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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A Beginner’s Guide to Local SEO

Beginner's Guide to Local SEO

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Here at LLD, clients come to us for, among other things, our search engine optimization services.  And being that we specialize in helping startups and new businesses, many of these clients are, well, new to this process, and often think that SEO simply means getting to the top of the search results page for their particular industry.  However, since many of these new businesses are brick-and-mortar operations, they may get better value from local SEO, i.e. being at the top of LOCAL search results (people searching for recommendations in their area,) rather than ranking first in their category worldwide.  If you need a haircut in Boise, you’re more likely to search for “haircuts in Boise” than just “haircuts.”  However, now that Google usually knows the approximate location you’re searching from—especially if you’re searching from your phone—just typing in “haircuts” these days is likely to result in hair salons or barber shops that are actually in your area.  So Local SEO is a thing you should do, basically because local search is now the de facto way of searching for pretty much any product or service. Read on…

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SSL Encryption Demystified

SSL Encryption Demystified header

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Website security is one of the most common concerns among people who are launching new websites today, and rightly so. We’ve all heard horror stories about hackers, identity and credit card thieves, adware/malware perpetrators, and other miscreants lurking about on the Internet.  Data shows that almost half of all Americans have had their credit card data compromised, and identity theft hit an all-time in 2016.  So the first question most entrepreneurs who launch a startup ecommerce site—or any site that collects sensitive information—will ask is: how can I assure my customers that their data is safe?

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11 New Year’s Resolutions for Startups

11 New Year Resolutions for Startups

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It’s that time of year again—you know, those 6-8 weeks when suddenly the gym is filled to capacity with those who have resolved to finally get in shape, smokers quit for a while, and you start seeing a lot more people in the aisles at health food stores.  However cynical that may sound, the New Year is, in fact, as good a time as any to reassess your current lifestyle, habits, and assumptions and make those changes you’ve been putting off.  For entrepreneurs running a startup or small business, this may mean making changes that not only benefit you, but your business as well.

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5 Reasons an Email Newsletter is a Digital Marketing Must-Have

5 Reasons an Email Newsletter is a Digital Marketing Must-Have

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Often, when we recommend starting an email newsletter to clients who have come to LLD for our digital marketing services, many start off by being on-the-fence or indifferent to the idea.  A common objection we hear is,  “No one uses email anymore.” While a strong argument could have been made to this point under a decade ago, Read on…

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5 Ways to Create Site Content to Improve your Google Search Ranking

5 Ways to Improve your Google Search Ranking

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If you’re like most new small businesses and startups, you want to get a website up and running quickly so that customers can find you right away and start buying your products and services, leaving you with nothing left to do but retire to a private island?  Well, we hate to be the bearer of bad news, but getting visitors to your site requires requires great SEO, and that’s hard work, not the “if I build it, they will come” that so many of us assume. Read on…

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Five Common Misconceptions About Using WordPress to Build Your Business Website

Top 5 Wordpress misconceptions

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Here at Love Local Design, we proudly build a majority of our websites on the WordPress framework. WordPress has been around for almost 15 years, is used by 75 million websites worldwide, and we’re confident that it offers the most secure, versatile and user-friendly platform for almost any website. Whether you are a startup just getting off the ground with your first site, or a large corporation who deals with sensitive customer information (and we’ve built sites for both), WordPress is most often the best solution. Nonetheless, we often experience resistance Read on…

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Building an Online Presence for your New Business

Building an online presence for your new business

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You’ve had an idea for a business for awhile now, and you’re finally ready to take the plunge! Or maybe you’ve had a business for awhile and now you’re ready to start putting yourself out there. Whatever your particular case, this is an exciting time – but building an online presence can be a bit intimidating. When new clients come to us, they often want our Digital Kickoff Package which includes a website, social media branding (profile icons, headers, post templates), and an email marketing template. Those materials are an excellent place to start! But then… how do we begin building Read on…

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7 Best Resources for Starting a Business in Connecticut

7 best resources for CT startups.

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Do you have a great idea for a business and think you’ll have to move to New York or L.A. to stand a chance of “making it?” Well, we’ve got some great news for Connecticut startups – one of the best places to start your small business is right here in the Constitution State. In 2016, Business Insider ranked Connecticut #12 in their list of best states to start a business, and that’s ahead of BOTH New York and California who Read on…

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