Featured on the site is a business directory of all merchants located in Racine Commons Shopping Center, outlining the nature of each business, hours of operations, and all relevant contact information.

Site visitors can stay up to date with the latest happens at Racine Commons, such as the Wilmington Oktober Festival by visiting the site’s news and events page.

We invite you to visit www.shopracinecommons.com today!

About Racine Commons Shopping Center:
Conveniently located on Racine Drive just down the road from Wrightsville Beach and around the corner from UNCW, Racine Commons Shopping Center offers a delightful shopping and dining experiences in a lush tropical setting.

About Cape Fear Design:
Cape Fear Design is a Wilmington based full service web design and development firm specializing in creating the most
effective solutions to help businesses achieve their goals. More information is available at www.capefeardesign.com

The site guides the visitor through a journey to match a beer with menu items. Choose a category, such as salads, or sandwiches, then choose an item, such as steak sandwich, and follow the descriptive advice of why the flavors of the food pair well with the flavors of different beers. Visitors discover, for example, that hoppy ales such as Lagunitas IPA, from tiny Petaluma, California, pair well with the meaty and tangy steak sandwich.

The pairings were completed by Eric Rylander, Fat Tony’s owner, who last year obtained an industry certification of “Certified Cicerone®”, or beer sommelier. Rylander was the first in North Carolina to obtain the certification, which involves rigorous testing in the styles, serving, brewing, storage, and pairing of beer.

“Craft beer is rapidly taking market share from the mass-produced American beers that use rice to lower costs of fermenting,” said Rylander. “The public is finding complexity in the flavors of these smaller-batch beers, and is willing to pay a little more to experience it. Our website is designed to help guide you through the wide variety of flavor profiles now available at Fat Tony’s.”

Development of the site was an evolving effort with Brett Neville, site developer and President of Cape Fear Design. Mr. Neville’s company developed the complex site with many unique features, including a “Flavor Feed” that is a Twitter-like scrolling message board which displays recent pairing suggestions, selected by website visitors.

“I must say, it was my first ‘Flavor Feed,’” remarked Neville. “With the excellent reputation of Fat Tony’s providing high quality dishes combined with the area’s most unique draft beer selection, FindTheFlavor.com is an additional benefit that will allow customers to have an outstanding dining experience above and beyond your typical restaurant.”

About Fat Tony’s Italian Pub
Fat Tony’s Italian Pub is a Wilmington, NC unit of Marzini Restaurants, LLC, with two locations and a focus on homemade Italian food and craft beer in a fun pub atmosphere. In its 8th year, Fat Tony’s is a local leader in the independent restaurant industry. More information is available at www.fatpub.com.

About Cape Fear Design
Cape Fear Design is a Wilmington based full service web design and development firm specializing in creating the most effective solutions to help businesses achieve their goals.

Contact:
Jill Newton, Marzini Restaurants
jill@marzini.com
910-343-8744

A simple, sensible web address
Make sure to choose a short, simple web address that is easy for people to remember. Try to avoid hyphenated words and numbers, as these tend to confuse people. Your business website should end in “.com” when available or the alternative “.net”.

Clear Navigation
There is nothing worse than going trying to navigate through a confusing website. Make sure your site layout is clear and doesn’t make the site visitor search for what they came for.

Make your contact information easy to find
Don’t lose a potential customer to your competitors because they can’t get in touch with you. Aside from a contact page (linked from main navigation), it is a good practice to include contact information in the footer of every page. This will ensure that a site visitor can find your contact information no matter what page they are on.

Testimonials
Honest words from others make your products and services more tangible to customers who are visiting you online. Testimonials help to build trust and confirm that your products and services will meet their needs.

Call(s) to action
Your website layout should tell your visitors what to do and encourage them where to click. Create a call to action, such as “call now for a free quote.”

Basic SEO
When creating your website, make sure to use good keywords, plenty of interesting content, and well described pages titles. This will help to ensure that your customers can not only find your website, but also use it as well.

Fresh quality content
For many businesses, your website will be the first impression that you will make on your customers. Give them what they are looking for and provide a reason to come back to your site.

Secure hosting platform
When choosing a web host, it is important to make sure they are stable and reliable. What good is your website if it is unable to be seen? Cape Fear Design’s web servers have a 99.9% uptime guarantee!

Easy to read content
Make sure to break your information up into short, easy to ready paragraphs. When discussing several points, use bullet lists to improve your layout. Highlight important words or phrases by choosing bold or italicized text.

Contact Cape Fear Design today to see how we can improve your website.

If you don’t have a Facebook Page, a Twitter account, or a YouTube channel, chances are you that you are missing out on tons of potential customers. We can help you design, configure, and market these social media platforms to drive real, tangible, and consistent results. Watch the short video on the bottom-left of our homepage to learn more about social media and find out what it can do for your business.

This can often be overwhelming and cause you to look into some of the “out of the box” website template companies found on the internet.  At first glance, they win you over with their satisfied client testimonials, ease of access lingo, and a much smaller deposit compared to the 50% deposit the local web design companies are charging.

Let’s say that your company’s website needs 7 pages and you can get the “out of the box template” for a $299.00 initial setup fee, and a recurring monthly fee of $79.00. On the other hand, the local web design company quotes you $2,000.00 for your website, requires a 50% initial deposit, and charges a recurring monthly fee of $20.00.

Now let’s compare the “out of the box” company with the local web design company to determine what the actual cost of each option is over a period of 10 years:

1. The “out of the box” template company would have charged you $299.00 for the initial setup, and then $79.00/month thereafter. This amounts to a grand total of $9,779.00 for a span of ten years.
2. The local web design company would have charged you $1000.00 for the initial deposit, the remaining $1000.00 payment once the web site goes “live” and then $20.00/month thereafter. This amounts to a grand total of $4,400.00 for a span of ten years.

In the example above, it would have cost you more than double if you picked the “out of the box” template company for your website.  At first glance, these companies may seem like a good, affordable option for your company’s website, but in the end…it’s going to cost you.

Cape Fear Design offers payment plan options to make your company’s website more affordable.

What can you do to prevent this problem? Take 5 minutes out of your day to create a file with all the important information regarding your domain. The file should contain not only contact info used to register the domain, but also the Customer ID number, passwords, and PIN numbers associated with the account. Make sure to include when the domain was purchased, last renewed and for how long. Do yourself a favor and create a “hard copy” of this file to prevent loss of information resulting from a computer crash.

When a domain is pending expiration, companies like GoDaddy will begin sending out emails, and notices in the mail to remind you to renew the domain as far out as 90 days prior to the expiration date. This is another reason it is important to keep your domain’s whois information up to date, so that you can receive these notices. What happens when your domain expires? Most companies will take your site down, and put up a holding page or sorts to let you know that the domain is “parked”. An embarrassing example of this could be seen last week when visiting Brunswick County’s Electric company, BEMC.org. See the image below of a BEMC.org’s expired website:

A worse case scenario is that your domain expires, the grace period is over, and someone purchases your domain out from under you. Your only option at this point is to try to buy your domain back, which usually comes at a ridiculous price. For example, The George W. Bush library website expired and a NC based web development company paid less than $10 for the www.georgewbushlibrary.com domain name – and sold it back for $35,000 to the library’s contracted Web developers, Yuma Solutions, who had accidentally let it expire. Don’t let this happen to you.

Do yourself a favor and make yourself the website information file mentioned above, and keep track of your website’s expiration date. You’ll thank us later!