Web Design and SEO Blog

Those of you who accept electronic payments through your website probably have a merchant account that gives you access to a provisional line of credit so that you can quickly and securely process your customers’ credit and debit cards and get paid for your goods and services. Businesses that sell a large inventory of product can benefit from having not one, but two or more merchant accounts in order to get the best rate, security and manage their incoming transactions.

Why open two merchant accounts?
There are many rules and regulations when it comes to processing payments and while there are cases where you will need multiple merchant accounts in order to be underwritten, there are several business reasons to separate your accounts as well. Here are a few other situations when this may be desired:

• Accounts for specific services — Some businesses prefer to separate segments of their business into separate accounts, whether to keep income separate or to keep track of specific products. At JTech, for example, we have a separate merchant account specifically for our clients' domain renewal transactions.
  
• Avoiding chargebacks — The description listed on a merchant account is typically the same as what will show on a customer’s bank or cardholder statement. If a customer doesn’t recognize the name that appears with the transaction, they may initiate a chargeback (costing you money and time). Some merchants can open another account to help avoid this, making sure to name it something familiar that the cardholder will recognize, which can reduce the risk of disputed charges, keeping their customers at ease when they see their statement.
  
• Different business models – Businesses accepting payment from more than one location, such as in-store (where the card is usually present) and online (where the physical card is not present.) Depending on the type of business and the products being sold, two merchant accounts might be required by your processor and/or acquiring bank.
  

Merchant agreements are a long and complex subject, and it is important for you to understand the risks associated with your products and talk openly with your payment processing partner to ensure you have the right accounts set up. We invite you to read our in-depth article about credit card processing, and would be happy to put you in touch with our merchant services provider and business partner, Matt Risley at REM Solutions. All website projects with JTech include an analysis of your merchant account to find out the very best setup for your needs. Feel free to give us or Matt a call if you have any questions.

Google Search Console (formally known as Google Webmaster Tools) is where you measure your website’s performance, identify any issues, edit the content you want indexed, monitor links and see how visitors are arriving at your site. Its is a valuable tool for website owners and digital marketers who help monitor this data for businesses. We’d like to keep you updated on a few improvements Google has made to the Insights, Workflow and Feedback sections of Search Console and how they will help you.

Insights
Insights is a tool that monitors issues that occur while Google is crawling your site. This update has the intelligence to determine the root cause of any issues that were discovered and presents suggestions of how to identify and fix them.

Workflow
It is now possible to share SEO problems with your team members, improving communication within a multi-person marketing team. You can pick up a task to fix an issue and assign it to a team member. For example, if the crawling issue has to do with the website’s code, you can quickly identify the solution, and send the task over to a developer to fix.

Feedback Loops
After fixes are applied to a site, it takes about 48 hours for Google to re-crawl your site and determine if the solution was successful or not. With the improvement of feedback loops, there is still a wait time, but you get a preview of the change in action so that you can tell right away whether the change worked or not without having to wait until the re-crawl is complete.

Future Updates
In the near future, Google hopes to further eliminate lag time after crawling your site, making data available in real-time. Currently in BETA is a new feature called the Index Coverage report, where you will be able to view data about indexed pages, your sitemap submission progress and if any issues occur. If your website was developed with AMP (accelerated mobile pages), Fixing Flow is another feature in BETA that will help you identify abnormalities in the HTML Google uses to quickly load pages on mobile devices.

Conclusion
Google is consistently working to improve Search Console, offering more and more tools to monitor your online business so that you can improve your visibility in search results as well as fix issues as soon as they occur. If you need any help monitoring your website analytics, contact us — we have a skilled digital marketing team ready to help you apply SEO tools that will allow your online business to thrive.

Optimization techniques.
In order to get the best possible results, it is important to optimize your images. To do so, we utilize three programs: ImageOptim (for JPGs and PNGs), ImageAlpha (for PNGs) and Scour (for SVGs).

Optimizing JPGs
ImageOptim reduces the file size of JPGs and PNGs. For large images, such as the ones we use for background panels, we cap dimensions at 1600x1200px. For content photos such as an image inserted in a blog article, we cap dimensions between 200-800px wide. After resizing to its final resolution, the image is output in Photoshop using the best quality available. Each time we compress the image it loses some fidelity, so we prefer to rely solely ImageOptim for compression rather than having Photoshop do a pass. Photoshop is noticeably less efficient: its “save for web” at quality 65 produces an image of equal file size but poorer fidelity than ImageOptim’s quality 85.

Retina JPGs
When targeting retina or other high-density displays, we've found it works best to save a single JPG at twice the resolution, but use higher compression, around 50-60 in ImageOptim, which can produce a high-quality image that looks good on both retina and standard, lower-density displays. This technique allows us to use a single asset for retina and standard displays rather than cutting and loading multiple versions and without quadrupling the size of our images.

Optimizing PNGs
For PNGs, we output from Photoshop using PNG 24 in their “save for web” option, then run it through ImageOptim. If it detects that the image is using fewer than 256 colors, ImageOptim will losslessly convert the image to a PNG 8, a simpler file format that can produce very light-weight files. With ImageOptim, our final output of an image without too many complexities (minimal color, simple shapes, and resolution less than 200x200px) can range in size from 15kb down to under 1kb.

Optimizing larger PNGs
For more complex images, if we can’t produce a file between 15kb and 50kb with ImageOptim, we use ImageAlpha. ImageAlpha is used to process PNGs from a PNG 24 (millions of colors) to a PNG 8 (256 colors maximum), changing the image from lossless to lossy, ultimately aiming for the one with the smallest number of colors. Lossiness in this format primarily means strategic refinement of the color palette, eliminating the least-noticeable colors to produce an image that still looks great while reducing its complexity.

After exporting from ImageAlpha, we run it through ImageOptim so it can be optimized further.

Optimizing SVGs
When it comes to SVGs, we reduce as much complexity as possible before we export the image from Illustrator. An often tedious process due to their size, we first try to reduce the number of layers to a minimum while still accurately displaying the artwork. It is then saved as an SVG in Illustrator and optimized with a program called Scour. We use this automator script to make it a bit easier to use in macOS, allowing you to right-click an SVG file in the Finder and optimize the SVG through the Services menu. We often use font files for vector graphics that are single-color with a program called Glyphs, a topic covered more thoroughly here.

Conclusion
Properly optimizing imagery is just another way we can improve the performance of our websites, prevent browser bloat, reduce server and bandwidth resource usage, hasten page load time, keep the development infrastructure clean and provide a much more desirable experience for the end-user. We hope this exploration of our experience with JPG, PNG and SVG file types, image compression and quality tools are a resource for you as we continually refine our own process to produce websites of high caliber.

As a part of their newest browser version that includes security enhancements, Tracking Prevention and additional features, Safari is now blocking videos that automatically play on websites. Aside from being annoying, videos that autoplay when you visit a website drain bandwidth and data.

This new Safari feature keeps all videos on pause until you choose to play them, allowing the user to have control over their experience. Because video ads are a huge source of revenue, many publishers are up in arms about this change — when videos play automatically, even those not watching are included in audience numbers, providing these publishers with skewed numbers to use to sell more ads on their site. No matter your stance, it is clear Safari is targeting two things in order to benefit users: intrusive advertising methods, and negative mobile experiences.