Welcome to Tech News Thursday, a compilation of the latest technology news. If you want to catch the best mobile development, web design, online marketing, digital strategy recommendations and more in one place, this is the weekly list for you.

The cloud - you’ve heard a lot about it, but what makes it special? Why should you transition your enterprise applications to an entirely new platform? Consider the many benefits of cloud based apps opposed to storing enterprise apps elsewhere. 

As technology continues to shift to dependence on the cloud, more companies are choosing to push business applications and processes in the same direction, including cloud based apps. While this isn’t necessarily the best option for every business out there, more are transitioning their enterprise data to cloud resources for five reasons.

 

Welcome to Tech News Thursday, a compilation of the latest technology news. If you want to catch the best mobile development, web design, online marketing, digital strategy recommendations and more in one place, this is the weekly list for you.

Google Authorship -- a feature that displayed author bylines and photos within search results as a means to  -- is no more.

The three-year old feature was originally designed to convey author authority and offer a boost in search rankings for sources deemed more trustworthy. Google has been scaling this back for about eight months and announced the complete elimination of this feature in late August, leaving many online marketers wondering what that would mean for search engine optimization.

Truthfully, though, the elimination of Authorship probably wasn't that big of a surprise. Google is constantly evaluating its products and eliminating those that don't perform. And Authorship was ultimately an experiment in display that may have done more for authors' egos than user experience.

What does this change mean for online marketers? Will Google use authorship as a ranking factor in the future -- and if so, how?

Welcome to Tech News Thursday, a compilation of the latest technology news. If you want to catch the best mobile development, web design, online marketing, digital strategy recommendations and more in one place, this is the weekly list for you.

SteadyRain is a web development and design firm accustomed to redesigning sites for our clients, but over the past year we have been using some of the spare time we have aside from client related projects to redesign our own website to be what you see today. With everything going on here and client work always being our top priority, the implementation of the new site was a lengthy process.

We know web development is more than just a pretty face, and everyone in our company had a hand in the new steadyrain.com we launched last spring.

In this Digital Clarity series, the SteadyRain online marketing team examines what we did to prepare for the launch of the new website from an SEO perspective to minimalize any potential problems down the road. There are plenty of things we can learn from this ongoing website redesign case study.

50 percent of mobile users browse the Internet primarily with a mobile device.

What kind of experience are your website visitors having on their smartphones and tablets? If your business isn’t leveraging responsive web design, your existing and prospective customers may not be enjoying the optimal experience.

Responsive websites allow users to have similar yet highly-targeted digital experiences no matter which device they use to visit your digital solution. This increases visitor engagement and therefore conversions, helping businesses continue to succeed.

Need someone else’s opinion? Google identifies responsive web design as its recommended configuration. This development keeps all content under one URL, minimizes duplicate content issues and maintains the integrity of SEO efforts.

Responsive web design has become the standard, and companies interested in updating the look and feel of their websites should strongly consider responsive strategies.