It’s come to my attention that there is a scammer out there who is impersonating my business and reaching out to you, my favorite clients, using the email address info.hunterrook@gmail.com or hello.rowdyferret@gmail.com to try to sell you bogus “updates” or other “compliance” services. They scraped my photo from linkedin and found you as a known client who is more likely to trust my name. What a jerk!

We love our clients and hate to see them get taken advantage of. If you ever get a suspicious email about your website please don’t hesitate to reach out. It’s always free to have one of us take a look for you and send you a quick reply: yes, this is a scam phishing attempt. You can ignore it. Or, no, that’s a legitimate renewal from your domain name registration. You should pay it.

Scammers like to target website owners, because they don’t always know the tech jargon and there’s a fear of breaking your site if you don’t do whatever needs to be done. That’s why it’s so important to have a trusted partner to help keep an eye on things and let you know what is a real need and what is a fraud.

Be suspicious, don’t be a victim!

Scammers have gotten more and more sneaky, so please double check the “from” address on any unusual emails- my team will always use name@rowdyferretdesign.com email addresses. If you see anything suspicious, please don’t hesitate to reach out and confirm with us directly via phone, email, or text. You can also report phishing attempts as spam to your email provider.
Here are some examples I’ve received from clients who have been targeted. If you learn of a new scam or suspicious pattern, please share it with us so we can help warn others. 
I am still absolutely here for you if you ever need website support, I just want to make sure you keep your eyes open and don’t get scammed.

(Yes, you need it!)

You’ve probably heard that little factoid about how mobile internet use is now bigger than desktops. But what does that mean for your business & for your website?

Well, it’s hard to know without looking at your statistics (and this is definitely something we can do in our free 30 minute consultation!) exactly how much *your* market share is made of mobile. If this number is super high, it means you are either doing a great job at reaching these users, or that a lot of users are seeing a potentially weird and wonky version of your site. Make sure you’re in the first camp and not the second, with a mobile overhaul.

A responsive site I designed for esipfed.org

Do I have to re-do my entire site?

Not necessarily. There are two kinds of sites out there which are mobile-friendly: Responsive sites and mobile-optimized sites. What’s the difference?

Finally, there are the not-mobile friendly sites. You know the ones- when you look at it on a smaller screen, stuff gets cut off, and on an iPhone you better be ready to pinch and drag all over the place to make the text readable.

So, which kind of site do you have?

Play around with your website on different devices, and on your computer, drag the bottom-right corner around to see what happens- does it scale gracefully or just get cropped?

There’s nothing to be ashamed of if your site isn’t mobile-optimized yet. It probably means you have been around for a long time, which is fabulous! But, even the best site needs regular maintenance and care to keep it up to date. It’s even more important now with Google penalizing sites which are not mobile-friendly by ranking them lower in mobile search results.

Okay, I want to reach my mobile users better! How do we do it?

Well, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Sometimes you can hire a professional to modify your existing theme to make it responsive (using those media queries we talked about before), and sometimes it’s best to just change themes altogether and use one which was made to be mobile-friendly from the start. If you are on a budget and neither of those is an option, you can download a plugin to help make a mobile-version of your site fairly quickly, though this will only help your phone users and might leave tablets out in the cold.

I hope this has been a helpful bit of background into your new and improved mobile site. I’d love the chance to help your transformation. When you’re ready to get serious about reaching your mobile users drop me a line- we can together make a plan of attack that reaches all of your users without breaking the bank. Your first 30 minutes of consultation are free!