Fusionfarm is Closing

According to NBC2 News, The Gazette, CBJ Business Daily and PR Newswire, the Cedar Rapids-based marketing agency known as FusionFarm (Facebook, LinkedIn), will be closing its doors for good.

Folience, which is the parent/holding company, also based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (the parent company of The Gazette), made the decision to shut down the company. The president of Folience, Daniel Goldstein, stated that “The business model for FusionFarm was not economically sustainable.”

We are truly sad to see a competitor close its doors (let alone people lose their jobs), as we love competition and how it drives us to continually improve. Not only does it help us grow to support our customers, but we enjoy networking by offering our monthly WordPress Meet Up Group, which is free to the public, including our competitors. We recognize that everyone has their specialties, which is why we are serious about, not only partnering with our competition where it makes sense to benefit our customers, to promoting a competitor’s strengths to provide the best outcome for our customers.

Before this announcement and within the last year, we have helped several of FusionFarm’s past clients. In many cases, we heard or discovered that mundane edits, i.e. fixing a sentence structure, required the client to contact the firm to make the simple change, even though the site was designed using WordPress. The sites were set up so only the agency could maintain and update the client’s pages. In a world of digital, we understand the value of a personal touch, however we believe there is a good balance between the personal customer service to entrusting a client to make minor changes that can happen instantly versus waiting for a 24 hours or less turnaround time.

Another thing we experienced was that the plugins and technology were outdated. Without updated plugins, this can impact the security, functionality, the aesthetic view of the design, as well as usability on all browsers and devices.

The biggest concern that many of their clients discovered was that the agency wasn’t using data to improve the customer’s website. As many Big Ten Web Design/Data clients can attest, data is our primary focus to help our customers achieve profit and success. We’ve found that data is crucial for making informed business decisions when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click Ads (PPC), content writing and just ensuring page titles have searchable content. We look at the client’s business model, their customer demographic, along with other factors to determine the best ROI for our clients.

Google PageSpeed Insights for fusionfarm.com

When we heard the news, we quickly did our own Google search for FusionFarm. When we found the site, it suffered from slow loading times (see Google PageSpeed Insights) even though the site is hosted on Google Cloud Platform. Once the site fully loaded, the page titles were almost all lacking any searchable content and the content was bare bones. So, unless someone was searching for the exact words “fusionfarm”, due to the lack of SEO, page headers, and basic content, it wasn’t as visible as it could/should have been and it wouldn’t have displayed in the top rankings for that search.

Our goal is to offer assistance to any existing customer’s of FusionFarm in a smooth transition from one agency to another, as we know that your online presence is key to most businesses success. Please contact us if you would like a free website audit and quote, to avoid any disruptions to your online presence.