First Website Design Client very happy

Launched my very first client's website late on Sunday night. Client is very happy.

One of the big dramas that he had been having with his old site - other than the appearance, was the lack of any meaningful data that he was able to collect. He had a hit counter on the home page, but every time he accessed the page it registered as a visitor. So he didn't really know how much traffic his site was getting, let alone where it was coming from, how long they stayed, or what pages they looked at.

If you have a website for your small business, I think it is vital that you are able to get meaningful data about your website. What pages are popular? What is the most common page that people bounce from? What enquiries are you getting? In short, is your website performing?

So, now I can work with the client as to what areas of there site are performing and what areas do we need to look at further.

First Website Design Client very happy

Website Design

I have been talking about it for the last week or so, but I uploaded the new website for my first paying client last week. Tested ity in IE and FF and made a few small changes because the layout was not quite right in IE. Fixed up all the metatags last night and created and uploaded the sitemap. All good and done now.

FIRST PAYING JOB!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Been looking at linking strategies for one of my wife's websites - Success Event Photography.

Did you know that you can look at your competitors linking strategy. I use the Firefox Site Information tool and then look at the Yahoo inbound links. That way you can look at the top ranking sites, see how many links they have and where they come from, and then figure out your linking strategy in order to rank better than them.

You can also use the Site Information tool to see what metatags they have, and what keywords they are aiming at.

This is a really useful free tool that I use for my sites and also for my clients' sites. It gives a good estimation of how much work you will have to do to rank in the search engines ahead of your competitors.

Website Design

Small Business Owners - Is your website search engine friendly?

Attn : Small Business Owners

there are some things that your website must have in order to be search engine friendly. Why are most websites for small business languishing on page 356 of Google with no hope of ever being seen by the average consumer.

When people search the internet they are invariably looking for 2 things. They are looking for information to solve their problem, or they are looking for a product to solve their problem. So, it is important that your website can be found.

Unfortunately I find that alot of small business websites are missing these critical elements.

The first of these elements are metatags. Don't worry about the computer jargon. Metatags are things that tell the search engines what your site is about. The title, description and keywords are what tells the search engines what your site is about. If your site does not have them then you are not helping them to understand your site and consequently your search rnakings will suffer.

Have you ever tried to sell a product to a customer without telling them what the product does? It is like a website without metatags.

The second element that your site should have is a sitemap. A sitemap is easy to create, but again I find alot of small business websites don't have them. A sitemap makes it easy for the seacrh engine robots to find all of the pages on your site. If your site does not have a sitemap, you are basically leaving the robots to find their own way around your site, and that won't be good for your search rankings.

And, once you have your sitemap you should tell the search engines where to find it.

My suggestion to you is that if your site was designed by a web designer make sure that they have included these basic elements into your site design. Your site might be the most beautiful looking site on the web, but if no-one can find it, what is the point?

Remember, beauty is only skin deep.

Small Business Owners - Is your website search engine friendly?

Website Design Work

Finding website design work? How do you do it?

I have found some very useful sites on the net for finding website design work. Designquote and Sitepoint are a couple of the sites that I follow to find website design jobs.

At the moment my Website Design site is not seeing alot of traffic. My current PageRank is Google is 1 but I have been working on building links, increasing the size of the site, and on optimising it for the search engines. Unfortunately all of this takes time.

As you know, one of my goals for this project was to spend as little money as possible. I want to see if I can create something that generates cash, using as little of my own money as possible.

Hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas and that you are all making lots of money online.

Website Design Work

Website Design

Just finished with my first paying client. He is very happy with his new website. This was a redesign of an existing site for which the client had very few statistics about how this site was performing.

So, I started from scratch with a theme and incorporated a user friendly and search engine friendly layout. Still planning to tweak some things as we go along.

The site should be live by the end of the week.

Happy money making!!

Website Design

Professional Website

I have my first paid job finished. Just waiting on the client to give me the OK to go live with the site, so I would like to get it up and running before Christmas.

Spent some time today doing some more link building with my site. Have registered my website with a number of business directories. All free listings at this stage.

Also registered for Facebook and will spend some more time with social networking sites.

Professional Website

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation

So, no money yet, but I have been doing lots of work on optimising my site.

At the moment I am updating all of the meta tags in the headers of each of the pages. Home Page is done and now working on the other site pages to make them more search engine friendly.

Also spent some time yesterday finding more potential link partners and submitting my site to some other link directories. I have been targetting small business service directories as it fits with my target market.

I am also going to redesign my links page on the site into different categories. This will give my some more pages on the site and also make it easier for my visitors to use this part of the site.

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation

Web Site Design Tools

Checked out a couple of different tools tonight to ramp up my internet businesses. Had a look at Internet Business Promoter and trialled the free version. It looks to be quite an effective bit of software. Their guarantee says top Google rankings or your money back. Will have more of a look at it over the next few days. Anyone out there have any experience - good or bad - with Internet Business Promoter?

Worked on getting some more links as well. This morning I submitted to some more directories and tonight I submitted an article that I wrote on website design to some different article directories. You can check out some of the website design articles that I have written. Always happy to get some feedback - good or bad. I have started using a tool called article submitter to submit my articles to different directories in a more timely fashion.

Web Site Design Tools

SEO and Link Building

Did some work on my site tonight. Mostly I am concentrating on SEO at the moment, trying to increase my PageRank and generate some free traffic. I know this won't happen over night.

Made some of my onsite links 'nofollow' links to try and concentrate my page rank on the pages that I want to appear on Google.

Also in the processing of submitting the site to different directories to try and build some links.
This is a bit time consuming but the rewards should be worth it.

Livened up the site with a background image for the pages.

Hopefully you are making more money online than I am at the moment!!

SEO and Link Building

SEO - Is it scary or not??

Perhaps I forgot to mention, but one of the other criteria that I am using for my quest is to do this on as smaller budget as I possibly can. This is mainly out of necessity, but that is another story.

At the moment I am working on SEO - search engine optimisation. Building links, refining my content, that is what SEO is about.

Don't we all want free traffic?? Have you got a story to share about SEO? Can you help someone else with their SEO? Do you have a site that is ranked highly on the search engines? Share your story about how you did it.

I already have a number of sites that are up and running, but I am not paying for traffic so my traffic is purely organic. The main way I have been generating traffic up until now is article writing, but I am now looking at other ways. Consequently up until now traffic has been small and income is zero.

SEO - Is it scary or not??

About Me

Just a little about me to get started. As I said in a previous post I have a reasonable knowledge of HTML and CSS and have been designing websites for a little over 12 months now. I have a site designed to sell an affiliate product and I have my own web design website to promote this business. I focus my web design on small business. I have a reasonable knowledge of SEO.

My wife is a graphic artist and photographer and I have designed a couple of websites to promote her businesses. Both of which need a little overhaul at the moment. My wife also runs a business on ebay selling stuff. Mostly we are just selling stuff from around the house that we don't want, but we are looking for a product we can sell on a regular basis on ebay and make a profit.

I am also in the process of completing my first two paying gigs for clients. One of my websites should go live this week, and the next one by the end of the year.

About Me

What This Blog is About

I have been exploring ways to make money online for a few years now, and never up until now have never actually made any!! It has occurred to me that there are probably alot of people out there in the world in the same boat as me. I know there are people out there that must be making money online. You can read it in any of the sales letters for the myriad of information and other kinds of products that are out there on the internet. So, my question is why is it that some can do it, while there are so many others that struggle.

Want to share an experience? Tell us about your success or failure in making money online. How did you do it? What helped you to succeed? Why do you think that it did not work?

What This Blog is About

The Beginning of My Quest

Here is just a bit of background info about me. I currently work fulltime as a pharmacist and enjoy my work. I have always been interested in computers and the internet. I have been designing websites for about 12 months now, and my wife and I currently have 4 websites and I am in the process of designing a couple of websites for my first clients. One should go live this week, and that will be my first online income.

The Beginning of My Quest