Category — websites web site design

The other day one of our larger sites had what they thought was a security breech and jumped out of their seats rushing to conclusions about site security. Their first conclusion went public and set off a bad series of events that could lead to legal ramifications. Now site owners should know that before you rush to judgment about what is going on in your forum, your first step is to stop and investigate. As this larger site may have learned, tossing out allegations of site breach and hacking are not a good idea without contacting a professional to find out what is really going on.

Since we do lots of forums for larger groups, we thought it would be a good idea to set out some guidelines for site owners. Now let’ say you are sitting in your private forum and suddenly you see another member in there that is not allowed. Oh my God, what to do. Well first of all don’t jump to conclusions about your security system, feeling you’re being hacked or worry that there is anything amiss. The best thing to do in any business is to first, take a breath, investigate and then proceed. Hopefully you have all your wits about you, and are not too stressed, sleep deprived or overly paranoid before you go jumping around concluding things that may not be true. You don’t want to start harassing site visitors and announcing that they are hackers when this might all be just a misunderstanding on your part, and geez, worse yet – don’t tell anyone you are going to file criminal charges for something they had nothing to do with. In the legal world I’m not sure how the courts will view this, but likely they will feel that you did not do your due diligence before making the accusations and this could lead to a big legal action against you. You don’t want that now, do you?

Most professionals have two sets of IT eyes on things to ensure they are not making rash decisions when it comes to forum security. It’s likely part of your obligation as a provider of services and you might consider it an important aspect of business especially if you are a large company with possible legal exposure.

Now, Can people access a private forum? A little googling will answer that for you. Not really but yes they can “appear” to be there. Anyone who is wandering around with time on their hands can put your url into the browser and start switching around numbers to see what is out there. A hidden forum or a private forum might appear, but likely they will only see a login or an error message. While you, sitting in the forum will see them browsing simply because the call to show who is browsing is higher on the list than the error message or login form. Fear not. You are safe. All those wild thoughts about hackers and site violators can be put to rest. Nothing is amiss except the subtle reminder that you need a qualified professional to explain to you what is going on, and possibly a lawyer if you’ve already banned members and jumped to conclusions, pointed fingers and made wild accusations about someone trying to find out what you’ve been thinking or worse yet, accused anyone of trying to take down your website. If you’ve already gone that far my advise now is put a nice apology in writing and last but not least get a lawyer.

If things haven’t deteriorated to this point and you need more help and don’t have a Phpbb forum site admin or web designer, check out our services or ask your host for more help.

Any questions?

According to Matt Cutts blog, Google has penalized sites that used the service traffic power to optimize and seo their sites:

I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you are a client or former client of Traffic Power and your site is not in Google, please see my previous advice on requesting reinclusion into Google’s index to learn what steps to take if you would like to be reincluded in Google’s index. 

Ouch! That means that if you were an innocent site owner hiring and SEO and they used some trickery to get traffic to you, it’s your fault for being that stupid and not investigating their tactics. That makes sense. (no sarcasm here).

Meanwhile, we noticed some pagerank drops in sites and pages being pulled down in rank completely since last week – although still indexed, their ranking is gone. Why? The most obvious reason floating around is purchased text links, but in this case the only payment involved in the links on the pages I’ve noted are cj.com links, which relate directly to the site promoting a related product, and links to other related sites. This makes one huge reason to have a single website that handles EVERY aspect of your company as Google’s robot can not seem to differentiate between your other companies, your revenue production and pure spam out there. Linking between your various sites can give the impression of spamming text links to the index. The best recourse is therefore to only list those “resources” on a single page not related to any other content on your site, lest you find your entire site gets caught up in the mix.

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?

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.

What we do is website design all day long. We have folders and folders of web design clients all over our hard drives and then some. But the real task is developing our own online presense, since I really don’t care how messy my client sites have become after they uploaded thousands of web images and thousands of files on top of the nice clean work that we did of sorting it all out.

So as the old adage goes, “What’s a mother to do”. Well first of all, we use mozilla tabs to organize groups of sites into a nice compact little manner so that we can open all tabs and go at it. Then we organize them in some manner and fashion that seems logical. We’ve placed our little group tabs all over the place in bookmarks where they below. Our websites have never looked so organized… right? Well, not exactly. Behind the fame and glory of a nice site is a backend that is still cluttered with folders and files. We have sub folders for each design phase, like mockup1, mockup2, etc. But our mockups are not the least of our worries. We need to store a backup on each of our sites because our web design customers often overwrite our design work and mess up their sites. So we have site backups too.

The thing to remember in web design and development is to have small names and nice places to put things.

Every folder for each client has an image directory, it’s just called images. Then there are other folder like style sheets under css. Then we have an ebay folder for our ebay design customers and we have a docs folder and a server folder and so on and so forth.

Organizing a website can be a daunting task, but don’t despair. Any good webdesigner will automatically do it for you, and if they don’t watch out.

For so many years people balked at the concept of making money with web sites. I recall as a young laddy, how I approached so many businesses to do web site design. No one beleived in the web. Ahhh, but that is old news.

The new news is that now we have the quest for making money on the web, even where no money exists. the old adage “build it and they will come” no longer applies with the myriad of thousands of websites going up each week… or are they. What we have now is a new breed of webbie, the domainers, who simply purchase domains for the sake of adwords revenue and put them online to compete with real mom and pops and mid sized buys trying to make a buck out here in the wild blue yonder. I’m not knocking the domainers who buy cheap bulk domain names to impart their wares upon the world, but moreover seller beware, the market has been skewed. As long as Google continues to reward the “fake” site with ad revenue, they will continue to exist and they will compete with you.

Now we get back to the original reason for this post. The glory of making money on the web is still alive but it takes oh so much more work these days. Once you get a domain, your next step is to design it, position it, link it and advertise it. Then and only then can you really make money. Each of these steps takes an additional step or two as you’ve probably discovered.

1. Design it: You must design it not only aestetically, but also in terms of consumer perception. Clarity of purpose, ease of use.
2. Position it: Your website standing out looking beautiful at a particular address is like a house in the burbs. If you don’t give your guests directions and there is no map out there with a way to find them, pretty much no one will be coming to dinner. You must position your site somewhere that will actually get noticed. You need an angle, and again clarity of purpose, a singular direction from which visitors may arrive knowing clearly where you are on the map.

3.Link it: the best way to get a position is to link your site from other sites. You can start with directories, free directories and cheap directories, but until your site is located somewhere on the web, it is landlocked within it’s own domain.

4. advertise it: Many small owners make the mistake of avoiding advertising, google adwords, and the like due to cost. But if you have a few dollars a week to make a buck, you can easily afford to advertise some niche keywords to get started.

Remember, you are starting a business, not just a landlocked web site in the suburbs with no hope of anyone finding out. Google and other search engines are mere robots, not here to punish you, or make it difficult, but certainly don’t realize your frustration. Take a step back, look at your dilema and make things happen that are logical from a robotic point of view. Spend a few hours a week on your website and in a few months you should be able to position yourself on a shoe string.

Good luck~!

Have a question? Make a comment

There are several tricks that we use to build templates for eBay. Eventhough it is said that you can not use script items in your listings this is not entirely true. In fact, most of our templates use both script items and formatting tricks that change html to respond differently than your normal run of the mill webpage. In addition using ascii code can allow you to code into an ebay listing which greater flexiblity to get over the eBay search maniupulation issue. You can find some conversion tools by googleling the words ‘ascii conversion’. Most of the auction management systems, such as ChannelAdvisor and Marketworks support these script items, but be careful as some of them only take the some of the tags in what I like to call reverse ascii code. This is simply that not only content areas but also inside html tags need to be coded in ascii type.

You can also change the entire eBay page using .css (cascading style sheets)rendering the eBay look quite different from what it actually is. Not all of these changes are that great, but the fact is that you can mess with the entire auction listing page. For starters we often use form css which makes the form submit button look different, changes the color of the button, etc.

We also use a font style that nearly ensures that no matter what is used by the person who is submitting the auction that the template will retain it’s integrity and the look that was originally crated. Other sites, like Overstock Auctions also allow for styles although their tags differ from those on the eBay templates. Instead of the ‘a name’ tag you can use a ‘div’ tag at Overstock. Overstock will otherwise strip out some html tags making it much more difficult to use standard html tags on the site. Quite a bit can be changed in your auction listing throught a listing template with style sheets and scripts creating a marketing template that will surely outshine your competition. Take a look at our services – we create eBay templates.

We’ve started a list of websites, on a page (click left navigation to get there) that inspired us this month.

Our favorite inspiration site, holds you from the minute you get there. Take a look at the Sundance Film Festival: http://festival.sundance.org/2006/

Small Business owners face many decisions when starting a web site. There are many types and choices for building sites and there are many opportunities available. Making the right choice can play an important role in website traffic.When considering where to build a website several things should enter into your decision.1. Do you have the funds for updates to the website, or will you do it yourself?2. If you plan to access the backend yourself is it a simple straightforward program that will make your job easier?

So now we have the blog spammers. These are the guys who arene’t really writing anything except buy this, buy this, buy this. Rank me, Rank me. and so on.

There is even software for those spammers who are too lazy to write anything. It will post you out to thousands of sites. I get submissions every day. I don’t act on them.

Then there are the auto submitters that post comments to your blog conveniently including their own url in the response in hopes of jumping off of your PageRank with a link of their own.

According to one blogger, CNN has even engaged on the battlefield, posting comments to blogs in order to win the rating wars.

I think we’ve disabled posting to our blog via comments, so not to worry, but if you have a blog, beware of the blog spammers and prune those messages!