Steamboat Scene Website Launch
I have been doing a little work and some consulting on a new website for Steamboat Springs, CO, www.steamboatscene.com. As with any start-up website there have been some hurtles to jump. The site is ready to go live and the placeholder has been removed. It is now time to tweek the SEO and get this baby moving!
Image / Banner Rotation Software
As a web designer it is always good to have some software in the arsinalthat makes the development process easier and faster. Why spend time on programming when someone else has already done a great job and the software in reasonably inexpensive. In working on a re-design for Labadie Toyota’s website they wanted more menu items on the home page. The problem is the website is a template that is very limiting. I have no server-side ability to put scripts or programs on the account. So I needed something that would work from another server, can be changed whenever necessary, and easy to train someone to use that has limited or no programming abilities.
Doing a quick search on Google I found the applications available at www.flashdevelopment24.com. This stuff looked good and was well written. They gave me a free sample to test on the website to make sure that permissions were going to allow pieces to pull from different domains. The sample worked! This is very inexpensive applications that work great and made my development time for implementation less than 24 hours.
First sample after purchasing software (the offers may be expired but the links should still work).
Need some dynamic elements added to your website? Contact David Defoe
David is a freelance photographer and website developer living in Saginaw, MI
Crazy Busy
Things have been crazy busy for me this past week. I haven’t had time to make an update so I figured that I’d type while I’m choking down a quick lunch. So what’s been happening?
- Trying to help get the steamboatscene.com website launched. They are looking at opening the site in a week. The site is using Joomla and it seems that every time we go to install a new component that I have to tweek the php.ini file for the server to get it to run. I’m not a fan a Joomla after this project!
- Working on updating the River Roar website with 2010 information. I did a new look for the entire website, deleted a bunch of old info and trying to keep up with the new info for the 2010 races in Bay City.
- Trying to keep up-to-date on the Michigan Galaxy Pageants website. The pageant is only a few weeks away and need to update the shopping cart with ticket information and final contestant information.
- New interface for Great-GM-Deals.com. The site was looking a little plain. I create some new navigation graphics and tweeked the home page to be a little more visually appealing and user friendly.
Aside from the usual work this has been a crazy week of website work.
Photography Website Redesign
I’m on the 3rd redesign of my photography website. The current one was easy for me to update but I’m getting feedback from potential customers that they want to see more of my work. The work is on the website but it’s not organized very well. I was using a blog format with is easy for me but is not effectively meeting my customers needs.
I looked at some online resources and have not been very happy with what I was finding or the pricing. It seems that a lot of photographers website look a lot alike and that is probably why customers are expecting me to have a similar type of layout. I want to be able to update the portfolio easily and frequently. Using Lightroom for my workflow I tested a bunch of the website templates and found some issues with each one. After doing some searches for Lightroom website templates I found a few that I liked the look of. Unfortunately they didn’t plug into my website as easily as I would have liked. After some playing around the redesign has started. Check out one of the new pages on my site at http://defoe-photography.com/portrait-photography/
Google Analytics
I’ve tried out a few website traffic reporting systems, Hubspot, Quantcast, Sitemeter and of course Google. No matter which site I use the results are similar but different. And the stats never seem to match my Wordpress Blog Stats. So which one do you use? Which one provides better information? All but Hubspot can be used for free (with advanced features being subscription based). Granted Hubspot is way more than a visitor statistics provider and is a very useful system at a reasonable price.
Quantcast – the free statistics break-up the visitors into US and Overseas. The Quantcast counter on my site is only showing 468 monthly visitors. This is only the US visitors. They are reporting and additional 560 global people. They also give some nice demographic information such as 58% of the visitors to my site are female, 62% are between the ages of 18-49, 31% earn between $60-100k per year, and 44% have finished college. I’m not sure how they get this information but I’ll take it! The other area that is interesting is the section labeled, “Audience Also Likes”. This shows that the people that are visiting my site are likely to visit the following categories of sites: bridal, commerce-food, discount, parenting, fashion/cosmetics. This gives me some information that is helpful in trying to get advertisers and making sure that any banner ads are targeted correctly for my visitors.
Google Analytics – now I look at my google stats and I see that in the past month I’ve had 710 visits with 1,538 page views. The information that I get from Google is a little different from Quantcast. From google I get that 70% of my visitors get to me by search engines, I can see my most popular pages, and my most popular search phrases. From this information I can see that restaurants are the most popular pages and search terms. This would either indicate that I’m heavy with restaurant pages or that there are a lot of searches for restaurants so I should concentrate on that area to build more traffic.
Sitemeter – this site gives me the same information that Google does, visitors, page views and referrers. The reports look ok and the nice this is they give me a little banner I can put on my site so that visitors can see how many visits I’ve had. This is always a nice little ego booster if your numbers are good.
Conclusion – I like Google and Quantcast and they are both free. Because they provide some different useful information I would use them both. This is going to junk up the code of your pages a little but it’s worth it especially if you are trying to get advertising for your site.
Want to advertise on my site? Contact me
Form Boss Software
Working on my day job for Labadie Auto Company, we decided that it was time to streamline some of our submission forms. This is an attempt to get more form submissions and less abandons. After several meetings with the departments involved we were able to pinpoint the minimum amount of information needed for each form. My next decision was if my time was best spent creating a bunch of secure forms or to hire an outside developer. After a little research using google I was able to find FormBoss. This was inexpensive enough and seemed to be the answer. I played with the online demo and figured others in my department should be able to create forms quickly using this software.
At this point I’m unable to say how the software works! I purchased the license and have spent the past 4 hours trying to add the extensions needed to make it run and re-complile apache on my linux server. Ugg! It seems that everytime I get some PHP software that my server is not configured with the extensions needed to run it. There was a time when I had a runaway script on the server. Since then I have locked down the software and security. Perhaps I went a little to far with the tightening of the server because I can never seem to get 3rd party php software to run without major issues! Seriously a pain in the butt! The day is almost over and I still cannot get the FormBoss to install. I’ll have to try again tomorrow.
SEO Worth the Money?
I was speaking with an acquaintance of mine the other day about website design and search engine optimization. This person has been working on websites for years and is freelancing for some websites. One of the sites that this acquaintance works for recently hired a, so called, SEO specialist to help with one of the sites.
This person that I was speaking with was explaining that this “experts” suggestion was to make sure that each product listing contained at least 400 words. This was very difficult to execute because of the nature of the products. This word mandate would require garbage verbiage just to meet the word count requirement.
Based on all the knowledge that I’ve acquired over the past 10 years of working on websites and having recently watched the SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training DVDs this didn’t add up for me. I thought that I would check out this website. Here are a few conclusions why the word count is bunk and why this company should look for a different search engine optimization consultant.
- There was no meta-description tag on any of the pages of the website.
- The meta-title tags were exactly the same throughout the site.
- Most of the images had no alt tag.
- Most of the text links had no title tag.
- The shopping links were through paypal and all had alt tags that was promoting Ebay and had no product or company keywords in them.
- The site contained little to no H1 tags.
- The site contained little or no bold or stong markup for product and industry keywords in the pages.
This is SEO 101! Don’t even think about telling a writer to change product descriptions if the basics are not covered.
Looking for a search engine optimization expert that will get the job done? Click here to contact me.
Why I love bit.ly
I would love to say that I have thousands of Twitter followers and hundreds of friends on Facebook and that I’m a social media marketing aficionado. Truth is that I have a lot of knowledge that I’m experimenting with.
This brings me to url shortening. I have been using websites to shorten my url’s for posting on Twitter and Facebook for a while. These are great and I can see in my website stats that it generates some traffic. But I wasn’t sure if my efforts were really being rewarded. I kept seeing bit.ly used by people who were SEO and industry leaders but never checked it out . . . until now.
So I tried out bit.ly and see why people love it. In one word – statistics! It’s great! I can see how many times my link was clicked and what site it was clicked from. Any true website marketer is a stats junkie and bit.ly gives you your daily fix!
twitter @defoephoto
I’m A Geek
Ok it is now official (or so my wife and co-workers say), I’m a geek! I was so excited when the shipment arrived and had the SEOmoz 6 dvd Advanced SEO Training Series inside. I couldn’t wait to get home and start watching it.
So far I’ve only gotten through the first and 2.3’s of the second dvd’s. Aside from some blatent advertising the SEOmoz’s pro features there has already been enough information to make the DVD’s worth the money. But buyer beware. This is not basic SEO. If you are not familiar with SEO, web-design and site architecturethis is not the DVD for you. My wife, who I put through the agony of talking about this stuff, said that the portion of the DVD she listened to sounds like a foreign language.
Here is what is included:
Disc One
- SEO for Content
- Site Architecture
- Advanced Keyword Research
Disc Two
- Linkscape Tactics
- Alternative SEO Tools
- Local Search Strategies
- News & Image Search
- Strategies
Disc Three
- How to Design a Link Building Campaign
- Good vs. Great: Why Some Startups Make the Leap
Disc Four
- History of SEO
- Future of SEO
- High ROI Social Media
Disc Five
- Researching the Algorithms
- How to Win SEO Budget
- Conversion Rate Optimization
Disc Six
- SEO Business Strategies
- Avoiding Search Engine Penalties
Within another week I’ll have viewed all the DVD’s and made my list of actions for the websites that I currently work on. Looking for an SEO website design specialist in Saginaw? Contact me for more information!
Upgrade Errors
Don’t you hate it when a security upgrade comes out, you have delayed to long installing it and when you do the sites break! This happened to me this week. Because of some issues with one server I was running I decided to make changes on all the servers to make sure everything was running consistantly across the servers and sites that I work on. A lot of the sites I’ve been designing lately are running on the Wordpress platform. The recent upgrade to PHP5 and some security patches and software made 1/3 of all the sites start giving a permission error. Very annoying! After 2 days of trying to reset permission I finally had to modify the php code for the Wordpress plugin that was causing the issues. But alas everything is back up and running in Wordpress world. Now I’ve got 3 Zencart sites to fix . . . ugg!
