Verizon Softcard: Tips to Activate It and Use It Part One

The American Express Serve Card
The American Express Serve Card

I thought it would be easy to start using the Verizon Softcard as a smartphone wallet, but nooooooooooooo, sometimes easy things are very complicated.

Here’s what I did to finally get Softcard working.

1. If you have a Verizon Galaxy S5, you most likely already have the Verizon NFC SE sim card installed. If you are not sure, don’t waste time, get yourself down to the Verizon store and get them to install one. It is FREE!

2. With the phone app, sign up for the American Express Serve card. If you are not at Chase or Wells Fargo, you’ll want to do this. For me, I did not want to link my own credit card or checking account until I really knew how this thing worked. I did not want to wake up one morning with my business checking or personal checking drained. So I took the conservative approach and got the free American Express Serve card. If you connect your credit card – know that cash moved to your Serve card is like getting a cash advance. Make sure you know your interest rate for a cash advance as it could be really high.

3. Make sure to set up an online account on your desktop for your American Express Serve card; just a way to very quickly manage your account. Use the app on the go and the desktop app for tracking, reports, and quick access to customer service.

4. Know that American Express will send you a plastic Serve card for your real wallet and that the number on it is not the same number as the one in your phone, but they are linked. The phone card has a different number for security. Very Smart! Thanks for looking out for me American Express and Softcard.

5. Add money to your Serve card at 7-11 or CSV store for free – no fees. I put cash on mine and by the time I got back to my car, my phone showed my new balance.

6. Snap a picture of a check made out to you to add money to your Serve card on your phone. It took five days for my deposit to show up. 7-11 is faster! But the pic is fast and easy if you don’t need the cash super fast.

Check back on Wednesday for more on using Softcard tied to an American Express Serve card and then watch my Try It Friday video this week to see it all in action.

How Does Your Website Stack Up in the Mobile Space – Test It!

Screen Shot Showing the Results of the Google Mobile Friendly Testing Tool
Screen Shot Showing the Results of the Google Mobile Friendly Testing Tool

Google continues to push and refine its message as to the importance all websites having a mobile friendly website. Just this past week on the mobile version of Google I started to see tags in front of search listings as to if the site was mobile friendly or not.

Truthfully, I believe the next step is for Google to filter out and not supply sites at all in the mobile search results that have not stepped up to create the proper mobile experience. I expect to see this happen within the next six months.

Google is serious about having a great experience for mobile users on their mobile search platform. If they do not, then users will migrate to other providers who show more relevant results. If they move, Google will lose big in the ad arena. So for Google showing the right mobile friendly results in mobile search directly equates with its own bottom-line. Miscalculate on how Google feels about mobile and you’ll be out of their index.

The great things is that Google moves slowly to make big changes like this, letting users know that they feel is important and provides tools to help site owners. Here is just one of the tools that Google has recently released: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/. It is an online tool to test just how friendly your website is.

Take the tool for a test drive to see just how your website stacks up. For now you have time to fix these problems, but you will not be able to wait forever. If you are using a legacy site, one that is not built with a responsive design and are not using a mobile rendering plugin or application to turn your old website into a mobile friendly one, you’ve just got to take action within the next six months to get there. We can help you get there. I invite you to review our responsive design options today to start on evaluating your options.

 

Google’s Webmaster Mobile Usability

Image of a responsive website on multiple devices.
Make sure you set the viewport for your responsive website to display it properly on multiple devices.

Newly introduced into the Google Webmaster control panel is a new section found under “Search Traffic” called “Mobile Usability”. With Google flexing its muscles and readying to penalize websites that are not enhancing the mobile viewing experience your site may be getting flagged as not having the viewport configured.

In fact, if you are using WordPress plugins to render your blog or website as mobile friendly, you may need to manually add in a meta tag too stop Google from flagging this issue.

The viewport is a meta setting that helps a device determine how to display the content properly. Without a viewport setting your site can not render as you had expected. Visit this page online to see images where the viewport is set and is not. It is an eye-opener and once you see it, you’ll know why you MUST update your code to show the viewport properly. (Without the viewport set images may be small and the site may not fill the device screen properly. With the viewport set image that you had wanted to be full screen will be and your site rendered maximized for that specific device.)

Adding a meta tag to the head section of your code is easy. Just grab this snippet and install it using the Editor in WordPress or Dreamweaver on your responsive website.

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no” />

Make sure you are using the code snippet that has the attributes separated with commas and not semi-colons. This little detail will assure maximum compatibility. Read this great article to find out why.

Google Means Business on Forcing You to Have a Good Mobile Website

Just this last week Google announced that it was ready to start penalizing websites that did not offer a good mobile web experience. Here’s why:

• Mobile devices have been a driving factor in an increase in time spent online. In fact, since 2010, the time the average individual spends online has doubled.

 

 

• 91% of adults in the United States own a phone; 61% of those phones are smart phones.

 

 

• In 2012, marketers spent $4.4 billion on mobile advertising in the United States alone. By 2013, that number doubled to $8.5 million. By 2017, the figure is expected to fall around $31.1 billion. Search and PPC advertising accounts for nearly half of this budget.

 

 

• 25% of adults in the United States only use a mobile device to access the Internet. PCs have become tools of the past.

 

 

• Organic search results matter now more than ever before. In fact, one-third of all search clicks go to the top organic result; this means that the mobile icons Google is testing could play a larger role than you’d imagine going forward. Read the full article online.

Beautiful young woman talking on mobile phone
Smartphones are no longer a luxury but a necessity.

What Google is doing about this important trend is very important. In the search results, Google has been testing aggressively just how it will be notating information about your website. It has tested a variety of icons that are cues to readers that they experience when they click into a particular site will be mobile read friendly since September with testing continuing.

The next step most SEO’s feel is coming in the near future is an update in the Google search algorithm to penalize sites that do not offer the “right” experience, from Google’s point of view. Remember, Google is all about relevancy. If it stops keeping its eye on that mark, its own share of the market will change.

Already it is predicted, with Facebook’s strong growth this quarter in the mobile arena, that Google share will drop below 50% of mobile search activity. So, Google must stay focused on making sure that its search results for the mobile space are the most relevant and easiest to use in the search world for this growing audience of mobile search users. If it does not, it will lose advertising dollars and its place in the marketplace as the top search engine.

If your website does not have a great mobile experience, you may want to consider our mobile and device responsive websites that are strong on content and SEO for your next upgrade.

Get a Free Mobile Website For One Year

This is a great way to try out the mobile web for your own website for free from DudaMobile and Google.  Just visit the link and DudaMobile creates a free mobile version website for you and hosts it for one year all for FREE! At the end of a year, if you like it, you’ll pay about $100 to $150 for each year after.

It is easy to create your own mobile website. I let the interface just create mine and then colored it and added my logo. At the end of the process code is created that I then just installed on the home page of my website that redirects my mobile viewers automatically to my new mobile friendly website.

What’s great is that I even get stats from DudaMobile showing how many visitors came to my mobile website to allow me to review if I feel it is important to keep.

I have to say that having experimented in mobile design and having had problems with sniffing out the various phone types to deliver a mobile page, that this application is really foolproof and has done quite well.

If you’ve wanted to test mobile but didn’t wanted to either get into the code, pay a premium for a special design, for now the service is free thanks to Google and DudaMobile. Just visit my site www.mccordweb.com with your smartphone to see my DudaMobile website.

Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean – Android Operating Systems

I’ve had an Android mobile phone for several years and have upgraded to  Motorola Droid Razr Max and like it. Just recently Verizon upgraded my operating system to Ice Cream Sandwich. If you have an Android tablet or phone, you know the terminology – Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean – all names of Android operating systems. Sounds yummy, but for users can sometimes be confusing.

With Apple’s lawsuits and push to strangle Android, I feel that Ice Cream Sandwich was a push to differentiate the Android platform from Apple’s. Case in point is the screen opening action that Ice Cream Sandwich now requires. No more slide – that’s Apples’ now you have a circle and click options in a circle. There are other changes that Ice Cream Sandwich has brought about as well such as new app and interface actions and new ways to customize your phone. If you want to get the most from your Android phone Motorola has a nice tutorial on Ice Cream Sandwich so you can check to make sure you are up to speed.

Here are a few nuggets:

  1. Widgets have really changed some of the ones you may have loved like the separate icons for GPS and Airplane mode are gone and are now combined into one power widget.
  2. There are many more options for customization and improved ability to manage and remove apps.
  3. Social widgets have changed and now are found in apps that you can drag to your three home screens. In fact you’ll have fewer home screens than Gingerbread so use the apps screen more frequently.
  4. You have more control over the four spots in your favorites tray at the bottom of all screens.
  5. Updates now show ads. Sigh, I hate this one, but clearly with Google’s big push to mobile advertising this must have been a must have for them in creating the Android up grade. It’s the carrot and stick – woo you in with candy and then hit you on the head with advertising.

Overall, it took me a bit to get used to and I am not sure I like the operating system any better than Gingerbread but you do have some nice new options. Plus it sure looks like Google is trying to differentiate the Android operating system to prevent potential legal problems with Apple.