The assignment was to create a design that could work with all of the areas of the Jewelry Making Professor website. This included an eCommerce section, a blog, and several call to action pages. Included within was the Video of the Week and a count down timer that display on the home page.

After refining the design, we settled no a basic layout. This design was then turned into a WordPress theme and an X-cart theme. Both needed to align perfectly and create the appearance of one continuous website. Take a look for yourself, check out the — X-cart portion and the Blog area here.

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!

Our piece of the puzzle was solely website design and web development. There were also certain elements of graphic design that were required of us, but the design and concept was done by Rodd at Cause Design.

This project was a rapidly paced project which moved quickly. We met with Rodd and he supplied us with the entire design and concept in Photoshop. We then translated this design into a web based format. Geoff from Geoff Matheson Design helped with CSS and graphic work. His work was invaluable in getting the design tweaked just right.

For this project we used WordPress as our CMS. WordPress is a superior user friendly CMS and is designed for SEO and other internet web standards.

For all of our websites that use WordPress, we design the WordPress theme from the ground up. Our theme is loosely based on the best parts of the current recommended 2010 design. We start with a stripped down 2010 theme + some of our own default goodies. A customized theme and layout is then created from this default. This is where we then build our CSS and XHTML code. Since we have such an in depth knowledge of WordPress, we can use built in WordPress functions at times, and then either use our own custom written PHP functions or create our own. The combination allows us to create anything and everything possible, while giving the site owner complete control over their site.

Other features of this website are:
1. A JQuery Cycle based home page splash. JQuery Cycle is very cool because it allows you to use JavaScript with regular XHTML & CSS. It is incredibly flexible and really easy to use.

2. Lots of WordPress Post customization. We use WordPress Posts as custom taxonomies which power pieces of the site, like the Testimonials. The site owner can then add and edit these Posts and all of the information will appear in the correct sections of the website.

3. Recent Blog posts on the home page use PHPThumb to display thumbnails of larger images. PHPThumb is one of the coolest scripts we’ve found in awhile. It allows runtime thumbnails to be created & their file size adjusted proportionately. This means that the site owner can upload any image & our script can crop this image however we tell it to. Super Cool!!

4. TypeKit fonts used for the website’s font.

5. Social Media Optimization and collaboration. Each of the Blog posts on the website have their subject and URL automatically posted on The Game Within’s Twitter feed. Once the tweet is done, it is automatically posted on The Game Within FaceBook page and then finally automatically posted on Christo’s Linked In page.

So check out the website today!

The article is well written, detailed, and very interesting to those in the digital advertising sector; written by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University .

Google’s public stance has always been to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute when you do not want the link to contribute to the link’s PR. This is yet another reason to use a reputable SEO firm and don’t rely on companies who improve your SERP by excessive reciprocal and back linking.

As always, make sure you understand what you are doing! and why you are doing it!

The aim was to filter out websites who had low quality repetitive content, such as aggregate websites. Sites that contain high quality fresh new content will be rewarded even more in their search engine results.

This is definitely something that has been known for a long time, but its good to see Google proactively taking steps to banish these low quality cheap repetitive websites to the bottom of the results, where they belong.

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.

The website was built in several rolling phases. The client needed a website built immediately with the idea that it would grow as we progressed. So we picked WordPress to manage the content and so the client could blog. We bought the domain and launched the site 1 week prior to CFR opening to the public! So the site was setup in WordPress and let the client add all of the content. As the site took shape, we applied certain styles to the content and organized it.

Geoff Matheson was hired to build a brand and logo for CrossFit Rehoboth. He developed a great logo which was implemented within the website.

Over the course of the project lots of additional functionality was added to the CFR site, which in turn attracted lots and lots of visitors!! Currently the site gets an average of about 100 visitors a day and is growing each month. Go over and check it out yourself!

Rehoboth Beach Bodywork needed their content moved into a CMS so we chose WordPress for its ease of use and shorter learning curve for the user. Additionally we custom wrote a couple of web applications to handle the specific types of content, including massage types. We also did analysis of keyword density per page, and came up with improvements to the existing content. We also implemented some other Search Engine Optimization tricks within the site to increase traffic.

The project turned out to be very successful for both the client and us.

Please check out the Rehoboth Beach Bodywork website as a great example of a superior site done on a limited budget.