As a content writer, it’s hard to believe that I would admit this but a website design can make or break the first impression of your company. While I wholeheartedly believe that effective content is king, I happen to sit with an awesome group of graphic designers who have managed to convince me to rethink what I’ve been spouting for years.
Both design and content are critical to attract and retain online visitors. They work in tandem to engage potential clients and re-engage existing ones.
Each of us has our own very personal reasons for becoming a funeral service professional. For me, it was my love of ritual. My anthropological training allowed me to spend decades studying the multitude of cultural rituals surrounding death. This love turned my strictly academic career into funeral service where I could work with families to create meaningful funeral and memorial services. Add to that my recent certification as a grief counselor and I think it’s easy to see where my heart lies.
It’s also easy to see that my heart does not lie with the seemingly mundane tasks of case management! Chances are you feel much the same as I do. We came to this profession as a way of expressing our desire to care for others not because we wanted to get buried in the minutia of case management (pun intended). Yet, how many times during the week do you find yourself stuck in your office, feeling overwhelmed by your management and operational responsibilities?
Fortunately, today’s technology can free you from the shackles of your office chair and allow you the mobility needed to serve today’s families.
Most everyone by now has heard of Heartbleed and we all recognize that’s it’s not a good thing. But for many of us, we don’t have a clue about what it is and what we should be doing about it. Even when Heartbleed became the top news story, there were conflicting reports on what the average person should do to protect their personal information that is stored online.
It doesn’t help that when you ask a more technically-inclined person to explain this worldwide phenomenon, they tend to roll their eyes at you when you stare blankly at their answer. And, if you look at all the tech websites and blogs out there, their cartoon depictions that were created to explain everything to us ‘dummies’, make me feel even dumber!
So, I’ve gone to the programmers at FrontRunner and asked them to explain this so everyone understands. Thankfully, they are patient and keep the eye-rolling to a minimum or they at least wait until I’ve left the room.
You have undoubtedly been hit up at one time or another by the hype of promised profits through the use of sympathy stores and other online selling tools. Before you put your firm’s reputation on the line, there are a few things that you need to know.
Once upon a time, just for fun, all of us would search our own names in Google just to see how we ranked. The act of ego-surfing was done on the sly so we didn’t come across as caring whether we could find anything about ourselves in the first few pages of the rankings.
Today, not taking the time to Google ourselves and our companies is simply irresponsible. Controlling what searchers find and claiming your business name on the major search engines is part of an effective online reputation management (ORM) plan and makes perfect business sense.
So where should you begin? The first step is actually knowing how your firm looks online when families are searching for you. This is the initial stage of your ORM Plan. Yes, this takes more than a few minutes and can be quite extensive but the following steps can help get you started to assess your current online reputation and determine what needs to be done to improve your online presence.
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