be stressful for homeowners and construction companies alike, we wanted to create a site that conveys a professional, simple solution to whatever issues they may have. To achieve this, we used a combination of clean lines and captivating imagery to attract their target audience.
Formerly known as Pacific Coast Ventures Inc., the foundation of what is now Vital Plumbing + Heating is a true Canadian immigrant success story. Arriving here with modest means, founder Ahmad Arang gained employment and Red Seal journeyman qualifications and went on to start his own business from scratch. Almost 20 years later, armed with a team of local experts, their company is well established with a proven track record of excellence.
We worked with Vital Plumbing + Heating to make sure that they didn’t just have a beautiful website, but a search engine optimized one as well. Providing SEO services on all of our websites ensures that our clients get a boost in online visibility and can generate more business. As with all of our builds, we submitted the website to Google Analytics and Bing to gain more exposure.
We are proud to work with companies such as Vital Plumbing + Heating to help them achieve websites that are not only beautiful to visit, but are intuitive to navigate and deliver results.
info@out-smarts.com
604 909 3532
