Tampa Website Development, Website Design and SEO
Tampa: 813.374.9341
Nip & Tuck
Several days ago, I attended a “girlie glam party” with a couple of my friends. It had been years since the last time I allowed myself to just let go, and let someone else be the creator of my image. I went to this thing, not because I thought I needed a makeover but I did it because a friend’s daughter was in town, and needed subjects to practice on.
Clean the Website Clutter
Can a cluttered website hurt your business? You betcha it can!
I don’t want to believe that other people wouldn’t think the way I do. When I go to a website looking for something, I want to be able to find it. I don’t want to have to sift through all the “stuff” to find the one thing I’m looking for. Do you agree?
Let’s look at some real simple things that can help to keep your site from looking cluttered. Continue reading
Copyright — Are You in Compliance?
One of the top questions we’ve been asked over the years is “Is the content on my website copyrighted?”. The answer to this is, yes, there are some things in your website that will fall under the copyright protection laws. However; before accusing someone of copyright infringement violations — consult an attorney.
There’s nothing worse than spending a lot of time writing the content for your website and then finding that someone else just took it for granted that they could copy and paste what you wrote, on their site. Where some people would look at it as “WOW! I must have done a great job – so much so, that someone wanted to use it!” I look at it as just being downright unethical, unprofessional and an irresponsible act.
Can Duplicate Content Hurt You?
Where do you get the text that’s on your website? Did you come up with it yourself? Did you have a Copy Writer write it for you? Did you copy it from a book, magazine or someone elses’ website?
If you just copied your content from other websites, whether it’s all of the content or a paragraph here, and a paragraph there — you site could very well be delisted from the search engines. First off, that’s not very good practice – copying other people’s work. I’m sure you don’t do that in any other aspect of your business; so don’t start doing it on your website.
Website Content
Have you ever noticed that when you search for a website, that the top websites all have one thing in common? What do you notice?
Right! They all have actual website content on the pages, not just graphics.
According to Google it’s important to have plenty of rich information that is relevant to what you do. (see Google Webmaster Guidelines)
Ok…So Now Where Do I Start?
So…you know you need to have a website; now what?
This is a common thought amongst business owners. They know that in order to survive, they need to have a web presence, but have no clue where to begin.
Over the past 12 years, we have seen business owners go in many different directions. From hiring the overpriced web development firm, to the cheapest one they could find; or they’ll go to the graphic designer – because they know how to make things pretty. Some will even just go to the kid next door, because he’s a genius when it comes times to computers.
We have heard some say, “Oh this is easy. I’ll just Google it and find the best price I can – I mean after all, a website is just a website…right?” or “I only need a couple pages and they’ll never change… my phone number and address is all people need to know about me”.
Have You Been I-Framed?
When we started our website development business back in 1999 there were only a handful of web developers in the area. By mid 2008, the growth of website developers increased tremendously. The prices for designing and developing a website ranged anywhere from $99.00 to over $10,000.00.
Competition was at its highest. It also brought in some very questionable practices by some of the website designers and developers. Ever since the vast growth we have had numerous businesses come to us and ask us “what is wrong with our website?” or “my webmaster will not return my calls”. The next most common statement we hear over and over again… “We paid them so much money to build our website and now we don’t have the monies to fix it — can you help us?”
The majority of business owners don’t know where to start or what is involved in having a website. This lack of knowledge opens the door for unscrupulous practices which usually leads to unpleasant results. It is VITAL that every business owner knows what is involved in building any type of website whether it’s a small 1 page calling card website to large websites with several hundred pages.
I have a business friend that just launched a beautiful new website. She used the company that developed her original site… this company literally framed her website. They built the website on a different hosting company then where the website was being hosted, then used i-frames (inline frame – an HTML document being inserted into another HTML page) to publish the website with their hosting company. The problem with this technique is, search engines will not be able to see the content of the website. The result of this practice is the website will not place very high within the search engines.
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It’s a Tragedy…
After doing some research we have found that about 40% of businesses in the US don’t have a website. Further research revealed that 50% of those 40% didn’t have the money in their budget to have a professional website developed… Continue reading
Linking Up…
Many ask if linking to other websites is a good idea. The short and sweet of it is, yes, links are a great idea and are important to have. Links to outside sources which leads people to good information… Continue reading
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