Tag: website advice

  • Reddit experienced a major outage yesterday, and our 5 tips for what to say to customers when your website goes down

    Reddit experienced a major outage yesterday, and our 5 tips for what to say to customers when your website goes down

    Reddit was down for several hours yesterday due to an “internal systems issue”. While the mobile version of the site fluctuated between being semi usable to being completed down, the desktop version was unusable for nearly five hours.

    Outages like this that occur to major website are a newsworthy event, as users flock to social media to report the outage and speculate on the cause. A fix was implemented and the site slowly came back up just before 7:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. By the time it was back up it had already been reported on by major tech news sites such as the Verge, Apple Insider, TechCrunch and more.

    We’ve discussed outages before on this site because as we just said, they’re newsworthy events, but what about when your company’s website goes down?

    It might be less news worthy than Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, Twitter etc. having an outage but depending on the type of business you’re in it may still be noticeable to your customers if your website has a major outage.

    When something goes wrong there’s often a knee jerk reaction to move along and pretend it never happened, but outages these days often go hand in hand with cyber threat events and moving along mums the word may leave your customers with the wrong idea (and rightfully concerned).

    If you’re in a business sector that saves customer data at all, and there aren’t many that aren’t, it’s always good to be transparent when you have a major outage. Even if your website was down briefly it still might have been noticed by some and it’s best to keep ahead of the rumor mill.

    Here are our five tips for what to say to your customers when your website experiences an outage:

    1. If the outage is ongoing, update your social media. Customers often look to your social media pages for news about your business and this will be the first place many will check to find out what’s going on. You don’t have to cover everything about the outage, a summary of what’s happening and that you’re aware of it will be enough.
    2. Let your customers know how they can reach if you needed (especially if going through your website is how customers usually contact you). Having an email address available specifically for customer concerns is a good idea.
    3. Also send an email proactively, especially if the outage extends longer than a day. Not every user will check social media, sending an email covers the rest of your digital bases for letting customers know.
    4. Be sure to post an update when the issue is resolved. Again, it’s best to stay ahead of your own narrative for outages within your business, posting an update and a brief description of what the issue was is a good idea.
    5. Finally, if your outage was the result of a breach, follow state and country guidelines for notifying customers of any data leaks that may have occurred.

    Your business reputation can be affected by major outages, we wrote an article on how to protect your reputation and recover. You can find it here.

    Providing advice like this is a service that comes with being a Valley Techlogic customer, here are four other benefits to being a Valley Techlogic customer.

    4 Reasons to Choose Valley TechlogicReach out today to learn more.

    Looking for more to read? We suggest these other articles from our site.

    This article was powered by Valley Techlogic, an IT service provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://x.com/valleytechlogic.

  • 5 Ways to Establish your Business Presence Online

    5 Ways to Establish your Business Presence Online

    New Twitter owner and billionaire Elon Musk recently announced he may be opening up the “Blue Check” for $8 a month, rather than the rigorous process you had to go through to potentially get it before.

    For most platforms, establishing your business is not a simple monthly charge. It can take time and effort to build an audience on social media or gain traffic for your website. Luckily, the effort you put into one often helps the others, and you don’t need to be an SEO expert to get started.

    The average person spends 8 hours a day doing digital activities, there is no shortage of time or eyes to view the content you create but it is a competitive market now (it’s estimated 252,000 new websites are created daily).

    How do we definite an online presence? It’s not merely existing online, while just having a website or social media page may get you traffic you can still do things to increase that traffic. Your online presence has three key components: visibility, credibility, and reputation.

    Yes, even reputation is a factor that comes in when you’re trying to get your website “ranked” on Google. By ranked we mean having a place in search engine results when a potential customer types in a keyword phrase.

    You want to protect your online reputation by posting content that is relevant to your business, if you’re in refrigerator sales the bulk of your content should be about refrigerators not the latest trendy outwear for the 2023 season. Trying to gain traffic by “tricking’ people into clicking will reduce your reputation and your ability to creep up in the search engine results.

    On a similar note, credibility is another factor and you can greatly amplify that by connecting with other websites in the form of “backlinks”, basically they link to your website and you link to theirs. In our refrigeration example, if you sell refrigerators but don’t repair them sharing links with another business that does would improve your businesses credibility online and give you a boost from whatever traffic that other business sends your way.

    Finally, visibility is what happens when you combine your efforts in improving your reputation and credibility online by posting and sharing valuable content to your audience. There’s a world of difference that happens traffic wise when you appear on the first page of Google vs the 2nd page and beyond.

    It doesn’t stop with optimizing your website though, here are 10 other things to work on to improve your online presence and give your business a boost in traffic that could lead to a boost in customer conversions:

    1. Have an easy to navigate site: The first is a no brainer, if your website is clunky or slow to load people won’t stick around to see what you’re selling. Google has a page speed tool that can give you some insight on how your website stacks up.
    2. Start a blog: If you’re not currently writing a blog (like this) then you’re missing out on a weekly (or daily, or monthly, whatever works for your schedule) injection of new keywords to your website. Landing pages are great but they’re one and done, you can strengthen your online presence by adding new content about your business through a blog.
    3. Post on social media too: You don’t need to be on every social media platform, some may not be relevant to your business. We encourage you to think about the platforms where your customers are likely to be, and then post daily on those platforms. You can create simple marketing graphics with a tool like Canva which practically does the work for you.
    4. Use hashtags too: Hashtags allow you to connect your content to people who enjoy the same content or are interested in a specific topic. Going back to our refrigerator example, if there’s a new model from a popular brand then using that brand name as a hashtag could make sense in the announcement post about it.
    5. Don’t ignore business directories: If you’re struggling to find a way to share links with other websites, starting with the free business directories is one of the best ways to improve your online presence and have your business linked from somewhere else. Start with the big traffic sites like Google My Business, Facebook, and Bing.

    Wondering what makes a good website? Here are 6 bonus tips:

    Click to view the full size version.

    Trying to work on your online presence can be difficult if the technology you use in your business Isn’t up to the task. Imagine taking the time to write out that first blog post and your computer crashes, you may be done with it before you even get started.

    Valley Techlogic can help you with your technology goals, and having a service plan with us is like working on any of the topics we covered in this blog, you will see a net overall improvement across the board. Learn more with a free consultation today.

    Looking for more to read? We suggest these other articles from our site.

    This article was powered by Valley Techlogic, an IT service provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://x.com/valleytechlogic.