New York May 5th, 2022 -

The Web Empire has been selected for the 2022 Best Developers in Yonkers Award in the Web Development and Web Design category by the Expertise.com program.

Each year, the Expertise.com program identifies all the potential providers in a community. They use public databases and customer referrals to collect an exhaustive list of local businesses, checking their availability and service areas. They look for Accreditations, Awards, and Licenses and they validate each business' qualifications. They know which professions require a license or certification to operate in the area, and they find providers who have gone above and beyond to educate themselves in their area of expertise. In addition, they analyze review data from public records and information to determine each provider’s reputation. Every provider is analyzed based on the number of professional databases reviewing them, their average review score, and the volatility of their ratings.

Expertise.com identifies the experience of each participant too. After their screening processes, they select their finalists based on a provider’s primary area of expertise, the variety of services they offer, and their years of experience. Finally, in order to check each business's professionalism, they do mystery shopping! Their shoppers call each company, identifying themselves as potential customers, to gauge knowledgeability, friendliness, and professionalism.

When it comes to Search Engine Marketing (SEM), one of the most common issues we face as professionals is to choose what's best for our client. Adwords or Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Here is a complete - in depth – analysis that explains the benefits and disadvantages of each tool. We provide real-life examples with cost comparisons and teach everyone when these two can be used together or separately, depending on your business and marketing goal.

What is AdWords

AdWords is part of Google AdSense. The advertising platform that serves millions of businesses across the globe, for more than 15 years, and brought Google (Alphabet INC) to today's market position. Google is one of the top 10 most powerful and wealthy companies in the world, with profits getting close to 1 trillion dollars. Guess where this money is coming from? Well, the main revenue source is Google Ads, or Google Adwords. Whenever you type something on Google in search of a restaurant or a doctor nearby, the ads that appear on the top 3-4 results and on the bottom and at the side, and, and, and...pfff all these are paid ads. A business paid from $1/click up to $150/click in order to appear in that position and gain from your click. Regardless though if you are going to do business with them or not, Google gets their precious money. Sounds bad? Well, it isn’t and let's see why:

When you deal with a strong social media campaign visuals (pictures) are the #1 priority and Instagram is a big proof of that. As of of May 2019, 1.5 billion monthly visitors are using Instagram to view and share photos, with 500 million using it in a daily basis. 71% of Instagram users around the globe are under the age of 35.All online audiences - especially the ones below 35 - are used ads and content poping up from everywhere. A busy instagram feed starts to look like an endless blur and have the opposite results of what you should expect.

Choose carefully the images and the accompanying text that goes along. Visitors and potenial customers have to be intrigued in order to dig further. According to the latest 2019 statistics. 65 percent of users take some kind of action after liking a post on Instagram, such as visiting a website, shopping or at the minimum searching online results.

How to succeed in today's web industry

In my last blog article I described and analyzed the 5 most important factors that someone should consider if he/she wants to have a succesfull website. These rules are personal opinions through my 20+ years experience in this industry and few of them are changing year by year. It's important to understand that these are generic rules for a multi purpose website and that they don't always fit all types of websites or businesses.

Let's take a look now at the other 5 factors:

How important are mobile friendly websites? In today’s market, crucial. The amount of visitors using mobile devices to view websites or search the internet is constantly increasing. According to emarketer in 2016 “… nearly one in 10 US internet users (11.7%) will go online exclusively through a mobile device,” and that number is expected to rise.

This means that if you want your business to be viewed, especially in service industries such as restaurants and hair salons, then you need to have a mobile friendly website or risk losing customers.

On April 21^st 2015 Google changed the way their search engine ranks websites.

How to succeed in today's web industry

There are probably hundreds or thousands of important steps, and factors that someone should consider if he/she wants their website to be succesful. Succesful means incoming traffic and results. Period.

Through my experience i have came up with some final conclusions as to the most important factors for almost any kind of business or cause:

A website landing page is the first page that a user lands on when they visit your website. Statistics are saying that you have less than 5 seconds to grab their attention.

A campaign landing page though is a separate page that is trying to make the visitor take action, such as subscribe to a newsletter, purchase a product, sign up for an event or register to get more info from a business.

Businessess spend thousands of dollars a week on Google AdWords, trying to increase traffic and of course revenue. 

The problem occurs when an ad promotes an offer, but clicking on that ad takes a visitor to a website homepage that makes no mention of the offer. This is a lost opportunity to sustain the initial attention and interest of the user. 

I have been involved with the development and consulting of several startups over the last 15 years. Some of them failed, others managed to stay afloat over time. At one point I even had under my command the biggest Portal in Greece, and few of the most traffic generating websites in the gaming industry worldwide.

While that’s not totally relevant I just wanted to back up my claims with some real achievements and experience. Either way, we got the introduction to this article underway – we will try to figure out the good and the bad startup ideas.What this article will not be is another list of things you need to have to create your own startup. You probably can get tons of those from uncle Google, so let’s not be repetitive and try to dig deeper.

This article is going to be more about the factors you need to take into consideration. Launching a startup is actually not that hard, the tricky part is not letting it die.So let’s begin with a clear -and at the same time hard- question:

Why might you fail?

Apple is one of the most successful corporations of this century. They have been pioneers in the industry, always showing the way for the competition to follow. They have been responsible for revolutionary products like the macbook, iPhone, iPod and the iPad.

More and more consumers are now picking apple products over those of the competition. This has as much to do with superior technology as the ңoolҠfactor that has come to be associated with Apple devices over the years. The tablet market was a creation of Apple and understandably so, they hold most of the market in that segment. In 2012, 63.5% of the devices sold so far in this category were iOS devices. The real war is being fought over in the smart phone market. Even there, Apple holds 32% of the market. That's a very significant number. All in all, 47.04 million iOS devices have been sold so far in Q1, 2012.

The basic rules of Typography is a resubmit from an article of Webdesigner Depot. This article came to my attention few years ago and since then I'm constantly trying to follow all of them. 

When someone visits a website you’ve designed, the odds are that they don’t care much about the colors, images or sounds, they’re immediately looking at the text. No matter how many bells and whistles you’ve built into a website, everyone relies on text to accomplish whatever they’re visiting the site to do. That alone should make typography, the art of arranging type, a priority for any web designer.

In this article we take a look at 10 easy rules to keep in mind when designing your next web project.

A very important cost for any serious business website development, is the cost of the licences for the Content Management System. That cost varries from $2,000 up to $100,000 and this is a really considerable amount to start with your expenses. On the other hand there are hundreds of solutions out there, that TWE strongly supports, with similar results and management possibilities, SEO engines, ecommerce, blogging, etc and the most importan with zero CMS cost at all. Let's see what are the options.