Category — websites web site 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!