Posts from — September 2007

Well, here we are, we’re a web design and development company, yet we are asked daily to do things for next to nothing. Unfortunately, we have to eat dinner just like the next guy so we really can not do it. But I guess it wouldn’t hurt to inform those of you who want to do your own sites, how to do it on the cheap. We would otherwise not divulge this information but at this point in our game, it’s all good, we have plenty of sites that pay us a fair price to develop for them.

So here are our best tips on making a cheap website:

1. Most people don’t know it but you can get a premade template for only about $50. and have it installed to your website, or install it yourself.

2. You can get cheap domain names and web hosting for as little as $4.95 per month that can handle these things.

3. Look for web hosts that carry “cpanel” which is a great little utility that will install programs on your website in a matter of minutes. You could start a blog in about 10 minutes using this utility. You can also install a complete shopping cart system with a click of a button.
4. Once you’ve installed a blog or shopping cart you’ll want to customize it.  Use your template (above) and install the header portion into the header section of the blog or cart system that you’ve installed.

5. you’ll need to put in products into your store, that is usually done via an import of an excel file, or it can be done over time manually.

6. Once you’ve got yourself a website, you’ll need to promote it. The changes of you getting natural search are slim to nill. Don’t just think that you can put up a site and people will come to you. You have to go out and let them know you are there. You need to submit the site to google, yahoo, msn and others and you also need to go out and get listed in as many directories as you can. Establishing a presence on ebay can help you as well. If you use your userid on ebay as your domain name you really can’t lose on this count. Make sure to link your website from your ebay about me page.

7. Enroll yourself in all the online shopping portals and put up feeds as much as you can afford to gain some traffic, maximize your efforts by determining when customers are most likely to purchase, seasonally, you can do a pretty nice business without going broke. However, seasonal times are also more costly so go for items and keywords that are less expensive and targeted directly to the product that you have in stock. Don’t try to hit the main keyword on a budget.
8. Start a mailing list on your website, you don’t want to miss a single customer without having that online. You can easily create buttons for your website mailing list using a program such as aSending for an  email marketing program. These types of programs provide the buttons and you just paste the code in the right place on your website.
9. If you need a merchant account check here for a quick cheap solution or use paypal.

10. You’ll need an ssl certication and can use the ones here for only $26.00 dollars a year. Why pay more, believe me, there is no reason.

11. If you don’t have the patience for all of the above, give us a call, we make great websites at reasonable prices.

There are many many other ways to make a web site yourself and make it work for you, but in general the theory is that if you have the money have a professional do it. It saves time, money and mistakes, but if you have the time you can learn, learn, learn and get quite far doing it yourself.

Check out the ebay and do it yourself directory for more

Any questions?

Need a free press release company. Well here ya go:

ecommwire.com

www.free-press-release.com

http://www.prleap.com/

www.prnewsnow.com

www.1888pressrelease.com

www.openpr.com

www.i-newswire.com

www.24-7pressrelease.com

If you are thinking of buying a used domain, or an expired domain name, you’ll want to check a few things first to make sure you are getting something good, unless of course you just like the name.

First off, try the backlink checker, which will tell you what PR value is assigned to any of the backlinks

Or how about an entire page of research on that domain.?? Try this tool

Well, if you read our Search Optimization article about our bulk domain site you’ll recall that at that time we went from a zero google keyword rank to a #17 page rank in less than two days! And that not all the good news about search ranking… Now it appears that we are at the number 7, up 10 spots since we last visited. In other words we are now on the first page of Google! Yippee. Now on some ranking sites that show google position we are at number 12, but either way we have successfully optimized the site to a much better extent than we had for 9 years.
How did we do it? Well first of all we optimized the page, we compared it against several other sites and figured out why other sites were ranking even though we have had that site for 9 years. We changed the keywords in the home page. We did some background code, mostly alt tags. This is simply the on page optimization we did. When we got to the #17 rank we did a bit more. We increased the number of terms in our title tag.

Finally, we started doing some directory listings, blog posting and forum posting. This is all manual work but it does pay off.

We have a single site that was new by the way and we linked it off of the domain site to get it indexed and interestingly that site has a #8 position in Google for it’s keyword, again within only a week of the link exchange.

We get this question quite a bit and we don’t mind it as we have a presense on elance as well as other bidding sites for html developers. The problem is not with elance or any of the other sites like it. The problem is with prequalifying the workers.

Do they actually have experience in the field that you want? How would you know?

We have seen many web designers, or should I say so-called web designers who have work online and all looks good. But when given a simple assignment, they fail. Why? We are presuming that it is due to either having taken something over on another website or touted a site they didn’t even make. There are a few issues here. First and foremost is that many designers create for a single size and when expanded, usually because a customer adds a large image into a template, the entire page shifts and the design breaks. This is why we use nested tables to accomplish most of what we do on ebay. There is no guarantee that design shifts won’t happen with templated designs.

On elance and other sites with freelancers, we’ve noticed that many so-called designers simply turn out cookie cutter designs and then attempt to fit them to our requirements which is not custom work. We now hire all our staff in house.

It simply doesn’t work for us to use the freelancers, but for many people it seems to work. The main thing about hiring talent on such sites is to ask them to draft something quickly to show their skill instantly with something YOU asked for, not just something that they have. This will tell you a few things. 1. if they can follow directions, 2. if they can design, and 3. if they are interested in your project. 4. if they are hungry.

Hiring a designer that is not hungry can be problematic. We try to find people who are committed, hungry and thirsting for more. If not you end up with mediocre web design.

Ever wonder how those spammers get so creative on your emails? See the latest emails that say things like “I am lonely tonight” and they all seem the same.

Take a look at http://hewgill.com/cgi-bin/ljmarkov.pl?user=xthexunlovedx&words=600&order=2 and change the number from say 300 to 600 and watch the spam grow.

Bloggers do you need some random words to fill your blog. Well there you go. Have at it. Your personal spam maker.

Uggh. When will it ever stop.