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New Year’s Website Resolutions: January Tune-Ups That Pay Off All Year

An agenda open on a desk with "Happy New Year!" written on the middle of the right page in black ink. A black pen sits next to the agenda.

A new year often encourages many of us to reflect and make some kind of positive change, whether it’s to exercise more regularly, give ourselves more time for that hobby, learn a new skill, or stick to just one coffee in the morning. The annual changeover is also a great time to revitalize your website with the same kind of review and care. These January tune-ups can help maintain your website and will pay off all year.

Maintaining Website Functionality

New year website maintenance is an excellent chance to ensure your website’s general functionality. You want to make sure your website works properly to give the best impression to potential clients and customers. A dysfunctional website could send the opposite message. Here are some simple but effective January tune-ups for to ensure your website’s functionality:

  • Pages and their assets load: Every webpage loading with all its assets is essential functionality. Ensuring pages, text, images, videos, etc. load correctly by browsing through each page is an excellent way to ensure functionality for the new year.
  • Keeping things speedy: Along with everything loading correctly on your website, everything should also load quickly. Websites that take longer to load easily lose their visitors and are deprioritized in search results. Google has an easy tool that can help you check your website’s speed. One effective way to reduce load times is to optimize your image sizes, since bigger images take longer to download.
  • Check for broken links: The internet is not as stable as we’d like to think. Links regularly change, meaning old hyperlinks may suddenly lead nowhere. These could be links leading to other pages on your site or those leading to other websites. The latter group are especially likely to become broken as other websites remove pages or redesign their page structure. These broken links could frustrate users trying to navigate your site or create the wrong impression. Various tools can help parse through your website to ensure links aren’t broken.

 

Tuning Accessibility

Besides maintaining and tuning up general functionality for the new year, you should also review your website’s accessibility. Web accessibility is a requirement for any business with more than 50 employees in Ontario, and also a best practice since it allows the most people to use your website. Website accessibility is also not a “one and done” process, because the standards are continuously being revised and updated. While expert web designers will be most familiar with these best practices, there are also some you can begin to review this January:

  • Good alt-text on every image: Alt-text helps those with difficulty seeing get a better sense of what is being displayed in an image or graphic. This is essential for users to fully grasp what a page might be communicating, because otherwise a screen reader simply reads the image’s file name. Every image should have alt-text that accurately and fully describes its content. For example, include all objects and quote any text and its placement in the image.
  • Accessible font-choice: You want to ensure your website’s font is readable for all users to ensure maximum accessibility. This includes considering both the type of font and its size.
  • Colourblind friendly: Colourblindness is quite common and so is a key concern in website accessibility. If a graphic uses reds and greens, it may be indiscernible to someone with red-green colour deficiency. Using tools that visualize colourblindess can help identify potential issues on the website.

Checking Your Website’s Security

Another important maintenance routine that will prevent headaches throughout 2026 is to ensure your website is secure. There are few simple checks to perform in January that will help keep pesky hackers and malicious software from breaching your site:

  • Update, Update, Update: Keep your website and all of its plug-ins up to date. Older versions can leave security vulnerabilities that will leave your website vulnerable.
  • reCAPTCHA: A particular plug-in we want to highlight is Google’s reCaptcha. This service helps to keep your website secure from bots that can destabilize your website.
  • Checking for HTTPS: It is best practice today that websites use the HTTPS protocol to keep their pages more secure for their users. Reviewing settings can help to ensure this is being done.

 

Content Review

Some other new year’s maintenance that can take more time and effort is a content review of your site. This takes more time because it means looking through all the information provided on your site. This review helps to ensure information is up to date, such as your address or services/products provided. It also helps to identify outdated or now irrelevant information which no longer applies and could confuse visitors. These updates also improve your website’s SEO, since search engines review when web pages were last updated.

January Tune-Ups Pay Off All Year

Now you should have a good sense of the simple January maintenance that will set you up for a smooth new year. Various plug-ins and tools can help you perform any of these tune-ups, although content review or a formal website audit will require some more specialized knowledge and input. Either way, Rosewood Marketing’s web team will happily review and implement these tools or more generally assist with website tune-ups. If you’re interested in more comprehensive maintenance or a complete audit, our team is ready and happy to help you fully prepare for 2026.

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Don’t DIY Your Holiday Marketing

A person presenting a gift with holiday themed wrapping.

The holidays are always a busy season, and not just because of all the family occasions. The holiday season is also important for every business as eager shoppers and clients look to check friends and family members off their lists (plus a little for themselves). To get ahead, businesses need to carefully plan and execute on their digital marketing. However, that takes a lot of attention, energy, and effort while other parts of a business are also demanding more attention for the busy season. You also can’t just abandon that marketing either. We explain why holiday marketing is important in 2025 and why you should leave DIY to festive crafts

The Importance of Marketing in Holidays 2025

Holiday marketing should always be a key part of a business’ annual strategy, but that’s even more true for the holiday season in 2025. It’s relatively obvious that this year has had some economic constraints, which has led to many customers and clients being a little more mindful with their spending. That will be the same going into the holiday season, where Canadians are projected to spend an average  $1,675 on gifts, entertainment, and travel. While an increase from 2023, this is notably 10% less than last year and 81% of Canadians said they were cutting back to save money.

This means that businesses need to be focusing their effort to convince customers and clients that they are worth their dollars. That can only be accomplished with sound marketing that reaches those potential clients and customers. Marketing of this kind takes strategy, creative asset creation, and digital account management, which in turn takes a lot of effort and expertise.

Don’t DIY Your Holiday Marketing – The Benefits of Outsourcing

All that effort and expertise, and the importance of holiday marketing in 2025 is exactly why businesses should outsource their marketing to an agency. There are numerous benefits this yields for a business, especially during this busy season:

  • Expertise: Outsourcing to a marketing team means getting access for a full team of marketing experts rather than needing to hire your own staff. This ultimately saves costs while ensuring you receive a team of knowledgeable experts that are effective for your holiday marketing.
  • A clear digital strategy: All those experts specialize in specific marketing channels. Together they can create a comprehensive and clear marketing strategy for the holidays which they know will work for your business and audience much more efficiently than non-experts trying to devise something that might work.
  • Active social media and reaching inboxes: Social media management is yet another huge responsibility. Between answering a flood of messages and comments and finding the time to network and connect with other accounts, it consumes valuable time that could be spent on other aspects of your business. However, those connections are a vital part of social media marketing. Similarly, email newsletters are a great way to maintain customer connection, but they can take a lot of time and energy to create. By outsourcing to an agency, you allow an expert team to manage these and keep your digital marketing active.
  • Focus on your business: This is one of the biggest ones. Outsourcing to an agency always helps a business with capacity concerns. Rather than dedicating team members to marketing efforts, a business gets the more efficient time and energy of a team of marketing experts who will accomplish more in less time. That is even more important during the holidays when you and your team need to focus on the business and your clients. Plus, you can all get time to enjoy the holidays with friends and families!
  • Retention Post-Holiday Sales: The holiday season generates an enormous volume of new leads and first-time customers, but this is where many businesses slip back into DIY marketing mode, treating it as a one-and-done event. An expert marketing agency views the 2025 holiday marketing period not just as a sales blitz, but as a long-term customer acquisition strategy. They implement a robust post-holiday strategy designed to convert those one-time shoppers and gift recipients into loyal, year-round clients. This crucial next step involves sophisticated audience segmentation, timely email campaigns (since email remains a high-ROI channel), and targeted social retargeting to maximize the long-term value of every customer acquired. By choosing to outsource marketing, you ensure that your business avoids the January slump and capitalizes on your biggest sales period, making your marketing Christmas investment truly pay off.

Leave DIY to the Christmas and Holiday Crafts

You should now have a sense of the general benefits of outsourcing your marketing agency along with the particular benefits for the upcoming holiday season. It isn’t too late to start strategizing and getting your marketing going, whether it’s your social media, email, ads, or any other digital marketing. Just like your holiday shopping, you shouldn’t leave it to the last minute. So contact the experts at Rosewood Marketing.

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Do You Look Legit? The Psychology Behind Website Design & Credibility

A black man holds a phone as a white woman sitting next to him looks at the screen and both smile, an example of an imaged used in positive psychology web design. Both have coffee cups in their hands.

There are countless websites on the internet, and while we aren’t as much in the Wild West days of a few decades ago, there are still plenty of security risks that make users careful. That caution is entirely reasonable. However, businesses want to give an immediate trustworthy impression on their website or else cautious users are more likely to close the tab. One of the best ways to instill that immediate credibility is to understand the psychology behind website design. In this blog we explain some key design practices for how your business’ website can instill trust and credibility.

Keeping Cognitive Load Low and Trust High

Psychologically, the human brain can only process so much information at once. This is obvious when someone is trying to speak with another person who is reading. Although they can hear them, they don’t cognitively process anything they say. This cap or limit of what we can process is our cognitive load. If cognitive load is overwhelmed, it can be confusing and even paralyzing. That paralysis can lead to an immediate sense of distrust for users.

For website design, you can manage your user’s cognitive load by organizing information into categories and groups. Rather than providing all the information about your business and every one of its services or products all at once immediately at page load, you start with an overview and/or some key recommendations (your users would then click on what they need/want). These should also be legible and visually organized, so that users can easily understand them.

Similarly, rather than listing every single page on the website, the menu is organized hierarchically, allowing users to first pick a larger category and then find the more specific page they want there. These website designs apply the psychological principle of Hick’s Law, which observes that humans make a choice from various options by subdividing into groups and reducing the available options speeds up their decision making. Thus, reducing cognitive load and using hierarchical designs allows users to speedily navigate it without becoming cognitively overloaded.

Keeping It All Connected – No Broken Links

Along with ease of navigation by not overwhelming your users, you also don’t want to perplex them with links which lead to the wrong page or a page that no longer exists. These broken links immediately impact a website’s credibility as users find themselves on a page they didn’t expect or one that doesn’t exist at all. It can feel like a trick or raise questions about the website’s maintenance, and thus its reliability. Broken links can also be detrimental to a website’s SEO.

There are a few ways to prevent and repair broken links. If they are to your own website’s pages, be sure to update these links or create redirects that will immediately take users to the right page. There are also tools that will help you find broken links. These can be plugins, website audits, or even using Google’s Search Console. Any of these will help you find those pesky broken links.

Optimizing Performance

Another maintenance tip that helps to improve a website’s credibility is to ensure all pages load quickly and run smoothly. When a website takes a long time to load or chugs along at even the simplest interactions, users begin to lose trust and patience. Just like broken links, it raises questions of credibility around the website’s maintenance, which in turn raise security and quality concerns that transition to their impression of the business itself. Psychologically, poor performance can also make users feel that they are not in control of their experience on the website, which will further harm their trust of the website. Ensuring your website operates efficiently on all devices, including mobile and desktops, helps to secure credibility for your website and business.

The Trust in Words and Brands

Along with functionality and performance, there are numerous other methods for psychologically fostering trust in your website’s design, including the good word of others. Testimonials from customers help to establish trust and credibility in a few ways. First, is that they simply act as evidence for your business’ quality of services/products. Psychologically, attaching images or videos of smiling clients to these testimonials further establishes trust and credibility, as humans naturally have positive associations with happy faces.

Along with testimonials, you can also feature the logos of companies your business has collaborated with on the website’s home page. If users trust these brands, they will immediately transfer some of that credibility onto your business. As well, psychology has demonstrated that humans have innate positive associations with images they recognize. Seeing brand logos they know, even if they do not have a lot of experience with them, will inherently increase the credibility of your business and website.

Verifying Security

Another way to visually improve the credibility of your business’ website is through security verification. For example, an SSL or TLS certificate indicates that the traffic on your website has been encrypted, making it safer for users. These encryptions are then verified by various services, such as Let’s Encrypt and  Google Trust Services, to tell a browser. Today, if a website isn’t encrypted, browsers will often warn the user and advise they not load the page. That won’t fare well for your business’ reputation as users are directed away. Thankfully, if you’re using a service like WordPress or Shopify for your business, they include such security (so long as you keep your website updated).

There are also other security features that comfort users to build website credibility along with increasing its security. Such services include reCaptcha, which protects websites from malicious bots, preventing fraud and attacks. When reCaptcha is added to a website, it also adds a badge, informing users the website is being secured. This immediately supports a business’ credibility as users see the website is more secure.

Open Information is Essential to Credibility

If someone thinks information is unclear or being kept from them, they immediately become less trusting. That’s no different for users on websites. Open communication and clear information are critical for a business’ credibility on the web. Clear links to all policies and providing all relevant information on products or services builds and establishes trust. Also, providing clear and direct contact information is essential to a website’s credibility. When users see there is a clear physical address, email, or phone number they can contact for more communication, their trust increases. Conversely, if these contact methods are not included on a website, customers immediately become suspicious of a business.

Trusting Credible Design

You should now have a good sense of some essential business for website credibility and its importance. Even then, there’s still more psychological principles to learn for web design, such as colour associations. Nevertheless, by considering the psychology behind website design, you can trust that your business’ website will establish its credibility. If you’re looking to improve your website’s credibility or create a new, trustworthy design, contact our web design team at Rosewood Marketing. You can trust their expertise.

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