RTJ Party Store Website
I stopped by RTJ Party Store last night to get some pictures for the website. Tony was not there and I took a few pictures of the products and some specialty stuff. Later in the evening I threw together a quick layout for the website with the images I had taken. Because the afternoon sun was not pleasing to the front of the building I had to stop back the following morning to get some outside pictures of the building. With a few more tweeks the website will be ready to go live. http://rtjpartystore.com/
Party Store Website
I met Tony at church. He is a very nice guy with a big family. I knew that Tony owned a party store in Saginaw and it wasn’t his first one. One day we needed some assistance and Tony helped us in a time of need. After a day of hard labor he said he had to go run his store. Having heard that Tony made a mean Chicago style pizza we decided to go to his party store to get some food. The rumors were correct . . . Tony makes a fantastic Chicago pizza. Being a nice guy Tony didn’t ask for any money or compensation for his day of labor and gave us the pizza for free. WOW I thought. What can I do for him?
I can do what I do best, was my first thought. I offered Tony a website. He took me up on it and now it’s time to get to work.
I have never done a website for a party store / take-out food establishment before. I need something that will look good, be easy to navigate and easy for Tony or an employee to add coupons or specials to. Once again I am going to use WordPress because of how easy it is for the customer to edit information. Look back for an update soon. I expect to have the website up and running for RTJ Party Store within one week.
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.
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.
Restaurant Review
About a hear ago my Debra, my wife, and I decided we were going to create a website to review restaurants in Saginaw, Bay City and Midland. We did a few reviews but nothing much happened with the site. As usually happens with this stuff – after a few posts we just stopped posting.
We decided that part of our strategy for the new year is to get the site going again. Previously it was called the Tri-City Review. But the name of the area we live has been changed to Great Lakes Bay Region. So we have changed he name of the site to Great Lakes Bay Review. Clever huh? Even though we have already purchased the domain name, we are still getting things setup. The site is currently located at http://defoenet.com/review/
We look forward to a great 2010 and hope that you read our food and restaurant reviews!
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.
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.
