Over the years, numerous content management systems have emerged, but WordPress has consistently stood out as the favored option for small businesses operating with limited resources, aiming to establish a robust online presence and achieve success.

As WordPress recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, this article will shed light on the factors that continue to make it a popular choice among small business owners in 2023.

WordPress provides a cost-effective and scalable solution.

WordPress dominates the SME market due to its affordability. The core software is free and open-source, allowing users to download, install, and customize without licensing fees. With both free and premium themes and plugins available, it offers a cost-effective and scalable solution for micro-enterprises to build professional websites without financial strain.

The interface of WordPress is intuitive and user-friendly.

WordPress’s user-friendly interface enables even those with limited technical skills to easily manage their websites. Small business owners can efficiently navigate the admin dashboard, saving time and resources while focusing on other essential aspects of their operations. WordPress by default is responsive and has mobile-friendly design

WordPress is a highly customizable platform.

Small businesses can select from a diverse range of free or paid themes and plugins to align their website with their distinctive brand identity. Furthermore, plugins offer additional functionality, enabling seamless integration of essential features such as e-commerce, contact forms, SEO optimization, and more. This wide spectrum of customization possibilities empowers SMEs to effortlessly create a website tailored to their specific needs.Creating an SEO-friendly website on WordPress is easy.

WordPress has clean code that facilitates easy crawling and indexing by search engines.

Moreover, a variety of SEO plugins are readily accessible, enabling small businesses to enhance their website’s visibility in search engine results. By harnessing WordPress’s SEO capabilities, businesses can expand their online presence, attracting a larger audience of potential customers.

WordPress consistently delivers updates and security features.

WordPress provides essential security features like user authentication, access controls, and automatic backups to protect websites from threats. Regular updates to the core software, themes, and plugins improve stability, performance, and security. Small businesses benefit from these measures, ensuring smooth and secure website operation. It is advisable to seek assistance from a WordPress expert when applying these updates to ensure a seamless process.

WordPress has a global community of users, developers, and designers.

WordPress’s expansive support community is a major contributing factor to its popularity. Small businesses can readily tap into this vast pool of knowledge through online forums, tutorials, and blogs. This extensive support network ensures that even individuals with limited technical expertise can find solutions to their inquiries and effectively troubleshoot any encountered issues.

WordPress makes it easy to launch an online store.

Online shopping has become increasingly popular in recent years and many small businesses are looking to sell their products online. These e-commerce solutions provide a range of features, including product management, payment gateways, shipping options, and inventory tracking. WordPress offers a seamless way to integrate e-commerce platforms, such as WooCommerce, making it easy for smaller companies to set up and manage their online stores.

Reach a global audience through WordPress’s multilingual support.

If you are a small business that is looking to expand globally, WordPress is a good option for you. The platform’s multilingual support can help you reach a broader audience and potentially increase your customer base. WordPress offers extensive multilingual support, with numerous plugins that can help businesses translate and manage content in multiple languages.

Overall, WordPress is a powerful and versatile platform that can help small businesses build successful websites. SMEs can achieve their unique website needs with professionalism, functionality, and visual appeal through WordPress. This platform continually adapts to current web development trends, ensuring a long-lasting and rewarding investment for SMEs. WordPress offers a cost-effective and scalable solution with an intuitive user-friendly interface. It allows for high customization and easy creation of SEO-friendly websites. Regular updates and security features are provided. With a global community, WordPress facilitates support and collaboration. Launching an online store is simplified, and multilingual support enables reaching a global audience.

Are you excited about using WordPress? Let us help you turn your ideas into a reality. Whether it’s a personal blog, corporate website, or e-commerce platform, we’ve got you covered. With extensive experience in managing and creating plugins for WordPress and WooCommerce, you can be sure that your website will be up and running 24/7. Call us at +63 929 7812-1647 or inquire online to get started.

Digital marketing is vital to any business under the new normal. A study by Magna Global USA, shows that digital marketing spend in 2019 reached $304 billion. Is your business also dedicating more resources to search engine optimization (SEO) and digital customer experience to stay ahead of the competition?

Although marketing leaders are doing every effort so their business will be on the radar of their target customers, they might be ignoring (possibly) their most important digital asset, which is their website, and its optimization.

A website is a business’s main digital representation for new and potential customers. But a webpage or URL could have one of these common critical issues: slow page speed, broken pages (404 errors), unorganized internal page linking. If website issues are left unchecked or worse neglected, businesses not only lose website visitors, but also lose the opportunity to connect to their customers because of poor website quality.

Unfortunately, the pandemic has resulted to global closure of many brick and mortar shops and also resulted to less website traffic, especially for non-essential industries. Although the situation may seem bleak, the Covid-19 mandatory health measures propelled online purchasing, and for that reason, marketers should ask themselves if they are paying enough attention to the flaws on their website and are they really aware of the impact of these unresolved issues? Like the negative correlation of the number of website errors and the website traffic. Why are customers aborting transactions or bounce rates are high?

If the marketing and tech teams work together to monitor and fix these issues, the problems can be prevented or resolved and ultimately protect the digital marketing investment of their business.

What needs to be fixed on the website?

The website development and marketing teams should list and categorize the website issues into critical, significant and optional.

1. Critical website issues are the urgent problems that need to be fixed, like slow webpage loading, oversized pages, broken/404 pages, which can cause higher bounce rate, less e-commerce sales and lower web page ranking in the search engine result pages (Google or Bing)
2. Significant website issues are necessary to be fixed but not urgent. These can be missing URLs in the sitemap, low indexing because of wrong webpage attributes or webpage compression.
3. Optional website issues are unorganized internal linking or long click path, which affect the user’s experience of navigating the site or doing a web transaction.

Other tasks or issues that the tech team should also check are legacy codes, slow server/web host, SSL certificate installation.

Impact of your Tech Team’s Efforts or Negligence

According to a research by BCG and Ryte, based on a sample of 351 websites and 4.5million URLs, there is a 7.5% reduction on digital marketing spend effectiveness because of slow load time that results in website traffic decline due to website maintenance/SEO issue negligence.

On the other side, if websites are well maintained and issues are addressed quickly, such us improved page size and loading, a business can reap up to 26% gain in the effectiveness of their digital marketing spend.

Quality Control Pays

Just like in website development wherein different teams work together to launch the website successfully, the same high-level team collaboration or team cross-functionality should also be put in place for website quality management. Website monitoring, problem identification, fixes, reporting, team coordination should be properly delegated to selected members of the webDev team, devOps, UI/UX, content marketing team and quality managers.

In today’s setting, your company’s digital assets are more important than ever and with the right team setup and process for website quality management, you’ll minimize lost opportunities and appreciate more what you invest for digital marketing.

Need help with website maintenance or development, digital analytics or social media marketing? Click here to discover our tech services.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

– Alan Kay

It’s difficult for most businesses right now to create marketing plans or strategize for next year, since 2020 has been a year of uncertainty for many.

Instead of focusing on a single strategy, business decision makers need to adapt and try to prepare for the unexpected. With the economy under the new normal, year 2021 would be a dynamic year for many businesses that demands flexibility and agility that lead to iterative improvements.

So what should you do if your business faces an uncertain future? In this article we will help you prepare for an uncertain year ahead.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT Analysis is a technique to assess the four aspects of your business: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

How can your business compete or at least survive during uncertain times?

It is by knowing and utilizing existing resources your business has to your organization’s full advantage. And minimizing or eliminating possible dangers by determining the flaws or weak points in your business processes or product designs.

Make sure to share your plans and insights to your team and contractors so their actions are aligned with your business goals for every quarter next year.

Manage your Cash Flow

Negative cash flow is a problem, but it’s not something new nor unique to a business. Even before the pandemic, many businesses fold because of cash flow issues and given the current status of the economy, positive cash flow is one of the high-impact tasks that you should focus on for your business to thrive in the coming months.

Reducing costs, prioritizing cash generation and team empowerment are three principles that you want to adhere to in order for you to protect your cash flow.

Monitor Consumer Trends

What are the consumer trends impacting the buying behavior of your customers during the pandemic?

Asking the right questions during uncertain times will help your team understand the behavior and sentiments of your customers. And the answers to these questions, will lead your business to develop innovative solutions, shift to a different direction and adapt to what your customers really need during the crisis.

Make sure that you have the right analytical tools in place for your business to gain insights in real time if you have to. For example, Google Analytics is free for websites to install, but proper data handling and storytelling is essential to make the most out of it.

Competitor analysis and digital media market trends should also be monitored regularly.

Connect with Customers

Show your gratitude to your customers, specially the loyal ones. You don’t need to send them tangible gifts to show your appreciation, since the money you’ll spend for these might be better given to support an advocacy or those who really need it.

A simple personalized thank you note for your customers in helping your business to survive during these trying times can warm their hearts, and you can also ask their feedback on what they want to be improved in your business under the new normal.

Develop a Support System for your Team

Just like showing appreciation to your customers, you also have to convey your gratitude for your workers or team.

Do you also believe in the saying that employees are a company’s best asset?

Make sure to ask your employees for their feedback and adjust accordingly to make work/office (remote) rules more favorable to them under the new normal.

Accept Change and Uncertainty

You need to accept the fact that you might have to let go of some assets or pivot to meet the needs of the market.

If you have a business that relies on face-to-face interaction, will you adjust your business model? Is it still worth it to keep your brick and mortar shop considering that customers are keen on buying online nowadays?

Although difficult, leaders have to make important business decisions, which should be carried out without delay, but with caution and regard for the affected stakeholders.

Balance Fear and Courage

We know 2020 has not been a great year for many reasons, mainly because of the pandemic, and depending where you are, possibly political or social unrest combined with natural disasters. It just keeps coming. These unfavorable circumstances have had a strong impact on us physically, mentally and emotionally. You might have experienced feeling various emotions in a short span of time, which is perfectly valid.

The most important thing to do is to not blame yourself or get stuck in negativity that will not help your business move forward.

Treat everything that is happening as a challenge so you and your team are ready when the economy improves or gets worse (Who knows?) If plan A does not work, move to plan B or up to plan Z if you have to.

Remember, you are not alone and what is happening to your business is not unique – this is also happening to other businesses globally.

For the meantime, plan, maximize what you have and take calculated risks to confront a volatile future.

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If you have any questions about web hosting, web development, e-commerce, digital analytics, digital marketing, social media management or business planning, you can contact us for help.

Playing video games is a valid way to unwind after work and may be the preferred coping method of some people, according to an article published in the Journal of Media Psychology¹. Especially now, in this time of lockdowns and quarantines, gaming has gained attention as a potential tool in reducing anxiety and maintaining good mental well-being.

In that light, let us use this occasion to take a very brief look at some of the results of research into the effects of video games.

On July 15th, 1983, the Nintendo Family Computer (Famicom) was launched in Japan. Even before that, other companies had been manufacturing and selling video game consoles. In fact, there are ‘generations’ of video game consoles, just as there are generations of computers. The Famicom is considered part of the third generation of video game consoles.

All in all, home video game consoles—and video games in general, in the form of arcade games—have been around for almost fifty years at the time of this writing. Researchers have studied the effects of video games on those who play it, as well as the effects on society at large.

There have been many controversies surrounding video games, especially pertaining to its negative social effects such as violence, with many highly publicized violent incidents² having been tied to video games, despite insufficient evidence to support the idea that video games are linked to violent behavior³. While negative effects should not be ignored, there is another side to this coin, and we should also consider the benefits of playing video games.

Take, for example, spatial ability. Having strong spatial ability in early childhood is correlated with future interest and success in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields, but such ability is not hard-wired and can improve with practice. In one study, participants playing Portal 2 showed improvements in spatial ability and other cognitive and noncognitive skills.

Even older people stand to benefit from playing video games, and we are not just talking about mental or psychological benefits, but physical health and social benefits as well.

By the way, conventional wisdom tells us that programmers tend to be gamers as well. Research bears this out; playing games, in general, is associated with an increase in confidence with computers and interest in computer science.

At the end of the day, playing video games is not harmful per se. If it helps you unwind after a stressful day at work, or if it helps you cope with the current pandemic, why not?

References:

1. Reinecke, Leonard. Journal of Media Psychology (2009), 21, pp. 126-142. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105.21.3.126. © 2009 Hogrefe Publishing. (Retrieved 22 July 2020.)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_controversies#Publicized_incidents (Retrieved 22 July 2020.)
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_video_games#Studies (Retrieved 22 July 2020.)