GlenboorkLumber.com was a client who had an outdated website and was in need of a revamped content management system that would be easy to update as well as search engine friendly. After consulting with the client to learn more about the kinds of services that they provided, we were able to figure out the best way to display their services by altering their corporate web design.

When altering the corporate web design for this Minnesota lumber yard, we stuck with the client’s original colors of red, white and blue. We then determined what the main aspects of their business were and made sure that these various aspects were displayed prominently on the site. These business aspects included the following: multiple locations, calls to action, products and services, and establishing company credibility. In order to display their locations, we put the information for the locations in the header of the page. Next, we created easy to navigate dropdown menus so that potential customers would be able to view all of their products and services. Finally, we created a news section in order to display upcoming events. To ensure our web design met the clients expectations we first built a web prototype.

The previous corporate web design of this particular client was old and outdated and failed to show the client’s size and reputation in the lumber industry. Additionally, the old design was not user-friendly and resulted in visitors to the site being confused about what the client had to offer. For this, and other reasons, we had to make sure that the new corporate web design captured the client’s vision. In order to accomplish this, we planned out the website prior to building it. Working with the client’s sales manager, we made sure that we had an understanding of all of the client’s products and services as well as what they wanted to say on the website. Afterwards, our website architect was able to successfully plan out the flow of the new and improved website within a wireframe.

Besides selling more products by getting bloggers to write reviews on them, you can increase your search engine ranking from the links created during the review process.  As many of you know building links coming back to your website helps increase your websites search engine ranking.

When you send a product to the approved blogger they will write a review and most likely add a link in that review going back to your website.  This one-way link is a huge benefit to your websites search engine goals.  Most of the time Google gives bloggers higher search engine rankings because they are updating content regularly.  Your review will be one of those pages that are weighed heavily, talking about your product, and linking back to your website.  These are the three major components to any link building campaign.

How Do I Tell What Links Were Added In A Review?

The power of Tomoson is its reporting features.  After a blogger writes a review they need to verify it with a simple piece of code they copy into the review.  This piece of code serves two purposes:

1.       It will display an icon stating this is a review the blogger got a free product for (Which is now required by law for all bloggers to do)

2.       It will capture the review so we can display it in your Tomoson.com control panel.

The second purpose gives you, the promoter all the power to review what was written, how many links are in the review, and where they link.  This makes Tomoson.com not only a powerful sales tool but a powerful SEO tool as well.

Next week we’ll review the tomoson.com Control Panel.

Tomoson.com Link Management Control Panel

Discountinvestmentadvisor.com is a membership based discount investment advisor website that allows its members to sign up, take a questionnaire and be placed into a suggested stock portfolio. Members who join the web site pay a fee to be on the website and, as a result, are allowed access to update information regarding suggestions as to what stocks they should invest in. Owners of this web site have full control over adding, editing, or removing stock portfolio information at any time.

The issue with this particular client’s web site was that even though it was membership based, we needed to create a CMS backend in order to allow the owners to have text editing capabilities. We changed the corporate web design to allow the owners to add images, change meta tags for search engines and change content without needing to know any coding language or html.

Because the client needed a number of customizations to the drupal platform, we decided to plan out the corporate web design before coding it. We consulted with the client who then worked with our architecture consultants to understand the client’s vision. After it was approved, a prototype was subsequently developed and sent over to our graphics team and coders for final implementation.

As a part of the corporate web design, there was also a section for portfolio management where each client takes a questionnaire which is then placed into a recommended portfolio based on conservative to aggressive. As a result, the client needed a system to make it easy for them to calculate both year and earning percentage in order to better control the portfolios. We created a portfolio management system that would allow each administrator the ability to update information instantly, thereby making it easier to manage their portfolios. We also produced a questionnaire creator that would give administrators the ability to change questions and the value of each answer, thereby manipulating the questionnaire to fit any portfolio that they wanted.

We have been working with the online jewelry retailer Mykonospa.com for the last year to increase search engine rankings. We started out by targeting the most highly search Pandora Beads & Charms initially in 2009; providing the highest ROI for the client. Results have been good:

In 2010 we are switching our SEO efforts from aggressive manual link development to developing software applications that will influence Aggregators & Distributors of information to build those links for us; Real Social Media Marketing (SMM) While we develop the applications we wanted to continue to improve search engine rankings through content development.

Building content for eCommerce Websites can be tricky. When someone comes to a category landing page they want to view the products; not paragraphs of text. So I wanted to share with our readers an easy work around on how to add content to eCommerce landing pages with out ruining the User Experience.

Step 1: Modify eCommerce Software so you can add content to the top of the page & the bottom of the page.

Step 2: Write & Publish a short paragraph at the top of the eCommerce Landing Page

Step 3: Write & publish a few paragraphs at the bottom of the eCommerce Landing Page. This way you can still have a good amount of text on the web page to tell search engines what the page is about while keeping the focus of the page on the products

Now you have an eCommerce Landing Page that is both user friendly both also search engine friendly. It is important to note that you can rank product pages #1 in the search engines with out too much content; but the more keyword optimized content the better!

That is how you rank #1 for your keywords:

Mykonos is a retailer of Pandora Jewelry, which is based out of Pennsylvania. Mykonospa.com is an ecommerce web site that sells authentic Pandora beads, Pandora bracelets as well as Pandora charms and more. They are one of the few authorized Pandora jewelry retailers. After creating a website in 2008, Mykonospa realized that it would have to take advantage of a new kind of eCommerce web site design if it was ever going to surpass its competitors.

The idea to create/revamp the ecommerce web site design came when the owner wanted to expand the business, but also wanted to set their company apart from its competitors. In order to get started, we first implemented a flash application called ‘Build a Pandora Bracelet.’ This application operates by pulling products from the ecommerce shopping cart database, which allows users to build their own bracelet.

Next, we incorporated a drag-and-drop feature to the ‘Build a Pandora Bracelet’ application in order to make it more user-friendly. This idea has proven to be a great success with thousands of users utilizing this feature in order to build their own bracelets. To further increase sales, we also added two additional features: 1) a shopping cart built in to the flash application (which allows a user to easily purchase all beads and charms that they’ve created), and 2) a print button (which gives each user a print-out of each product along with a sku and a description.

Building an extensive web site from scratch can sometimes be complicated as well as costly. Because Mykonospa.com was working within certain budget constraints, we decided to go a slightly different route. Rather than focusing on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, we instead launched an aggressive link building campaign along with a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, which has resulted in a 225% increase in website traffic for 2009.

Follow Our Marketing Efforts on WebBizIdeas Twitter.

Open up these applications:  Word (with your text in it), Notepad (it’s in all programs> accessories folder if you are a windows user), and your websites edit.

Once the text is inside your editor you can start manipulating it with links, italic, bold, ect….  This is important because the editor will work a lot better if you follow these steps rather than copying and pasting directly from word.  The reason is word will bring along some extra code messing with the editor and it’s formatting.

If you need to copy over bullet points from a word document follow these steps:

1. Follow the steps above first and then in the editor click the bullet points one at a time.
2. After each bullet point copy the text from the word document and paste it into the copy and paste from text icon (read above).
3. Repeat the steps for each of the bullet points to make sure the formatting is done correctly.

I hope this has helped you with some of your wysiwyg and fck editor formatting issues.   Please feel free to contact WebBizIdeas.com with any of your questions.

We provide a service called website architecture (a.k.a. website planning) where we plan out your entire website before we start coding.  This is absolutely critical when making a custom website or software, and is why we put everyone of our websites through it.  I could write a long article about why it’s important but I will refer you to this image.  It depicts the importance of planning and our process perfectly.

WHY WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE IS IMPORTANT IMAGE  click here

So you want to start a vlog. You realize blogs are great branding & marketing tools and you want to take that next step. Here are 5 easy steps on how to create a video blog for $105.

1. Download www.WordPress.com
2. Buy a Vlog template
3. Hire this company to Install Wordpress for $35
4. Download CamStudio for free, or buy Camtasia for screen capture / editing video you took from a web cam or a video camera.
5. I have heard the Logitech QUICKCAM PRO 9000 Web Cam is pretty good webcam for creating online videos and the Flip Ultra Video Series is pretty good for the money as a digital camera; has a built in usb drive for easy transfer.

YES. A website may benefit from a site map. Even though pages can be indexed from a website following quality back links, it cannot be confirmed that all the pages will be indexed, due to variety of reasons. But if you have a site map ready, with all the information in place, one can confirm that all the pages are indexed on Google and the other search engines.

There have also been instances where sites without sitemaps have also made it to the search engines without much difficulty. That’s fine, but if you have a website that is not well reputed yet on the search engines, and have fewer backlinks, then submitting a sitemap may help. And if you have a website with large amount of content, a site map gives you an opportunity to organize the content and get the best ones out there on the search engines.

BUT, site maps are not required. Site maps won’t guarantee all your pages are indexed. Creating a Site Map will not fix poor coding, website navigational, keyword research, and Meta Data. In fact, if you need a site map to index all your web pages it means your web developer & programmers did a poor job building your site. It also means that you are most likely not benefiting fully from internally links.

A good web design company & software development company knows how to plan, build, and organize a website so it doesn’t need a website.

Read this article about, The Difference between a .HTML Site Map vs. .XML Site Map

Would you like a way to increase sales & customer interaction for your eCommerce site? Would you like to allow your customers to customize the products you sell? Do you want the technology that CustomInk.com & CafePress.com have?

Picnik’s Developer API now allows you to do all of this. Picnik’s software allows you to integrate a solution that will allow a user to upload a photo, edit it, write text, and then see how all of it will look on your product! Let me give you an example:

We manage a website called Wholesale Keychain. The website sells automotive, sports, and a few other kinds of keychains. The site needs a better way to reach a broader audience than just car & sport lovers. We decided to start offering users the option to personalize each keychain with their own logo or message.

Using Picnik’s Developer API we could have users:

1. Select Keychain Style

2. Add Text to Keychain

3. Choose Color

4. See & Order Final Product

So instead of just spending $100,000+ building your own Personalization Software you can hire WebBizIdeas to build you a Personalized eCommerce Website Design and instruct use to use Picnik’s Developer API to save you a load of cash.