I got tired of installing toolbars, or flipping between Firefox tabs to check positioning in the search engine results pages, so I made myself a little tool that I could see my positioning in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
It uses frames, which kind of sucks since you end up with side scroll, but it definitely makes things easier for me.
Anyway, here it is
Dr. James Kilgore, a plastic surgeon in Portland, has recently expanded his service offerings. In addition to offering botox in Portland, he is also offering Restylane and Hylaform Plus®.
It’s great to see that my clients keep up on updating their sites with new information. That will always translate into more revenues for them.
I have finally merged pdxbars.com with BarFly. Barfly has been covering bars in the Portland and northwest areas for over 6 years, I’m quite excited about what will happen with this site.
I also have finished up a site for a Portland plastic surgeon.
He specializes in quite a few cosmetic surgerical enhancements, as well as non-invasive procedures such as thermage, botox, and microdermabrasion.
Hopefully I’ll be able to generate them some new clients, otherwise, I just ain’t doing my job.
I’ve been recently watch many of my sites climb to #1 – #3 spots for their terms across all of major search engines. This has been a slow process, for some sites it took years. I hadn’t even checked my logs for monthes on one particular site, and when I finally did, I saw that it’s traffic had quadrupled in that time, mostly from the SEs. This opened up a door to explore more business relationships that were previously closed to me. While this is still shaky ground, if google decides my sites aren’t all that special, then it’s back to square run. Such is business though. It’s amazing how this kind of positioning improved my business clout, when before I had nothing to bring to the table. It all sounds so silly, like such an intangible and unstable piece of collateral. Very strange indeed.
Seems that where ever I live, I always end up making a website or twenty about it. So now I’ve been back in Portland for 8 months or so, and what do I do? First my pal Jason the Videographer and I built our Portland Bar review website and blog. Now, when I really should be doing other work, I started up the Portland Oregon Directory.
If you know me, I’ve got a fairly large hard-on for using geeking phrases like “geo-targeting”, so I think that is why I keep building these freakin’ sites. Anybody wanna buy some of my regional-centric domains that currently do nothing?
I have recently added Rectangle Gable Vents to TheBuilderStore.com gable end vent inventory. This has lead to an increased number of inquiries from homeowners due in part to search engine traffic and Froogle feeds. While my true goal is to sell to home builders, contractors, and architects, increasing the sales volume from homeowners does help with exposure and our marketing efforts. I am very excited about the future of this website.
It was about that time…I needed to refinish the concrete floor in my basement, so I called up my friend “Your Floor Guy” and had him do a little work. It was too nice of a day yesterday for either of us to be inside, but it was nice knowing that I could sit in my house and work while he was doing stuff downstairs. Next week, I may have him do the old ass hardwood floors.
Sometimes these mundane blog posts are so nonsensical, but trust me, their is value in them for someone, somewhere.
Adobe to buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion
This could either be the best thing, or the worst thing in the world for a few reasons:
(1) Getting rid of Macromedia Freehand and just using Adobe Illustrator would be great
(2) Getting rid of Adobe GoLive and keeping Dreamweaver would be awesome.
(3) Using the web graphic tools in Fireworks and scrapping Image Ready.
To quote the article:
Adobe is best known for its PDF, or Portable Document Format, technology for presenting text files online. Macromedia’s flagship product is the Flash animation software.
My retort to this is: Adobe’s Acrobat PDF reader is best known for bringing the processor to it’s knees, and causing your browser to lockup for minutes on end. Flash is known to annoy the living shit out of most websurfers due to long load times, browser hijacking, intros, background music, and unintuitive navigation.
Should be interesting, I wonder if the renounded Photoshop filters such as the ridiculously overlame “LensFlare” will be incorporated into Flash. Yargh. My head hurts.
Looks like google has set up a wireless local search, according to WebProNews. This is simply awesome, I tried to do a similar thing with PDXbars Wireless ( mob.pdxbars.com ). Unfortunately, I don’t have the good search algorithm, and quite frankly, typing on wireless devices sucks. Perhaps with scripting an autofill feature for wireless browsers would help, but I just haven’t seen much of my traffic using it yet. Still, the potential is awesome, particularly once more and more phones take the shape of the Sidekick II. Having a full qwerty keyboard would definitely be a motiviating factor in using wireless web capabilities on your phone.
Before you go decide on a designer based on price or fancy graphics alone, this is a must read.
I wrote this primarily because I deal with clients who are dissatisfied with the results they are getting from their existing site. Many times, they hired an art school student or some kid armed with a cracked version of Photoshop. Often, their sites are pretty to look at, but fail miserably in the context of operating as a business tool.
Step1
Take a look at your business and ask yourself the following questions.
Once you have answered these questions go on to Step 2.
Step 2
Look at a prospective designer’s website and ask your self these questions.
If you can answer YES to every single one of these questions, proceed to Step 3. Otherwise, go back and start looking at other companies.
Step 3
Look at their portfolio. Visit each of the sites in the portfolio and ask yourself the same questions as above. Additionally, also ask yourself the following questions.
Again, if all the answers are YES, chances are, this is a professional, business oriented web designer who can create a website to be a business asset. If not, go back to Step 1.
Step 4
I call this, the courtship process. Too much information is far better than too little. Prepare as much of your text based content as possible. Gather up photos, logos, and everything else. Make sure you have a legal right to use all of this material. Then, contact the designer.
The designer should look over all of your material, and prepare you an accurate estimate, or may choose to decline at the moment if their isn’t enough material to work with. Usually, a contractual agreement is drafted that states both yours and their responsibilities. Also, limitations should also be set. For instance, a certain amount of mockup changes will be allowed, but perpetual wishi-washiness will not. It will also state a completion date.
Once you have agreed to the terms, be prepared to pay the designer a downpayment of up to 50%. We do this to protect ourselves. It serves many purposes. With money on the line, a client will often be more dilligent about delivering the material requested of them, and more motivated to finish the project. Otherwise, it can go on forever with no real resolution in site.
With both parties understanding that a website’s purpose is to assist your business, then you are already halfway there. Good luck!