Mobile Payment Technology and Adoption Gains More Traction

Every week it seems that mobile payment technology and adoption gains more traction.  Two articles were posted in the past few days showing that if you haven’t already started thinking and planning for the day when consumers use mobile payments more than credit/debit cards, checks or cash (combined!), now is the time!

First, the Electronics Transactions Association has formed a Mobile Payments Committee to study public policy, regulations and standards for  moving funds with a smart phone. Members include Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Wells Fargo and Capital One.  According to an article posted on VentureBeat,  AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Google and Apple have joined as well.

venturebeat.com/2012/08/09/the-mobile-payments-committee-att-verizon-sprint-t-mobile-unite-for-the-future-of-payments/

Second,  Diane Mermigas writes in a post that “social media will move mobile payments to the next level”. http://www.businessinsider.com/social-will-move-mobile-payments-to-the-next-level-2012-8

Most organizations don’t use Facebook, Twitter, or texting with any skill.  Missing these vital communications links might mean your members, customers or patients could be picked off by someone who does.

Just as online banking changed the business nearly 20 years ago (yes, it’s been that long!), mobile devices and social media are shifting the world again.

Great Basin Engineering South Launches New Website

Great Basin Engineering South of Salt Lake City, UT has launched a new website, http://ROIEngineering.com delivering information about the company and it’s projects.  With over 50 years of civil engineering experience, Great Basin’s projects span 12 western states, from Washington to Texas, and Montana to California.

Working side-by-side with national retailers such as Kroger, Walgreens, and Target, local companies like Harmon’s and Bountiful Mazda, as well as developers such as Boyer Corp, Great Basin handled the civil engineering on a variety of projects, including fuel centers, large and small retail complexes, office and residential, and government developments.  Their objective is to maximize the developers’ ROI on every project by bringing insight and out-of-the-box concepts learned from their long experience.

Great Basin played a key role in developing The District, a multi-faceted shopping center with theaters, restaurants, specialty shops, a grocery store and large department stores in South Jordan, UT.  Currently the company is partnering with developers and Summit County on the Kimball Junction retail center in Park City, UT, and many others projects.

“We wanted a platform to showcase the diverse projects we have done over the years and to tell our story of helping developers maximize the potential of every project.” said Bret Wahlen, President and Managing Partner.

Great Basin chose Coppermoon to develop their website because of the company’s skill in strong design, video production and quick development time. Coppermoon’s common sense approach focuses on Great Basin’s strengths and capabilities.  A key requirement was the ability for Great Basin to manage the site without a programmer, and Coppermoon delivered.

Press Contact:

Rod Garlick
President, Coppermoon
Rod@coppermoonusa.com
801.660.0123
http://CoppermoonUSA.com

Google Warning About Bad Links

Beware that Google is watching so closely for unnatural or artificial links that they may even send you a warning. There have been webmasters reporting getting a warning one of which follows:

Dear site owner or webmaster of ….

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

In the past Google has “silently distrusted” sites that are posting unnatural links, but now it’s being more outspoken about such offenses. This makes it more important than ever to make sure that you are getting genuine links and relying on your quality content to get true links…Google is watching you!

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & Technology firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

Did You Know…You Need Video

One of our clients asked us to help them with a video campaign. We created a half a dozen web videos that we posted on YouTube, Vimeo, MetaCafe and others. It has since been picked up byother blogs and pages. This all links back to their websites, helping in their Page Rank, but more importantly giving their potential customers another way to find them.

Remember that it’s more important to please your customers than the search engines (though by doing this it in turn pleases the search engines). We are a video driven society, we are much more likely to view a video than to read a blog post or content on a website. Help yourself out, do some video.

If you have questions on web design and video contact Coppermoon at info@coppermoonwebdesign.com

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & Technology firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

Did You Know…You Need a Good Writer

In your company everyone has their strengths, for a lot of people writing isn’t their strong suit. Some people don’t realize that they use too much jargon, write the way they talk, or just make common grammatical mistakes that make reading something confusing or difficult.

In the examples below, see how simple grammatical errors can make all the difference:

Having a good writer can make all the difference when it comes to your web content, from the content on your site, to your blog posts. If a client sees that you can’t properly place a comma, how can they trust you with their business?

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

Did You Know-You Should Be Using Anaytics

If you have a website, you should be utilizing some form of analytics to track activity and traffic. If you have a storefront, you very likely could tell me approximately how many people come into your store on a daily basis and how much your average customer spends, right? Your website should be the same way, you should be looking at analytics at least weekly. See how long people are on your site, what pages they are viewing, etc. This tells you what’s working and what you need to change.

The beauty of analytics is that basically have a survey of what your customers think right in front of you. If your bounce rate is 85% your customers don’t like something about the home page. If they go into your inventory and spend a long time there they really like what they see. As a small business you need all the power you can get, and utilizing analytics helps harness that power.

Aren’t sure how to use analytics, need a website or a new website? We can help check us out at coppermoonwebdesign.com

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

SOPA and PIPA Aren’t Just About Piracy

I am so glad that 1/18/12 is over. I can’t tell you how many websites I regularly visit weren’t functioning normally due to the SOPA/PIPA protest. These bills heading towards congress next week, SOPA and PIPA are supposed to help stop internet piracy, but their are written in such a way that it could hurt the rest of the internet, and the web would perpetually look like it did yesterday. There is a potentially good alternative to SOPA and PIPA called OPEN, check out this chart below that compares the bills:

A Full Explaination of SOPA Can Be Found on SearchEngineWatch.com

TheOatmeal.com was blacked out yesterday, but had a video running instead of their usual website (if you are easily offended do not proceed to the video in question) in the video they said “This is like dealing with a lion escaped from the zoo by blasting some kittens with a flame thrower!” There are better ways to deal with piracy than by passing a bill that is so poorly written that it could potentially shut down any website accused of copyright infringement without due process.

The lawmakers writing these bills did not have a solid understanding of the ramifications. As it has become more clear to them with the outrage over the last several days that it’s a bad thing, the SOPA train has been losing steam. Many of the supporters, even co-sponsors of the bill have withdrawn their support. Many of the Hollywood companies, Time Warner and such are backing it because they are losing millions to pirated material, they deserve a good bill that protects them and their intellectual property, but not at the cost of millions of websites and blogs that would be censored under this new legislation.

If you are in favor of an open internet without censorship make sure that your voice is heard, sign the petition and call or write an email to your congressman asking them to oppose the bill, or if they already oppose it tell them thank you.

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

Why are SOPA and PIPA so Bad?

SearchEngineLand.com along with other resources have been helping webmasters and SEO firms prepare for today’s protest of the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation. Wikipedia and Reddit are some of the biggest names going black for the day.

WordPress and Google’s hompages have been altered to show their solidarity.

Google’s Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst announced that they would be slowing down GoogleBot’s crawl activity to reduce the effects of the blackout on a sites SEO standings.

Pierre Far posted the following on his Google+:

Hello webmasters! We realize many webmasters are concerned about the medium-term effects of today’s blackout. As a precaution, the crawl team at Google has configured Googlebot to crawl at a much lower rate for today only so that the Google results of websites participating in the blackout are less likely to be affected.

Floating around Twitter, Facebook and accessible from Google’s homepage is a petition to tell congress that we don’t want this kind of censorship on the web. I’ve seen online people saying “Well shouldn’t Wikipedia and Google want to stop piracy?” All of these sites and those supporting this want to stop piracy, but the legislation needs to be rewritten, as it stands it could cripple the internet with far too much censorship. This post from Stumble Upon’s blog gives a good overview of why so many websites are against SOPA and PIPA.

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

Search, plus Your World

If you are a part of Google+ you have probably seen Google’s push for you to use Search Plus Your World. As rolled out on Google’s official blog on January 10, 2012, Google has announced that when you utilize this type of search you are going to get the following features:

1. “Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community. “

But this new method of searching is under much scrutiny, as PCMag.com reports. Google’s new search results could warrant an FTC probe. Critics are claiming that Google is favoring its own networks over its competitors. This goes against Google’s initial mission, which was to bring the most relevant results regardless of the network. They have claimed since day one that they would provide the most relevant results, so does this cross that line? This new search could exclude blogs not under Google’s Blogger, and block out other sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Do you think this new search crosses a line? Are you using the new search method?

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

 

Classic Cooking and Sewing Goes Digital

The Finishing School, a private academy specializing in teaching homemaking arts to children and adults, has launched a new website developed by Coppermoon Web Design. The new site includes a full content management system giving full site control to the School’s staff to add content without programmer intervention. Custom produced video explains the School’s offering and franchise opportunities. An eCommerce component features online class enrollment and credit card processing, enabling easy student interaction. A mobile version of the site is optimized for iPhone, iPad, and Droid based devices. Coppermoon hosts the site on secure, high speed servers, with analytics to determine site visitor behavior.

As The Finishing School expands through franchising, the new site showcases class offerings and will be the basis for supporting new locations. Visit the site at LearntoCookandSew.com

Coppermoon Web Design offers website development, mobile enabled sites, eCommerce functionality, content creation, search engine optimization, internet marketing, social media management and YouTube campaign with video production. We deliver websites that bring our clients new customers, patients, members or donors using a holistic approach to internet marketing.

For more information visit us on the web coppermoonwebdesign.com or YouTube

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.