Small Business | Akira Media Designs

Instagram Hiding Posts?

I am, by no means, not a master of Instagram. However, I know a social media false info campaign when I see one…

I love doing restaurant websites because they have a built in easily organized content that is super great for search engines and customers. Unfortunately, as easy as it is to do it right, it’s just as easy to get it wrong and there’s one thing that makes me absolutely crazy and it’s the menu. When […]

A Few Words on Free Services

With the announcement of restructuring at Medium, I feel that it’s a good time to point out some of the caveats of “free” services. Getting eyes on your content is an issue. Websites like Medium will get more exposure for you for little to no cost except for your time. This is great, except for […]

New Site: Ramar Transportation

Like a lot of places, Ramar Transportation had someone in-house that built a website for them, but they were ready to move up. Akira Media Designs built a new, responsive website for them with a design that matched who they are. The photo of the tractor trailer on the homepage was a composite of four […]

Adobe Flash — Is it time?

New exploits and Firefox killing it by default has brought Flash back into the spotlight this week for reasons that probably make Adobe cringe. Even Norton did a sponsored Tweet today with friendly instructions on how to disable it in IE, Firefox and Chrome ( No love for Opera anymore, I suppose ). If you’ve […]

Mobilegeddon

(Original Image Source) We’re about a month and a week into Google’s mobile friendly update. A lot of people were in a Gozilla-attack panic mode over this and as a result it’s been a busy two months for me. Things are starting to cool down. Now that the dust is beginning to settle, we’re all […]

What is Responsive Web Design?

The trend towards Responsive Design has been going for a while now, but there’s a good chance that term means absolutely nothing to you. What is Responsive Design and why should you use it when building your website? Hopefully by the time you are finished reading this, you’ll have a good general handle on the concept. What […]

Microsoft Fake Telephone Support Phone Scam

I got a call last night from someone with a fairly heavy accent claiming to be from Microsoft. They were calling to tell me that I had a virus and needed to go on my computer so they could show me where it was infected and how to fix it. Yeah, right. Microsoft is never going […]

Google Authorship is Gone

Google Authorship info is no longer showing up in search results. Glory! I remember the first time I added the appropriate rich snippet code for a client on a blog (at the request of their somewhat questionable SEO company, but that’s a story for another day.) because I thought it was one of the most […]

Microsoft to Drop Support for Older Versions of Internet Explorer

Last week Engadget reported that Microsoft will drop support for old versions of Internet Explorer beginning in January of next year. This means no updates or tech support for anything other than the current version of IE. Business customers that need legacy support for web apps can use IE 11’s Enterprise Mode for backwards compatibility. […]

Copyright 101: You Can’t Use Stuff Without Permission

Image Credit When I worked in television, we occasionally would get a request from a client involving using a popular song on one of their commercials. Our response was always something along the lines of, “You can’t do that without permission or you’ll get a cease and desist letter from or (worse) they’ll just sue […]

New Client: Coastal Hot Tub

We welcomed a new client to the Akira Media Designs family this week: Coastal Hot Tub. This is only the second site we’ve launched using a premade theme and we had to hack the code a little bit to get it to do what we wanted, but the end result is a clean looking […]

Unamused with our conduct, Facebook cracks down

Facebook made an announcement last week that made me pretty happy. I’ve got a really big pet peeve about Facebook business pages that try tricks and manipulations to boost their reach. It bothers me a lot when I see posts ending with things like: “Like this post to show your support for this fallen soldier.” “Comment […]

Restaurant Websites

Today I’m working on a website for a nice Italian restaurant in San Diego. I love working on menu pages for restaurant websites because it’s a good example of well organized content that is easy to format. I come across a lot of restaurants that use PDF’s or even straight images ( ack!) to display […]

Welcoming a New Member of the Family

We’re welcoming a new member of the Akira Media family to the wonderful online world of the Internet… or as George W. would say, “The Internets”. Dr. H. L. Keith III, DDS is a third generation dentist in the Wilmington area and we’re proud to give you this site that presents information about his practice […]

The Three Components That Make Your Website

While working with clients, I find that there can be some confusion on what is required for a website, so I want to take a little time to spell out what the different components of are and how they work together. Today I’m going to cast some broad strokes and talk about the three main […]

Three Reasons to Buy Your Own Domain Name

It may feel like it’s something you can’t do, but you can & should purchase your own domain name. Here are three quick, compelling reasons why. You will save money Granted, it’ll only be a few dollars per year, but the rich don’t stay rich by just giving their hard-earned cash away, right? Might as […]

ADT Allegedly Caught Buying Endorsements

ADT has reached an agreement with the FTC after they were allegedly caught paying bloggers for endorsements of their products on TV without disclosing the relationship. Aside from it just being plain creepy and obviously wrong, the laws are very clear on this matter. If there is any sort of payment made, it must be disclosed. […]

Attention vs. Connecting

I frequently bemoan the state of online marketing today. We have such a great opportunity as small businesses to really connect with our customers to make them more than just anonymous one time consumers of our wares and make them part of our families. Unfortunately the way most social media streams are managed, we seem […]

Facebook Contest Rules

We all know that more “likes” on Facebook means better value for our Facebook business pages. In the never ending quest for more likes, it’s tempting to run a contest, but before you do, you need to know that Facebook has a few rules for such things. Some are obvious (“you are responsible for the […]