Heather

Hello! I'm the owner of Love Local Design, Heather Strycharz. When I'm not designing and building websites, I'm usually taking pictures and enjoying all that the New Haven area has to offer.

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Love Local Design Develops App for Yale to Tackle Opioid Addiction

Love Local Design Develops App for Yale to Tackle Opioid Addiction

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Today we’re excited to share a really nice piece that recently appeared in the Yale News about an app we developed for them to help people who are struggling with opioid addiction. Later in 2019, we will be working with Yale once again to develop phase 2 of the app, as well as to develop an app for those living with Hepatitis C. We’re extremely grateful to the whole Yale Med team for the opportunity to work on such worthwhile projects.

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Getting Ready for Gutenberg – Part 1: Is Gutenberg Ready for Us?

Gutenberg Stress Test

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If you run a WordPress website, you’re undoubtedly aware of the big change that’s coming in the platform’s next major release, WordPress 5.0. Whenever this update rolls out (should be any day now), the page building and editing interface we’re all familiar with will be replaced by Gutenberg—a new visual editor which utilizes draggable “blocks” of content to build your posts and pages. While it’s great that WordPress is focused on actively updating their product, we here at LLD – who build 95% of our sites on WordPress – wonder if this is the best direction for the platform and if, in fact, Gutenberg is stable enough to be included in its core installation. In fact, the last time we checked, Github users have logged no fewer than 1,200 issues reported by users.  

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Designer vs Website Builder: What’s the Difference?

Website Builder vs. Designer

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With cloud services like Wix and Squarespace that allow users to build websites on their own, it’s not unreasonable to ask why you should pay a professional to design it for you. In fact, if you’re just starting a site as as a blog to record your thoughts or as a place to showcase your photography, a website builder might not be a bad way to go. But most startups and small businesses are not just interested in selling widgets, but building a brand – which means that you want to differentiate yourself for your competitors however you can. Imagine showing up to a Halloween party wearing the same costume as three other people. Awkward! And it should be no different for your business—you want your website to represent your brand, with all the wonderful uniqueness and personality you strive to bring to it every day. Also, if you’re on online-only business, chances are you’ve got some unique functionality that will need to be built out that simply cannot be purchased off-the-shelf.

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9 Security Tips For Keeping Your WordPress Site Safe

9 WordPress Security Tips

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Imagine you’re a new small business owner who has just opened a small retail shop on Main Street, USA. Within this shop, you not only have all the widgets and wares you sell, but also a safe full of cash in the office, and computers containing your customers’ sensitive personal and credit card information as well. One night, after an exhausting 12-hour day, you leave the shop and head home, only to realize halfway there that you forgot to lock the door. You race back to the shop and find, to your relief, that no bad guys discovered your error, so you lock up and go home. This story has a happy ending, but it may make you think a bit more about how to make sure your business is safe without having to worry about whether you locked the door every night on the way home. Maybe you’ll invest in security gates or an alarm system, just for the added peace of mind.  

 

If you’re willing to go the extra mile for the safety of your brick-and-mortar business, why wouldn’t you do the same for your online business, into which you’ve likely invested just as much time and expense? Each month, almost 20,000 websites experience malware attacks, with a great majority of these sites running a CMS like WordPress or Joomla — not because these platforms are inherently less safe, but because users running them tend to make assumption that, because of the built-in security features of the platform, they do not need to take extra precautions. This is a dangerous assumption for any online business.

 

In this week’s post, we’ll walk you through nine basic steps you can take to make sure you’re not the victim of a malware, crypto-mining, or any other type of attack that could put your business at risk.

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10 Best Practices for Creating Effective Email Newsletters

Email Marketing Best Practices

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Earlier this year, we published a post on why an email newsletter is a digital marketing must-have, where we gave you 5 reasons you should have a newsletter, but not a lot about how to execute your email strategy effectively. Today, we’ll focus on the latter topic by offering some basic best practices that will help ensure your email marketing newsletters are achieving your business goals.  There’s no doubt that newsletter strategies are tricky, and require constant attention and tweaking to get the job done, but by adhering to these principles, you should start to see results in no time.

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Is Your Site Ready for Mobile-First Indexing? 5 Tactics That Can Help

Is you site ready for mobile-first indexing?

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As you’ve probably heard by now, Google—after 18 months of testing—has begun slowly rolling out “mobile-first” indexing of websites. What this means, for any content publisher, is that Google will look at the mobile version a website first to analyze your site’s structure and content for indexing and determine which snippets will be used in the listing. In the past, Google has used the desktop version of a website when crawling a site for indexing. At the moment, not every site is a part of this pilot but, according to Google, they are starting with a small number of websites and will be gradually expanding out until it eventually mobile-first indexing will apply to every website. Read on…

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Tips on Using Storytelling in Digital Marketing Campaigns

Storytelling for Digital Marketing

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“Technology is a glittering lure. But there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.”    

                                                                                   –Don Draper, in Mad Men

We are all storytellers. Since the time we first stood upright and started painting on the walls of the caves, human beings have used storytelling to share their experiences and make sense of the world. Be it through poetry, painting, literature, music, theatre, film, or just sitting around a campfire, telling stories is an essential part of our humanity, and will be as long as we walk the earth. Stories not only allow us to communicate an idea but, more importantly, to connect with each other on an emotional, empathetic level so that we form connections with each other in a much deeper way than simply transmitting concepts. Read on…

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7 First Steps for Starting Out with Google AdWords

2 tips for starting out with adwords

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When drafting digital marketing plans for our clients — most of whom are small businesses or startups — we often recommend using Google AdWords to ensure their messaging gets in front of people using Google to search for products or services like theirs.  But while Google has made AdWords outwardly simple and easy to use, crafting an effective advertisement for this specific medium can involve multiple levels of complexity that can seem confounding once you begin to dig in.   In this article, we’ll give you an overview of what to expect, and how to best navigate the world of AdWords by providing a simple list of 7 of the first steps you might want to take when first starting out.

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9 Tips on Choosing and Purchasing Your Domain Name

9 tips on choosing your domain name

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One of the first choices  any owner of a small business or startup is faced with is choosing the right domain name for their website. On the surface, this seems like an easy choice to make— just add .com to your business name, right?  Not so fast. What if your business name is “Ted and Andy’s Superior Rug Emporium? That might be a bit unwieldy in a domain name. Or what if the .com domain you wanted is already taken? Or if your business name contains a frequently misspelled word?  There are dozens of roadblocks you may encounter, so we’ve come up with 9 tips for choosing a domain that take into consideration some of the most common issues our clients face when choosing and purchasing their domains. Read on…

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Is Podcasting a Smart Content Marketing Strategy for your Small Business or Startup?

Content Marketing Podcasting

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On October 3, 2014, a 53-minute audio recording was quietly launched into the digital universe, and changed the 21st century media landscape. I am referring to Serial, the blockbuster podcast produced by the folks at This American Life, and that took the county—and the world—by storm. Hosted by Sarah Koenig, there was nothing particularly spectacular about the podcast itself, it was merely a young woman telling the story of the arrest and conviction of 18-year-old Adnan Syed for the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, and featured interviews with those involved in the case, including the alleged killer himself. The show, however, asked so many important questions, and captured the imaginations of so many listeners, that Syed was granted a request for retrial in 2016.  

Podcasting: A Brief History

Podcasting was introduced in 2004, just 3 years after Apple’s introduction of the iPod, where podcasting gets its name (iPod + broadcast.) Podcasting initially enjoyed brief popularity, until podcast producers seemingly ran out of steam—iTunes is littered with abandoned podcasts from this era with only a few episodes—and smartphones came along with an all-new set of distractions for our eyes and ears.  But since the launch of Serial in 2014, podcasting has entered a “second wave” of popularity, not only for storytellers, but for comedians, writers, foodies, news organizations, sports fans, technologists, marketers, and small businesses (the popular StartUp podcast also launched in 2014), among dozens of other categories. The format has proven particularly effective for entrepreneurs who have harnessed the popular medium to not only tell the story of their business, but to offer listeners valuable, useful content, establishing themselves as influencers and experts in their field.   

Is Podcasting for You?

There’s no doubt that content marketing using podcasts has been effective for many new business owners, but you may be asking yourself, “Is podcasting the right strategy for me?  And will it really make a difference in my business?”  The short answer here is “Probably, but it does require a bit of effort.”  Is that effort worth it?  Let’s pause for a moment to take a look at a few numbers from Nielsen’s 2017 report on podcasting: Read on…

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