User experience (UX) is how a person feels when interacting with your website or your employees feel when they interact with your business applications. UX encompasses a lot of factors, some that are controllable by designers and developers and some that are environmental or just user preference. These factors include usability, accessibility, performance, design/aesthetics, utility, ergonomics, overall human interaction and marketing.

But UX is not exactly the same thing as usability, although they are closely related. UX is the experience, emotion, intuition and connection a user feels when using a site or product. Usability is more about the effectiveness of a site design and how user-friendly it is. Usability is a key component of the overall user experience. When working with and designing your user experience the usability aspects should be equally thought of during the process.

The core revenue of our business is on helping company's better use Digital Marketing to get people interested in their company's unique brand. There are huge benefits to doing digital marketing for any size business. Digital marketing ranges from social media, web logs (blogs), search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing and mobile applications to name just a few. The core of all of these items though is they all should not only interact with your target audience but drive traffic to your website.

Every business initially sees Facebook as a must have which is certainly true for many companies starting off as they are currently the biggest of the social networks. The problem with Facebook, or any social media outlet, is that they dictate what your brand is. They mandate the colors, placement, and what is shown about your brand. You company brand should be an extension of your company and not based off of another's brand. This is where a very blurry line can come into play. We all want as many followers as possible on social media but we want to market as ourselves. We want more for those followers to be engaged and working on helping promote our brand.

I just had a nice unexpected phone call this morning from someone asking advice (yes at 6:30 in the morning we are at work -- actually we start between 5-6am). They currently have 9 social media sites (I was glad I was sitting). They are spending over five hours per day on social media for all 9 social media sites seven days a week (yes 7 days!). They have one person dedicated to social media alone and also have a social media manager helping them.

After getting the initial details I found that they wanted to know if they were doing the right thing as they are not getting the results they want and are about ready to "quit". They wanted a second opinion. They have no digital marketing plan, no goals and no content calendar. All major mistakes; especially since they have a manager helping them which also makes gauging "success" virtually impossible.

As our second year is closely approaching and just a month away we are reflecting on everything that has happened. From the initial planting of our seed to form JM2 Webdesigners to present day. Being an entrepreneur has been quite different than that of being a person at a small or large organization. There are different challenges and I feel that I have become a stronger and better person because of it. The success, or failure, is entirely in my hands. This alone has caused a lot of stress but overall in a positive way.

We started with a vision of being a differentiator in the web design/development. We know we’ve achieved this dream and focus as the companies we continue to work with have all seen improvements in their online experiences and improved business processes.

There's one sure-fire way to take your blog and Digital Marketing strategy from non-existent or amateur hour to full-blown pro status, and that's to make absolutely sure you've got a plan. We can guarantee that the writers of your favorite blogs and websites aren't sitting at their keyboards at 9pm the night before a post gets published, just finally deciding what to write about. Neither should you.

Going PRO means you always deliver on time and this editorial calendar is your ticket to getting there.

In our December 22, 2014 newsletter we included some predictions that drew a lot of questions. The link below is our newsletter post with additional information added to go into more detail for those that asked for it. It covers core items you need to know for 2015 on the Internet. May your 2015 rock!

Digital Marketing often creates a deer in headlight look from clients. Whether it is with basic terminology, that you need to be monitoring your account(s) continuously or the amount of time and effort you need to devote to do it properly. It doesn’t have to be complex and we work with you on making it simple and will do the heavy lifting for you. If you’re too busy or you do not want to handle your companies’ social media that is perfectly fine. Knowing some of the basics is critical as even if you are not being active with your account there will be situations where we need your guidance. This will include postings, content creation as well as how you wish to deal with certain situations. At times we all have to deal with situations that are not positive. No one likes them and we all wish they could just all “go away”. Ignoring a problem though doesn’t fix it. Not addressing negative problems will only have a chance to grow into something worse.

Saturday we sat down for several hours with a current client of ours discussing their plans for their business. This included their website, search engines and social media. Each topic was deep and insightful to say the least. One of the topics that came up that we felt could benefit everyone was how to properly handle negative comments or feedback from customers in social media. Although this will not cover everything we talked about it will be a great foundation for any company whether you are just starting in the realm of social media or have been at it for some time.

Many companies not yet on social media may be avoiding it to avoid such negative criticism. The problem with this approach is that you have no voice to counter the negative criticism. With many social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Urban Spoon, Google+ to name just a few you will find that people are already talking about your brand. These online conversations can be positive or negative and if you avoid being online the only person you are hurting is yourself (aka your brand). With so many places to cover for feedback the question is where to dedicate your efforts.

A blog is combination of two distinct words of web and blog and originally started as a weblog. The phrase came from Jorn Barger in 1997. Since the time the word weblog has been simplified to be just blog.

A blog is a collection of blog posts that are grouped or categorized to be easily found. Each blog post or article covers a single topic, is concise to the point of what is being talked about and will routinely relate to other articles that are of interest to the company hosting the blog.

Now that we have an understanding of what a blog is and a high level understanding of what the benefits can be let’s look at the benefits of how having a blog can benefit a your business.