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.

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.

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

• 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.