Salt Blog

A lot of website designers and online marketing specialists talk about their integrity and commitment to providing their customers with the best possible service. But, as the old saying goes, talk is cheap. At Saltmedia, we know that actions speak louder than words, which is why we prove that we're worthy of our clients' business every single day. At the foundation of our online marketing and web development company are a set of core values that shape everything we do, from the types of services we offer to the quality of those services and the rewarding, lasting relationships we build with our clients. Choosing us as your website designers or online marketing providers means aligning yourselves with web experts who will remain true to their word. The Values that Shape Saltmedia Honesty: We don't make empty promises nor will we sugar coat or stretch the truth just to make a...

In business, first impressions are everything. You've got one shot to impress people or they'll move on, taking their money elsewhere. It's that whole instant gratification thing, where people want to see that you've got what they need - right away - or they're gone. On the internet, where your website is your business' online representative, the user experience you provide has the ability to turn those site visitors into your customers or leave them hitting the back button. User experience includes everything from how quickly your website pages load to the quality of the design and information you provide, or how easy it is to navigate. Invest in a Website that Delivers Results When you own a website (and you should!) with a great user experience, you're armed with a powerful tool for driving more leads and sales to your business. These are just some of the many things...

Yup, there's no getting around it, if your business still doesn't have a website, you're missing out on big opportunities. If growing your business by bringing in more leads and sales is your ultimate goal, getting your business online with effective web and graphic design should be priority number one. Why? Let me count the ways! A Website is Never Closed: With a website, you're open all day, every day. Even if you're not selling your products or services directly from your website, an effective web presence ensures existing and potential customers can always access your contact information, learn about what it is that you offer, and the ultimate goal, take one giant step further into your sales funnel. When you aren't available to give the sales pitch, a well designed and executed website will do it for you! Provides Credibility: Gone are the days when people flipped through the...

For those of you who are still coming down from Halloween candy sugar highs, I hate to break it to you, but Christmas is approaching - fast! For anyone with a business, this is a great time of year to kick your marketing efforts up a notch and to drive more leads and sales before the year's end. These are just a few of the many ways your friendly neighbourhood website design team, Saltmedia, can help: Graphics that Grab Attention In addition to building websites that are a cut above, Saltmedia is also a graphic design company with the skills to create quality, eye-catching promo graphics, perfect for the Christmas season. Whether you're hosting a Christmas sale, need to draw attention to a specific product or service via website or web ad graphics, or want to let customers know about your involvement in a holiday charity fundraiser, Saltmedia graphics can...

If you own a website, you've probably heard of search engine optimization or SEO. You wouldn't, however, be the first person to admit that they have no idea what it is, or more importantly, why it might be something worthy of consideration. The definition of SEO is pretty straightforward: the process through which you drive organic traffic from the search results to your website. What's not so straightforward is all of the factors that make up the SEO pie - there are more than 200 factors - or staying up to date with what it is that the search engines are rewarding or penalizing today. Today's post is meant to give you a very basic understanding of what SEO is and why anyone who owns a website and who wants more than their closest relatives to know it exists, should consider investing in search engine optimization. How Search Engines Rank...

Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about online marketing and why it's critical for businesses of all shapes and sizes to employ a well-designed strategy to give their brand greater exposure. Today's post will give you an idea of what it is that you need to have in place before you get started designing your online marketing plan of action. A Stunning, Robust Website: If you consider that your website is the central command station for your online marketing efforts, it goes without saying that you need to start with a well designed website. You not only need a professional web design that's user-friendly, but it also needs to be mobile-friendly and the pages have to load quickly. Google won't give good rankings to a site that's slow to load and can't be searched from a mobile device, and the goal of any marketing strategy is to convert...

Just like a business, municipalities have a brand they need to popularize and the best way to do just that is online. Websites for municipalities, however, must be highly accessible and appeal to an audience that's more diverse than any business' target market. A thoughtfully designed and executed online presence is exactly what cities, towns, counties, villages and hamlets need not only to attract new residents and industry but also to act as a valuable resource for those who already call the area home. Knowing how to effectively present your community's 'brand' to a wide audience requires an understanding of the area and the people who live and work there. When you work with website designers who know what matters most to the people in a specific region, the challenges they face and the opportunities they wish to seize, the website development process is streamlined and the end result is...

At Saltmedia, we think it's important to have an idea of who it is that you're doing business with. While you can read our About Us page to learn about the educations and work experiences of the people who make up our Grande Prairie web design team, you probably don't know that our company is majority Aboriginal owned. What does that mean for you, our client? We'll tell you! Our Web Design Company is a Part of a Growing Trend In the last two decades, Canada has seen a significant jump in the number of Aboriginal owned and operated businesses, according to census statistics . Aboriginal entrepreneurs are starting businesses in many different sectors, from banking and natural resources to hospitality and, in our case, technology. We are proud to be among the growing number of Aboriginal people who are pursuing their passions while creating employment opportunities for others and...

Continuing with the last post's theme and sharing a little more about what makes us, as a team, tick, in today's post I want to talk about our tireless efforts to keep up with the latest trends in technology and search engine optimization, or SEO. Ongoing Research & Development Keep Us Cutting-Edge What drives us to continuously research new trends and concepts for web and graphic design, as well as SEO, is the fact that we are truly committed to providing our clients with the best possible value for their dollar. We value honesty and want to ensure that when we say our graphics, SEO and web design services are at the cutting-edge of what businesses need to succeed online, that our services actually will bring their businesses results. We don't believe in smoke and mirrors but get excited about 'wowing' our clients by providing industry-leading services and products with...

Today's post is the last in a mini-series about ownership, and specifically the importance of being in control of the various facets of your business' online presence. I've already shared some of the reasons you should be the owner of your domain name and your company website, and today I'm going to be talking about email. Are you in control of your business' email address? Custom Email Addresses are Part of a Professional Web Design To start, let's talk about some of the reasons your business should, in fact, have a custom email address instead of an @yahoo, @hotmail or any of the other free email providers. The first thing people think when they see This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is that you're legit. Custom email addresses give your business credibility and an email from This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is a lot less likely to be sent directly to the trash by the people who receive it....

Here's an important question that you may not have given much thought to in the past; do you actually own the domain name for your business' website? As web designers, we regularly work with businesses, and because we've heard the horror stories and know what's possible, we always make sure that our clients own their domain names. In today's post, I'll tell you why it's vitally important for you to be listed as the owner of your company's domain name when you're building a new site, or why you should find out if the domain name for your existing site is, in fact, your own. The Risks You would be surprised to learn of the number of instances where, after years of working with a particular domain name and building an online presence around that name, business owners discover that the domain is actually owned by someone else. In some...

This month, I've been sharing some proven tips for achieving more results through effective calls to action and other website copy. While a call to action and persuasive writing are fundamental to generating more leads and sales, they're not the only ways you can boost conversions. In fact, there are many facets of a website design that can and should work together to provide the user with a specific experience and, hopefully, elicit a specific response. Today's post will talk specifically about how to effectively use buttons to improve your site's conversion rate and deliver real results. Adding Better Buttons to Your Website Design A great deal of testing has been done over the years to determine how the look and placement of buttons affects their conversion rates. It's not enough to toss a 'Buy Now' button on your product page and expect people to click it. When considering your...

The Nitty Gritty on Calls to Action: Why the Best Website Design Always Includes Effective Calls to Action - If there's one thing we've learned, in all our years of providing web design services to businesses throughout northern Alberta and B.C., it's that even the best website design, complete with the the flashiest logo, coolest graphics, and most cutting-edge content management system, isn't enough to encourage site visitors to make contact for more information or to purchase a product online if there isn't a clear call to action. 'What's a call to action,' you ask? It's the magic tool that drives site visitors to call you, visit your location or buy your goods and services. Okay, it ain't magic, and it actually isn't all that difficult to master good call to action writing skills. You just need to first understand the importance of the call to action and learn a...

There's no doubt about it; Facebook is a proven internet marketing platform that small businesses can and must use if they want to popularize their brand without spending a bundle. The only drawback, however, is that businesses can often get hung up on Facebook, devoting all of their social media marketing efforts to the one platform and missing out on big opportunities to develop their brands via other channels online. In some cases, other social media sites are actually better suited for marketing certain types of businesses or for helping to facilitate specific business goals. Discover how and when Facebook should be used for brand development purposes and when it's good to add one - or better yet, several - of the popular online platforms to your social media marketing repertoire. How & When to Best Use Facebook The fastest way to turn Facebook friends or followers off of your...

At some point over the years, you probably advertised your business in newspapers, magazines and brochures. The thing about these more traditional forms of marketing is that they've been made nearly redundant by the many advertising platforms that are available on the internet. When most people today look online for the businesses they'll frequent, and an advertisement sent out across various channels on the internet has the potential to reach exponentially more people than an ad in your local newspaper, it goes without saying that online marketing is a must for businesses. The thing about online marketing is that you've got to A) know how and where to effectively brand and advertise your business, and B) you've got to have the time to actually do it. Whether you operate a pet food store in Valleyview, AB, or a restaurant in Dawson Creek, BC, chances are you can't devote the amount...

In my last post, I talked about some of the more general pros and cons of professional web design and do-it-yourself, or DIY. This week, I want to take a closer look at how the function and look of a professionally built site differ from one made using free tools like those from Weebly and GoDaddy. What Quality Web Design from a Team of Pros will Provide that the DIY Route Can't Without mastery over the tools and technical skills it requires to design and build a site that not only looks great but also functions well, taking on a web development project yourself isn't likely to provide you with the type of website you imagined or that your business or organization even needs. Appearance As far as appearance goes, professional web design always looks more professional, typically using layouts and images that are creative and of a higher quality....

As the founder and president of an Alberta web design and development company, I've had the old do-it-yourself (DIY) versus professional web design conversation with new clients and others more times than I can count. Restricted by budgets or thinking a web development project could be a 'fun' challenge, business owners and organization leaders can be tempted by free web design tools, like those from Weebly and GoDaddy, to build their own sites. There are, however, many benefits to choosing the professional web design route over the do-it-yourself option, the biggest one being that a professionally designed, built and managed web presence is always far superior to anything a novice could create from a canned template in little more than a Saturday. I'm sure you're probably thinking "of course a web designer would say it's best to go with a pro," but by the end of this 3-part blog series,...

If you copied another's essay in school and were caught, you'd undoubtedly get in trouble. Plagiarizing another person's work on the web is equally as serious as it is when it occurs offline, but did you know that you can even get yourself in trouble for copying your own work online? If you're struggling to wrap your head around how that's even possible, I'll explain. Even if you're at all in-tune with search engine optimization, what's considered 'duplicate content' can be a bit confusing. As the name implies, 'duplicate content' includes any copy that appears on more than one page of a website, or that has been copied from one site and used on another. The risks associated with trying to pass another's work off as your own, without asking for the original author's permission and citing the copy properly, are pretty clear. For the purposes of this post, I...

In my last post, I talked about a couple of the most common search engine optimization misconceptions we hear while working in this industry. All too often, people get hung up on outdated information, think they can run a successful search engine optimization campaign themselves in their spare time, or believe they don't need it all. The truth is, the days of DIY SEO are long gone, and unless you eat, sleep and breathe search engine optimization, your site will never reach its true potential as far as rankings, traffic volume and conversions are concerned. Last time, I discussed two things that we at Saltmedia hear all the time; the myth that you can give your website a quick-fix of SEO and enjoy top rankings and high volumes of traffic for years to come, and that it's possible to build a strong web presence without a mobile-friendly website design. In...

Nearly every business owner with an online presence has heard of search engine optimization, or SEO. Perhaps you, too, have been vying for Google's attention in an effort to edge your business' website further up the search rankings. But, where so many business owners go wrong, whether they own a small local business in Grande Prairie or a chain with multiple stores across the country, is that they're still under the impression that they can 'do' SEO in their spare time, build a few links here, share a couple of blog posts there, and sit back and watch as their site skyrockets to the search rankings' coveted top spots for dozens of keyword terms. The long and short of it is that some common search engine optimization misconceptions are holding businesses back from succeeding both on and off the internet. Check out the following, the first in a two-part series...