With Black Friday coming up the day after tomorrow and Cyber Monday just around the corner, I thought I’d let you all in on a sweet little deal I like to call Merchant Warehouse.  Before starting on my Sprocket journey, I had no clue who Merchant Warehouse was or why it was super important to have such a great company for payment processing.  Now I realize it makes all the difference in the world.  Forget, for a second, about the loads of other benefits MW offers –let’s skip to the obvious benefit, they guarantee that they will save you money.   Literally, if they can’t save you money by switching to them, they will give you $100 for your time.  I’d be hard pressed to find a company that works that hard to make sure that the customer is happy.  One thing that I’ve found when dealing with them, they care if the customer is happy.

Since surveys show that 54% of us check our phones even when lying in bed ( Lookout.com ), the chances are very high that your customers are mobile users, too. OK, lying in bed doesn't sound very mobile, but they're using their mobile phones then. Think "convenient", "personal", "handy." Then think, "is my business ready for them?" Take a look at these statistics – and this cool way to display them!

This article has been updated on 3/21/2019 with the article entitled “Keep Your Website Content Fresh to Stay Searchable"

When planning out how you’re going to pull your website together (and even after you already have it all together!) remember something very important, the content on your site is absolutely one of the most important components.  I’m not going to pretend that all of you know what SEO means, because I didn’t know what it meant before either.  SEO is search engine optimization.  Basically, search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. are out there scouring the web trying to find some relevant, fresh, and substantial content to fill their searches with.  What does this mean for your business website? UPDATE YOUR CONTENT, do it often, and keep it relevant to what your customers are looking for. 

You're involved in running your business and don't have time to spend worrying about how to make your website look good on mobile devices. We get that. But there are some basics that deserve your attention. 

Back from an informative DotNetNuke World 2012, TechMan is inspired. 

"We're the hit of the conference! Everybody was talking about showing websites on small screens. Miniature is in, man!"

"Right you are, old chum, The world needs small websites." Sprocketeer returned. "And we're just the size, er, guys to do it. Let's get busy! We're going to need to develop a shrink ray..." 

TechMan stops our Gallant Gearhead. "Wait a minute. I think we can build them without a shrink ray. Here's how." 

Think you’re ready to take the jump and design your own website?  What’s next?  Choosing a color palette!  This is a much more important step to designing your website than you may think.  Arguably, one of the most important aspects of any design is its colors.  Sure, you want to gain some attention with your color choices but, you also want to make sure that it’s positive attention. 

There are certainly many cool new modules out there for social interaction. And then there's the tried and true ones. Like Forums, for instance.

Forums let you know via email if a new post has happened. Not yet so with the new 6.2 journal. But the journal has a really simple way to add a photo to a post, and the forum has image manager, very powerful but way overly complicated for a quick forum post. We'd like to change that, with the help of the DNN community.