Website Design - Defoenet.com

Saginaw Business Listings Closed

March 28, 2012 By David Leave a Comment

A while back I was going to create an online business listing directory for Saginaw, MI with my son. We had a great start but time constraints have slowed down the progress. I’ve decided to close the directory. The listings will be migrated to this site (defoenet.com) and continue to function.

Now that the weather is getting nice again I will probably continue to take pictures and list businesses. I am committed to helping the business community in the Great Lakes Bay Region. We have been hit hard by the economy downturn and are still not recovering. I feel that the businesses that are still open and operating deserve as much exposure as possible. This is a great place to live and we are losing population every year. Everyone doing a little bit can make a huge difference. I know we are still a few years away from recovery but I hope that it comes soon.

Filed Under: Website Design Tagged With: directory, website

Schema For Photographers

February 27, 2012 By David Leave a Comment

As a photographer I want my work found by potential clients and I want my online images as protected as possible. So anything I can do to identify my images as mine is helpful. Almost 9 months ago Google and Bing announced they were going to recognize Schema.org as the official microdata format. Since then I have been using this successfully on product websites and using it for specifying local businesses. However, I have had a hard time getting a good example of how to apply this to a photograph. On the schema.org website under CreativeWork they give examples for MP3’s, movies and books but when I click on the link for photograph – no examples. I also did a few searches like “schema for photographers” or “photography schema examples” and found nothing useful. I have decided to test a few uses of schema.org myself and see if it helps me. The few things that I want to identify are:

Image – anything that can get my image to show up on the search engines is great. It appears that the img html tag is not always enough.
copyrightHolder – I want the internet to know that this image belongs to me. Hopefully in the future this will help keep people from stealing my images.
creator – this is more for marketing than copyrightHolder and a little for ego. If someone searches for my name it would be fantastic if a huge collection of images shows up. This will help establish me as a professional and hopefully get me more paying photography jobs.

I don’t want to include all the info and junk up my website post so I wanted to keep some of the information hidden but still allow the search engines to read it. Here is the format that I came up with that seems to work. It will be interesting to see what this does to my rankings, especially in the image search, and how it will be used in the future.

Filed Under: Website Design Tagged With: microdata, schema.org

New Band Website

February 15, 2012 By David Leave a Comment

I’ve been working with a friend to help her develop a website for her business. As with most band promoters the winter is very busy so trying to get some time to train her on how to use the new website has been slow in coming. Tonight I will be training her and look forward to good things. For those who are wondering what the band and entertainment scene is like in Michigan be sure to bookmark, facebook like and/or pin this site to your Pintrest board – http://stagelevelproductions.com/ – because great things are coming for 2012.

The site will not only feature bands that are promoted by Stage Level Productions out of Bay City, Michigan but will also list shows in and around Michigan as well as press releases for many acts so you can keep up-to-date with your favorite bands.

Filed Under: Website Design Tagged With: Blog, website, wordpress

Advice For Website Success

December 10, 2011 By David 1 Comment

Anyone who runs or works on a website is always looking for new ways and new techniques to get more traffic. I have found it interesting that you can turn an average person into a statistics junkie just but giving them a website and setting up Google analytics.

Because most of the information is the same and never changes it’s always great to come across a new voice that puts things into a short, understandable and usable format. I mean really do we need a 3,000 word dissertation stating that good content and quality links help with SEO and site traffic? Pfffft

This is why I like the site put together by Eugen Oprea. The site is easy to navigate. The stories are short and have useful information. In fact with all my studies his recent post that Google+ is one of the few sites that has “dofollow” links was new news to me!

But don’t just take my word for it. Check out his site today. You won’t be disappointed!

Eugen Opera and I both use SEOMoz – check it out at http://mz.cm/t6wjyw

Filed Under: Website Design Tagged With: seo, website traffic

Learn HTML and CSS Free

November 22, 2011 By David Leave a Comment

I’ve been working on websites for a looong time now. This have changed over the years but basic html is still the same. With everything and everyone basically living in the digital space it is more important than ever that everyone should know some html. This is especially true if you own a business or have a hobby that you want to make some extra money off or promote.

Today I came across this great little site with some fantastic training videos. If you ever wanted to know about building a website this is a great was to commit to a 30 day program. Easy to understand and only 1 month! How can you loose. And did I mention that it’s FREE?

Check it out – http://learncss.tutsplus.com/

Filed Under: Website Design

Why Schema.org?

June 7, 2011 By David Leave a Comment

I’ve been using microdata for many years on websites that I work with. The main piece being the hcard format. This has allowed software and search engines to easily identify a company and it’s address.

With Google and Bing announcing that they are now going to use the schema.org format as a standard – how many man-hours is this going to waste for web designers? Are web designers going to update all their pages or just hope to move forward and perhaps update the most popular pages on the sites to make sure they stay indexed or increase the exposure. I’m sure if I ran a review site I’d be working overtime to get the code updated.

I know that I’m at least using the LocalBusiness itemscope for all the websites that I manage ASAP! There is also a lot of question about what will and won’t work for specific types of content. I’ve played with the Thing>CreativeWork>Photograph properties and found the basics to work when tested with the google tool. For many of the properties schema.org doesn’t have good examples and the format seems to be to new for a lot of working examples to be out yet.

It will be interesting to see what and if the schema will make any significant result changes.

Filed Under: Website Design Tagged With: seo, snippet, website design

3 Months of Business Listings

April 4, 2011 By David Leave a Comment

It’s been three months since my son and I embarked on a project to get a website up and running. Now that March is over and we both put in a very dedicated month I wanted to compare the Google Analytics. When the site started my goal was to ad a business a day. That goal wasn’t achieved until the middle of February. In the middle of March we started posting 2 businesses a day and have seen the number skyrocket. We now have over 100 businesses listed and I look forward to seeing 300 by the end of April!

Now for the stats:

February showed 155 visits with 558 page views.
March showed 435 visits with 967 page views. That’s a 180% increase in visits for one month!

If we can get another month of 180% increase April should have 783 visits. Not to bad for 4 months work. I think we should actually see a higher increase because we will be going from 100 businesses listed to 300. Therefore I predict that your visits will be over 1,000.

So how many visits do we need to make some money? My son is working for a cell phone. The phone is $100 and the plan is $26.50 per month. Because he gets 1/2 of the profit of the website we need to generate $250 in profit. I think we are a few months off from that – unless we can get a sponsor or nice local ad contract.

Check out the site at: http://saginawbusinesslistings.com

Filed Under: Website Design Tagged With: search engine optimization, statistics, website

Favorite WordPress Plug-ins

January 28, 2011 By David Leave a Comment

I love WordPress for the ease of use and how quickly content can be created on uploaded. There are plenty of templates to make your site look great. But for maximum advantage of the site here are some of my favorite plug-in’s.

WordPress SEO by Yoast – there is a little bit of setup but once it is installed it just runs. Be sure to optimize the settings from the first time.
WordTwit – I’ve tried a bunch of Twitter posting plug-ins and some worked, some didn’t at all and most were hit or miss. This plug-in worked great from day 1 and has never let me down.
WP-PageNavi – this seems to be the tried and true page navigation plugin to replace the back and next and number your pages. Easy to use with most themes a little coding is required.
Contact Form 7 – I have used a few other contact form plugins but always end up removing them and going back to this one. Easy to use and works great.
Micro Anywhere – not perfect but it works. Depending on the theme some of the information may not look very clean and puts in extra spaces.
GD Star Rating – get your website visitors to rate anything – posts, businesses, images – this is a fantastic easy-to-use plugin.

I’m sure I will be updating this post and I use more plugins. Remember that plugins can send information to the author or other sources to do a little research and make sure that the plugin is recommended and has a lot of downloads.

Filed Under: Website Design Tagged With: plug-ins, wordpress

Saginaw Business Directory

January 18, 2011 By David 1 Comment

A few years back I was working 3rd shift at Concentric Network (now XO Communications). I had the idea of creating a local web directory for the mid-Michigan area. The 3rd shift job gave me a lot of time to work on the website. After about a year of working on the site I got another job and sold the site. The company that purchased the site from me scrapped the site, used the domain for a local directory for a while and now there isn’t even a directory the domain is just a splash page.

Fast forward about 10 years and I was reading on SEOMoz that local directories are a becoming a huge part of a successful SEO campaign. Once again I figured I was WAY ahead of my time on this idea. In fact I read on a few SEO websites that they see local directories as a huge area of growth and opportunity for 2011.

I figured it was time to give the local directory a shot again. I got some software and purchased the domain saginawbusinesslistings.com

Utilizing the search engines reliance on microformats I have made sure that the site is as up-to-date with search compatibility as possible. This will give local businesses that want to participate in the directory a shot in the arm not just in organic search placement will boost the relevance in maps and local search.

Like most business websites there is a pay section on the site. I’m trying to keep the cost very low to get a lot of businesses to jump on board. Doing a manual website is a lot of work and a labor of love. It would be nice if this could become a full-time business but only time will tell on that one. Why would a business want to pay a little for an updated listing? The main reason is to get an external link to their businesses website. Why is an external so important? Top SEOs believe that external links are the most important source of ranking power. In fact most experts agree that of the top 5 ranking factors the amount and quality of external links is the #2 factor in getting a good search engine ranking.

I am going to work hard to make sure that the search engines love this site and that it is not considered a link selling or link bait website. I am not selling links – I am selling additional information about a local business. Currently this site is a one man show and I don’t have the time or inside information to write a good business description for each business. I can get an address, phone number and picture of the business very easily.

So help me out – visit my site and give me information about your Saginaw County business. I’ll list it for free even if you don’t want to pay!

Filed Under: Website Design Tagged With: website design saginaw, website launch

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