once you manual spam action revoked you'll show up

Manual Spam Action Revoked – A Testimonial Video

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If you’ve been hit by a penalty from Google, you likely need to have your manual spam action revoked. We were able to help our client Frank Murch at Signs for San Diego with his manual penalty recovery (you can read how we did it here).

Manual Spam Action Revoked – Testimonial Video:

Frank’s Testimonial

To Simon at RemedyOne

I want to thank you for the work done on www.signsforsandiego.com

I talked with 6 or 8 companies, 3 of which I have accounts and business dealings with – none of them knew what was happening. Remedy One took this on, and found the bad links that nobody else could.  

RemedyOne resubmitted to Google for reconsideration resulting in success!! My time in “Google jail” ended. This action from Google threatened 7 months of work. Without RemedyOne I would have not been able to solve the problem and would have probably abandoned the site.

Of course Remedy One has modern software tools, and a very methodical approach resulting in abilities that could solve this problem, but other firms had that too. RemedyOne had something infinitely more valuable – They had the expertise, knowledge and aggressiveness to figure out the problem and solve it.

I was asked if I would recommend Remedy One – Absolutely!!

Frank Murch

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Wordpress San Diego

Speed up WordPress – the 3 Best Techniques to Make Your Site Fast

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WordPress is fantastic – and economical. But let’s face it, it can suck for speed. We ask this faithful platform to achieve so much, and it faithfully struggles to deliver!

A great way to test site speed is with Pingdom.com’s Speed Test page.

To keep your customers delighted with your online presence, it’s important to focus on site performance. In our new article we detail three often-overlooked methods for boosting performance:

Check your host

Not all hosts are created equal. Those guys charging you $5 / month to serve your site might have worked great for that site you designed in 2007 in Dreamweaver, but times have changed, and with the increased flexibility offered by WordPress you’re going to have to throw a bit of love at it. Shared hosting isn’t quite perfect. You’ll need at a minimum, managed WordPress hosting, and ideally some sort of dedicated server or allocated resources.

It doesn’t really matter who you choose to host your site, as long as you have enough resources available to you, and they understand WordPress’s needs. Dreamhost, Bluehost, Rackspace, as well as other, managed options like Websynthesis are all good options that could speed up WordPress on your site.

Cache and minify

WordPress works by pulling bits and pieces of posts and pages together from a database, and generating a website from fragments in real-time. This isn’t easy, and as your site and your audience grows you will notice it taxes the system more and more. You can help relieve the pressure on your servers by having the site create cache versions of important pages. It simply creates a version of the dynamic, database-driven site, and translates it into a static page which is easy to serve to visitors.

There are a couple of really good cache plugins for WordPress: W3 Total Cache and WP-SuperCache. Setup of these plugins can be complex and outside the scope of this post. Generally, WP-SuperCache is the simpler option, and W3TC, while more powerful, takes a bit more knowledge and effort to configure. Shared host sites are probably best using WP-SuperCache.

Once your site is caching well, make sure all your associated scripts like Javascripts and CSS are merged and minified as much as possible – this is called minification. There are plugins that do this for you, and the feature is built-in in W3TC.

Use a CDN

All those images and scripts you have on your site? They slow it down! Try offloading some of that heavy lifting to the big players – Amazon, NetDNA, Cloudflare etc. It’s called using a Content Delivery Network, and it really helps. You simply send your large files off to a third party, and using a CDN plugin on your site, you set it up to deliver those files from the third party. Hello Speed!

These three techniques are a great start when you want to speed up WordPress. If you’re overwhelmed or need help, drop us a line and we can help.

Responsive web design

Responsive Web Design

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According to this Pew study, 56% of Americans have smart phones of one kind or another. If your website isn’t optimized for small screens you may be alienating half the market! There are a couple of options for making sites look good on mobile devices, but the current best practice according to Google is Responsive Web Design.

What is Responsive Web Design?

The whole concept of Responsive Web Design arose when we started looking at sites on mobile devices. Most of these devices have screens that are narrower than our desktop machines. This means that websites designed for full-width desktop screens look either too small or just plain strange on the very narrow mobile devices.

Responsive Web Design (RWD) compensates for this by using rules to re-draw the web page depending on the width of the viewer’s screen. It’s basically the same page, but its just handled differently by the browser on the device. You can tell if a website is responsive by simply re-sizing the screen width. If the appearance changes when you reduce the width, you’re looking at a responsive website.

Advantages of RWD

Have you ever visited a website on your phone and it just didn’t look right? Maybe it was all small, or some items were laid out off the side of the page. It’s pretty frustrating and often can be a huge turn-off for your customers. A responsive design caters to the screen size and automatically re-draws so everything is in view.

Using good RWD practices it’s even possible to make buttons larger for touch-screen devices so they’re easier to push with your fingers, compared to your mouse.

Responsive vs. Adaptive web design

Another option to make websites compatible with mobile devices is for the serving site to actually detect which device is requesting the website and serve a different page for the device. This is known as Adaptive Web Design. The difference here is that RWD doesn’t care who loads the page, only the width of the viewing device screen, whereas Adaptive tailors the content to the device.

They’re both good options, but at RemedyOne we prefer Responsive web design. It fits with our style of keeping things simple. We don’t care which device looks at the page- we just adjust for screen sizes. It’s simpler, quicker, and is the generally recommended practice in web design.

Another potential weakness with an adaptive approach is that often mobile devices don’t identify themselves properly when they request websites. With the fast pace of technological improvements, device identification can be tough to keep up with. This is less of a problem with responsive web design because your site doesn’t need to know the ‘who’ of the device – just the ‘how wide’!

Considerations

In some cases, you might not need your site to be responsive, or an adaptive site might even be a better option for your company site. As a leading San Diego web design company, RemedyOne should be your first call for responsive web design. And once we’ve got your responsive site up and running, we can make sure it’s optimized for search, conversions and help you use your site as a business development tool to grow your company.

Legal Web Designers

Legal Web Design: 6 Essential Tips to grow your practice

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As an attorney, there are a few absolute must-dos when developing your website as a lead generation tool. There are also a couple of things to watch out for and avoid. Here’s our list:

1. Make it look good

A simple way to stand out from your competition is to have a better-looking site. Front-end design and user experience is highly important, and will set your site apart from the rest. From our experience as a leading San Diego web design firm, most small practice attorneys are simply too busy to devote the time to stay up-to-date on the latest design trends. A good website designer will have a portfolio of beautifully designed sites.

2. Own it

Many Legal web design specialty firms charge a monthly fee, and retain ownership of the website for a certain amount of time. This practice is quite unusual in the larger web development community and I really suggest you avoid it. There’s no reason you shouldn’t have full ownership and complete control of your website from day one.

3. Flexibility is key

The best online marketers understand that any conversion system needs constant testing, improvement, and tweaking. It’s more of a process than you might initially expect, so it’s very important that the site framework that you choose has the ability to be upgraded, altered, edited and improved as time goes by. There are a number of easy-to-use and economical frameworks out there such as WordPress. Make sure your solution is freely available for developers – that way if things don’t work out with your initial developer, you can always go to another firm for changes in the future.

4. Optimize it for search

What good is your site without people looking at it? Not much, really. And how do people find legal websites? That’s right, the search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not rocket science, but it makes a huge difference and should be done. The best SEO techniques are continuous and constant, and complement your practice’s marketing plan. Most attorneys are simply too busy with their practice to be able to effectively focus on SEO so they hire specialists such as us to take on that responsibility.

5. Make it FAST

Once you have people landing at your site, help make their experience positive by providing a super-fast website. Don’t keep your potential clients waiting – every second counts when your competition is only a click away. There are numerous page speed testing sites (such as Pingdom)- simply enter your site’s URL and click ‘test’! If your site is slow or gets a low grade, consider having a web developer take a look at potential optimizations.

6. Don’t forget about conversions!

Most ‘web designers’ or SEO specialists focus on traffic only. We take a different approach – what’s the use of having thousands of site visitors if you still don’t see any sales from those visits? We test your site to see what’s working and what’s not, then improve and optimize the site with a focus on your Call to Action.

Like I said above – none of this is magic, and truly anyone can do it. But when you want everything taken care of, with a ‘no worries’ approach, it’s worth finding a legal web design firm who’s experience and attitude matches with your vision for your practice.

Wordpress San Diego

What does a WordPress website cost?

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More and more companies are deciding to invest in quality marketing to get their message out, but even so, when we meet new web design or e-commerce clients, the topic quickly turns to cost: “How much will this WordPress website cost?”

The main factors influencing the cost of a website developed by a professional firm are:

Quality of design: Does the site look professional? Is it created using a template, a customized template or a fully custom site or theme?

Quality of functionality: What does the site do? Is it a simple brochure site or a more advanced storefront to sell products?

Level of support: How responsive and communicative are the web designers? Are they native speakers of your language? Do they live nearby and are they available to discuss changes on the phone?

Currently WordPress websites are very popular. Here are some common prices for WordPress web designers in San Diego:

Economy WordPress Package

A simple package with up to 9 or 10 pages, compatible with mobile and desktop devices, with one custom form and newsletter sign-up form. The designer would create the site based on the client’s specification with usually no more than three revisions to the design. The ideal client for this package is a small business needing to get going now.

The typical cost for this package is $2,500 to $3,000.

 

Standard WordPress Package

This package would typically include up to 15 or 20 pages, social media sharing features, more advanced SEO configuration, a slideshow added. In this case two or three design ideas would be provided for the client to choose, with up to three revisions included for the chosen design. An ideal candidate for this package is a more serious firm who understands the importance of inbound marketing and wants to really get their hands dirty to work hard to drive sales to their business.

The typical cost for a Standard WordPress Package is from $3,500 – $5,500.

Premium WordPress Package

For the business serious about their image and inbound marketing, the Premium Package would include a custom design based on the client’s specification, customized forms, calendars, event schedules or members sections with two designs to choose from, social media landing pages and up to three other keyword landing pages, advanced search engine optimization and performance enhancements.

The typical Premium Package cost is $7,500 – $12,000.

When you’re choosing web designers in San Diego or elsewhere, be wary of firms quoting amazingly cheap prices – if it seems ‘too good to be true’, it probably is! Think about how long your web design candidates have been in business, how much experience they have, and how well they communicate with you. Those aspects can make or break your web design project and mean the difference between being highly satisfied with your marketing campaign or being left with a poorly designed or non-working website.

 

The Importance of Web Design

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Designing your website is much more than making it look pretty. The bigger the site, grey-scale-blue-eyethe more pages and information you want on it, the more complex the design becomes which requires a team of people and hard work.  In the design world, there are limitless ways to change and improve your website.  Listed below,  are some of the suggestions that RemedyOne believes are important to your site’s design. Read more