Up from the Depths...

What's your Black Friday party like? Follow these guidelines and you'll be dancing to the music for the rest of the holiday sales season.

Carousel sliders are still popular despite years of lackluster effectiveness. It’s best to eliminate them entirely from your site. We’ll tell you what to replace them with, and if absolutely necessary how to make sure they do the least amount of damage possible.

You sell everywhere, but where do you have to collect and pay sales tax? It's all about nexus, and we'll break it down for you here.

In a no-holds-barred knock-down, drag-out cage match between four of the top ecommerce brands, we feel that Shopify offers the most mature, well-balanced, and economical service to companies looking to sell their products online.

Your visitors’ ability to get the most out of your website depends on their being able to shoulder the cognitive load required by your site. Since you can’t affect their cognitive load capacity, the best thing you can do for your site in this area is to make sure the cognitive load you introduce is as light as possible.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a powerful tool to help you understand how visitors use your website, so if you’re currently running Google’s Universal Analytics, you should switch to GA4 as soon as possible.

It’s worth it to engage in continual customer retention activities so you’ll have happier customers while maximizing your profits.

Your site attracts blind visitors in addition to sharks and their blind plaintiffs, so you should perform screen reader testing on your site.

ChatGPT and other AI tools can help with some of business' written content, but their implementation can be tricky, and it is likely ChatGPT will transform rather than replace copywriters.

Learn why and how you should enhance Your e-commerce business through Jitterbit’s integration and automation solutions.

It’s worth it to engage in continual customer retention activities so you’ll have happier customers while maximizing your profits.

My journey in the Accessible Internet Rally was illuminating on a number of fronts, but it would have been worth it even if I hadn't learned anything. The world needs more accessible sites!

If the contrast ratios throughout your site are high enough, it’ll make it easy for all your visitors to have a great experience and want to come back.

To give your customers what they want, you need to offer them a customer portal. To get what you want (a deepened relationship with them) you need to make your portal custom, with your brand and your voice, and make sure that it’s accessible to all.

Since SMS marketing is far more effective than the other options, you should make the effort to learn how to do it well, and make sure that you are using it in a compliant and well planned way.

Among all the other things you need to do to get your ecommerce store up and running, it’s most right, profitable, and safe that you also make your site accessible to people with disabilities.

Learn how cosmetics brand FlutterHabit optimized fulfillment and scaled up its growth using ShipBob with the help of SeaMonster Studios.

The government incentivizes businesses to become accessible by offering the Disabled Access Credit to make their sites fully accessible. Find out how you can tap into it!

The Black Friday weekend will only mean all it can to your ecommerce store if you take the steps now, months before, to lay the groundwork for that to happen: build your contact list, build your contacts’ trust, and optimize your website for conversion, sales, and accessibility.

The government incentivizes businesses to become accessible by offering the Disabled Access Credit to make their sites fully accessible. Find out how you can tap into it!

Buying a new product for the first time won't feel to your customers like jumping out of a plane if you include reviews on your site.

Eco-friendly packaging is a great way for individuals and businesses to help preserve the planet. The future looks better with eco-friendly packaging.

Before you can sell anything on your ecommerce store, you obviously have to set it up with your products. What might not be so obvious are some of the steps to do that most effectively. Let's get into that!

Video marketing has come a long way from the era of TV ads to the present day of Youtube, TikTok, and Instagram. Use it to add value to your business.

If you think it’s time to take your business online, we agree with you, and hopefully this series on the Big Picture can help you as you do.

Want to get into the subscriptions game? We at SeaMonster Studios applaud you. We think it’s a great idea. Yes, there are some things to take into consideration, as we pointed out in our last post, but overall subscriptions offer a great chance to compound your sales in a relatively easy way. Here’s how you get started.

You’ve set your ecommerce store up completely and it’s humming along. Great work! With all the logistics of manufacturing, sourcing, distributing, copywriting, advertising, managing client relationships and everything else, your mind is reeling, and you wonder how you can possibly keep all the plates spinning at once, much less add any more to the mix.

In early 2020, the zoo went from never taking online admission sales to having to rely on them to stay open. Thanks to their new site, they were able to comply with Governor’s orders. In fact, on the day the site launched, they were able to make advance tickets for their biggest fundraiser of the year, the Issaquah Reindeer Festival, available online.

Upsells increase customer lifetime value and AOV. Here’s how you can leverage reviews to create powerful upsell campaigns every single time.

Our accessibility series to this point has explored some generalities of website accessibility, but now let’s get into some of the nuts and bolts of one of the most common things I see that make sites less accommodating to users of assistive technologies: an inaccessible menu.

You’ve worked to ensure your site is as accessible as possible; the next step is to add an accessibility statement to tell what you've done. Learn how and why to write one.

You’re looking a shark (lawyer) in the eye, trying to stare it down, but you’re struck by the irony that seeing is the whole problem in the first place. The lawsuit brought against you says that your website discriminates against blind folks. What do you do?

Paul and Lisa talk about how Bumpin Blends started, overcame challenges, and scaled their business up to get to where they are today. Check out the interview, and then check out their website at bumpinblends.com.

The sharks are circling you, but the letter they sent you didn’t mention anything about auditory challenges, so our last installment of the series left you gasping in the water, and grasping at straws rather than a life preserver. Actually, though, it probably left you standing stock-still, hoping the sharks won’t see you to attack.

By the end of this three-step process, you’ll have addressed the various issues you face. It’s impossible to instantaneously fix everything about your website that doesn’t meet WCAG standards, but you should move forward on it, and as Wes says, document all the steps you take. In this blog post, I’ll cover what I consider the easiest prong of your compliance efforts, which is to make your site fully accessible to someone who is deaf or hard of hearing.

If you followed our advice in the first two articles in this series, you’ve got some splendid images for your page or post now, and they’re properly sized to make the biggest impact without slowing your page load time too much. Great job! But you’re not quite done yet, unless you want to expose yourself to potential legal problems.

Welcome to the second installment of our Seeing is Believing series. Now you’ve got a few stunning images you want to include on your website to draw people in and get them interested enough in what you have to say to actually read what you’ve written.

So how do you get your images right? Where do you get them, how do you recognize them when you find them, and what are some of the considerations for including them in your site?

If you’ve followed our quick and dirty method for producing your website content, you’ve committed yourself to writing the content before you begin with your web developer. You’ve come up with the questions you want your viewers to know the answers to, and produced a lot of words to answer them. Now you'll want to cut it back to the essentials. Learn how!

Setting up a refined starting point for rapid Shopify app construction from concept to MVP.

You’re almost ready to grab your visitors by the hand and draw them through the ether of the internet to stroll with you along the delightful riverbank of your business. Before they know it, they’ll be as entranced with the business as you are.

Setting up a refined starting point for rapid Shopify app construction from concept to MVP.

Setting up a refined starting point for rapid Shopify app construction from concept to MVP.

Your React.js (or .tsx) app doesn't have to be 100% reasonable yet but that shouldn't stop you from creating new components and features in Reason. Using React.js and ReasonReact components together is simple. You could say they were made for each other... or that one will eventually cannibalize the other.

Getting your web project off the ground can feel like the haphazard toss of a twelve-sided die—you’re probably surrounded by nerds, are up way past your bedtime...

You know your website’s main purpose is: to sell your services and products, build your credentials, and engage and convert potential clients but how do you go about best ensuring that your site is accomplishing all of this for your business?

Why does SeaMonster Studios develop with ReasonML? Because we prioritize simplicity, pragmatism, performance, scalability, happy and healthy developers, and satisfied clients.

Leaving behind the ghosts from your past, you now understand why it’s vitally important to the success of your website, and more especially your budget, to hammer out your content as a first step...

The right technology provides the foundation for a fast, brand-focused, cohesive user experience –  the polish that some sites have, yet you can’t put a finger on exactly why.

A really good agency, however, will strongly caution you that starting on the design of any website without content will extend the amount of time it takes to finish...

Look, we know you’re not a hater, but your non-WCAG compliant website may be making people feel otherwise.

During this pandemic, we'll continue to offer round the clock security and support for your websites, build great products, and create helpful solutions for you and your team as we all get through this together.

There are lots of hot takes out there that email is all but dead... chances are you’re reading this because I sent you an email and enticed you over here...

You don’t run your business without evaluating and evolving. You’re where you’re at because you’ve shown a knack for being flexible and responsive...

Keep professional-grade WordPress sites fast, secure, and scalable. We've got good reason to recommend that your web environment doesn't suck...

Annual online sales topped $1 trillion (with a T) in 2016. The way you ship your product could affect how much of that spend you get...

Getting your web project off the ground can feel like the haphazard toss of a twelve-sided die—you’re probably surrounded by nerds, are up way past your bedtime...