Happy New Year!

2016 was a very good year for The Ian Scott Group as we took on new clients and worked on new projects for existing clients. We were really excited to complete several large projects as well as help the local community in promoting Orangeville’s largest event, the Orangeville Blues & Jazz Festival.

We’ve been attending the Orangeville Blues Fest every year since it began and so it was quite an honour to be asked to help out with their social media campaign. What a great way to mix our love of music with some of the things we do, all for a wonderful community cause! The Festival, which his held annually during the first weekend of June, had an especially great turnout in 2016. We’re looking forward to helping again in 2017 to bring out the crowds for this weekend of free music featuring awesome performers.!

Other Highlights Of 2016

A big project that we worked on was to create a plan and develop an updated website for the Association of Ontario Library Technicians. The website features a full e-commerce component where existing members may pay online for their membership renewal dues in addition to new library technicians and students applying for both general membership and the option of joining a local chapter.

In addition, we helped with solutions to streamline their annual conference applications and payments with real-time credit card processing. The website also features a “members only” area where news and other documents may be shared.

In 2016, we also took on new clients in the United Kingdom! We assisted several wedding photographers with their Local SEO and helped to bring their websites up to standards which included implementing SSL. This is going to be an important consideration for all websites in the future as Google and other search engines will be favouring websites that communicate with browsers securely and that have valid SSL certificates configured. It’s something you may want to consider for your own website, and we’ll have more on that shortly.

The issue of security and websites that are not properly maintained and/or updated regularly was also a big factor in 2016. A local community organization discovered that their website had been badly hacked and turned to us for help. In addition, backups had not been regularly done so we had to work with what we had while also investigating just how the breach occurred. We are happy to say that we were able to get their website back up and working correctly in a timely fashion and provided advice on updates and backups.

We had several new clients during 2016 that came to us due to having their web presence compromised. In some situations, it required a complete rebuild of their website as the existing one was so old, there really was no point in trying to fix it. In addition, those older websites were not responsive and did not render well on small devices such as tablets and smart phones.

Larry Kurtz is the founder of the Orangeville Blues & Jazz Festival, and he also happens to operate an awesome business called Kurtz Millworks. We were really happy to help Larry out with his website and we’re also now proud to call him a friend. He’s a gem for the local community, not only for his vision years ago in creating the annual music festival, but for his own musical and artistic talents. His business provides Victorian architectural woodworking and they have become known as “The Old Home Experts.” You might want to check out their website and see what they do!

Toward the end of the year, we were very happy to help out Johanis Karate School with both their website and hosting needs. Like many small businesses, they were being taken advantage by a well-known marketing agency that is trying to survive through the digital age but their expertise used to be in door to door printed material. With exorbitant monthly fees but a website that was barely responsive, it was time for the school to move on. It has been a real pleasure working with JKS and we love their martial arts teaching philosophy!

Looking To 2017

We’re working on some exciting new projects to be launched during 2017 – some involve present clients that need to upgrade their websites while others include new clients that have been referred to us. We’re looking forward to further growth this year and assisting present and new clients with the rapidly changing technologies that occur and how it can help them grow their own businesses.

We’ll have more news on this as these new projects are launched throughout the year – and our goal is to make 2017 the best year ever! Not only for us, but also for our clients as well!