It’s so hard to believe that we are celebrating our 1-year anniversary here in Fredericksburg, Virginia! Our family moved down to Fredericksburg after a year-long search trying to get the heck out of Northern Virginia. I grew up in Fairfax County, but the traffic, high prices, and general mentality can be a bit overwhelming. My husband and I were looking for a slower pace, and a family-friendly community to raise our two girls in – and boy did we ever find it in Fredericksburg. It has been absolutely wonderful living here. Fredericksburg has given us an amazing home, a fantastic community to be a part of, and is proving to be a great location for my web design and marketing business, CreationDepot. […]

Clients are humans too. There. I said it. We all know it’s true but sometimes when they ask us to do the impossible and devolve into demanding demons… or really-scary-deadline-demanding-jerks-who-don’t-realize-you-are-not-a-robot. In light of this, I would ask you to remember something. Ladies and gentlemen… please remember you can push back. If a client wants a deadline that’s unreasonable, for heaven’s sake just SAY so. Don’t destroy yourself with an all-nighter, or give up on what you had already planned! That will make your life miserable and eventually it’ll breed resentment. Truth be told, the client has no idea why one graphic may take 10 minutes but another takes you 10 hours. Saying a **version** of “no” to a client almost never means you’ve lost that client for good, but designers are afraid to put that foot down. If you can save the client every now and again with an 11-hour Hail-Mary pass then that’s awesome, but even when you pull that off you need to be clear that you can’t do that every time – but you’ll happily accept their praise for rockin’ it this time. 🙂 […]

So this all came about because I had gone to order flowers for a client who was in the hospital. Half way thru we found out flowers weren’t accepted in the ICU so we decided to wait until he was moved to another room. Then the stalking began. I’d closed the website, but was being followed around by an ad for 1-800-Flowers literally everywhere I went. Kohl’s, Yahoo, and I believe CNN and Facebook as well. It was a bit creepy!     But I knew why it was happening. When I’d visited 1-800-Flower’s website, they installed a cookie with a tracking code so Google Ads could serve me flower ads wherever they were located – to get me to come back and finish out my order. These kinds of ads that follow you around, they work from a business standpoint extremely well. They’re targeting a warm audience, someone who’s already visited their site and is familiar with their wares. However, there’s no way for an ad to know that the reason you didn’t buy something was because you genuinely just didn’t need it (yet anyway). […]

The short answer: WordPress.com is where WordPress (the company) hosts WordPress sites (much like Wix or SquareSpace). WordPress.org is where you can download WordPress the open-source content management software to use on your site. The easy answer is .com is for beginners, and .org is for developers. It does get confusing because there’s WordPress the company, WordPress the software, and WordPress the service WordPress the company offers that hosts WordPress the software sites. Got it? […]

One of my favorite topics is addressing how users interact with a webpage because there is so my psychology behind it as well as artistic input. This episode deals with buttons specifically, and how to craft the ones on your site so they are appealing the best to your visitors, helping with conversions, and standing out on a busy page. If you’re looking for some direction on how to handle buttons on a landing page, or a general overview, this broadcast is for you. […]