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Is your website dynamic or static?

2011 was a productive year around here. I continued to improve upon my skill set in order to provide easy-to-use, template driven, web software. Most new or recently updated websites I design are now in Wordpress. Designing a website in a powerful web platform, such as WordPress, has tremendous advantages (see below). My goal is to provide my clients with a powerful, yet affordable, website that they can update themselves without any knowledge of HTML or coding.  I use the power of WordPress to help my clients achieve their goals, by giving them the tools to manage all aspects of having a website.

Websites should not be be created and then left unattended! Think of it this way: If you had a brick and mortor store front, would you never change the display in the window? I think you see what I mean. Your storefront would not be very appealing. It is important to keep your website and its content current. With a web platform that is also a Content Management System (CMS), it couldn’t be easier to manage your content.

You already have your hands full?  Many of my small business clients are busy running their businesses and do not have the time or inclination to look after their websites. No problem! That is where I come in. Let me be your website partner.

Coming Soon! Early next year, I will be offering turnkey WordPress packages with Maintenance Agreements that include keeping your site updated with reports on how you are doing on Google and other search engines. Maintencae Agreements will also be available for existing WordPress users. Details will be forthcoming. This will be a cost effective and powerful solution for keeping your Web Presence current, tracking your visitors, and reaching your goals. Then you can do what you do best and manage your business.

There are many advantages to using a platform like WordPress for your website. WordPress is Open Source, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it (more than most commercial platforms). It also means you are free to use it for anything, from your personal page to a Fortune 500 website, without paying anyone a license fee.

• Over 25 million people have chosen WordPress for their website.
• Unlimited uses, not just a blog, but full featured e-commerce, galleries, media, memberships, social websites.
• SEO and Google Analytics are easy to manage. (Now part of my new maintenance package)
• Thousands of plug-ins, themes and community support. (I have included plugins that add great fuctionality to every site I build, such as shopping carts, galleries and contact forms.)

Start the New Year off right, contact me here or give me a call at 941 312 1034.
Please share this information with someone that you feel could benefit from my services.

If you are a Paintscape.Net customer and on one of the platforms we support and/or you are hosting your site with us and are not comfortable with maintaining your website and doing updates, we would be happy to keep your site updated for as little as $35.00 a year. Contact me if you have questions.

• The information included here is priceless!  Click Here…

• Remember I can help, get a free report on where you stand. Contact me!

Most people wouldn’t dream of setting up a website that lists their personal email address, home phone number and street address. But this is exactly what happens on a daily basis when a new domain name is registered.

The WHOIS Record is an informational record tied to every domain name that tells the entire Internet about the owner of the domain. You can see an example of a WHOIS record at http://www.tucowsdomains.com.

For large corporations, having their street address, email, and phone number on the Internet might not be a big deal, but what happens when individuals, or home office register a domain name?

Suddenly there’s a connection between the work you do, family photos you share, the opinions you express, emails you send and your physical location and your phone number.

If you’re a domain owner already, or if you’re thinking about registering one, you should consider enabling the Contact Privacy feature on your domain’s WHOIS record. Doing so will hide your personal contact information and tell others your personal information is off limits.

Besides personal security, another reason to enable Contact Privacy is to avoid unwanted spam in your inbox.

WHOIS records contain email addresses that spammers routinely ‘scrape’ so the addresses can be used to send unsolicited email and phishing attacks.

If you are a business, of course you want to be as accessible as possible. But a WHOIS record really isn’t a valuable promotion vehicle. Credible prospects will easily find your contact information on your web site, in your local yellow pages and in other directories that you choose. A WHOIS listing mostly services these spammers and unwanted
solicitors.

Securing your contact information online isn’t complicated and Contact Privacy offers important privacy controls for both businesses and individual domain holders.

Find your perfect web address!

The 20 things I learned about browsers and the web

It is a joy to look through and who knows, you might learn a thing or two!

Build your Site Map online.

I highly recommend this service for creating your Google sitemap. www.xml-sitemaps.com lets you create your sitemap online:

• Create an XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google, Yahoo and other search engines to help them crawl your website better.
• Create a Text sitemap to have a plain list of all your pages.
• Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.
• Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your site.

Newsletters and Email Marketing

An email newsletter about your site keeps your visitors coming back. Let those who sign up know when you make changes or have special features on your site.  We offer complete management services for your email campaigns or you can use the built in features of our Hosting Plans to manage your newsletter!

• Communicate with your most important assets—your current customers
• Email Marketing makes it quick, easy and affordable to connect with your customers
• Email Marketing: Build a better business through customer loyalty and referrals
• Build customer loyalty quickly and affordably with Email Marketing

Search engine listings are important to drive traffic to your site, and each search engine and directory works in a different way. To get better results I make sure you have your title and keywords in place. As part of my service I will list your Website with the major Search Engines and manage your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns. For costs and details please contact me.

• Google Adwords – PPC advertizing
• Yahoo Search Marketing – Search Submit Basic
• Microsoft Advertizing – on Live Search

Use the Title Tag

You want to have a short title that describes your site’s content (less than twelve words). It is also one of the most important places to position your keywords.

Use Meta Tags

We make sure you have meta tags and your title is in place before we submit to search engines to ensure better rankings. While meta tags will not ensure a No. 1 ranking in the search engines (and some search engines ignore them altogether), it is a good idea to try to help the search engines that do use them to index your site and give you a better ranking.  Meta tags basically consist of two parts: keywords and a description (Keyword Meta Tags are ignored by most search engines today). You will want to choose a few keywords and a short description that are relevant to your site’s content. Try to make your main page as search engine friendly as possible in order to help get a better ranking. The more the search engine finds relevant keywords words on your site, the better ranking you will get. You may want to work the targeted keywords in bold/large imprint into the copy on the comment page itself. You can also put keywords in the alt tags of your images and in comment areas. Make sure your HTML is accurate, your page does not take too long to load, your links are working, and you stick to your targeted subject. To get an idea of what words you may want to use for your area, do a search on the keywords you want to target and see what the top sites have used. Then click through to those sites and view their source code. The more specific the keywords and focus and the more relevant they are to your site’s content, the more likely you will be to get a higher ranking in the search engines.

For more Information on this subject, check out these resources:

• Building Findable Websites – Make sure your site is findable!
• Google Webmaster Tools – Handy information for making your site Google friendly.