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!
Upgrade Errors
Search Engine Optimization
What is the developer of a new website going to do when you need traffic? This is a problem with any new website. SEO takes time and there is no magic bullet when it comes to listings.
This is where an SEO specialist can help. I’ve been designing and modifying websites since 1991 and each year it gets increasingly harder to get the websites to the top of the search engines. Sometimes its a task just to get listed. This is the case with a site that recently contacted me. The site is a few months old, has a few hundred people on their email list and need to get found. This will be a great test because this site really isn’t listed yet.
Do you live in Saginaw, Bay City or Midland Michigan and ever wondered what is happening in the area? This is the place to visit: http://www.greatlakesbayscene.com. But there is more to come. Currently Great Lakes Bay Scene is working to have the most complete listing of restaurants in the area!
New Christian Website
I had the pleasure of meeting with Pastor Chris of Saginaw. He gave me information about The Church of Saginaw, which is not a church but rather a fellowship of churches in Saginaw towards a common goal. The mission is to synergize the churches of Saginaw to do as one what we can’t do as many, to advance the Kingdom of God. This is a fantastic idea and they currently have 12 churches of Saginaw that comprise the fellowship.
After meeting with Pastor Chris he was excited to get started on a website for the fellowship. I was able to throw together a sample using the limited information that I had in a few hours. You can view the sample site at http://thechurchofsaginaw.com
I’m looking forward to working with this fellowship and perhaps some of the participating churches to develop more christian websites.
Restaurant Website
For a few years I’ve been trying to get a restaurant to sign on for my website design services. One of the reasons that I’ve always wanted to work with a restaurant is that I want to work on my food photography. So the reason is a little self serving. But I was offering a huge discount to try to land a restaurant job.
A very well established restaurant in Saginaw just got purchased by an acquaintance of my wife’s. This seemed like the in that I needed to get my food photography experience and create a killer website. After a few meetings with this new owner we are up and running!
Yeah! My first restaurant website! Keep looking back to find out what it is and how it looks.
Do you have a restaurant in the Great Lakes Bay area and need a website? Click here to contact me for information and pricing.
Sammy Gets a Blog!
I’ve been working with Sammy Coleman to get some online marketing going. The second step in the process was to setup a blog. Step #1 was to setup social media and Sammy was already using Facebook so that was covered. For the blog we decided on WordPress because of the ease of use and functionality. Sammy didn’t want to mess with his own domain yet so he is hosting on a wordpress subdomain: http://therealdealsam.wordpress.com
Two posts down and a lot more to go. Google hasn’t hit the site yet and we want to have some more content before it does so that it comes back sooner and gives us a good jump start!
Michigan Galaxy Update
I was speaking with the director of Michigan Galaxy Pageants and she wanted to change the way the navigation is on the website. After a little brain-storming session we figured out how the new navigation should look and the order that we wanted it in.
After creating the content for the new pages, Debra emailed me the changes and within 2hours the new navigation and pages were in place.
 
Website navigation is huge! Most visitors to a website want to get to the information they are looking for within 2 clicks. Research has shown that visitors will start leaving the site if they cannot find the information they are looking for quickly. There is no point in having a beautiful website if people are leaving because the navigation and link structure is not clean and easy.
Need to redo your current website? Does your navigation need a little tweek? Contact Defoe website design in Saginaw.
Labadie Banner Ads
I work on the websites for Labadie Auto Company in Bay City Michigan. A few of the domains that I administer are; www.labadieauto.com, www.great-gm-deals.com, www.labadietoyota.com, www.labadiescion.com, and www.labadierentacar.com. There are others but these are the main domains.
The Labadie’s signed up to be part of a new email campaign and they needed some banner ads. I haven’t done banner ads for Labadie in a few years so I had to start from scratch. I remembered reading an article on a marketing blog recently about a great way to find what works. I can’t remember the blog or I would promote it here. I logged into Commission Junction and started researching which banner ads were creating the highest EPC (earnings per click) for a 3 month period. After finding a few that were more specific to the automotive industry I took a few of the ideas that I saw and created the following banners.
It will be intersting to see the statistics on these banner ads.
Do you have a business and need some banner ads created? Contact David Defoe!
Fresh Oil Ministries
I have been working with Iain Gunn to help get his website running for http://freshoilmin.org. This site is created in Joomla and I had never used Joomla before so there was a bit of a learning curve.
We ended up having to uninstall Joomla and start from scratch to get the website functioning again because there was a piece of code that was causing the site to not display using IE.
Once the Joomla was re-installed on the server and we re-uploaded the template the first order of buisness was to get the fantastic logo that was designed by Stephanie Mason, owner of Cloud9Design.net.
Iain had purchased me a fantastic sandwich while we worked on the website. After some engaging conversation Iain went home to create content.
Next time we meet we will be installing some plug-ins and tweaking the way the site looks.
New Layout
I’ve switched the defoenet.com site to WordPress. I plan on moving a lot of my multiple websites into this one main site. Keep looking back for updates, web-design info, photography stuff and really just anything want to waste space on the Internet with!