Category Archives: Featured

Help your Target Market find your Website

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So, you have a website; what to do next?

There are millions of website online in 2011.

Nowadays, there is competition within every niche market. New websites pop up every day, making the internet a very crowded place.

How do you connect with your target market?

That is literally the million dollar question. How can you beat out your competitors & have your digital customers find you?

The short answer is it is possible, but it does require a large effort in time and unless you are willing to spend even more time manually doing certain SEO processes, money.

In this post, I’m just going to go over some very high level items that will help you get started.

In any case, a website owner MUST either learn SEO strategies OR hire a SEO professional. In the best of worlds, the website owner would perform certain SEO tasks them selves and contract out other tasks.

A good SEO professional is usually a web designer and has an understanding of programming. Legit SEO professionals will outline their strategies in how they will help your website gain online visibility. But SEO is only 1 part of the equation.

If your website is not a typical retail business, or offers specific services the best way to find new customers may be to leverage social media. Word of mouth sometimes is the best way to sell your services. Social Media Optimization or SMO as it is known is the term for properly configuring your social media.

Connecting with certain people on Twitter or Facebook is like hitting the Jackpot

Connecting with reputable people who have high status with online communities can make or break your business. Receiving a positive rate or testimonial from certain people can create a huge buzz. Finding and impressing these people is the hard part.

With the Internet changing so rapidly, new methods of finding your target market are just around the corner.

Keep your website’s visibility on the cutting edge by hiring the right SEO / SMO professional today!

Advanced WordPress functionality

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Most websites should not just have bunch of pages with unrelated content. Almost all websites need to have a set, group or list of data that makes up a collection. A collection can be things like News articles, Events, Testimonials, Blog articles, and image slideshows.

Why are we bringing this up in a WordPress related post?
Simple. WordPress provides a superior way to itemize your collection of data.

Although there are several ways to do this within WordPress, we typically use the built in category classification. This allows us to assign our types of items to these different categories. We then display these items in specific places within the website. Just look how we’ve displayed the most recent blog posts on the home page.

The site owner can control list based content within WordPress by simply adding it to a specific category. We use the custom field area to provide variables where information related to the item is stored. We can give these items custom attributes such as images, links, names, dates, and other textual information.

All of this is transparent to the site owner (end user) and we’ll provide training and a manual if necessary. Our goal is to create an easy to use interface that requires no training.

WordPress Development Process

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There are a lot of references to WordPress within our website and portfolio page. If you are reading this then you probably know what WordPress is, or at least you have an idea of what it does.

ong>If you are unfamiliar with WordPress, here is a brief description:

WordPress is a flexible, intuitive website Content Management System. A Content Management System (CMS) allows the customer to control the website’s content without any programming knowledge. Typically this is done through a WYSIWYG interface. WordPress also provides the client intuitive control to add / remove pages and reorganize the menu. Clients also can also add images within the content. EJ Host also custom tailors WordPress’ content management on a per client basis. This gives the client the ability to update specific parts of the website.

Search for WordPress designers or developers and you will see thousands of results.

How does EJ Host stand out?

We stand out from our competition by developing our WordPress websites the same way we develop all websites, with XHTML and CSS . We start with analysis and research to formulate a design with you. We graduate these ideas and concepts to create a design. This design is then developed to a WordPress theme.

Our Competition

Most other “WordPress designers” have no idea how the inner workings of WordPress actually work, nor do they care. These designers either use WordPress theme templates or are using themes as a guideline to dictate their layout.

Our Competitive Edge

We only use WordPress as a Content Management System – all of our layouts are custom designed and then integrated into WordPress. We use CSS and XHTML to control the look of the site. The content is then filled in by WordPress. We have in depth WordPress knowledge which allows us to use WordPress functionality without having to settle on any out of the box design. So when we create your website, we can design it to any specification and then integrate it into WordPress.

Why do we use WordPress

There are many other pieces of software that perform many of the same functionality as WordPress such as Joomla, Sharepoint, Drupal, and PHP Nuke.

Why do we use WordPress?

  • WordPress is very intuitive for the client to use with a short learning curve
  • WordPress is an active and widely used product that is constantly updated, improved, and refined.
  • WordPress offers your revision history which allows the author to recover a prior version of any page or post within the website
  • WordPress has great Search Engine Optimization capabilities, including search friendly links and W3C compliant code
  • Modular design allows developer to include or exclude as much code as necessary
  • Ability to integrate other technologies such as AJAX, JQuery, Flash, Janrain and Ruby on Rails
  • Unbelievable amount of plugins available to extend functionality

Read about advanced WordPress functionality here

Questions? Feedback? Leave us a comment or spread the word via Social Bookmarking below

Exceeding Client Expectations but not the Project Budget

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Sometimes we find that clients have a hard budget, meaning that they simply cannot spend more than a certain amount on the project. This can make things difficult for a number of reasons. Revisions have to be decreased, functionality scaled back, and bells and whistles left out. The project still needs to be done in a professional way since it ultimately has our name on it. Possibly the most important aspect of working within a budget is that customer (site owner) expectations need to be managed.

Working with a hard budget means that we need to work backwards to decide what type of features are included and what is excluded. Flexibility is needed by both the site owner and the developer since the project plan can shift. The reason this occurs is that different parts of the project can take more or less time than anticipated. The most important part of the process is that both the developer and the site owner focus on the most important aspects of the project.

Establishing the client’s vision and understanding the client’s expectations up front is a necessity in any project, but even more so with a budget restricted one. The project will fail miserably if developer and client do not communicate effectively.

By managing both the customer’s expectations and budget the final result is a win win for client and developer.

It has taken a long time to be comfortable working within a hard estimate and it does take a long time. Many other developers would balk at doing such a thing, and it is understandable. Sometimes the developer’s quote and the client’s budget are just way too far apart. Don’t be afraid to stay away from these types of projects and always communicate clearly and politely with the customer. By maintaining a professional attitude, you may find that the client will return once their budget increases.

JCPenney Black Hat SEO Ordeal

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Recently in the news there have been reports of punishment by Google for black hat SEO techniques used by JCPenney. These techniques of link spamming are very common and are used by lots of “SEO Companies” looking for an edge. Many link spammers operate in ways where they do not get caught and swear by incredible results.

A very interesting article from the New York Times outlines what JCPenney was doing and how they were punished.

Pretty interesting stuff, glad that these companies using these black hat SEO firms are getting punished in some way. Their methods clog our pipelines with useless links and pages that are only meant to fool Google’s algorithm.

Here’s hoping that Google finds more ways to rid us of this problem, but until then these black hat techniques will evolve and thrive.

SEO Services

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complicated process encompassing all of the services that increase a website’s search engine ranking. Typically, SEO is geared towards increase a site’s organic search engine ranking. Since Google is by far the most used search engine, our SEO is usually measured in Google’s SERP. The objective of Search Engine Optimization campaign is a goal conversion for the targeted traffic.

SEO is very specific to every business and every industry. In fact there are specialized SEO for different industries such as Dentist SEO. We are located outside of suburban Philadelphia, near Wilmington, Delaware / Cherry Hill New Jersey in Claymont Delaware. The majority of SEO strategies are for the Philadelphia metropolitan area. We use many local resources to gain either your Philadelphia business or Wilmington Delaware area business visibility in organic Search Engine results.

Our organic Search Engine Optimization goals will be to get your website more online leads. And not just MORE leads, but better qualified leads. SEO techniques are generally guarded, so we will not post exactly how we increase your online presence. Organic Search Engine Optimization is also typically a long term process that takes several months. We will work with you to put together a plan based on your budget and goals. SEO is a highly scalable service, campaigns can be done for as little as $300, and some can spend as much as $10,000 / month. There are many ways to increase your Return On Investment (ROI).

Our EJ Host organic Search Engine Optimization strategic services typically include: Creation of an inbound and outbound link swapping campaign to increase relevant keyword traffic; Optimization of all pages on your website, including images and other media; Listing of any and all vertical search engines in your industry; Free and paid directory inclusion; Keyword research / long tail keyword campaign; Analytics software installation to track results; XHTML / CSS updates to site; Site architecture modification; Increasing the Community aspect of the site; Domain Name research; and Improvements to Web 2.0 / Site interactivity.

Although we have worked with companies across the USA, we concentrate our efforts on small to medium sized businesses in the Philadelphia Pennsylvania, Cherry Hill New Jersey, Wilmington Delaware, Newark Delaware & Rehoboth Beach Delaware area.

EJHost.com specializes in anything web 2.0, social networking, web marketing, graphics, website, web hosting, web applications; including Graphic Design, Content Management Systems (CMS), custom Web Applications, PHP Coding, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, AJAX, Flash, social networking cross site logins, mysql database design, web applications, html, css, xhtml, online branding, Seach Engine Optimization, logos, and developing / improving your online presence.
How Effective is Your Website if No One Can Find It?

Let’s say you have the best website in the world built in Flash. If the developer doesn’t know how to properly tag the site, it will be completely invisible to search engine crawlers. Even with a regular html site, you can lose a lot of traffic if it is poorly tagged and optimized. We at EJHost.com will design, develop, host and optimize your site. Many of our clients come to us with websites looking for an upgrade, take a look at some of our recent website designs.

EJ Host designers and developers will work with you to find an effective domain name for your brand. Our targeted Search Engine Optimization will help you reach people searching for what you are advertising on your site. Our advertising group will also assist in marketing campaigns, designed to further enhance your web presence. Since we specialize in the Philadelphia / Wilmington Delaware area, we can recommend local publications or marketing that will increase quality traffic to your website while increasing your Google ranking.
EJ Host Loves SEO!

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Have your site analyzed and a proposal put together for FREE! Just use our contact form and send us your site name and some background about your business. Together we can put together a plan of SEO your site and to increase your online presence. EJHost’s SEO services typically start around $700, however it is possible to focus on parts of SEO for much less. We will work with any budget and have put together many successful campaigns for varying budgets. Make sure you mention you saw our special.

We are Website Design / Hosting / SEO Experts, let us help you expand your business today!

Hosting

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EJHost will configure your website’s hosting setup to take advantage of the right tools for your website’s functionality. All medium to large hosting providers cannot offer this for shared website hosting. This is a unique advantage as most website designers do not understand hosting and most web hosting providers do not understand website design. We at EJHost understand how different compilers, programming languages, applications, plugins, modules and extensions work. This ensures your website is utilizing the proper tools and extending the highest level of functionality.

Contact the EJHost.com designers and developers today for a customized quote for your business.