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One thing small businesses struggle most with is brand reputation. Specifically, bad reviews. One bad review can really do a number on your reputation across the internet, depending on what it says and how it was received. While we do have guidelines on what to do with bad reviews and how to best handle them, we always advise our clients to let us respond rather than have the client respond themselves. Recently we had a couple of clients who did come down with bad response/bad review syndrome. The first case was a bad review that our client wanted to respond…

It’s 2018. People are sick of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. People are tired of “the algorithm” and yearn for the old days of seeing their posts in order from their friends. If you’ve spent any time on Instagram this weekend, you may have noticed that a new social media app has gone viral, and with good reason.

We build a lot of WordPress pages. A lot of them. In fact, WordPress is our preferred page building method due to the sheer versatility of everything. WordPress has only gotten better with time, and many users will find WordPress to be intuitive and easy to use — even for beginners. Because of this, we’re often weighing out if we should use plugins, and which ones we should use. Here are a few of our favorites we use: Contact Form 7 The top most installed contact form plugin on the WordPress plugin repository. There’s no wonder on this one, though….

When making websites, we understand that a website we build for you today may be outdated as soon as a year from page launch. Because the internet is a part of technology, new things and ways to consume data and information routinely come out. A page that we made five years ago may not have the same functionality as a page that is created today. That’s why we offer website development services to update your brand website and attempt to add functionality where none exists. Many times we do this to conform with best practices for responsive website building, since…

I just went through an interesting couple of hours. On top of being a web developer, social media manager, and general many-hatted SEO adventurer, I’m also a freelance illustrator. Anyone who is an illustrator, photographer, or visual artist knows that image quality is really, really important — especially when displaying portfolios and the like. It’s with this in mind when I’m developing for visually creative clients that I keep quality in my thoughts always (as well as compression optimization keeping the page load speed in mind). I ran into something very curious, though. I noticed on my own portfolio website,…

Break Free 603 LLC is an escape room in Amherst, NH. The owner, Keith, did a fantastic job using MobiRise to create a nice starter website with necessary information. We call it a “starter” site, because as you know, in-browser website builders usually aren’t all that great. He did a good job of getting the information out on the web so people could find him and the escape room. With that being said, there were some issues. He wanted us to take over updating the website as he couldn’t commit to constantly updating the website. The problem with this was…

Recently we learned that Instagram is testing out, in select markets, a separate messaging app rather than packaging it directly inside of its app. Most of us remember when Facebook made this move a little while back, taking messages out of their colossal Facebook app and bringing it into its own app — enabling the obnoxious chat heads and frustrating people everywhere. Personally, I am of the belief that we have too many individual areas where you can direct message or private message someone. On any given day, I can receive and respond to messages on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook…

EcoSource LLC, who provides cleaning services to business of all sizes in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, became a hasOptimization client in the summer of 2017. When we take on new clients, we often “inherit” sites that can be plagued with problems. Most of the time, sites can easily be modified or “fixed” to bring them up to speed. With EcoSource, we inherited an older WordPress-based site. While it was great that it was WordPress, it hadn’t been updated in roughly five years. That meant it was running a very old version of WordPress. While many issues can sometimes be resolved…

When we take on new clients, often times they hand over DIY projects and websites to us to continue working on. While we are all for taking responsibility into your hands and trying out the DIY route, we often have to explain to our clients why sometimes DIY website builders aren’t the greatest things. Sure, if you need a basic web presence and need a decent easy-to-use and easy-to-make website in a pinch, we applaud your effort of using a web builder online. Still, understanding some of the shortcomings of these website builders can help you make a more informed…

You may have heard a bit about net neutrality recently. The reason for this being that the FCC unveiled a plan yesterday (11/22/2017) to roll back protections put in place in 2015 to preserve net neutrality. Many people understand what this means, and others do not. This is where I’m going to derail: this is different from our usual calm down, internet posts, as calming down is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing. You should be freaking out. Everyone should be freaking out. This is a huge problem, and you should be freaking out That being said,…