PSPINC Official Company Blog

PSPINC What's New Newsletter Vol.79 "Is your website where it should be?"

Sep

2

Vol. 79

When you read a book, newspaper, or magazine, what is your purpose? Whatever you are reading, I believe there is a purpose. It may be to gain some knowledge you don't have, or simply because it's fun or exciting. So when do you read a dictionary? When it comes to dictionaries, it might be better to say that you use them rather than read them. No one reads a dictionary or a phone book from the first page to the last page.

So, is a website a book or a dictionary? Let's assume that a website is used to introduce a company. In this case, it would be safe to say that no one would read the website from the beginning to the end. This means that the website is not a book, or at least not one that will entertain the reader. In this case, I think it is correct to think of it as you would a dictionary.

A dictionary is designed to make it easy to find the information you need. Your website is also designed in a way that visitors can easily find the information they need. Is the information organized? Is the information arranged in a way that matches the level of need? When you think about it, there is a difference in the design concept between a website for distributing information and a marketing page for creating a corporate image.

When creating a website, you need to think about whether the appearance or the information is important. Pacific Software Publishing Inc.'s hosting service allows you to freely use any website design you want. If you want to easily set up, edit, and manage your website, we provide a free website building tool called WebdeXpress.

If you need help designing, developing, editing, upgrading, or even scaling down your website, please contact Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. at any time.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.
info@pspinc.com
https://pspinc.com
1404 140th Place NE, Bellevue, WA 98007 USA
800-232-3989
425-957-0808

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#BusinessWebsite #Dictionary #PSPINC #WebDesign #WebHosting #Website

Managing Comments in WordPress

Aug

10

Comments are a great way for your visitors to interact with you. You can build a nice community on your website through your comments. However, you may want to moderate your comments and manage which pages you want visitors to post comments on. Managing comments in WordPress becomes important as Google will index your comments along with your website. So you may want to filter out unwanted comments, spam, and moderate comments not suitable for your topics on your website.

Managing comments in WordPress can be a tedious task. But the alternative of disabling comments may not be ideal either. Comments solicit engagement from your visitors. Even if you are not the one responding to comments, this type of engagement can draw repeat visitors and drive traffic to your website. Having regular posters that are helpful to others can really add value to your website.

You can manage your comments from within WordPress admin. Navigate to Comments on the left menu. You have the ability to approve/unapprove, reply, edit the comment, mark it as spam, or delete it as trash.

If you have comments already filtered out as spam, you can click on the Spam tab above comments. From here you have the ability to mark comments as “Not Spam”, or delete them permanently.

There are detailed settings you can change to help you manage comments further. You will find these settings under Settings > Discussion.

There are two settings that will help you reduce spam comments; Comment author must fill out name and email and Users must be registered and logged in to comment. You should check the boxes and enable these settings.

If you would like to manually approve each comment before they are displayed on your website, be sure to check the box for Comment must be manually approved. With this setting enabled, no comment will automatically appear on your website unless approved.
If you have regular visitors that post helpful comments, you may want them to be able to post and respond freely. Enable the setting Comment author must have a previously approved comment. This means if a visitor already has an approved comment, they will not be required to wait for moderation in sequential posts.

Comments containing lots of hyperlinks are a characteristic of spam comments. You may wish to limit the number of hyperlinks allowed in your comments. Set this setting under Comment Moderation.

WordPress comment moderation link limit setting

You may set your own blacklisted words, IP & email addresses, and browser’s user-agent strings. Perhaps there’s a competitor you don’t wish to have mentioned in your comments. Or you wish to block the numerous pharmaceutical spam that has started to show up on your website. The Comment Moderation setting will put matching comments in your moderation queue. While Disallowed Comment Keys will put matching comments directly into your Trash.

We hope you’ve found this article useful. Well-managed comments can help you unlock the powers of user interaction. It will drive traffic to your website and make your existing content even more valuable. Looking for WordPress hosting? Take advantage of our 60% off promo and start hosting your own WordPress website for as little as $2.90/month. A free domain is included! Need assistance with your website? Contact us, we are always here to help.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#comments #pspinc #webdesign #webdevelopment #websiteseo #wordpress

What is an Affinity Diagram?

Jul

27

Affinity diagramming is a technique created by Japanese anthropologist Jiro Kawakita in the 1960’s. It’s an idea creation method designed to help you organize ideas by their natural relationships with each other. It can be helpful for organizing and consolidating information about products, processes, or other complex issues or problems.

It’s a technique often used by Product Designers to help decide how to best organize information for an app or website in a way that will be most intuitive for users who might be unfamiliar with certain products or services.

How to use the Affinity Diagram technique:

Gather your product team for a brainstorming session.

Record notes and ideas about a specific product onto note cards or sticky notes.

Have the entire group organize notes/ideas into groups that are in some way related.

Have a discussion with your team to define categories from these relationships, and select header cards for the various categories that clearly identify the common thread.

Affinity Diagramming can be a very useful method to help you come up with your information architecture for a website or application. It allows you to move beyond habitual thinking and preconceived categories, utilizing a more intuitive approach to grouping information. This can result in a product structure that is easier to understand for end users.

The PSPINC design team would be happy to help you organize your website in a way that best serves your target audience.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#affinitydiagram #productdesign #webdesign

Benefits of Business Blogging

Jul

6

A blog is defined by Wikipedia as a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries.

So we know what a blog is, but now the question is - why should you as a business owner blog? There is more than one reason that your business should have a blog. So let's talk about the benefits of business blogging (I love alliteration)!

Make a personal connection with your customers

We are all looking for that edge that sets us apart from our competitors. One thing that we absolutely value at PSPINC is the personal customer support we offer. If you talk with one of our support technicians you will learn their name and be able to contact them easily again in the future.

Blogging is another way to establish that connection. It allows the author to speak in an informal manner to their customers and create a relationship of sorts. If a customer follows your blog, they may be more likely to call and request the blogger by name. Think of it as a way of laying the foundation for future lead generation and sales.

Good for search engine optimization

We’ve talked a lot about search engine optimization in the past because it is so important to get your website seen. Blogging has the potential to be a big part of that for a number of reasons.

Provides fresh content on your website which tells search engines that your site is actively being updated. This encourages search engines to crawl your website more frequently.

Blogging allows you to use keywords that your customers are likely to search to find your website. The more those keywords are organically found on your website through blog content, the more likely it is that a search engine will serve your site to your customers.

Allows you to reach a specific audience with each post. At PSPINC we offer numerous different types of services, from web design to web and mobile application development to technical support. Often each service caters to different types of customers. The keywords one type of customer uses in search engines to find you may be different from another. Blogging allows you to fill the gaps and cast the widest net possible.

An avenue for showcasing your company culture and news

When a customer is deciding whether or not to do business with you, or a potential job candidate is trying to determine if your company is the right fit, the company blog lets them know what you are all about. It’s an invaluable tool to share company culture, latest news, as well as brag a bit about your many accomplishments!

Those are just a few of the many benefits of business blogging. There are many blogging platforms out there that make it really easy to get started. We even have our own platform called Bloguru. Bloguru is totally ad-free, can be embedded on your website, and presents your content to Bloguru’s loyal and established user base to get extra eyes on your content. In fact, the blog you are reading right now was published to Bloguru. Did we mention it is totally free to sign up?

If you have any questions on blogging or need help getting started, please contact us by phone at 1-800-232-3989, by email at contact@pspinc.com, or by our online contact form.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #bloguru #businessblog #customers #pspinc #seo #smallbusiness #techsupport #webdesign #webdevelopment

How to choose the right type of website for your business

Jun

22

So you have decided you need a website, what next? Perhaps you search online for Web Developers, or you talk to your best friend’s cousin who has built websites before. The next thing you know, you are being bombarded with requests.

Things like:

How many pages do you need?
Do you have content and images ready?
Can you provide some samples of websites you like?

I know this can seem overwhelming, but these are all important questions that will need to be answered to build a successful website. In many cases, we work with customers to answer these questions as part of our initial finding session.

However, there is another question that is equally important to the project but not as straightforward. That question is - what type of website do you want? Your initial reaction might be, “Is this a trick question? I want a website on the Internet.”

No, it’s not a trick question. When it comes to websites, they come in many shapes and sizes. The type of website you choose will have an impact both on how you manage it in the future, and most importantly - the budget.

There is no right or wrong answer, as ultimately it depends on your needs. Let's take a look at 2 common types of websites and the pros and cons of each.

Custom-built Website

What this means is a website that is coded by a Web Developer. This is generally done through the use of HTML, CSS, and maybe other coding languages the Developer is comfortable with.

Pros: Generally quicker to build, and thus more cost-effective for initial development. Often less bloated under the hood so it is capable to be much more optimized than a content management system for search engines.
Cons: Unless you know how to code yourself, you will need to hire a developer to make every little update. If you frequently change your site this can prove to be costly, and challenging if your updates are time-sensitive.

Content Management System (CMS) Website

You have likely heard the term CMS before, but you may not know what that means. In a nutshell, it is a website that has an admin section so it can be updated through a web browser.

Pros: Provides tools for the website owner to make updates immediately themselves, lowering the cost associated with future changes. Many have plugins that are easy to install and use to add more to your website.
Cons: Initial development is longer and more costly. There is also the risk of the website owner breaking their website when making updates. You will be responsible for making necessary security updates as time goes on (very prevalent with WordPress). Sometimes running these updates can cause issues with various areas of your website.

Depending on your initial needs and how frequent you will be updating your website, you will be able to make a decision that is best for the budget both in the short-term and the long term.

If you have additional questions please let us know. We have Designers and Developers capable of building custom websites. In addition, we have experience building many websites using CMS tools. This includes products such as our in-house secure web builder tool WebdeXpress, as well as WordPress.

You can call us toll-free at 1-800-232-3989, email us at contact@pspinc.com, or fill out our online form to get a hold of us.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#CustomWeb #PSPINC #WebBuilder #WebDesign #WebdeXpress #Website #WordPress

We are the Best Web Design & Development company in Bellevue, WA

Jun

14

We are happy to announce that we have won the Best of Bellevue 2021 in the category of Web Design & Development as reported by the Bellevue Reporter.

A special thank you to everyone who took the time to vote for us!

If you, or somebody you know, needs a website designed or developed - send them to the top company in Bellevue, WA for web development - PSPINC!

Learn about our design and development services

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#designer #designsolutions #pspinc #userexperience #ux #webdesign #webdevelopment #website

Tips for making a better User Experience (UX) for your website

Jun

8

When talking about what makes a good website, we often point to a good design and useful content. However, there is a component to web design and development that isn’t actively talked about at the surface level. To industry professionals, this is called UX, which stands for user experience.

What is UX?

According to Wikipedia, it is defined as:

"How a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency."

This is a critical and often overlooked component of web design and development. Having the most beautiful graphics and well-crafted content means nothing if it is not arranged in an easy-to-navigate manner.

Improving your UX

Our team of Designers and Developers is always focused on the user experience in all of our projects. From our cloud-based business tools to custom application development projects to sites we design for customers just like you - user experience is a critical consideration for everything.

You don’t have to be UX Designer to make sure you are providing your customers with the best experience on your website. Below are a few tips you should consider when working on your company’s website.

Have a simple and organized navigation

I know it’s tempting to immediately focus on the design of your website. However, a critical first step is to determine the purpose of your website and then creating a sitemap to map out all of the pages you need to create.

Part of the sitemap process is to determine how you will organize your pages into the website's navigation.

Your site navigation should:

Not exceed more than 7 top-level navigation items. If you have more than 7 they should be arranged into a sub navigation beneath ‘parent’ top-level items.
Not feature a sub-sub navigation, meaning having a dropdown menu for your dropdown menu items.
Pick clear and simple page names so users know where to go to find the information they need.
Make sure your navigation is easy to access and click on mobile devices. Over half the world’s web traffic is browsed on mobile after all.

Consider “above the fold” content on your home page

Every website has a purpose. Be it lead generation, sharing information, sales, etc. “Above the fold” refers to content that is seen on a web page without requiring any scrolling. The “above the fold” space on the home page is your most prime piece of real estate when it comes to hooking your customer/site visitor. When used incorrectly it is the quickest way to lose them as well.

When creating your website determine what is the ultimate goal and use this space to funnel those requests to this location. If your website exists to sell products, focus on popular items and link to pages where they can purchase them. Do you gather leads? Send them to a simple online form (we have an online form building tool for that).

Keep it simple

Nobody is more passionate about your business than you. So it goes without saying that it is tempting to give site visitors all of the information they would ever need and more.

Unless the purpose of your website is to deeply document information it is always recommended to keep the content and layout simple. The fact of the matter is these days customers want information at their fingertips as quickly as possible. If they are looking for an answer but find an overwhelming amount of text that is poorly arranged, they are likely to bounce and find that information elsewhere.

—

We are just scratching the surface on what can be done to provide site visitors with quality UX. However, following the above steps will get your website off to a good start so you can maximize its impact.

If you would like some professional assistance auditing your existing website’s UX, please reach out to us. We have years of industry experience on tap to help you and would love to help take your website project to the next level.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#DesignSolutions #PSPINC #UX #UserExperience #WebDesign

PSPINC What's New Newsletter Vol.66 "Selling Your Services Online"

Jun

3

Vol. 66

Does your company sell your products or services online? If your company is in the manufacturing, distribution, or retail sales industry, then you are selling products, and I would like to talk about that another time.

A service business provides services regularly, rather than delivering goods as products. It is also considered a service when the customer comes to the location to receive service. In short, anything that does not involve the delivery of a product is a service.

For example, medical appointments, consulting, maintenance, beauty salon appointments, tutoring, parking lots, lodging, restaurants, and so on. Needless to say, these are things that are not sold on Amazon (although I'm sure Amazon will appear in the future). By integrating them into your website, you can use your site to sell these services.

At Pacific Software Publishing, Inc., we have developed custom reservation systems in the past. Why don't you consider selling your services online using the Internet for your business? Needless to say, all of the hosting services we offer have been developed so that they can be purchased online.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.
info@pspinc.com
1404 140th Place NE, Bellevue, WA 98007 USA
800-232-3989
425-957-0808

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#OnlineBooking #OnlineServices #PSPINC #SaaS #WebDesign #WebDevelopment

Impact of Website SEO with Search Engines: Responsive Design

Mar

9

What is responsive design?

Responsive design is a web design approach used to create a site that adjusts smoothly to various screen sizes. Developers do several things such as size elements in relative units (%) and use media queries to apply different layouts and styles based on screen size. Using this approach their websites can automatically adapt to the browser space to ensure content consistency across devices.

Code on computer screen

Why is responsive design important?

The internet is an ever-changing environment. Mobile as a platform has officially overtaken desktop computers as the first choice of device for web browsing.

Remember, Google is and will always be user-centric, as society shifted to a more mobile-focused web browsing journey, they adapted. If you are moving toward a more mobile-optimized website, then you have the approval of Google, and your web search ranking will reflect this.

One of the main reasons that users may not stay on your website for an extended amount of time is because they are having a hard time navigating it. Consequently, the time a user spends on your page is used by Google to determine a site’s or page’s quality and value.

If you have a responsive website, users will have a much easier time navigating through your website and will have a good user experience overall.

Website on mobile devices

Is your website mobile-friendly?

The best way to find out is to open it up on your mobile device. Does everything scale well or does everything look tiny and hard to read? If it is the latter you could use a website refresh not just for search engines, but for your website visitors as well. You should deliver the best experience possible, regardless of the device your visitors are using. So don’t forget about your mobile users!

If you don’t know how best to get started, give us a call! At PSPinc, we have professional Designers and Developers who are knowledgeable about SEO and sophisticated web design! We would love to talk to you about it further! You can reach us by phone at 1-800-232-3989, by email at contact@pspinc.com, or find us online at PSPinc.com.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPinc Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#PacificSoftwarePublishing #PSPINC #WebandEmailHosting #SeattleBellevue #SoftwareDevelopment #WebDevelopment #ApplicationDevelopment #Bloguru

#PSPinc #ResponsiveDesign #WebDesign #WebDevelopment #Website

What is responsive design?

Feb

9

Years ago web design was a lot simpler than it is today. People could only view websites on desktop computers, and the options for screen sizes and resolutions were very limited. For this reason, those websites are what we refer to as ‘fixed width’. Meaning no matter what size your browser window was, the website would never change.

With the advent of mobile devices (phones and tablets) of all shapes and sizes, this proved problematic. Having to pinch and zoom and scroll horizontally as well as vertically made the web viewing experience hard to navigate.

Enter "Responsive Design"

Responsive Design is an approach that makes web pages render appropriately on a variety of devices or screen resolutions. How it works is elements of the website change position, size, and visibility depending on how much space is available.

Where you may have a multi-column website layout on a desktop computer, a general rule is you would scale down to a single column display on a mobile device so everything stacks nicely. With a phone, it is really easy to swipe vertically with your thumb to navigate content.

More than one way to build a responsive website

There are many methods, approaches, and strategies for Web Developers to create a responsive website. A couple popular ways to build a responsive website are:

Mobile-first: It’s the idea of first building a website for the lowest browser size (mobile). This version should display the most basic functions and features. Anything that is perhaps unnecessary is hidden or pushed further down the page. As you advance to tablets and PC’s, additional interactions, effects, and complex layouts are slowly added over time.
Graceful degradation: This is the opposite, you start with the design at the most advanced end (desktop computers). As you scale down you start to limit functions, reduce the number of columns, and deliver a beautiful single-column mobile experience.

Both options have their pros and cons. Regardless of the approach, having a Designer making thoughtful choices is critical to ensuring your website is best optimized for whatever device your customer is using when navigating to your URL.

A few important considerations when building a responsive website

As your website scales down to mobile, your navigation should be contained within a ‘hamburger menu’. It is a fairly universal practice to manage your navigation, users can click to expand a full list of navigation items. This will save you space and make your nav links more manageable.

Previously mentioned, but as you scale down to mobile it is best to utilize a single column layout and stack everything to make it easy to read.

Make sure to utilize proper line height, spacing, and size for your typography as your screen size decreases.

We are really just scratching the surface here on responsive design. There is a lot to learn and take into consideration when planning your website.

If you don’t know whether your website is responsive or not, test it for yourself. Size your browser window down until it is really small. If the elements on your page don’t adjust and you are stuck with a horizontal scroll bar in your browser, odds are your site is NOT responsive.

It can be overwhelming but if you need advice or help with designing and developing a responsive website please let us know. We have a team of talented Designers and Developers skilled at making responsive websites. You can visit our Design Solutions page to take a look at our work and learn more about what we can do. You can call us toll-free 1-800-232-3989 or request a quote online.

Create a contact-less digital restaurant menu for your customers with ImaMenu

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPinc Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#MobileWeb #PSPinc #ResponsiveDesign #SoftwareDevelopment #WebDesign #WebDevelopment

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PSPINC Official Company Blog

freespace

PSPINC What's New Newsletter Vol.79 "Is your website where it should be?"

Managing Comments in WordPress

What is an Affinity Diagram?

Benefits of Business Blogging