Hello, World!

“Hello, World.” Those two little words that appear whenever you create a fresh website page are scary, especially when it’s a blog page. Those words disappear when you start filling the page with content, but that’s a lot easier when you’re listing your services or writing about your team.

Somehow a blog is a good bit scarier. . . What do you say? Can we keep it up on a consistent basis. . . and what exactly is a consistent basis, anyway? Will it eat up too much time – time that could be better spent elsewhere? Will we run out of things to say? Will anyone care?

Well, we’re going to give it a go. And we’ll let you know what we find along the way.

Hello World screenshot

So far, we learned that blogs should be a minimum of 300 words in order to perform well in search engine rankings. Blogs with more than 1,000 words rank best with search engines. Blog posts containing more 1,500 words are more than 68% more likely to be shared on Twitter and more than 22% more likely to be liked on Facebook compared to shorter posts. And, according to research done by the blogging platform Medium, the ideal length for blog posts is 1,600 words. Yikes!

Okay, after thinking on that for about 30 seconds, I didn’t think we could handle 1,600 words on a regular basis, even if we split blogging between four of us to make it easier. We decided to aim for weekly, and I’m going to blog about business, our design director Rebecca will blog about design, our web director Raymond will blog about technology, and our project manager Christie will blog about marketing. Optimum lives at the intersection of all four.

We will aim to educate and inspire clients, prospects, and random visitors alike — and to cultivate a supportive community of business leaders, designers, marketers, and web developers. We’ve been at this a helluva long time, so we’ve got 27 years’ worth of experiences to draw on, as well as a deep network of peers we’re in touch with daily about our industry.

It’s never the same day twice at Optimum, and we’ve been “blessed” with some interesting, educational, and head-shaking experiences. It’s time to share them.

Lara Kisielewska, Founder
lara@optimumdc.com