While most of our clients are small business, spam can decrease productivity throughout a business no matter the size. Firewalls are usually not in the budget of a small business, but we like to offer our clients several anti spam solutions before even going live with a website and before considering our firewall solution.

• Don’t List The Email Address On The Site – This is important as spam bots continuously crawl websites through search engines looking for email address variables. If you don’t list the email address than it is unlikely you will receive immediate bulks of spam.

• Hide Email Addresses In Forms – We like to use forms to submit email questions and comments for a business. It enables us to hide and/or encrypt the email address and makes it much easier for customers to contact the company.

• Stay away from common email address such as “Info”, “Sales”, etc. These are common targets of spam bots and will be spammed regardless.

• Free Email Is Great! - Use a free email service such as Gmail. The spam protection is phenomenal and did I mention “FREE”. You can set this account up in Outlook just as any other email account.

For our serious business clients that have several email addresses and prefer the email address to be listed on the site, than we offer a Spam Firewall by Barracuda Networks. It is truly amazing the way it catches spam and viruses.

Here is a brief introduction to our Spam Firewall:

As a verified solution to spam, we have purchased and installed enterprise-based hardware, from which we offer a premium spam/virus filtering service. Please note; as with similar services or products offered by other companies, we can not guarantee a 100% reduction of SPAM and Virus-infected emails. As to the success of this solution in particular, we are excited to share with you the results of one of our local affiliate companies who installed this same hardware at the start of this year. Over the past 6 months they have blocked/filtered over 760,196 SPAM messages and 8,856 e-mails containing Viruses.

Here is a link to the hardware we will be using to provide this service: http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/ (It is the first product listed on the page). In the brief description, you can see what other companies use this product.

This product is offered by us to SFC Design Group clients only. We have limited space on the firewall and reserve it for our clients.

Our long time client Luis of Rezkill fishing team needed a logo idea that he had drawn, to be vector based so it could be printed. We received a hand drawing of his idea and since we know fishing, We knew exactly what he needed in terms of design, colors, etc.

Here is the before and after:

We recently wrote an article on why top ranked sites benefit from Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising such as Google Adwords.  In a recent case study we designed and developed a fishing guide website that was launched in under a week.  The entire industry for the area is extremely sluggish, but we were confident that a highly optimized and research PPC campaign would enhance business consistently.  For this reason, we would rather do PPC marketing, than go after the natural rankings in the initial life of the website.

We first start out with a consultation of the client who in turn knows the particular industry the best.  We find out the area, types of services, etc. and then begin to do our own keyword research.  We use tools such as the Google Adwords keyword tool to investigate the market among many in-house tools developed by our programming staff.

Once we have a high level of education for this particular client’s business and marketing, than we put it together in an Adwords campaign.  We charge a one time setup fee to setup the campaign and then a small maintenance fee to tweak and optimize the campaign over time.

In this case study, we decide to only target keywords that we know (from previous experience) that will convert for a fishing guide.  This will keep ROI up and along with conversions.  Based on the slow industry reports, we don’t have time or money to experiment on keywords that may or may not produce, so for this study we kept to high converting potential only.

In the following screenshot you can see that we are converting each click 15% of the time at a cost of only $11.33 per conversion!  So for every $11.00 or so, this guide is potentially booking a fishing charter.  While the conversion rate varies in each industry and the state of the economy, you can only benefit from having a professional company like ours in your corner, constantly tweaking your marketing dollar.

Not all websites will convert this well due to design issues.  Your website has to look professional and able to easily navigate to your conversions.  We have taken on clients with poorly designed websites in the past, only to see those waste marketing dollars.  Revamps are generally easier than a website from scratch, so please inquire.