Code My Own Road - Josh Kohlbach

Technology Review: Website Grader Online SEO Research Tool

Josh Kohlbach — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:19:02 PST

I was looking at an article the other day which was pointing out useful website design tools and came across something I used long long long ago when they first started, Website Grader.

Website Grader has been around for a while so it was interesting for me to see how it had changed in the last year or two.

I tell you what – it’s a lot more advanced than it used to be.

When I stumbled on them in what I think was late 2007 they weren’t very advanced in what statistics they were reporting on. In fact it was like pretty much every website grading tool on the market at the time – pretty lame.

Now, they’ve beefed up the statistics, culled the useless ones, and left us with something that is actually quite insightful and useful.

Testing Website Grader

As a demo I decided to run it on this site and then went on to run it on pretty much all my sites and some client sites as well, revealing some interesting data.

They send you a personalised copy of your report – here’s mine for Code My Own Road.

Features

Some of the statistics include:

Readability
A summary of your on page SEO
Domain information
Your MOZ rank
Off page SEO (inbound links and competition analysis)
Conversion info (if it found an RSS feed or newsletter email conversion form)
A social media summary

… and loads more. You can even compare your grading and data to competitors. In fact it’s a great tool for scoping out competition when entering a new niche!

Mindful Use

While it’s important NOT to put too much faith in a tool like this, I do think that every once in a while it’s good to pause and reflect and check some of the obvious things.

Make sure you’re not making silly mistakes – for me it’s not having a newsletter subscription option (something I’m looking into) – and get a rough idea of how you’re going compared to competing websites.

I’m usually pretty critical when it comes to judging the usefulness of tools such as these, so I was actually pleasantly surprised to see some groups out there are making real measurable progress in providing useful stats for webmasters like us.

More Resources

I’ll be adding this to the resources page. Find more interesting and useful tools there.

You might like to read one of these next:

Code My Own Road is a blog for Do-It-Yourself Entrepreneurs. You'll find entrepreneurial tips and technical tutorials to help you be the best online entrepreneur you can be.

Josh Kohlbach is a professional programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia.

Expert Interview: David Doolin – Wanna Be A Web Hero?

Josh Kohlbach — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:09:44 PST

Today I have an interview with my friend and Wordpress aficionado David Doolin of Website In A Weekend.

Dave started Website In A Weekend just over a year ago as a way to learn about Wordpress and post his findings.

His site is already picking up lots of visitors and he’s built a really active community of contributing authors (ahem, yes, I’m one of them) and active commenters. This really gives his site a buzz!

When I approached Dave for an interview I was a bit nervous actually. Dave and I have been talking for nearly over 6 months now and we’ve exchanges lots of ideas, so it’s no surprise to me that his site is successful.

I was nervous because I’ve always wanted to know how he seems to get people to gather around him and pay attention. That is a hardcore skill that not many people have.

I don’t want to keep him from you any longer! Here’s the interview:

Thanks for agreeing to the interview Dave! We’ve been website buddies for a little while now and having posted on your site a couple of times it’s nice to finally repay the favour!

Your site Website In A Weekend is packed full of tips for starting and maintaining a website, but what I (and a lot of others) like about your site most is the active community. What are the main things you do to get people involved and talking to each other?

Two effective ways I’ve found to build community are 1. reply to every comment possible, 2. leave a lot of comments on other people’s blogs. This is time consuming to be sure, but it’s very effective.

I have to agree, comments that I leave seem to provide a lot of the traffic I get on my site as well. Truth be told I kind of swiped this strategy from watching you!

You started your website with the moniker “Dr. Wordpress“, but interestingly, you’re a real post grad Dr. as well.

Can you tell us a bit about your doctorate studies and keeping your online and offline lives separate?

As it turns out, the firewall between myself offline work and Website In A Weekend is pretty thin. It’s mostly what I’m doing right now. “Dr WordPress,” however, is retired. As it turns out I am a world authority in implicit discrete element methodology (market is very tiny), but not in WordPress. Since the firewall is so thin, I don’t want to imply that I have any more knowledge of WordPress than I what I post on Website In A Weekend. Basically, if you want to know what I know about WordPress, you can read it. I post it all. This means that if I haven’t written about it, I probably know nothing about it.

Has having the docotorate helped your blogging in any way?

I don’t think so. Blogging has zero accountability. People can say whatever they want (almost), be whoever they want, and no one will call them out. If I had to do it over, I believe I would remove references to having the post-graduate degree. Don’t be surprised if you see that disappear everywhere on Website In A Weekend in fact. It really is irrelevant, so it shouldn’t be mentioned.

Update: Dave has started removing all references to Dr. Wordpress – I, on the other hand, will remember him (R.I.P. Dr. Wordpress! *sob*)

It seems like Website In A Weekend is really starting to pick up steam now after a long year of content creation. I’ve seen it mentioned in a few places around the web.

With all the extra traffic what are you doing to monetize your site?

I sell small, very specialized pdf reports. I like writing these. They aren’t making the rent yet, but they just might in the future.

What’s do you think has been the most effective thing you do that’s contributed to the success of your business with Website In A Weekend?

Taking it slowly so I keep a tight grip on all the moving parts. The current meme is “outsource everything,” but it’s been my experience that outsourcing is most effective when you can basically do the job yourself. That way, you know what needs to be outsourced, you know how to spec the job, and you can run effective due diligence on the deliverables.

That’s true, I think it was Bill Gates that said:

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

… I guess that applies doubly for outsourcing.

Let’s talk about collecting emails, I know that you manage a very responsive list of subscribers to your newsletter.

Being in the dark ages myself and not having subscription options to a newsletter or anything, I’m curious to know about the success of your newsletter.

How long has it been going and what sort of response rate do you get from promotions there?

I’m building my list very slowly. There is no bribe, there’s no reward for joining. I keep the newsletters fairly short, and I keep the sales pitches even shorter. No BS. This has resulted in a small list of responsive readers (average 30% open rate, often much higher), and 10-15% click through.

For people with smaller websites, like myself, do you think it’s still worth gathering email addresseses with a newsletter?

Yep. It’s yet another arrow in your quiver. Email isn’t going away anytime soon, and people are comfortable with email.

As we touched on earlier, one of your more visible traffic strategies, commenting, is a bit of a favourite. How effective is it at bringing visitors to your site?

Commenting is very effective at bringing in traffic!

Well, now that you’ve been nicely peppered with questions I have just one last one.

What’s your next big thing? Care to link drop anything? (Fine, that was two)

I have a couple of interesting things up my sleeve at the moment. I prefer to keep these to myself, though, until they’re ready. I execute methodically. Once I release, you can expect accurate and precise material. This violates a core principle of business and marketing which is to be the first out of the gate. And I *hate* getting scooped. So, watch and see. Other than that, more of the same community building, concentrating on providing measurable value (that is, giving you stuff you can plug into your spreadsheet and get a number for).

David’s website Website In A Weekend helps people create and manage blogs and sites for personal and business. It’s brimming with hundred of thousands of words on how to get the most out of Wordpress – the most popular content management system on the internet.

Check out his newsletter for insider news and gossip.

Thanks for the interview Dave!

A Collection Of Tools For Creating Multiple Streams Of Income

Josh Kohlbach — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:07:45 PST

Hi Guys and Gals,

Just a quick note to let you know all know about the new Resources section here on Code My Own Road.

I’m always coming across kick ass tools that I use for researching business ideas, website information, designing pages, and loads more.

It seems a shame that they just get collected in my Delicious account and never see the light of day, so I’m going to start a new page collecting links to all of these tools. I hope you find it useful! Feel free to refer back to it whenever you like and share it around – it’s a free resource.

Let me know in the comments if there is anything you’d like to see here or if there are any broken links.

It’s a small collection of tools at the moment, but I’m hoping it will grow large and useful with a bit of time and, of course, your wonderful help.

- Josh

Photo Credit: batega

You might like to read one of these next:

Code My Own Road is a blog for Do-It-Yourself Entrepreneurs. You'll find entrepreneurial tips and technical tutorials to help you be the best online entrepreneur you can be.

Josh Kohlbach is a professional programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia.

Expert Interview: Rose DesRochers – Building Online Communities

Josh Kohlbach — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:15:26 PST

Today I have a very special post here on Code My Own Road. This is actually the first interview I’ve conducted and I’m absolutely stoked that I could interview community website owner, writer and blogging expert Rose DesRochers.

Rose and I made contact via comments I left on her blog which I’ve been following for a while now and after some chatting on Twitter, I had the idea of getting Rose write a guest post.

Rose has a whole wealth of experience online, with over 8 years running and operating websites, so to capitalize on that we eventually settled on a question and answer interview format.

Today Rose runs multiple community websites in the writing and blogging niche. I was quite impressed with her success in this ultra competitive niche online and how she managed to build up multiple streams of income with these websites.

I was especially interested in getting information about how she build herself up, what monetization methods she’s using for her websites, and what advice she could give people just starting to look into generating income from a website.

The Interview

Thanks for agreeing to do this interview Rose! I’m humbled to be in contact with someone that’s really had some great success online.

My pleasure! Thank you for asking me.

I’ll just jump right into the questions I think. So Rose, you’ve been making websites for a while now – about 8 years I hear – can you take us back in time to when you were just starting out and tell us a little bit about your first ever website and how you got started?

My first web portal was Todays-woman.net. It was build by my husband Shawn of visionthishosting.com. In the beginning my plans for Today’s Woman was for it to be a woman’s portal. I changed my mind and decided it would be a friendship community for both men and women. Some of the first members joined and started submitting their writing. It took on a writing theme of its own, so we began to gear the site more towards writers. Before long it was full-fledge writing community.

Interesting how it kind of took on a life of it’s own from what you thought it was going to be about to what it actually became.

Building a thriving community is definitely hard work, can you give us a broad overview of what website communities you run now?

Right now I run two community portals, soon to be three and I’m the author of five blogs. I’m the administrator of bloggertalk.net a community for bloggers and todayswriting.com, a community for writers.

I’m sure every webmaster at some stage has had the thought of “I wonder if I can make a dollar or two with this thing”. How have you attempted monetizing your sites in the past?

I’ve sold advertisement, premium memberships, signed up for affiliate programs and joined other primary CPC and text based contextual ad networks.

That’s a pretty broad range of options, what would you say has been the most successful way you’ve monetized your websites so far?

Advertisements, ad link networks, premium memberships, and Google Adsense have been my biggest source of revenue.

Having the success you’ve had isn’t something you come across everyday online. There are lots of people struggling to “make it” and build active communities online.

Is there some specific action you’re really proud of that you would attribute most of your success to?

I think the reason my sites are successful is, because I’m not an administrator who remains invisible. I get involved in the communities and get to know my members. I also have to attribute most of my success to my family and the members of my communities. My sites would not be successful if it were not for the members. I’m very lucky to have a supportive family and the kind of members, friends, and staff who are willing to devote so much time and energy to the communities they are apart of.

What advice would you give someone planning to start and monetize a website now? Where should they start?

The first thing you’ll want to do is make your site or blog a place people will want to visit. Content is king! Give people what they want and they will visit. I would encourage posting quality over quantity.

When you’re ready to make money with your blog or site, the internet provides so many opportunities for people to make money. You can apply for Google Adsense. You can earn money by talking about certain products and services. Place the BidVertiser text ads on your website. Earn money through affiliate programs. The possibilities are endless. What works for one person may not work for another. It’s really trial and error.

Excellent advice. You’ve mentioned that you’re trying to push the envelope – so what are your plans for the immediate future? Can you link drop anything for us to check out?

I’ve been asked to make a guest appearance on Wordcast. I’m also entering the social networking scene very soon with the launch of my own social network. I’d love to drop a link to my new social network, but it’s still being built.

Rose, thanks again for the interview. It’s been extremely valuable and enlightening. All the best in the future!

Marketing Yourself: When You Don’t Know Something, You Don’t Know It (And That’s OK)

Josh Kohlbach — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:30:12 PST

One of the best ways to increase your income is to work on the income steams that you already own.

For me, my biggest income stream still happens to be my full time job as a software developer. I earn a modest salary which I’m fairly happy with, but recently though, I felt as if my job wasn’t challenging me in the right ways – to push me forward in the direction I want to take with my work.

When you go into work day in and day out doing the same thing it’s a little hard for it not to feel like drudgery at times. I thought I’d take advantage of this “feeling like I’d hit a brick wall” phase in the position I was in. I knew it was time to shake things up a bit.

Weighing The Risks

Shaking things up with your job position isn’t without risks, but the biggest risk to me in a technical position is that my skills aren’t varied enough staying in one job for an extended period of time.

That, and it’s probably dangerous for my co-workers if I’m surrounded by grey fabric walls bored out of my skull for 8 hours straight everyday.

I decided at the turn of the new year to change jobs. And with it came a raise and some really exciting work. I’m loving my new position and it’s filled me with the energy I needed to follow my other passion of building up my side business’ as well.

An Interesting Discussion

My new boss and I were chatting and getting to know each other one morning (it’s a small company) and he was telling me how he interviewed another guy for one of the positions.

Similar level of skill as myself, similar amount of experience, and similar professional background. The one difference was, as he put it, “he just knew it all”.

Everything they discussed about this project he was being hired for was “not a problem” or “I’ve had heaps of experience with that”. To my trained, more experience boss who was doing the hiring, it was pretty obvious that he didn’t. The interview was all but over in 15 minutes with a friendly “we’ll be in touch”.

I’m pretty sure his resume was filed under ‘R’ for “arrivederci”.

My Interview

Contrast this with my interview – while I’m still a cocky little bugger, I know my limits. My recent ventures online have illustrated that to me quite well thank you very much.

I spent probably half the time saying “No, I don’t know that technology, but learning is half the fun.” To my surprise, he agreed and we spent most of the time bonding and sharing a laugh.

The Take Home Lesson

The take home lesson for programmers and any other job seeker out there: If you don’t know it – admit it. It’s a thin veil and your future boss knows when you’re bluffing.

When you don’t know something, you don’t know it. But that’s okay as well.

For technical people at least, your goal should be to demonstrate that you have the core skills, so your prospective employer knows that when it comes to technical road blocks (of which there will be many, trust me) you will know how to figure them out. That is more important that “knowing” the ins and outs of the syntax of the latest tech programming craze any day.

I can’t remember who it was (pretty sure it was one of my engineering lecturers) that said, “Engineering is not really about knowing things – it’s about knowing how to find things.

Parting Advice

The conversation finished up with this parting wisdom which I’ve paraphrased:

Fulltime positions are a two way street – it’s the company’s responsibility to make sure you’re constantly challenged and not bored in your job. If I hired the guy that knew everything (even though I doubt he does) he’s not going to be challenged enough to stick around.

Good advice.

Photo Credit: Zach Dischner

You might like to read one of these next:

Code My Own Road is a blog for Do-It-Yourself Entrepreneurs. You'll find entrepreneurial tips and technical tutorials to help you be the best online entrepreneur you can be.

Josh Kohlbach is a professional programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia.

The Lazy Mans Guide To Designing Your Customer’s Website

Josh Kohlbach — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:00:46 PST

This is the third article in a series about my web design mini business case study. It’s all about the my interactions with my first website customer Nick the painter. If you haven’t read the first article yet, feel free to go back and read it now before moving onto this one.

When I pitched my idea for Nick’s website we were sitting at his kitchen table.

I allowed myself to switch over into “sales person” mode so I sounded like I knew what I was doing.

In reality: I had no freakin’ idea.

I’ve never pitched a build for a website before. Every website I had created has either been for myself or for a relative. So while I’ve created quite a few websites in the past, I still felt a little bit like I was treading water, just figuring things out at I went along.

It’s interesting working with someone who’s paying for your services because the ideas that you have aren’t necessarily the same.

Nick and I originally started with the idea that I would come up with a couple of concepts that he might like to choose from.

What ended up happening was the exact opposite.

I started the project by drawing up a few designs for layouts on paper. Then I mocked these up in photoshop so I had something to work with and finally figured it’d be easy enough to actually implement the landing page.

So that’s what I did, I had a few designs ready for shooting at Nick so I just started on the first.

Now Nick at this stage hadn’t decided on business cards or other business stationery either, so he needed a logo and everything.

We talked about paint spewing from buckets and all sorts of stuff, so that was going to be part of the mock up.

While I think the first idea was pretty close to what he was originally thinking, Nick and his wife didn’t think it quite matched up with the homely feel they were trying to create with the business. There was something not quite right about it.

I understood and vowed alter the design to achieve that effect.

That night something magical happened.

Nick and his wife spent the entire night literally glued to their computer screen. They started thinking about what they originally thought it was going to look like and began drawing it in MS Word, the most familiar program to them.

It just wasn’t turning out right.

After a while they changed tact completely and went with a dramatically different colour scheme and logo and by the end of the night they had something that they were really happy with.

This is a little part of the email he sent me that night:

“hey dude,

hope you dont mind how these items look, we really like them [referring to the attached documents]. We had big discussions last night bout logos and decided against, we had a look at few other websites and did not really have logos. Give me a call and we can discuss properly. I hope this is alright [...]“

Amazing huh?

Even though he was a bit timid about offending me (we’re mates afterall) I was absolutely proud of my first customer. Nick and his wife turned what can sometimes be a pretty difficult job (getting requirements), into something that was just too easy.

Now I had something to work with.

This tactic of getting the customer to literally show you what they are imagining worked out much better than I could imagine, because no matter how many mock ups and designs I would have done, it couldn’t match something that came directly from their heads.

This is the lazy man’s way of designing a website – and it freakin’ works.

So now that I had the basic design, all I needed to do was polish it, and implement it. This process took another couple of weeks of working on it on and off and now we were in each other’s heads, Nick and I exchanged ideas a lot more freely.

I gave him some pointers on his business cards and other stationery and now everything about his business actually matches. His branding is consistent and he’s giving the same underlying message across everything.

My Challenge To You

I’m looking for a method/system that will allow me to quickly draw and demo layouts and designs to customers while I’m sitting right there at their table. It’s the tool I’m missing. If you know of something like this – please email me, or leave a comment below.

What Do You Do?

How do you design with your customers? Do you sit at the kitchen table and nut it out? Or do you design lots of mock ups for their approval?

Tell us about it.

For me – I’m definitely going to be lazier in the future.

This is the second article in a series about my web design mini business case study. It’s all about the my interactions with my first website customer Nick the painter.

Photo Credit: rogerimp

You might like to read one of these next:

Code My Own Road is a blog for Do-It-Yourself Entrepreneurs. You'll find entrepreneurial tips and technical tutorials to help you be the best online entrepreneur you can be.

Josh Kohlbach is a professional programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia.

Writing Techniques For Bricks & Mortar Business Websites

Josh Kohlbach — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:52:03 PST

Through my interactions with writing blog posts and guest posts for a bricks & mortar painting business website recently I discovered that it’s not quite the same as writing for yourself.

I’ve enjoyed the whole process thoroughly as you can probably tell if you’re still reading along with my series so far about how I setup my web design mini business.

Perception

Perception seems to be pretty important when you’re marketing a real business online.

Are you a funky business? A professional business? A local hero? A corporate wrangler?

As you can imagine, the online marketing strategy you might take for one kind of business could be pretty different to another.

Tone

Tone sets the perception of how your writing will be interpreted.

Using the wrong tone of voice for the business can really damage how it’s seen. If you’re trying to come across as a professional but can’t seem to string a coherent sentence together you’re in trouble.

I like to act as a bit of a buffer between my clients and the world wide web. It’s a harsh place out there.

When I say buffer, I mean screening the text they write up for me and editing it for tone.

Audience

There is about a million factors you could look at when analysing your audience, but I think if you nail these two you’ve got a lot of the equation sorted:

Who are they?

How do they want to receive this information?

Usually for business blogs you’re writing to your existing customers or potential customers.

For customers you want to convey info that might affect them as customers of your business. This might mean you focus on, product information and updates, giving out rewards for being loyal customers, and anything else that could change the way they interact with you and your business.

Potential customers will be a lot more interested in hearing about how your products or services are going to help them. You should work on providing them with some real value via your blog to build trust and convince them that real salvation lies in becoming a customer.

How this info is delivered to can take a few different forms and you can vary your approach depending on convenience (for both you and them).

Have you written for a business blog? What sort of business was it? I’ve recently done some writing for a painting business and loved it. Tell us about your experiences.

Photo Credit: ktylerconk

You might like to read one of these next:

Code My Own Road is a blog for Do-It-Yourself Entrepreneurs. You'll find entrepreneurial tips and technical tutorials to help you be the best online entrepreneur you can be.

Josh Kohlbach is a professional programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia.

Domains, Hosting and Making It All Repeatable

Josh Kohlbach — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:00:55 PST

This is the second article in a series about my web design mini business case study. It’s all about the my interactions with my first website customer Nick the painter. If you haven’t read the first article yet, feel free to go back and read it now before moving onto this one.

The funny thing about setting up a website is all the extra crap you have to do before you start doing anything meaningful about how the site looks and feels.

This includes researching and buying a domain, settling on a hosting company that seems reliable, and finally deciding on your content management strategy and software.

Once you take all that setup away, designing a website is what it’s supposed to be: a fun process.

My goal with Nick was to take care of all of this for him because it would just confuse things and get him thinking about the small stuff that, in the end, doesn’t really make much of a difference.

Prior to setting up any hosting or domain name I decided to research a few keywords. The obvious one “painting” should probably feature in the domain name. We would want some locality involved as well as we aren’t really after customers from Melbourne or overseas. And of course getting his brand out there would be important too – we need to dominate the search results for his name in case people search for him to find his website address.

There’s a whole tome of information written about keyword research online and if you search long enough you can find everything you need for free. For those that are just starting, I highly recommend you check out this excellent keyword research article by Glen of Viperchill – I am now using a similar strategy to this for evaluating keywords and markets.

Once Nick and I had settled on the domain we decided to make the purchase. As we were after the Australian and specifically Brisbane locality I recommended he buy a .com.au domain name.

I’m not sure about the validity of this little SEO fact so maybe someone can confirm but to my understanding it’s better to buy at least 2-3 years of domain registration as the longevity of your domain name is a factor in ranking algorithms of all the major search engines. I think the thinking behind it is that they need to know your site is going to be around for a while if they were to put you higher in the rankings. Even if there’s no truth to it it’s not going to cost you a lot as Australian domain names only run around the $12 mark per year.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve used Bluehost for a while now and never had a problem. There’s been reports of CPU throttling and so forth, but you’ll probably find a share of bad reports with many of the hosts around today.

Bluehost has always provided a pretty decent service for me and their software support is outrageously good. They use cPanel which makes installing things a hellava lot easier. And they also support a lot of third party apps to make your hosting life easier.

This all said I knew that I would be wanting start up several small websites in the near future as well as revamp my Dad’s business website for him. I needed some way to manage everything without drowning in usernames and passwords, login addresses and the hassle of setting up Wordpress on each site from scratch.

My first solution has promise, but lacked a few details.

At first, I became really interested in being able to replicate Wordpress installations by setting up a small base install with just the bare minimum of plugins that I use on all my sites. This would then be used to setup sites.. really fast.

It was a novel idea, but of course meant I’d have to setup and maintain a development site somewhere which included all the goodies I wanted to have in my base install. Not such a big deal, but it is when you need to update plugins, themes, and more and always keep your snapshot up to date. I thought about doing this monthly, and it would have been workable until I discovered something that was a little closer to my dream solution.

My second solution – the one I’m running with at the moment – was found while browsing around for details on the Wordpress.org website.

I came across a thing called Wordpress Multi-User and instantly wondered why the hell I hadn’t seen this before.

I’ve written about WPMU before so I’ll spare the gory details, but basically WPMU allows you to install, run and maintain multiple blogs (or websites, whatever) via one administration interface.

You setup WPMU using a sub domain setup so each new website gets a sub-domain of your site. For example, I could setup a store on codemyownroad.com and it would be called store.codemyownroad.com.

The beauty of this – and pay attention because this is where the magic happens – is that you can then map a domain name to this sub domain and brand it something completely different. To continue the example, let’s say I was selling T-Shirts for nerds from store.codemyownroad.com. I could brand it something like JoshsNerdyTshirts.com and no one would ever know that it was actually hosted as a subdomain to my codemyownroad.com website.

This was the perfect solution for Nick’s website. A way for me to get out of the hosting costing me a fortune upfront while still providing a quality service to him. A service that I could now administer a lot easier by having the website on my server.

The beauty is that because the site is still Wordpress based, if we ever needed to move it to it’s own hosting account we could just install regular Wordpress, install the theme, import all the data and switch the domain over to the new hosting account without harming any rankings or anything.

So to summarize what had been done up to this point:

Checked on keywords and decided on some likely domains that could work.
Bought a .com.au domain with 2-3 years of registration.
Instead of setting up a new hosting account with Wordpress for each site, I discovered the joys of Wordpress Multi-User and set Nick’s site up with that so I could manage it easily.
We linked his new domain to the subdomain on my hosting.

This is the second article in a series about my web design mini business case study. It’s all about the my interactions with my first website customer Nick the painter.

Photo Credit: jared

You might like to read one of these next:

Code My Own Road is a blog for Do-It-Yourself Entrepreneurs. You'll find entrepreneurial tips and technical tutorials to help you be the best online entrepreneur you can be.

Josh Kohlbach is a professional programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia.

Setting Up My Web Design Mini Business [Case Study]

Josh Kohlbach — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:00:26 PST

It started mid last year – I awoke with a start thinking I’d missed my alarm. Still, it was only just past 5am. Perfect. I turned it off before it was due to ring and silently rolled out of bed.

At 5:30am I was picked up by a high school buddy of mine, chucked my fishing rod and tacklebox into the back of his ute and we headed out to where the sea meets the shore about an hour north of Brisbane.

After pulling in a few quick catches (much to my surprise) the conversation turned to work.

My friend, Nick, was telling me about his new painting business – he’d just started out on his own after breaking off from his business partner.

Things were looking promising for Nick, and because he’s a bit younger than most of the other painters around Brisbane that have their own business it was obvious he had one advantage to play – he was a little more tech savvy than his competitors.

Now his business was setup, his thoughts turned to setting up a web presence.

I mentioned to Nick that I was thinking about setting up my own little side business building websites and would love to be able to start with his with the view to moving on to also doing other friends and family member’s websites for them.

Web designers generally charge upfront for their services. Usually it’s a sum of money that most people would not consider an insignificant amount.

Obviously I’m not in the business of ripping friends off, but I did want to somehow take advantage of this awesome opportunity that was being served to me on a platter and use it as some sort of platform for making a viable side business.

I suggested that because I don’t really want to dump the website on him and run (what actually happens to most small business owners unfortunately), I would stay on, kind of mentoring him on how to run his site and build up a viable web presence for his business to see him rise in the rankings.

The sad fact is that most small business websites rank well for about a month, then disappear from the search results only to send nothing but a small trickle of visitors. Hardly an effective use of money to advertise your business.

My idea was to charge Nick a small amount of money month on month, and in return help him build a website that sent him customers.

Our strategy is unfolding as follows:

1. Get the hosting sorted out

Being mindful that I wanted to save money and make this a win win scenario, I made the decision to host his website on my existing hosting account via Bluehost.

Bluehost is pretty reliable and I haven’t had a drama with them in the last two years – I feel good recommending them to anyone.

What I’ll also cover in “hosting” is my additional layer of using WPMU (Wordpress Multi User) as a way to maintain control over lots of websites, including Nick’s.

2. Get the site up

Nick and I originally started this with the idea that I would come up with a couple of concepts that he might like to choose from.

What ended up happening was the exact opposite.

In the end Nick and his wife spent a night attached to their computer screen in MS Word mocking up what they thought the front page of their website should look like.

This turned out to be a better tactic and I’ll explain why later in this series.

3. Setup some basic advertising

While this wasn’t a massive thing as the general idea was to generate new leads via search engine results (meaning we don’t have to keep paying to get those leads) we did want to do a little advertising as a way to get the website’s address out there.

This involved a couple of tasks including updating his business stationery and preparing local listings.

4. Blogging

As a painter, I’m sure you can imagine Nick’s thoughts on blogging at the start.

This one was interesting because it’s hard to explain what kind of value doing this would create for a painter, but I explained why we would want to do it, and why it was important for his long term success online.

5. Getting the word out

We’re approaching this with one firm thing in mind. To gain links.

Of all the search engine optimization strategies out there for optimizing your homepage by doing a flurry of different things, getting out there and convincing people who own related websites to give you a link is the MOST effective.

We’re seeing if we can do a number of things for our friends around the internet including giving them guest blog posts, answering some Q&A’s, and anything else they want to get a link back and, of course, provide some value to the community.

Summary

So… that’s the bird’s eye view.

While this project isn’t the most rewarding in terms of time investment and monetary return, it IS extremely rewarding for me in a number of ways.

I’m learning a massive amount from the whole experience. This is really my first chance at helping a business person extend their business into the online world. That in itself is massive.

Technology wise I’m being exposed to installing and managing a WPMU installation and on top of that managing a business website that represents someone’s real bricks and mortar business. I’ve also learned about a few domaining issues, like the fact that you need an ABN (Australian Business Number) to buy and use a .com.au address.

And finally, but probably most importantly, I’m getting the satisfaction of helping out a close mate. It’s been loads of fun and we’re getting to see a little of the professional side of each other and how we work.

Hopefully after we’re up and running a little more we can go back and fish and reflect even more.

Coming up next we’ll leap into discussing the five points above and I’ll talk about some of the things we’ve come across. Sign up to the RSS feed if you’re interested in keeping up to date and let me know your thoughts so far in the comments below!

This is the first article in a series about my web design mini business case study. It’s all about the my interactions with my first website customer Nick the painter.

Next posts in this series:

2. Domains, Hosting and Making It All Repeatable
3. Getting The Site Up

Photo credit: jakeprzespo

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Code My Own Road is a blog for Do-It-Yourself Entrepreneurs. You'll find entrepreneurial tips and technical tutorials to help you be the best online entrepreneur you can be.

Josh Kohlbach is a professional programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia.

The Blogging Desire

Josh Kohlbach — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 15:00:59 PST

Skelliwag wrote an interesting post back in June on the three D’s of blogging which really resonated with me and kind of echos how I’m feeling about the whole blog situation at the moment.

“For some, the loss of a desire to blog might be caused by the novelty wearing off. Particularly when writing in narrow niches, or writing timeless content that is not based on news or new developments, you can begin to feel over time that you have said everything there is to say on your topic, and that you are essentially repeating yourself. In this case, it’s important not to continue in the same way – particularly when writing blog posts begins to feel like a chore. The content you write will be poor and you will damage your feelings about blogging.”

The emphasis in the quote is mine, but I imagine she would have said it something like that.

I’m not sick of blogging per say, but still feel kind of guilty about the lack of focus and the confusion that I must be bringing to every post I’ve been writing. I don’t really wanna write crap that’s not worth reading anymore. I want to reignite my blogging desire.

In my previous post I was really truthful with you guys about the future of Code My Own Road and apologised (in a round about way) for the lack of structure about the place. The blog doesn’t really have a focus. You can’t goto codemyownroad.com and go “oh this site is clearly about such and such”.

Such is blogging (to borrow the famous saying “such is life”). We make mistakes, regroup, and move on.

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” – Oscar Wilde

The most important thing is: I’m feeling inspired. I have things to keep me busy and never fear, Code My Own Road is still part of these plans. I will be umm… coding my own road… so to speak.

I’m going to start writing up details about how my interactions with Nick the painter (from the last post) have gone and how we’re handling his website project together. It’s great fun and we’re both enjoying the process so I’d love to share some of that. I can’t wait to share some of that actually, my fingers are quivering above the keyboard just thinking about writing up that little gem of a series.

Once that topic is wrapped up for the moment I’ll probably aim to talk about another small project I’m about to start work on now. And as I promised last post, I won’t be posting things in between unless I feel it’s good quality content, would be well-timed, or happens to be news worth sharing.

I want every post to be “worth reading”.

Photo credit: Annie Mole

You might like to read one of these next:

Code My Own Road is a blog for Do-It-Yourself Entrepreneurs. You'll find entrepreneurial tips and technical tutorials to help you be the best online entrepreneur you can be.

Josh Kohlbach is a professional programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia.