Charlotte Website Development

How I Built A Killer Website

CWD — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:59:45 +0000

One of the most common questions that I get is ‘What should I put on my
site?’ The short answer is ‘Anything that will help your audience with
their questions.’

The longer answer is to help your audience with their needs in a way that
leads them to buy from you, become your client, refer you to their friends,
and keep them coming back for more. That’s what I’ve done with over 300
articles and counting now. I rank well in search engines for a wide variety
of keywords and phrases. This helps my website design business
tremendously.

Answers: Great Website Building Opportunity

Each time a prospect or existing client asks you a question you get a
chance to educate them. Chances are that you answer hundreds if not
thousands of questions every week. And the chances are pretty good that you
are answering the same ones again and again and again.

Some questions come to you over the phone, some are over email. All of them
are useful in building your site. After all, everyone coming to your site
is going there to find information. Why not give it to them? A website is
like a 24 hour-a-day salesman on your behalf. Give that salesman the
firepower necessary to make the sale. Answer your common questions on your
website.

Pretty soon your customers will become self-provisioning. They’ll be able
to find their answers on your site. You’ll now enjoy the position of an
expert. They’ll be ready to buy from you. Your competitor down the street
without this knowledge base is out of luck. You win the sale.

How I Answer Questions on My Website

Blog Articles

My first option is to write a blog post answering a question like the one
you’re reading. This allows me to take the time to fully explore an issue
under a discreet topic. I use WordPress and I’ve configured an option to
allow me to post by sending my website an email – pretty convenient, eh
? Once the articles are written, people can comment follow up questions
which spawn further posts!

The good thing about this approach is that each blog article is syndicated
across the web where other people who are looking for those same answers
are linked back to me.

FAQs

I have written before on the effectiveness of a FAQ page on your site and stand by it. This is an especially
useful resource if your questions often come in the one-sentence variety.

Hmmm… What 1 sentence answers would you like to see on mine? Related Reading:

How Long Should A Website Article Be?

CWD — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:52:52 +0000

As long as you can keep people’s attention for.

No longer. Related Reading:

Ranking my Favorite Web Hosts

CWD — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:20:24 +0000

Who are the best and worst hosts you have ever used. Where did they go
wrong, where did they go right? I’m working on a review piece and here are
my candidates:

Web Hosting Companies I’ve Used.

(in only alphabetical order)

Blue Host
Go Daddy
HomeSite
MidPhase
Network Solutions
SquareSpace
Yahoo

What other Web Hosts Have You Used?

There have been other hosting marvels and attrocities that I’ve forgotten.
What do you use and why? Related Reading:

30 Second Picasa Review

CWD — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:26:43 +0000

Ever wondered what Picasa is, if it’s worth your time or how it can help
your business?

I did.

Here’s what I found out.

What is Picasa?

Picassa is a photo sharing service owned by Google. In short, you can post
images for free to their website and share them with your friends.

How Does Picasa Work?

You can use their web interface or do I
like I did and download their free desktop software.

After you log into either interface you can create an album with a specific
label, upload your photos, tag/label/map them, and then send a URL out to
your friends so they can see and comment on them.

How Easy is it?

Totally painless. Novice users comfortable with a web browser should be
able to easily use Picasa. I was able to download 300+ vacation photos from
my iPhone to Picasa and upload them to the site in a matter of minutes.

Why Use Picasa?

Because you want to share pictures. For your business, remember, all
press is good press, so share those photos!

5 Ways Photos on Picasa Can Help Your Business

Product / service photos!

Seeing is believing.

Chamber of Commerce events.

Especially if you are in B2B sales!

Charity

Let no good deed go unpublished.

Clients

Celebrate your successful clients.

Prospects

Prospects want to be able to see themselves using your service.

How do you use Picasa for your business?

Related Reading:

One-Sentence Web Design Answers

CWD — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:56:59 +0000

Have you ever wanted a quick answer to your website design questions? You
go to Google or some other search
engine, type in your query, and you get presented with a list of forum
discussions, in-depth articles that may or may not address what you’re
looking after.

Doesn’t that frustrate you?

Me, too.

One Sentence Web Design Answers

I’ll be making a FAQ page filled with 1 sentence answers for the most
common questions that I have been asked.

The floor’s open. Post your question to the comments below or Contact Us.
Whenever I answer a question I’ll put it on the FAQ and contact you back so
you know it’s there.

Some questions will require longer discussions, examples, videos, diagrams,
or step-by-step instructions. That’s cool. I’ll make a bigger post
for anything more complex that people have an interest in. Again, just let
me know. I’m here’s to help!

Let the commenting begin!

(See attached file: one sentence web design answers.png) Related Reading:

Posterous test

CWD — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:22:59 +0000

This might be the most amazing app, ever.

Do headers work?

Related Reading:

Website Design Advice to a Friend

CWD — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:12:53 +0000

Recently, a friend asked me for some thoughts about his website. The conversation drifted from his original question to a list of things that I thought he should do for his site. Since I like to treat the readers of this site as my friends, here’s the conversation.

See how many of them you could implement. There’s a lot of web development jargon and geekiness going on here. I can get a way with that in an email to my friend because he’s an advanced user. If you have any questions at all, let me know in the comments below.

3 Things You Absolutely Must Do for your Website

1) Change those file names from qnode to natural text. Never, ever have a url modifier unless you have to. Too many tools to bring your site down to risk it. Ex. Yoursite.com/qnode?=&34 is not as nice (or as safe, or a search engine efficient) as yoursite.com/article-name-here/

Bonus Before you change the file links, make an excel sheet and chart each old URL to the new one. I can show you how to use .htaccess as a Google re-mapping cheat sheet so everyone going to the old address automatically redirects to the new one. There’s a WP plug in that does this very well and I’d bet Drupal has one, too. If not, I’ve got a post on how to fix broken links with Meta Tags and .htaccess redirects.

2) Change the posting module to allow for RSS readers to see the entire article. Check out your site in Google Reader. Then check out mine. You’ll have a greater audience and more external links if you get this going. This includes images!

3) Get your meta straight. I’m lazy here too, but if you want to dominate, it’s necessary.

A) Title: You have the post title being the actual page title. That works for the most part. For really competitive markets, you might want to re-architect that like I did this weekend.

B) Description: We need a meta description. 1-2 teaser sentences describing the article. Goes a long, long, long way.

C) Image Optimization: You post a ton of images but none of them are optimized. Name the image,
the alt text and image description with the same words you are using in the title, description, etc. Then watch your page views skyrocket through the magic of Google’s Image search.

That was my advice to a friend. All clear?Related Reading:

6 Topics for Guaranteed Traffic

CWD — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:47:23 +0000

What Topics Should You Write About on Your Website?

OK. You’ve got a shiny new website for your business. You know that the way to get website visitors is through excellent, captivating content that people want to read and pass on to their friends. What you don’t know is what to write about. We’re here to help.

I interviewed a host of successful website writers and owners to find out what made their website’s – and their most popular articles – tick. We’ll cover each of these in the 6 Habits of Highly Successful Website Articles Series. Today’s topic is, well, popular topics.

Before you write anything, you’ve got to have a topic. While this may seem easy at the outset, after all, your website is already about something (ex. Website Design). You may find that writer’s block quickly sets in if you get overwhelmed by your subject area. Try any one of these topics for a quick energy boost.

Tutorials

I’ve had most of my success with the tutorials I have made on this site. For example, my Craigslist Image posting article continues to drive traffic and clients to my site. That article alone as more than paid for the cost of creating and running this website. What could one great tutorial do for your business?

Here’s an example of how one developer did it:

I run a modest blog with .NET samples where I describe simple how-to’s that may take forever to find out yourself. The samples serve both as a reminder store for myself and my collegues, but apperantly also for others. A single post from february in which I describe how to call WCF services from Javascript is responsible for half the blog traffic, according to Google Analytics. An even older posting about how to call asmx web services (the precursor to WCF) is responsible for over 25% of the traffic. So quite old two postings about roughly the same subject generate 80% of my traffic.

Apparently a lot of people are trying to write the kinds of applications where these techniques are used, and they cannot find simple enough step-by-step samples. It did not quite influence my way of posting, apart that I spend a lot of more care to my postings, now I see that a lot of people are looking at my blog. And I am shocked to see that if you hit “wcf service javascript” in Google my blog is actually halfway in at the first page.

-Joost van Schaik, Senior Software Architect at Vicrea

Holidays

Holidays are a rich area. People use the web extensively to research holiday themes. Take advantage of their searching to bring new visitors in creative ways to your site.

My most popular post has to be some Halloween wallpapers I gathered back in 1997, sized for 640×480 resolution – and seasonally, it gets many hits.

-Randall Goya Web Developer and Project Manager

Politics

Politics area always a hot button. Construct your article in such a way to attract the right audience and to foster a discussion and there can be tremendous spillover effects. For example, I wrote a post comparing John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s websites and the traffic spike was tremendous.

While my article was from a research perspective, other webmasters have gotten even more creative offerings going on. Check this one out:

We got a bunch of traffic to our blog post where we embedded a beta version of a Flash shooter game for political candidates. Basically, you get to pick which candidate is shooting and they can fire on moose and flying pigs with lipstick.

Scott Germaise, Senior Internet Strategic Product and Project Manager

Sensationalism / Celebrity

Everybody loves a great celebrity story. The web is no different.

A while back when Daniella Cicarelli (Ronaldos’ ex ) tried to get a Brazilian judge to shut down youtube world wide to remove a video of her getting romantic in the surf with a boy friend – I did a test in early 2007 on my blog writing about this and this year I have an average of 120 per day an 35,417 views this year on that post.

Legality

Legal issues are surprisingly popular topics to search for on the web. I have written a few mainly to answer my own questions about issues common to website developers and writers. Can I quote you? and Copying the Copyrighted, articles on the legality of quoting people’s statements on public internet forums are very popular posts for this site. Perhaps you can write an article concerning topical legal issues that your audience face, too.

Here’s another example:

I wrote a post about the illlegality of spouses tapping one another’s phones and you wouldn’t believe the traffic that popped up overnight. For some reason people really wanted to know whether or not they could go around monitoring their spouse’s phone calls. In California it’s completely illegal as we have one of the more strict wiretapping laws.

-Erick Rhoan, Law Clerk Volunteer at United States Attorney’s Office

Religion

They say that there are several topics you should never discuss in polite company and religion is one of them. What do people do when they want to learn more or talk about these topics anonymously? They head to the internet! As for what happens when another passion collides with religion? Meridith had an example about shoes:

My most popular posts seem to be the ones where I zoom in on a link between Judaism and Christianity…and mention food. Although my all-time most popular post was my commentary about Pope Benedict XVI’s shoes.

-Meredith Gould, MarComm Pro, Pharma Writer, Author, Publishing Coach, Sociologist.

There you have 6 topics for the next time you’re stuck looking at the keyboard for something to add to your site. Some will be good for qualified traffic, others will be good for exposure and back links, each should be good for future traffic.

What other kind of topics have you seen that can spike your traffic?Related Reading:

Are Short Blog Posts Worth It?

CWD — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:08:44 +0000

Sometimes I’m in the mood to write long, lengthy posts. Sometimes I am not. When I can, I like to provide substantial content. When I don’t have the time I wonder if writing a quick note as a blog post is even worth it.

Short Blog Posts Are Worth It!

RSS

Your posts are transmitted the world over in RSS. Even short posts can gain you an audience.

Practice

Short posts keep your site top-of-mind to your subscription audience but they also keep your blog top of mind for you.

Eliminates Clutter

Not every post has to be a novel. Most web surfers are looking for quick, dirty answers. They can always leave comments or contact you if they need a better answer!

Google Loves Content

Every short post is another post of content for Google to crawl for you. That’s well over 100% better than not having that post!

Google Loves Frequency

If you want to stay atop the search engine rankings for your keywords, you better have a frequently-updated website. The highest rankings for competitive keywords generally go to the most frequently updated sites.

What do you think? Was this short post worth your time and mine?Related Reading:

Why I Re-Joined the Lake Wylie Chamber of Commerce

CWD — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:37:14 +0000

Well, it’s official. I re-joined the Lake Wylie Chamber of Commerce. And I’m pretty happy about it.

Why I re-Joined the Lake Wylie Chamber of Commerce

In a word – marketing. Earlier this year I took a look at all of my various kinds of marketing activities and I listed the amount of money I spent investing in it. In the end, it was a no-brainer. After the measurements were in it was clear that running this website was my primary and cheapest source of new clients. Second place went to the Chamber.

A Return to Value

Before I decided to re-join the chamber I added up all the hours I had to spent doing doing marketing and calculated what I would have charged a client at an hourly rate. I then added up all of the money I spent on marketing added it to that total.

Note: While all figures below are entirely fictional, the spirit is true.

Website Design and Blogging Example

Total Cost = Hours worked + Associated Costs = = 10 per month @ $50 / hr + $100 => $600 / month in costs.
ROI = Revenue / Total Cost = $6000 / 600 = 10.

Lake Wylie Chamber of Commerce Example

Total Cost = Hours worked + Associated Costs = 6 per month @ $50 / hr + $20 => $320 / month in costs.
ROI = Revenue / Total Cost = $1600 / 320 = 5.

Radio Advertisement Example

Total Cost = Hours worked + Associated Costs = 1 hr @ $50 / hr + $250 => $300 / month in costs.
ROI = Revenue / Total Cost = $0 / 300 = 0.

Results

As you can see from above, even using fictional examples, I enjoyed a 10 fold return on my web design efforts, a 5 fold return on my Chamber of Commerce efforts, and a 0 return on my radio advertising efforts. You don’t have to have an MBA to realize that spending money on radio instead of joining the chamber is a poor choice.

What results have you enjoyed by being a member of the chamber of commerce? Let us know below.Related Reading: