Creating a great web site takes a little thought, this guideline will walk you through the steps of preparing information for your web site designer.

1. What is the purpose of your web site?  Information, sales, community site?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. Put yourself in the mind of your audience what type of content would you be looking for when visiting your site? Make a list of that content.
4. Develop a list of key words and phrases that accurately describe your business, product/service. These will be used for search terms for your web site.
5. Besides general information what type of content will you offer on your web site that will keep it fresh and entice visitors to come back to your site?  Examples here could include: blog, newsletters, updated products/services, contests, forum on a topic you can offer expertise in, etc.
6. Gather your contact information.  Also list the hours that the office is open for phone calls if you list a phone number as a contact.
7. Do you have a logo?  If not, prepare information about your company and how you would like it reflected in a logo.
8. Do you have a budget?  If so share it with the designer up front so they can tailor a web site and package to fit within your budget.

That should get you started on your way to a new web site.

As most of you know I have been spending countless hours working on delivering better services to you - the client.  Projects that I have been working on and researching include:

Building community web sites - examples of community web sites are: MySpace, Monster and Facebook (no, I didn’t design those sites) But I have learned to design sites like them.  I have been educating myself with an open source php driven program called Drupal and have since developed my first community web site for a client.  The site includes:

1. user profiles
2. the ability for users to create their own home page
3. users may also create their own group within the community complete with their own home page, forums, blogs, etc. They may choose to have their group open to the community or by invitation only
4. a career center where users may create an online resume stored in the site database and the ability for recruiters/employers to create job listings.  Users may browse listings and click the apply for this job button and their resume is automatically sent to the employer. 
5. An invite a friend script where users can invite friends and add them to their friends list
6. Users may also create their own content such as blogs, articles, pages, and photo uploads to a photo gallery. 

There are MANY more options that can be implemented into this program and I am now happy to offer this type of design service to my clients.  If this is something that interests you contact me and we can discuss your specific needs.

Word Press - Word press is a blogging program, however the implementation of many plug-in modules available today make Word Press a pretty awesome web design program, offering alot of flexability to the web site owner.  This site, for example has been designed using Word Press.

Search Engine Optimization - This story in itself is pretty interesting.  One of my clients paid a search engine optimization company alot of $$$ to move their site up on the search engines last year.  This spurred my interest to get more involved with the search engine technology and training and have worked the last year honing my skills and I am happy to tell you it has paid off!  My clients using the service are seeing a dramatic increase in web site traffic.  I now offer a monthly maintenance package that includes 1 hour of web site maintenance/changes, a Search engine analysis report and site statistics for only $35 per month.

Press Releases to the newswires - This was yet another area that interested me and I thought may be useful for web sites that were interested in gaining national attention.  I now have some really great resources for getting your press releases to the national news wires.

Of course I am always working to develop my skills to become the best I can possibly be in order to provide you with top notch service.

In today’s internet world if your site is not optimized you are going to be lost in the shuffle. There are many aspects to search engine optimization (SEO) and I will address a few of them here.

It is important to know also that not all search engines read a web site the same, so not all the rules below apply to all the search engines.

1. pick a domain name that is related to your business subject. For example michigan-hunting.com with a hyphen placed between the words of the url it identifies them as individual words and uses them as keywords.

2. Your title tag needs to be short and to the point. I am going to use http://www.michigan-outdoors.com as an example here. The title tag reads “michigan hunting and fishing” this gets right to the point of the site. A tag such as the official site of the michigan sportsman might be ok but would not key in on michigan hunting and fishing quite so well.

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Spam is a nuisance and causes great grief to those who have to sift through tons of spam. I am listing a couple of helpful solutions to reduce your spam.

1. Create a hotmail or yahoo mail account to be used strictly for fill in forms on the internet. Some sites (not all) sell your information to outside parties. This is one of the ways that spam comes your way.

2. After researching some information I have found that spammers use spiders to troll web sites and collect email addresses. By embedding your email into an image or a flash file they will not be able to capture your email address.

3. Finally if you are experiencing spam issues we can implement a spam assasin and spam box program. One thing to note about spam filters they are not fool proof and some of your wanted mail may end up in the spam box.

There is a reason why people aren’t visiting your site. It’s because it hasn’t changed since LAST time they saw it. Remedy this, with updates! Updated content, updated specials, updated photos.  The clients that get the most traffic to their web site are those that update often. 

Here are just a few examples of items that could help improve traffic

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Email comes in a couple of different formats and this article will describe the terminology and the uses of each type.

POP mail account - this is an account that is created using your domain name for example lori@mattawan.org To download you mail into a program such as Outlook you may configure it by following these steps:

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